June 19th marked my 26th Birthday. Thanks to everyone who sent me kind words on the social sites and PMs on the forums, I really appreciate it.
As usual with these large projects there was a lot of work over the last week, none of which I found interesting enough to write a post about. I’ve been addressing bug reports from the last test as well as fleshing out existing features before I add anything new. As great as new features are I’d rather the existing ones work smoothly and correct before I move onto another. Here’s a brief list of some of the changes I’ve made since the last post:
- Sending empty chat messages has no effect
- Moving an item to the same tile it’s already on has no effect
- Item movement verification to prevent abuse
- Item interaction on a priority bases to handle people moving the same items at the same time
- Server prevents grabbing items out of order
- Can’t grab items another player is standing on
- Characters collide and block each other while moving
- First pass at skill experience tables
- First pass at item and equipment stats
- Redesign and expansion of Character Creation system
- Item and Character identification with Ctrl + Click
I feel like things are a lot cleaner now. First impressions are very important and I don’t want the game to come across as some bug riddled mess, thankfully now it feels the opposite. My inexperience with MMO development is becoming quite irritating, it’s almost impossible to gauge how long a task might take. Things I think will take a few days can be finished in a few hours where as things I think might go easy require features I don’t realize until the time comes. The item system is a prime example of that. Thankfully I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and things for it are winding down. I’m ready to move onto creatures, the completion of creature spawns will be when the game actually becomes a game with reason to play longer then a few hours.
Looking forward as an necessity for the equipment system I have started working on the Region System for the world map. Every World Chunk is a part of a Main Region which can contain Sub Regions. The Regions control a ton of information for the land but now specifically what music to play, if it’s a safe zone, and the name. For example a Main Region could be a city called “Noob City”. Inside that city a Sub Region could be a bank called “Mark’s Bank”. When you first enter the city the words “Noob City” would display over the World View and the text on the mini-map would read the same. When you enter the bank the text would read “Mark’s Bank – Noob City”. Regions can be as small as 16×16 tiles and Sub Regions as small as 1×1. This will add a lot of detail to the world and will allow quests to be more specific in their descriptions. It will be nice to have different music playing as you move around the world, the same song gets irritating when it looks for hours on end.
Item movement is feature complete at this point and I’ve moved onto picking up, dropping, using, and equipping items. My next blog post will be focused on backpacks, I expect to post it within the next few days.
