VectorStorm Blog

So I’ve been a bit busy the last few days.  I’ve once again shrunk subscribers and monsters (or expanded the world, depending on your point of view), and I’ve increased the maximum number of entities allowed in a region.  The new maximum is 300 per region;  I find that 200 monsters and 100 players per region feels about right.. but this will be wired up to options in the “Design” area, so others can tune things differently.

Subscribers are now drawn using the vector sprites I created for “Ill-Timed Petition Damsel”, and the monsters are drawn using the Muncher sprite from “The Muncher’s Labyrinth”.  I know, I’m totally ripping off my own work.  It’s probably just temporary;  I wanted to see how things looked, animated.

So now if you really zoom in on the map screen, munchers actually chase meat (and petition damsels), instead of just having little geometric symbols slide along the ground.  I think it’s a big improvement.

I’ve also fixed a number of extra AI bugs on both the subscriber and the monster side.  Getting monsters and subscribers to actually approach each other to attack is surprisingly non-trivial.  But it’s pretty much working now.

Devs are also now in the world, though they aren’t really doing anything yet;  they’re just little arrows (like the player’s arrow cursor, only they don’t rotate and they’re fainter) that move around in the world.  Eventually, these will scurry around fulfilling the player’s build orders and assisting players in distress.  But that’s not been implemented yet.  Soon!

In other news, I’m pretty sure that next week I’ll be taking a break from development on MMORPG Tycoon, and doing another Game in a Week.  Need to clear my head a bit with a change of pace.  More on that as we get closer.

Wow, has it really been a full week since my last post to the blog?  Time flies..

This has been a week with some real ups and downs, and it’s kept me away from programming rather a lot.  But even so, there’s been some progress on MMORPG Tycoon.  This week, I have gotten monsters and players to fight each other properly.  Players can theoretically gang up on a monster, or a player can be attacked by several monsters at once.  Monsters chase after nearby players, and respawn after a while, when they’re killed.

What’s more, players now try to run away from monsters who are too dangerous for them, and will totally ignore ones that are too low level for them.  This will probably lower the penalties for having users in an incorrectly-zoned region, since most users will attempt to run away from particularly nasty monsters, rather than fight a hopeless fight.

I’ve also done some more map rendering cleanup.  The game map now sits in an infinite ocean, instead of being a big square in the middle of nothing.  I think that makes it look nicer.

There’s also been a lot of code cleanup behind the scenes, in preparation for adding Devs to the game.

Finally, I’ve been rethinking the “placing individual buildings” thing that I’d been talking about before.  The more I think about it, the more I realise that there’s no really good reason for someone to place just one of the buildings; people would just end up placing one of each type of building for every city that they wanted.  So to minimise micromanagement, it’d make more sense for players to still just place towns, but to instead define a few different types of towns for them to place.  For example, we might have three types:  An “outpost” (contains only a small shop and an inn), a “City” (contains a normal shop, a tavern, and an inn), and a “Castle” (contains a shop, a tavern, an inn, and an auction house).  Each of these would cost substantially more than the previous, and you would need to achieve a certain number of subscribers in order to be able to place them.

Oh, and I’ve also fixed that old bug about the “Inspect” window not clearing some lines of information, if you switched from inspecting a player to inspecting a town.  Yay, UI code.

Next step is Devs.  Then the town building, then the subscriber AI to use the new town buildings, and then we’ll see where we’re at.  So there’s still a little ways to go, but progress is being made.  :)

So I thought I’d post a little bit with what’s going on.

Between work and mild illness, I haven’t actually gotten much at all done on MMORPG Tycoon v1.1.  But here’s my work log from this week:

1. Substantial modifications to the map and subscriber code, in preparation for rendering monsters and devs on the map.
2. Monsters now spawn on the map, but do not yet interact with users.  (In the 1.0 series, monsters were handled using probability calculations, a bit like random encounters in many single-player JRPGs.  In the 1.1 series, monsters now have individual placements on the map, will attack nearby subscribers, and will respawn after being killed, as generally happens in real MMORPGs)
3. Made substantial (CPU-side) performance improvements to the graphic engine.
4. Added a nice effect to the roads when loading into a game, so that they don’t just “pop” into place any more.
5. Small modifications to map rendering, to make it more GPU friendly and less cluttered for complicated maps.
6. Began work modifying the “Build” toolbar to support the new building types (resizing and moving buttons, etc).
7. Dramatically simplified building handling code, to make it easier to add new building types.
8. OS X build now saves preference files in ~/Library/Preferences and save files in ~/Library/Application Support/MMORPG Tycoon, as Apple recommends.  This should stop occasional user permissions problems with preferences not saving correctly in multi-user OS X situations, and will also make it much easier for OS X folks not to lose their saved games when updating versions.

Note that this is all going into the 1.1 build;  there is no new build available for download yet.  It’s just work in progress.

Anyhow, hopefully the progress summary will be a bit longer, next week!  :)