Jan 24
Success!
Apologies; another screenshot which contains absolutely nothing visibly new. But after far too many hours, I’ve finally fixed up the drawing of procedural models to work either using shared models for common things, or with custom models for things that need to be unique.
Most things in MMORPG Tycoon 2 go through this code. Region boundaries, buildings, monsters, players, NPCs, the GraveShip, quest boundaries, etc, all work through this single interface, so it was important to keep supporting things that were all unique (regions, quests), while also sharing resources between things that were all the same (monsters, players). This also vastly simplified the code, and will make it easier to work with in the future. Bonus!
So the shot above looks exactly like it did before. Which from where I’m sitting, means that it’s pretty awesome. :)
January 24th, 2010 at 7:52 am
Awesome! Being a programmer, I know how satisfying the feeling can be!
On an aside: I was wondering since the combat system and moves are fleshed out in this version, will it be possible to either possess a characters and play, or start your own character as if you were a player? Or maybe that’s related to the secret mode and I’ve said too much?
January 24th, 2010 at 11:39 am
Answer: Yes, it’ll be possible to start your own character as if you were a player. And no, that’s not the secret mode. :)
(In the screenshot for this post, the top left tab on the action bar opens a window that will let you select which class to play as, and the buttons underneath will have their names replaced by the attacks assigned to that class)
But as I’ve mentioned, the new combat model hasn’t actually been implemented yet, though all the data and UI is set up for it; the combat itself is probably on my list for later today.
January 24th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Thats sounds quite cool, Also since we (the player) are the devs (when playing the game) we will be able to edit the character we are playing. so e.g start from max lvl, with silly hp, etc etc.
would be kinda funny to ramapage a city full of people and watch them go mental about it.
also, the progress looks great, looking forward to release
January 24th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
Freely changing levels will definitely be possible, as that will be necessary in order to test advanced class abilities, and playtest your higher-level areas. Changing other stats of your (or other) characters in the game is technically possible, but would probably require a lot of work on my part to make a nice interface to it, and to make subscriber AI react properly to having their stats meddled with by the developer. ;)
In any case, neither of these will be in the first milestone build. (But changing levels will definitely be in the second milestone build)