Shades of the Ancients

Well, I’ve been fiddling around with some stuff lately.. And well, I’ve added a lot of new systems, fixed up a lot of new systems and whatnot. It’s coming along pretty nicely if I may say so, but now’s the entire problem to try and keep the game FUN.. You know, like I can add new stuff, and new quests and things like that, but those don’t nessecarily make a game fun.. So yeah, I’m going to have to add some nice features and options to get it all to work properly, like guilds, crafting and things like that! Sure it’ll take a while, but that shouldn’t stop me!

Anyways, just for lolz here’s a screenshot showing off some new progress, the big yellow exlamation mark is there to show you this NPC has a quest for you which you haven’t completed yet!

Client-Side

• Fixed a few issues with some tilesets.
• Switched out the old items for new ones.
• Added some new paperdolls.
• Fixed an issue with the shadow on a resource sprite.
• Fixed an issue with quests that require you have have another
  quest already finished, these will now display their status
  correctly.
• Fixed an issue that’d occur when a player had more then one quest
  in their log and completed one of them.
• Modified the item system to use a single item image for both the drops
  and the inventory.
• Changed the rendering order of equipment.
• Fixed the issue where blood that was from an NPC would transfer over to a
  different map on the exact same X&Y locations as it was on your old map,
  this data is now ereased every time you switch maps.
• Added an option to render NPC Names in the client.
• Added an option whether to render Player names or not.

Server Side

• Fixed directional blocking for NPCs, they will no longer ignore
  these boundaries.
• Changed the way a player death is handled, you will now lose Experience
  based on your level, and when this amount exceeds the amount you
  currently have you’ll lose all your Experience instead of levelling down.
• A player will no longer lose their equipped gear when they die.

Server Side:

• Added support for ‘scripted’ events to both Tiles and NPCs.
• Modified the drop system’s mechanics, NPCs can now drop up
  to 10 items, as well as drop specific items which are only
  available when on a certain quest.
• Fixed the questlog to update properly when you drop more
  then one item or pick more then one item up from the ground.

Client Side:

• Cleaned up the quest handling sequence, it should now respond
  much quicker.
• Added an NPC speech Dialogue that allows us to create ‘Talk To’
  quests.
• Added quite a few new music files, these are provided for free
  by NGXMusical.

Yes, we’ve just pushed out Patch 0.0.5 to our Development server!
There’s not many changes but we’ve added a system which will be used
throughout the entire game.. A quest system! This is very important
and we’re quite proud of the result we’ve managed to obtain. Anyways,
here’s the notes:

Server Side:

• Added full support for both the quest log and quest system.
• Removed the annoying message that came up every time a
  player joined.

Client Side:

• Added a questlog as well as a simple NPC dialog that shows
  what quests an NPC has to offer you. The quests are tagged
  with various simple marks, [N] = New Quest, [P] = In Progress,
  [C] = Completed and [X] = Not available yet.
• Modified the sound engine to support much more formats,
  as well as music streaming.

Well, as the title states.. We’ve got functional quests! There’s a few minor quirks I want to iron out.. But so far so good! I’m including a screenshot of the quest log, will show more once I finish cleaning up some bugs and finish the interfaces properly for the other things.

Aaaack, the quest system is killing me! It’s quite a bit trickier then I had imagined at first! Sure I’m nearing completion but there’s just so many different things you’d need to think of when working with something like this, I mean there’s so many different things that can go right or wrong, and not to mention I had to take care of a visual editor as well, a log system, an NPC dialog system(granted I slacked my way through this and it’s fairly simple now.. But hey, it works! .. will make it more versatile later on.) and.. and.. well, I forgot. Had to rewrite a bunch of stuff over and over already today, it’s almost insaaaaane! Agh!

Oh well, I’m hoping to get it done tommorow or something.. We’ll see.

Well, I’ve been fiddling around with the interface and all today.. and some other components and bits and pieces, and I think I’ve gotten up to a point where I can show you guys a screenshot.. So, yeah.. Here it is

<Clicky Clicky for full image size.

Server Side Changes:

• Modified the Resource system to no longer display the damage done,
  instead it’ll show you a message you’ve made a hit.
• Reduced the amount of items a player can carry along to prevent
  the clipping of items in your inventory panel.
• Added Support for the AFK/Away command.
• NPCs will no longer send you an empty message every time you hit them.
• Changed the Classes to use the proper sprites for male/female.

Client Side Changes:

• Changed the way player names are rendered to allow AFK tags to show
  up.
• Changed the layout of the game screen to a more fancy looking layout,
  it’s not finished yet however and has no graphical features as of yet.
• Updated the character graphics so they don’t stand out from the terrain
  around it.

Well, I’ve just uploaded the base engine to the SVN! I’ll be adding my own modifications to it from tommorow and onwards, and will offcourse keep you guys posted about it every now and then

Well, this is something that had been boggling me for a while.. I mean, a corrupted area? How would we ever be able to display such a thing? We could modify every tile and add fancy effects to it, we could turn everything brown and boring.. or simply take out some of the colors..

I’ve been fiddling around with some ideas and tested some out, but the easiest and most effective way to show such a thing is making everything seem a little foggy, I’ve messed with the saturation value of a tileset a little and it looks decently, there’s a clear difference when compared to the vibrant colorfull displays of the regular world, and the darker grey-ish corrupted world.

Now here came a different issue, how would be show which NPCs were corrupted and which weren’t? I’m still wondering about this.. keeping NPCs and Players in their original vibrant colors looks odd in the corrupted areas, so we’ll be greying them out as well.. But that leaves us with an issue, how will we display the corrupted humans? Perhaps a different skintone or something.. Not quite sure, will think about that when the time comes.. But I guess we could make them green or something?