So Many Updates

Well where to begin. Realms has had so many updates it really starting to “hang together” as an actual game at last.

I’ll just list a few of things rather than blather on for ages about each one.

• Monsters now have a chance of dropping a chest which in turn has a chance of dropped varying quality and number of items.
• Monsters can have “body” loot too. So if it isn’t in a chest it’s actually on their body instead.
• Indicators have been added for corpses that contain loot. The corpse will decay a lot slower if it has an item on it and it will never decay if it has a quest item. Quest items corpse have spinning Q and other items would just have a spinning star.
• Monsters can now have multiple attack animations (again I’ll need to find a good animator at some point because my skills are mediocre at best).
• Particles can now fly in the direction of something. This is first used by the Ghost of Venril monster that haunts the graveyard. It spews forth green plasma/lightning.
• Killing a monster now gives you some experience points. This meant I needed to have text notifications that float and fade to show how much you gained.

I spent rather a large amount of time finding an annoying lighting bug with the animated models. They just weren’t being effected by the color of the lighting enough for some reason.  After a few hours of head scratching i realised 2 lines of code were in the wrong order between the static model shader and the animated one. Annoying but it looks suitably beautiful now.

Another large change is pretty much the whole UI. The “hotbars” have now been replaced with a more console friendly layout. I think it looks a whole lot neater too.

The first 4 are for the primary weapon, the next are for the secondary, the third for the ranged weapon slot (or a wand etc) and the 3×3 block are for assigned spells or items.

The health and power bars are much smaller/clearer/neater too and I think a lot nicer.

I’ve started to add in the skill/weapon merchants which will use the same UI to try and give consistancy but that’s not ready for human consumption.

We almost have an actual game!

Until next time…..