Eternia: Battlegrounds

by Writing A New One
ID:2228140
 
The last week has been a bit slow for me, been fighting valiantly against my yearly sinus infection/cold that I tend to always get as Winter shifts into Spring every year, thankfully I was able to pick up some good medication to help things out, unfortunately they kept me in a stuffed-up daze most of the week so I didn't get a whole lot of work done, but fear not!

The marketplace stuff is coming along, but I tend to hate doing UI work (my ugly UIs are probably a good hint at this, but they're efficient!), so while there's a lot of internal work done on it, it basically comes down to a set of generic input()s on the front end, so I have a ways to go there before it's ready for people to actually use. What's there works pretty good though, thank jebus for SQLite, or this would be damn near impossible with any degree of speed, and keeping track of market flow is made a ton easier by it as well.

I've also been thinking more on how I'd like to implement character slots and have settled on a method that won't require sweeping changes to how the files work, instead of storing all of the characters in a single, massive, bloated, ugly, corruption-prone file, each one will be stored independently in its own file. This obviously needs I need to automate moving existing data over into the new structure but that's a trivial task. All it really needs is a UI (ugh, again with the UI) for loading each specific file, and a way for said files to keep track of where they belong. In theory this method allows for an unlimited amount of characters per account, but I'm obviously not going to allow for that, so initially people will be limited to two character slots, with subscribers gaining an additional two (for four for subscribers). These numbers may go up, but that's where I've settled for now.

I'm expecting the slots to sneak their way into the game by the end of next week if this cold continues improving at the rate it has been, and the marketplace to go live within the next few weeks.


I've also decided that I'll begin taking community input on what non-combat skills you'd like to see the most using polls where you pick between a set of four or five planned skills. Using those results I'll begin compiling a list what to implement and prioritize them based on what the community wants the most.

The first series of polls will focus on the Resource Gathering category, which will contain subcategories such as Mining, Lumber-jacking, and Foraging.

The second series will focus on the Crafting category, which will contain subcategories such as Blacksmithing, Woodworking, Alchemy, and Jewelcraft.

Each subcategory will contain skills associated with that category, for instance under Mining you'd find the skills "Copper Mining", "Iron Mining" and so forth.

The way non-combat skills will work is very similar to how combat skills work as far as how you unlock new things, any non-combat action you take, such as mining an ore, cutting down a tree, creating a sword, whatever; will generate non-combat experience which will go towards your non-combat level (deciding on a name for this), each level gains you points you can spend on unlocking new non-combat skills. With a maximum non-combat level of 100 or so being imposed.

Not all of these skills are the simple unlocking of new tiers either, some of them will provide perks and passive bonuses to various things, like spending extra points to buy a bonus under Mining which would provide a 20% chance of getting twice the resources any time you gain them.

This will allow people to focus on specific paths for their non-combat skills if they choose to do so, to gain extra perks for sticking to that path, or they can choose to round out their skills and miss out on some of the bigger bonuses. This keeps everyone from being able to do everything, providing some diversity to what people can do when they're not out killing things.

The ability to produce items coupled with the marketplace should add a player-driven economy based on not only loot from monsters, but things people have created, where the two will overlap often when things you want to create will require an item only found as monster loot -- which you could choose to buy from the marketplace (if anyone's selling them) or grind out yourself, in turn selling the equipment you make back to the people out grinding up the stuff to make them.


As for COMBAT stuff, the next game patch will introduce the game's first proper dungeon boss at the end of the Grub Cave Dungeon, this boss will be the first experiment in some adaptive AI for bosses, as well as introducing some new types of spells that monsters haven't had access to previously.