MMO Prototype

  I took the time this week to fix the bugs that were present in  last week’s near-hour long demo . Now that a good amount of the basic systems are in place, yesterday I was able to work a little bit on the user interface and connecting it to some of the functionality you may have seen previously. It’s great to see that things start to fall into place. Items can now be looted and exist in the inventory and the server dictates whenever or not the items fit in the grid. Likewise, items can now be dropped anywhere in the world. There’s obviously a lot to tweak. As the GIF can show, the large 3x2 item in the inventory was a log that I had gathered from cutting down another tree. Instead of dropping the stack of logs as an item, the server interpreted it as planting a tree as it has yet to make the distinction between the source and its associated resource. My plans for September: Display item stack amount on the inventory icons. Display item tooltip when hovering the cursor on inventory ic

It's been roughly 4 months since I worked on the Prototype and I figured I'd showcase what it can currently do rather than talking about things I'm going to add in it. It's 50mins long  so it's not for the TLDR crowd; it goes through nearly every feature implemented. Instancing (bugged).  _edit: fixed bug as of Aug24th . LOD logic. Sharing names (display bug).  _edit: fixed bug as of Aug24th . Player Decorations (tiny bug).  _edit: fixed bug as of Aug25th . Room-based chat privacy. Inventory (incomplete & bugged)  _edit: fixed bug as of Aug18th . NPC Pathfinding (tiny bug)  _edit: fixed bug as of Aug18th . NPC Dialogue (incomplete). Area-based Pollution. The biggest feature of all (and the most complicated, considering what is going on) is something that can barely been shown: the Server-Authoritativeness of the game logic. Game clients have zero data about the game, don't do any game logic except for UI stuff and just displays what the server tells them to

Last month was a little bit stressful as I self-imposed a deadline on some milestones for the first quarter of 2020. It was kind of a selfish act because I wanted to show people what a reasonable list of "things to do" would look like for a single developer. In hindsight, I realize that it's not that great of a reference considering I only do this on my spare time. I would like to point out, however, that for somebody who would work on something like this full-time, the more further along you are in a given project, the more time it takes to get something done. The exception to this rule is content creation  (like creating a dungeon or a quest line)  as you progressively have a better grasp of the tools and the capabilities of said tools within the game engine. You have an establish pipeline. But, generally speaking, the list of things you can do should be considerably shorter 7 years down the line compared to when you first started. There are potentially more things to b

A few individuals have expressed their disdain towards the idea of announcing my progress here, I'm more or less shying away from making more posts on the matter. Unless I'm looking for   help   and/or   testers , this may be my last update here. As per  my plans for the first quarter  of the year: ( Done )  Complete the path-finding logic (with a procedurally generated grid to accommodate the ever-in-development terrain) to allow NPCs to move. The grid is done, I just need to assign "weights" (so that NPCs are less likely to walk on grass than on the road) and plug the NPCs to said grid.  <--  This took slightly more time than planned primarily because, while the grid was functional, it didn't take into account the possibility that different instanced copies of the same location might have variations of that data (where a player might cut trees in his copy of the instance, etc). So that's fixed. ( Functional )  Create spawn points that can spawn procedural

As per  my plans for the first quarter  of the year (and following up on  January ): ( Done )  Complete the path-finding logic (with a procedurally generated grid to accommodate the ever-in-development terrain) to allow NPCs to move. The grid is done, I just need to assign "weights" (so that NPCs are less likely to walk on grass than on the road) and plug the NPCs to said grid.  This took slightly more time than planned primarily because, while the grid was functional, it didn't take into account the possibility that different instanced copies of the same location might have variations of that data (where a player might cut trees in his copy of the instance, etc). So that's fixed. ( In progress ) Create spawn points that can spawn procedurally (based off available space on the terrain) as well as enabling some to be destroyed by players. This is to enable the game to dynamically spawn encounters based on player density, like pushing a wolf den away from the perimeter

As per   my plans for the first quarter   of the year: ( In progress ) Complete the path-finding logic (with a procedurally generated grid to accommodate the ever-in-development terrain) to allow NPCs to move. The grid is done, I just need to assign "weights" (so that NPCs are less likely to walk on grass than on the road) and plug the NPCs to said grid. Create spawn points that can spawn procedurally (based off available space on the terrain) as well as enabling some to be destroyed by players. This is to enable the game to dynamically spawn encounters based on player density, like pushing a wolf den away from the perimeter of player structures or having mobs appear from the depths of a dungeon and have them walk/patrol back to their designated "spawn location"; rather than just popping into existence behind players as they delve into a dungeon. ( Done )  Allow player-owned plants to grow at a pre-determined rate rather than be subject to the growth rate of the ove