Landson July 5-11

It's now the week before the midterm evaluation, which got me thinking a bit about what I've gotten done so far. I was looking at the project and I felt like I really hadn't got enough done; So I looked through everything step by step that I've done so far to really evaluate myself. I've actually done a lot, including learned a lot. This is my first large scale project in which more than myself are working on, and I must say it's been a real humbling experience. I've done smaller projects which took some work and I've always had a habit of jumping in and coding without any sort of plan or even commenting. One of the first things I learned through this project is that when working on a major project that just isn't a viable direction to a working solution.

In my proposal at this point I expected to have combat working at this point, which I'm proud to say technically it is, but in my proposal I had expected to have simply made a queue, an attack structure(which did nothing but held damage), and the only real code changes I planned to make was to fit them into the current combat manager. It was a very vague plan and there was honestly no way I could have made it work that way; the first week or two I actually tried to make it work that way, but it was obvious I was only making a mess, so I cut it short right there. I went back to the drawing board and realized I had learned a lot about the current code, a lot of which would work here.

• I wanted to implement a requirement function for attacks, which makes getting attacks something special and varied. Quests already have a perquisite function, which after a few modifications became a great general purpose perquisite tracking tool.

• I wanted special effects on attacks, and each attack to be flexible as to what it could do, progression scripts are perfect, each attack can be completely customizable with both damage, messages, aoe and special effects such as dots. It's also a great place to be able to add more functions as i go and anything I add not only helps combat but also anything else that progression scripts is used for.

• I also wanted damage to vary and to have aoe available. Aoe is now functional and ready to be testing, which is something I'll be doing over the next week or two. Damage can currently be calculated through progression script, using a math script variable with calculates power based on skill levels. I haven't made the math script yet, as I feel its more something for rules team to do. I can program but balancing power is not something I can do very well. But I do have a test value in it.

So at this point, I can say my project has grown to be quite a bit more involved than I had originally planned. All of combat has moved from the combat manager to the attack structure, with combat manager being a simple driver. This will allow a lot of functionality and flexibility. Already I have a default attack implemented that works exactly as combat did before, I have a melee special attack which currently works, and I have a range special attack which works but still needs thorough testing. Breaking the system up into pieces and abstracting the pieces out like this will allow each individual piece to be worked on and balanced by themselves without directly affecting others. It will hopefully allow the settings and rules team the freedom to implement things however they want to best fit what is needed for both game play and story. There are a lot of things left to go, but when I look at it, it's came a long way.

Now what I've done this week:

• I have implemented ranged special attacks, though they still require detailed testing and adjustment.

• I have further developed and made some tweaks to the melee special attack class.

• I have started developing the gui for attacks, but since this is the first time I've looked at the paws system it is going a little slow.

Next Week I plan to:

• Work toward finishing a gui, hopefully complete it. This will be the bulk of my focus, because its needed to do any sort of thorough testing from a players perspective.

• further tweak both specials, where it's needed.

• start looking at the best way to integrate spell combat.