Landson June 20-26
PlaneShift Weekly Update #4
This time last week I anticipated meeting my milestone of getting my combat system to work with the current default attack system by tomorrow. I believe overall I have done that, despite running into a couple snags. After a couple days working on it I managed to get past the issue that NPC’s were not responding well to the combat system. The problem was with how I was handling targeting.
The one issue I have struggled with all week is dual wielding vs. single weapon attacking. In the previous version, weapon speed played a big role in PlaneShift’s combat system. The major impasse is that when I planned out the attack system I reasoned that each attack would have access to any and all weapons the character was wielding and would have unlimited options with them. The problem with that is the weapons don’t always move in sync, so it was impossible to time everything just right. I tried many ways to get it to work and I did find a few, but I was not satisfied with the results. I decided it was time for some collaboration, because for me to come up with a solution independently would cause a fundamental change in Planeshift’s attack system. I went onto the IRC and user “rlydontknow” was a huge help; he helped me brainstorm a great method of doing it. Originally we came up with the idea of having two queues, one for the left hand and one for the right hand and just giving each attack access to one weapon as opposed to both. This would keep flexibility while also making it easier on the rules team later, and most of all it simplified the sync issues. The only issue with this is that I want it to be a simple single queue for the end user, so this would be hard and unnecessarily complicated in the backend, but multiple queues was still the answer as well as creating attacks by weapon rather than the other way around. So instead of creating queues for the right and left hand, why not create one that one handed weapons have access to and one that two handed weapons have access to? I am fairly sure this is the route I am going to take, and I expect it won’t take more than a day or two to get worked out and implemented(a day or two likely starting Sunday since my work time is limited until then).
This week’s plan is to finish working out how weapons are handled and to get everything exactly where I want it. By this time next week I would like to have started on fleshing out the special attacks and the databases and to have the special attacks loaded into cache.