MMORPG Contest - T minus four days

Ok, so it's actually about two weeks, but with my vacation and everything, I only have four days of actual work.... I'm excited about the progress.

AFX

This morning (early) I complained about the way the spell book worked. The initial implementation, although good, didn't fit a multiplayer game because you were basically limited to a single spell book. The reason was because the spell books were implemented as datablocks, and as you should know, datablocks are mostly meant for static data that is common among all clients.

So... the fix (and I'll post this later as a resource) is to move all of the spell information down to the object (afxSpellBook) and out of the datablock (afxSpellBookData).

As it so happens, this was very easy to do.... after a couple of hours (and most of that was just typing) it worked flawlessly... well, I had one bug, but it was easy enough to fix.

NPC Dialogs

Taken directly from Mathew Walker's (NCsoft) article in MMP Game Development, we're actually using a database representation of use cases for the NPC dialogs.

Complete with pre-conditions, post-conditions, extensions, notes, title and short description, this data model worked perfectly. Although using UML would've been a bit overkill, the final data model made perfect sense.

After the contest I'll write a white paper on how it's implemented. I can't take credit for the idea or anything, but seeing a practical application might shed a bit of light on the subject of standard development methodologies applied to game development.

Path Finding

Yes! I've updated the database interface to include path-finding nodes... one of the things I changed was making the objects NetObject scoped only to GM's that have indicated an interest in subscribing to them. Since this information isn't required on any normal clients, this significantly reduces bandwidth, but this still allows GM's to see the nodes when they want.

Another feature is the "cookie crumb" mode. In this mode, GM's can walk around, trailing a cookie crumb a second behind them... as soon as the GM is out of sight of the previous cookie crumb, the current one is dropped. As long as no short corners are cut, the GM effectively is creating paths just by walking around. This eventually clutters things up, but a nightly optimization routine will cull the unnecessary nodes. Net results... NPC's actually follow the same basic natural paths that the GM's tend to take.

More AFX

As it turns out, AFX is absolutely perfect for melee and not just spells. The choreography features makes it so players and monsters can have a natural looking fight, complete with parry's, jabs, stabs, slashes, etc.... I look forward to seeing the new models with the motion datasets taking advantage of this feature.

Not quite done with this yet, but I have high hopes that it'll be done soon after the contest.

Thanks for reading...