Productive Weekend
Well, I think that was a rather productive weekend. For Amethyst I've added quite a bit of new stuff:
*Completely revamped the item database, including equipment and their stats. (Adding two new sets of armor types).
*Created new damage algorthms for characters and monsters which work awesomely, and should balance everything out far better than it once did.
*Created a new level formula; Well, actually created A level formula. Before it was looking at specific dat files for each character which was insane and silly. Now there is only one dat file which is used as a lookup table to determine HP/MP at certain levels. (These stats are also affected by a characters strength and magic) The rest will raise (or stay the same) depending on a characters base stats, plus an automated "bonus" after certain levels has been added...I'll explain more on that when I actually get around to releasing it. This also means that casters will now have 0 chance of ever being better that meleers at attacking, etc. etc.
*Fixed little menu glitches where item names and such went out of bounds...there's probably more of those, but I haven't seen any for awhile.
*Added the ability to do "All" spells. (Choosing more than one target at the same time)
And a bunch of other little behind the scenes stuff. Looking back it doesn't look like I did that much, but I can safely say that the game is far more balanced now than it ever was, and from my random testing (at different levels, higher level monsters, etc.) I shouldn't have to worry about fiddling around with that anymore.
I gotta say at, at the risk of sounding narcissistic, how impressed I am with myself with how...modular I made the engine. Adding all this new stuff really only took the additions of a few lines to the functions I had created beforehand and aside from the new way the Learn system is being handled, (and the very minor rewrite of GainLevel() ) I didn't have to rewrite anything huge to make it work.
My code assimilates other code into its collective.
*Completely revamped the item database, including equipment and their stats. (Adding two new sets of armor types).
*Created new damage algorthms for characters and monsters which work awesomely, and should balance everything out far better than it once did.
*Created a new level formula; Well, actually created A level formula. Before it was looking at specific dat files for each character which was insane and silly. Now there is only one dat file which is used as a lookup table to determine HP/MP at certain levels. (These stats are also affected by a characters strength and magic) The rest will raise (or stay the same) depending on a characters base stats, plus an automated "bonus" after certain levels has been added...I'll explain more on that when I actually get around to releasing it. This also means that casters will now have 0 chance of ever being better that meleers at attacking, etc. etc.
*Fixed little menu glitches where item names and such went out of bounds...there's probably more of those, but I haven't seen any for awhile.
*Added the ability to do "All" spells. (Choosing more than one target at the same time)
And a bunch of other little behind the scenes stuff. Looking back it doesn't look like I did that much, but I can safely say that the game is far more balanced now than it ever was, and from my random testing (at different levels, higher level monsters, etc.) I shouldn't have to worry about fiddling around with that anymore.
I gotta say at, at the risk of sounding narcissistic, how impressed I am with myself with how...modular I made the engine. Adding all this new stuff really only took the additions of a few lines to the functions I had created beforehand and aside from the new way the Learn system is being handled, (and the very minor rewrite of GainLevel() ) I didn't have to rewrite anything huge to make it work.
My code assimilates other code into its collective.