Wow, has it really been a full week since my last post to the blog?  Time flies..

This has been a week with some real ups and downs, and it’s kept me away from programming rather a lot.  But even so, there’s been some progress on MMORPG Tycoon.  This week, I have gotten monsters and players to fight each other properly.  Players can theoretically gang up on a monster, or a player can be attacked by several monsters at once.  Monsters chase after nearby players, and respawn after a while, when they’re killed.

What’s more, players now try to run away from monsters who are too dangerous for them, and will totally ignore ones that are too low level for them.  This will probably lower the penalties for having users in an incorrectly-zoned region, since most users will attempt to run away from particularly nasty monsters, rather than fight a hopeless fight.

I’ve also done some more map rendering cleanup.  The game map now sits in an infinite ocean, instead of being a big square in the middle of nothing.  I think that makes it look nicer.

There’s also been a lot of code cleanup behind the scenes, in preparation for adding Devs to the game.

Finally, I’ve been rethinking the “placing individual buildings” thing that I’d been talking about before.  The more I think about it, the more I realise that there’s no really good reason for someone to place just one of the buildings; people would just end up placing one of each type of building for every city that they wanted.  So to minimise micromanagement, it’d make more sense for players to still just place towns, but to instead define a few different types of towns for them to place.  For example, we might have three types:  An “outpost” (contains only a small shop and an inn), a “City” (contains a normal shop, a tavern, and an inn), and a “Castle” (contains a shop, a tavern, an inn, and an auction house).  Each of these would cost substantially more than the previous, and you would need to achieve a certain number of subscribers in order to be able to place them.

Oh, and I’ve also fixed that old bug about the “Inspect” window not clearing some lines of information, if you switched from inspecting a player to inspecting a town.  Yay, UI code.

Next step is Devs.  Then the town building, then the subscriber AI to use the new town buildings, and then we’ll see where we’re at.  So there’s still a little ways to go, but progress is being made.  :)