A few months back, I spawned myself into the MMO world and wandered around near some monsters (bears) to check that my attack buttons enabled and disabled themselves properly. And at one point, I noticed that my health was dropping. It took me a little while to work out why; due to a bug in my code, the game had given the bears fireball attacks. And without proper models, animations, or visual effects, the only clue that the bears were attacking me with fireballs was that my health was dropping.

Of course, since then I’ve added (placeholder) models and (placeholder) animations to the bears. And today I added some (placeholder) particle effects to attacks. It’s all very placeholder, but suddenly you can see what’s actually going on in combats, with little explosive bursts for melee attacks, and big glowing orange balls for missile attacks. Very visible even from a long distance away.

After doing this, I noticed that players never use missile attacks. After some investigation, it turned out to be because they didn’t consider attacking at all until they’re inside melee range, due to some leftover code which dates back to MMORPG Tycoon v1.1 (which somehow survived two major AI rewrites). So I fixed that. Now there’s usually an exchange of fireballs before the players and bears close into melee range.

According to my task tracker, I’m 83% of the way to the MS6 build. Hopefully not too much longer, now that I’m back to spending real time on the project!