Thursday, June 23, 2011

The Characters Are Moving!

After days of frustration, my characters are finally moving correctly.  Here's what was goin' on:

First, the characters would move to their new positions, but the map would still hold onto their references in their previous positions.  This caused the pathfinder to incorrectly interpret the characters' previous positions as obstacles because it thought there was still a person standing there.

The problem there was that the characters' positions were only being updated on the local machine and were never being broadcast across the network.  This was causing a problem because the corrective code that removed the old references was in the game client where character updates are processed.

Once this was corrected, another problem emerged. The characters were moving, but they were leaving ghosts rendering in their previous positions.  Basically the same problem as before, except now you could actually see the characters' images in their old positions.

The problem with that one was that the characters weren't clearing their old positions before moving into the new positions.  Once that was corrected, there were no more issues.

There are a couple of things I really want to fix before moving on to the next steps.

  1. Get the characters to animate along the paths.  Some code for this is already in place, so I just need to finish it.
  2. Remove faulty or unnecessary code that was written for troubleshooting the issues mentioned above.


Speaking of next steps, I have a few possibilities for what the next steps will be.

  • The combat token system.  This leads to:
    • Token source.
    • Token inventory.
    • Token selection UI.
    • Attack, defend, heal, draw, and teleport actions.
      • Attacking leads to implementation of containers.
  • Broadcasting and handling the "whose turn" message.  This leads to:
    • Implementing action points.
    • Creating the "whose turn" UI.
    • Adding gameplay intelligence to the AI players
  • Random events, including:
    • Random injury.
    • Random bonus item.
  • Finishing the HUD, including:
    • Event log display.
    • In-game chat component.
    • "Whose turn" display.


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