Cast a Deadly Spell

Long long hiatus indeed… Life’s been keeping me busy lately, namely a wonderful awesome girl. 🙂 I’m turning my attention back to the CRPG…

When I last left off, I was doing a lot of prep work for spell casting in combat. I had to redesign the damage system to account for non-damage effects, compress effects code, redo a lot of my spell data, plug in test values for every spell to experiment with… you get the idea.

Now, it’s time to start actually writing the interface! For the record, combat in general has NOT been thoroughly tested in all edge cases… There’s going to be a lot of QA work involved there later.

I first fired up the current code and tried casting a spell. I found several glitches in the interface I had to fix, and I changed my basic spell data so I could validate that it was grabbing the right spells and populating the lists correctly. I have to be careful here because in game, there’s a theoretical maximum of 16 spells in a spellbook… so I don’t want to exceed that because it will overwrite other areas of memory. I still have some interface bugs to fix (Fireball wanted to target party members?) but I’m feeling good about the setup.

Naturally, when I looked at my code for spells actually doing something,I found to my amusement that I had NOTHING written in the action section… no wire-up at all. This actually reminds me of a recent interview that Richard Garriott (a.k.a. “Lord British”, the creator of the Ultima CRPG series) conducted where he admitted that he discovered AFTER he had released Ultima III that he had completely forgotten to write the code to wire up weapon damage to weapons equipped. He didn’t notice (as the ONLY tester) because the characters level also affected hit and damage and it seemed balanced enough. So if you play Ultima III, don’t bother equipping anything but slings or bare hands. 🙂

My next task will be making sure spell types and the necessary targeting interfaces are correctly wired, and then start writing the code to actually make spells happen and calculate effects AND display the FX. I probably won’t get this done before the end of the year… another New Year’s Resolution uncompleted! Oh well…