Encounters, Unforesen Bug-Fixes and Starting to Think.... Maybe?

The last few days have been a mix of furiously writing code to replace what had already been working, before my "fix" to wandering monsters, and also to patching up issues that I didn't know existed. These have all been really successful.

So, I've been working on encounters doing encounter things before we hit combat mode - and that's been both fantastic in the sense that creatures will now happily use abilities against the party before you get into full combat mode, so if you're running past a goblin shaman, best be prepared for all manner of spell-casting gimmicks as you try to scurry past, or you'll have the option to engage properly in full blown combat.

That brings me to my second part of the update. I discovered, that as I was hooking into code that already existed in these steps, there were some "unforeseen" issues cropping up. Like starting combat, and having everyone keel over for no good reason. Turns out that as I'd been purposefully getting my characters killed "outside" of combat, various events were queuing up nicely in various lists and collections - and then executing when they had a chance, so as I stood there lining all my characters up to get killed - to test respawn code and functionality OUT of combat - various combat queues were filling up with events that were killing characters, and the moment I started a new fight... blammo.. everyone gets KTFO. So, there has been a good deal of bugfixes to get rid of such silly artefacts, and get things working the way they are supposed to. And it's been quite successful - which has brought me joy.

I've also snuck in a few more special effects with some new code - mainly reviving characters that are no longer responsive *cough* game over man, game over!! *cough* which means that I can now make spells and abilities (I made a few test potions that revive them, that can be poured down their throats by someone else to test this) which do work very nicely now (there were a few code tweaks that needed to be done to make that properly happen too) - but this is all leading to a very long-winded way of saying....

I feel that we're actually really close to getting the app to where it needs to be to start proper beta testing. With these things in place, I can make some minor updates to the world (a few hours in the editor) to get spawns working exactly as I want, I think, and I can spend a few hours tweaking skill-trees for characters, and creating some more abilities and spells to basically set up one skill-tree for each class. Okay, maybe both those will be longer than a few hours. But then, I'll be building the world. More quests, more creatures and more content. Beta-Testing Time.