World Building

It's been a busy fortnight or so - Arnthak rumbles toward completion as always. The week after the last update was spent mostly solidifying Items, crafting and lore. This week's been a whirlwind of new content - Jay has sent me over three new sprite sets for creatures, so they've gone straight in. Additionally, I was inspired to work some new features in, and a huge amount of mapwork got done.

Map Work

Arnthak's map has grown severely since the last update. Here's the current Progress chart:

Changes here include the formation of a new mine on the Wakeward (left) side of the mountain, as well as a vast amount of new Ice Caverns. More work has been done on the tunnel from the Caer Mydnydd (Tower) mines to the Ice Caverns.
Here's a quick peak at a section of the new area for the Ice Caverns

(Click to enlarge)
There's some tricky sections in there, so I'm going to enjoy watching people play through them. You'll also notice, there are two new creatures in there.

Spritework & Art

Jay's smashed through some new artwork, which means I have entirely new creatures to play with. While I already had a skeleton set of sprites, it doesn't compare to what Jay's done.

(Older sprite shown on the left, new sprite shown on the right)
Here's the brand new Frost-based lizard, for the Ice Cavern zones. This one impressed me:

There's also a new Frost-based beetle (Beeltor, in Arnthak), which I also love the look of:

Items

As part of the Item additions from last week, I made the following sprites (though Jay will probably be redoing them, since his work is so much better):

The new items are (from L to R):

• Book - The State of the Planes
• Boots of Jumping (Gold)
• Boots of Jumping
• Jellor Egg
• Poached Jellor Egg
• Golden Bow
• Diag-Tiw grain

Engine

Tarvos got a reasonable overhaul, with several changes in the last fortnight:

Pre-scaled graphics

Despite my research, it seems that the Java in-built image scaling algorithm is too slow for Arnthak. This showed when it would struggle whenever the scale was raised higher than 2, and it would be significantly slower for non-integer scales. This has been changed to a case wherein the sprites are scaled on load. Unfortunately, this means longer load times and the inability to rescale on the fly - but I believe the increased complexity available per map chunk is a reasonable trade off in this case.

Damage Calculations

NPC's now have protection levels against different attacks. For instance, the new Frost based creatures above are (practically) immune to frost based attacks (Iceball spell). They are vulnerable to Fire based attacks, however (taking an extra 10 damage per fireball - which is itself only worth 8 damage).

This means that the player will need to be more careful in a few areas, where the use of Sapper fields will drain his/her mana. In these situations, a player is reduced to using Items to kill foes - which may only do a certain form of damage (for instance, Potions of Combustion will make fires, and hence do fire damage).

NPC alignment

As of a few months ago, when I rebuilt the NPC engine (to use an NPC engine instead of a single one for Enemies instead), I put in a small option for the NPC to 'belong' to a faction/alignment. At the time, this was divided into 'Hostile to Player' and 'Friendly to Player'. Now, however, I've put into place 'Animal' and 'Undead'. This is important, as I've recoded the NPC's to automatically attack any other NPC's that wander into their Watch Zones (areas that trigger an attack by the NPC) if their alignments are hostile to each other.

What this means, is that Animals will now attack Undead (and vice-versa). When the alignments are distributed correctly (ie: when I relook at all the existing sprites, heh) - new items/spells can be coded to allow the player to pass by some Alignments without trouble (perhaps some form of 'Animal Affinity' to temporarily allow alignment with animals, etc).

The other impact, is that when I was testing the sprites for the new skeletons, beetle & lizard... I watched as the Frost Lizard completely destroyed a pack of 8 skeletons with one blast of its breath weapon. Fantastic. Perhaps, also, a spell can summon an animal to do the dirty work for the player in the future...