From The Mana World

Information

Summary

More priority is given to allowing the world to be expanded. This effort needs more tiles, but it also requires Tiled to be integrated with TMW soon. Hammerbear will now work on reading Tiled's maps.

Rotonen mentioned a new graphics artist joined our team. He seems a decent pixel artist and learns fast.

Bear is supposed to start scripting.

The equipment system has been discussed. Items will be identified in messages using IDs instead of names to keep the small message size. The being definition will define the slots available for that being, and the item definition will define a slot the item may optionally be equipped in, maybe multiple can be allowed.

Being will have a list of inventory and a list of equipment slots. Items can be moved from one to the other and back as is allowed by their specifications. Relevant messages for the new server are:

Client to server:  MSG_EQUIP          { L beingId, L itemId, S slot }
Server to client:  MSG_EQUIPMENT_UPD  { L beingId, L itemId, S slot }

The rationale behind the client sending the beingId to the server is that the client may be controlling multiple beings. Unequipping can be done by using the same messages but passing 0 as itemId. ElvenProgrammer will start to work on this part.

Fixes to A* were mentioned. It is doubtful wether it is worthwhile to fix it because pathfinding can be moved to server side and will probably better be completely reimplemented. Also we still plan to switch to pixel-based movement instead of tile-based movement.

Attention was given to the currently proposed movement message pairs:

Client to server:

MSG_WALK           { L beingId, L x, L y }
MSG_TARGET         { L beingId, L targetBeingId }

Server to client:

MSG_PATH           { L beingId, A path }
MSG_ATTACK         { L beingId, L targetBeingId, L damage, S damType }

This moves away from direct player control, and seems only based on mouse control. Still, it was pointed out Shura and Hammerbear have been discussing two ways of doing keyboard control that can map on these kind of messages.