Land of the Rair Dev Blog #5

Heyo!

It’s been checks watch over 8 months since my last update. Life’s been busy, covid has made it busy, and lots of life changes in the mean time. I’m not sure if I’m able to commit hard right now to LotR but I have been working on some serious updates to try to get the core functioning. I’ll open with a screenshot:

Note that this UI is only half implemented - a lot of it doesn’t work, but one of the major hurdles is getting it there so I can implement the functionality later. So here we are, it’s there even if it’s not done. I also have a lot of things in my “not blogged about” column, so I’d like to talk briefly about some of those.

1. First, you might have noticed my thief has MP. I’ll be reworking stealth into a resource that drains and you can spend it on skills, among other things. This isn’t fully hashed-out yet, but the general plan is there. Similarly, warriors have a stamina resource too.

2. The messages area has two tabs for now. We’ll see if we end up using more than two, but we’re going to start with that.

3. The game will now try to tell you it thinks you meant a different command. When you typo a command, you might see something like this: Command "sa" does not exist. Did you mean "say"?

4. Previously, “one handed” used to be the skill that represented one handed swords of all types. It was confusing, because it was labeled “one handed” and there was also a “two handed” skill that applied to weapons that were, well, two-handed. It has been renamed to “Longswords”.

5. I’ve started moving the old wiki over to a new location. I’ve grabbed most things, documented as much as I reasonably could, and reworked the layout a bit.

6. I have a new font! It looks a lot nicer and supports more characters than the old one. Some UI elements might look a bit strange, but we’ll fix those on a case-by-case basis.

7. I’m working to get a lot more data statically embedded in the client. This means that there is a lot less data being sent over the wire. Which means consequently that the server will be lighter, and ideally support more players. There is an enhanced architecture in place compared to LotR1, and I’m hoping it will pay off when we get to a state where the game is playable! It does mean there is about an extra MB of data or so to load, but the spritesheets are already quite large comparatively, so I don’t forsee any real issues there.

8. I’ll be working on a modding toolkit for LotR2! I may have talked about this before, but the long and short of it is that it will provide a convenient way for players to create their own content. To start, it will cover maps (you still need to use Tiled to make these), npcs, items, droptables, recipes, and spawners - the basic building blocks of a map. It will eventually be extended to support dialog chat with NPCs as well as quests, but that’s a ways off.

That’s all for now! I’m not sure when the next update will be, but here’s hoping it’s soon!

• Seiyria