Day One: Spell Effects
Hello, one and all! I have been hard at work in the lab, cooking up some wonderful gameplay experiences for our players. I thought, after the wild experience that was the stress test, you all would appreciate some more insight into what Tides of Power will actually look like. Hence, I’m happy to introduce my new blog post series: X Days of Devmas!
First up is discussing our new spell effects feature but first, I need to talk about names.
Did you know that not everything has a name? Well, I do, and almost certainly so do you and everything that has existed since the spawn of language. According to UO’s servers, however, most things don’t. In the very early 2000s, the Ultima Online team localized their client. That’s all fine and dandy as long as the client is displaying text the way you want. Unfortunately, our dev team is a big fan of early UO and its aesthetic. As such, we couldn’t get over the ugly properties label. Thus, I cracked open the code and set to work.
Turns out, every item just has a properties list which the server parses out and sends to the client. If you prefer your items to come attached with Excel spreadsheets, well, there you are. I don’t! Let’s axe that method.
Replacing it with a custom built string is easy enough, but first I need a nice way to parse magical effects. Turns out, every category of item does it a little differently. Some don’t even do it at all (looking at you, jewelry). Now, I could just go through and build/modify custom magical effects for every category out there or I could take advantage of OOP’s inheritance to make my life a little easier. That’s when it hit me: Boots of Earthquake.
If I were to create a generic effect class, we could do anything. We wouldn’t have to worry about constraints or software updates when creating new bosses, expansions, mini-games, etc. Why not boots of earthquake? Why not dagger of create food? (Credit to Boomland for this one). While we certainly won’t have these items in the production shard, the endless possibilities are nonetheless very exciting. Staff will be able to whip up more exciting and engaging content on the fly, leading to more designing with fewer constraints and spending less time writing code. In fact, why stop at items? (Or, even, portable items. House of teleport, anyone?) Since spell effects can be attached to any entity, let’s make a Groundbreak Titan event mob that breaks the ground (mini-earthquake) with every step.
So, rest assured that you won’t be finding any game-breaking items dropping in the world but don’t be surprised if your CTF opponent gets themselves a Scimitar of Forced Polymorph.
I hope you enjoyed that little insight into my world. Keep your eyes peeled for the next installment of X Days of Devmas, where I’ll have a sneak peek at the new factions systems.