Most major change this week is the new JS Promise system, first examples are the buy and upgrade functions, instead of returning no value, they now return Promise's - which provides an alternate and easier way to detect the completion of actions. For those who don't know, when you call the buy() function, it sends a buy command to the server, which completes the action and responds, so almost none of the game actions are instantaneous, they are async - If your ping is 100ms, a buy() command usually completes in 100ms



One side advantage of refactoring the entire codebase and server responses is making everything more easier to translate - once this refactoring is complete, almost every game response will be inside the "game_response" socket event Added the Wanderer's 5-piece Armor set, pieces are scattered across the Town, Cave of Darkness, Spooky Forest, Spooky Town, Winterland - It's the first actual set with bonuses! Second one will likely be a pirate set Stress tested the game to find performance issues, couldn't find the causes yet, but players who hop servers too much are reporting the game slowing down on Steam after a while, possibly has another cause, also it's a good time to remind the "/pause" chat command Started but didn't complete "duelland" - a new map for duels, to be able to safely test pvp fights between 2 parties Started collecting Linux-related problem solving tips at: https://adventure.land/linux Improved smart_move - it now has a new ability called "Baby Steps" - when it's close to the target, it starts considering smaller moves, to get into and out of tight spots easier (thanks to Seth's reminder on Discord and nerd's secondary bug report) - It was a long standing and half-ignored issue, glad to leave it behind

Most exciting idea this week - From Jilaris on Discord

Achievements are always heavily requested, Trexnamedtom originally drafted the first proposal for achievements, and once we move on to game-level achievements, his draft will likely still be the starting point -but- the main problem with achievements, and the reason they aren't in-game yet, is the effort to return ratio (in terms of development) Jilaris suggested adding simple achievements based on how many monsters of a type you've killed, for example for killing 1,000 Goo's, you would get permanent 10 HP's, for 10,000 Goo's, 10 permanent MP's, for 100,000 Goo's, 1 permanent attack and so on. His idea really clicked with my vision for the game, and it's both simple for me to integrate, and at the same time, simple for players to understand. Furthermore, I believe it would add a new purpose to the game - for early achievements, it would nudge players to go after other monsters and at the same time, reward those who just like to stay in one place - as a bonus, promotes partying Planning a Pokdex-like item for the addition of this new system Lately, from #feedback on Discord, one of the common concerns have been how the game doesn't force you to go after stronger monsters and how you could just grind a monster you can one-shot. While this new system isn't the ultimate solution for this problem, it will add meaning until new, higher hp and harder monsters are added

Some thoughts on a CLI client and gameplay

Re-experimented with running Adventure Land in the command line, thanks to the existing modifications that enable running characters as bots (the start_character system) - it was possible to directly run the game with minimal modification. As a proof of concept it works. It's exactly like running an iframe character in a very lightweight browser. There are several problems that come with CLI characters: -(1) Makes it easier for future botnets to leech the game -(2) Potentially reduces the enjoyment of regular players -(3) Makes it easier for a regular player to run separate accounts -(4) Could conflict with ALBot (which started as an official project with our community member NexusNull) and potentially other player-made game clients, due to future roadblocks aimed to hinder (1) and (3) To address (2) - I aim to add an observer interface for CLI players to observe their characters (potentially change their code remotely), and hope to have the mail system ready by that time, so even though they mainly play from CLI, they can (and will likely be required to, every 2 days) visit their characters, observe them, reply to mails and so on - this way, a player who stumble onto a bot character can interact with the person behind the bots Currently this undertaking isn't a priority, the priority is still the early player experience, documentation and new game content - but there's something cozy about running your character from a Raspberry PI, it continually comes up, and to be honest, if I can meet my requirements for (2), it would be how I run my characters too

Changelist:

- Codes are now run at the global scope inside their iframes - "level_up" Character and Game events - New character events - Moved handle_death() and on_cm() to runner_compat.js - Promise system, internal push/resolve/reject_deferred functions - Improved the character# limitations enforcer system (thanks to a bug report from "Big Dad" on Discord) - Updated SKILLS UI with new top buttons (thanks to a reminder from "Big Dad" on Discord) - Fixed a bank deposit/withdraw issue where sending a non-integer amount would wipe out all your gold (thanks to NexusNull) - Updated buy(), upgrade() functions, added new documentation interface - New locate_item(name) runner function, returns -1 if the item isn't found - Added the "irregular" flag to "cyberland" - also added a door out to "main" - Fixed show_json - non-object arguments was throwing exceptions after recent changes - Improved internal performance logging and metrics, planning on slowing down characters a bit and increasing xp/gold ratios instead - Wanderer's Set

[ 2019-03-12 13:48:06 CET ] [ Original post ]