Random Ranger Changes

1) Last Hits

I've been going through the code using some new tools we got a while back to detect combat actions (like "swung" "swung and missed") to fix up a lot of older code that used hacks and tricks to find the same information. Stuff like poisonous snakes and amedons are a lot more likely to actually poison you/set you on fire when they should because of the fixes. (It goes both ways, there were some false triggers as well as cases that didn't get caught.) It occurs to me that rangers probably need the same overhaul for their last hit detection. Right now I believe if two people hit a creature at the same time the chance of the ranger getting the last hit is 50/50. And I don't know what happens if Bloodmage damage over time spells kill a creature when a ranger was the last one to hit it. I think the ranger gets it, even if they hit it 15 seconds ago, but I'm not entirely sure.

So they're long overdue for a refactor that tries to assure that if they hit the creature on the same frame that the creature died, they get the last hit. I don't know how easy this is as there still might be some tricky guesswork and timing issues involved even with the new tools.

2) Growling

Rangers should "growl" when in a shape changed form. It gives them a special speech bubble, the text log shows up as "growls" instead of "says", and it sometimes makes a growling sound. This is probably a trivial change.

3) Tracking

Tracking could probably be improved in a few ways, but the most important is giving an actual reason for training to a longer duration. Some possible improvements include automatically switching to another monster of the same type if the monster you are tracking dies and/or automatically finding a new target whenever you or the monster switches snells.

Experimenting

I've been experimenting with new abilities. The idea is rapid prototyping with hopes of getting something fun, then working on balance or actually being useful later. The new Capture the Flag was an outlet for that experimentation as well as working with ideas that just don't work in a player vs. everything context.

Along those lines I was wondering if it would be easy to take direct control of monsters, using your mouse to control where it moves to. I figured the easiest way to test this was to patch it into the befriend AI and see if I could let the player control that monster instead of having it run off an AI. It worked wonderfully and I had a lot of fun just testing it. The best part (for me) was it didn't take much work. Kudos to RangerGM for really clearly written code.

It works surprisingly well: and you don't have to be still to use it (although you can). The monster will go to wherever your mouse is whether you are clicking or not. If you were to move the monster would move wherever you're moving, so they would tend to attack whatever you attacked, retreat when you retreated, and so on. But beyond that there are a lot of new tactics opened up which I'll leave for players to discover.

It can be a little weird. If you choose a menu selection, for example, your friend is going to run towards the north, and since I don't currently limit where you can tell the monster to go, it will keep going until it reaches that point, even though it is off your screen. You can always stop directly controlling the monster, of course.

I'm still considering the original ideas I had in mind that would use this technique. But I actually have to balance those and turn them into proper abilities. And that takes work.