Hello,

I have another update for A Tempest Season.

After a lot of thought and suggestions from Telrei, I have decided to try to convert as much as the old content as possible. I thought it would be better to take a few weeks to do that through a convertor, than it would be remake everything.

Overall, it has been very successful! All of the rooms, exits, items, stats, monsters, quests, shops, item and NPC resets, etc, have been converted.

Here is an image showing the current in game information:

Converted Game Data!

The only thing that have not been converted are the mob programs, which I will be starting on next.

Overall, the conversion process is huge – it will remove months of hard work from what we have to do and we can focus on more interesting matters, like new game systems, adding NEW areas, and just making things better overall.

Another topic I would like to talk about are abilities. One of the main issues with the old ATS was the creation of abilities for the classes. This was a very tedious and time consuming task, which also involved lots of duplicated code. As you can see, it really wasn’t a good situation.

One thing that I always wanted to do was to have some sort of ability editor. I started on it a few times but never got very far, mostly due to the fact the old ROM code base is written in a certain way and we had so much already present in the internal tables and structures.

However, with the new version of the code base, the idea of an ability editor is really almost an afterthought – it is very easy to implement and I have done the majority of it. This is really huge! Since it allows anyone (like builders) to make up their own abilities. I can still make abilities and will do so, and it will be FAST!

Now, I realize that we cannot make every ability through this editor, so I also designed the system in such a way that we can have hard coded abilities. This gives us ultimate flexibility and capability to have a really good set of skills, and allow for growth in the future.

Here is an image of the ability editor:

The Power of the Ability Editor.

On top of these major updates, I’ve done a lot of other changes, which can always be tracked in the Game Updates section on the forums:  Game Update Section

Well, that concludes this update!

Until next time…

Hello!

Things are going well. I have coded up a lot of base line functionality into the game.

I’ve completed a lot of internal code to run the combat system. It looks just like the old ATS combat but has better performance and more functionality.

New Combat Technology!

For example, some of the improvements are: being able to easily set combat messages based on the damage type (all those nice looking melee combat messages), and having them to do certain actions. For example, the message may say that blood goes spraying – in this case – the message would also load a blood pool in the room. So it is very powerful and functional.

Combat Message Technology!

Finally, I’ve also put in the bleed system. It functions very similar to the old ATS one. There are some other improvements, but most of them are unseen. But, to put it simply: the combat code in the old ATS was awful and slow! This version is much better. I am able to do 1,000 combat attacks in around 0.09 of a second! Let the performance reign supreme!

Super Fast Combat!

I’ve also done a lot of work on making the abilities much easier to program. As this was a major issue in the old ATS. A lot of work and effort was needed to put in a simple skill. A lot of that effort dealt with the way the skills must be coded in, and the rest dealt with the messages. There was a lot of repeating code that was used in the game to display messages. I have streamlined both of these processes for the new game – it is very easy to add in messages. There are different types of messages such as caster, target, room, area, and world. It is very powerful.

Right now I am working on the magic system and Tiberius is helping me test. So far that is going well.

Stay tuned – for great things are coming your way!