EQClassic - Spell System

Roughly three weeks ago, I resumed my work on the spell system. I got distracted for seven days or so when I noticed bards were not functioning correctly, but my recent efforts have been focused around refactoring and finalizing the spell system.

The spell system is massive and I am confident that it will beat the size of any other system in the source (including NPC AI) 2:1 or more. The time sink in this area is sickening, but I am optimistic that spells will see their completion before the middle of December. The refactoring of the existing system is pretty much done (I occasionally come across something else that needs to be rewritten), so I have been free to move onto finishing our preliminary implementations of spell effects.

I am currently working on summoned pets and this is an area that will require some serious time. Tazadar started the work for pets back in 2009, but the current implementation is far from complete. Pets have special combat rules, special abilities and special attributes; all of which need to be thoroughly researched. Fortunately, I have invested serious time into a necromancer in the past, so I already posses an intimate understanding of pets. Although I am concerned about implementing pets correctly, I am not concerned about balancing them at this time. Balancing will come much later when the entire spell and combat systems are complete, so that we can look at the damage, mitigation and avoidance tables of all the entities in the game.

After pets, we have a handful of unimplemented spell types, but they are pretty trivial to implement, such as silence, destroy and translocation anchor. The only other significant time sink with spell effects remaining are illusions. Illusions themselves are pretty strait forward, but my concerns lie in temporary faction adjustments and armor textures. In fact, my favorite bug was the way armor textures were saved between illusions and I will replicate it. Basically, one could put on armor that looked great but would not be worn due to its less than desirable stats, chalk up a monster illusion, put their real armor back on, remove the illusion and they would come out donning the nice looking gear but possessing the stats from their current equipment.

Anyway, once the spell system sees its completion, I will finally step back into the combat system and ultimately arrive back to where it all started for me--NPC AI. This work will probably keep me busy through February.