9.8.0:2351 – Fixin' The Engin'

So, reading the response to Obsidian Tog made me realize something: I’m not being evil enough.
Also there have been several bugs with the combat engine that have been left alone for far too long and it was about time I stopped avoiding the maze of code that is our TWO separate battle engines (one for new quests and the legacy one from pre-9.0 era that runs the majority of fights in DragonFable even still) and fix the problems.

What’s been fixed in 9.8?  I’ll do a quick list for those of you wanting a cliffnotes:

• Having negative stats will no longer deal zero damage – true for both players and monsters
• Weapons with on-hit specials will now only affect the hit they trigger on – not continually hit every strike after the first one in a special

These bugs were both in the player’s favor and as such lower priority, but they lead to a very unbalanced game that resulted in some armors being far more powerful than ever intended (looking at you ChickenCow Lord).  These bug fixes will let us make more classes with fun animations and more weapons with on-hit specials.

These bugs were tracked down thanks to the help of the community, a bonus big props to our bugs lead Verlyrus!

The Battle Engine is held together with string and sheer force of will, so playing inside it is like poking a cobra with the Cobra Annoying Stick (Patent Pending Ebil Corp).  Things will go badly.  Very badly.  It went about as well as you’d expect.

Long story short, I took a mop and a flamethrower into the battle engine and walked out victorious, resulting in a much more organized base of code and two big bugs as trophies of the rampage.  With that we should see more bug fixes like these two in the future with considerably fewer headaches.  (for those of you artistically inclined – Rolith wielding a mop and a flamethrower would make an epic piece of fanart).

I love the smell of Mop and Glo in the mornin’!

Oh, also, Hard Mode now scales monster’s stats, and has increased their damage noticeably.