Progress Update! Joysticks, Jumping, Helms, and Commands

AdventureQuest Worlds Progress Update

Here is the latest on the development of AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity. It is a cross-platform rebuild of the MMORPG which will allow you to login your character and equip your well earned items.

Conventions, Trailer, and Stuff

We are taking this new (Is it new? It is rebuilt from the ground up.) video game to our first convention of the year in March! The pressure is on to get a fully playable demo ready for the public to look at. Also, I need to create a trailer for the game this week. Which is a problem. A big problem. Because how do you build a trailer for a game the size of AQWorlds if you only have two areas partially working? Also, with all of our animators maxed out on the weekly releases-- who is going to animate it? Inquiring minds want to know. (Especially me. Looks at the calendar with a raised eyebrow as a drip of sweat falls down my forehead.)

Top Things in Development

The biggest thing in development is new dev tools for placing and naming monsters & NPCs. This is a HUGE improvement over the older AQWorlds from a dev perspective. Frankly, this is the only way we will be able to re-build the maps with the level of speed needed.  If you are also following the progress of this game's 3D sister, AdventureQuest 3D, then you may know we are building slightly more advanced versions of the same tools-- for the exact same reason.  I am looking forward to seeing Reen's reaction when she sees this for the first time. To add a monster in the web version of AQWorlds, she needed to edit the physical map, adding a spawn pad with a unique identifier on it. Then upload the map. Then clear cache so the old version of the map was not stuck. Then she would go to the database, add an entry for the monster with a matching id. Then she would go back to the game clear the data and reload the map to see if it worked. In this new version of the game, she will be able to type a single command... then poof, the monster will be there for all players. Done.

Below, please find a copy/pasta from our meetings to keep you in the loop. 

I put them in chronological order to make it easier to read.

2022.01.25.Last Week of Jan

• We now have two big meetings a week
• Wed = Content and UI
• Thu = Combat, Server, Engine, Code
• Content  Meeting Review 
• Bug with speech bubbles not showing the pop ups
• Sorting Layers being added to the main engine
• Particle Effects toggle being added to the options menu - Tunik
• Particle Effects gameobject added to the maps project to enable/hide particles
• /MapReload not pulling new map data and needs fixed - Yorumi
• Dynamically loaded characters are now showing  their speech bubbles
• J6 is making art modifications to the town of battleon
• Widen the first screen
• Separate fountain into  a separate z-ordered game object
• Create leaf particles

2023.01.26

• Tunik
• The black bars on the top and bottom of the apop extend farther now to stop the user from seeing past them when scaling the window.
• Cutscenes now have black bars on the top and bottom.
• Compatibility flag is no longer used on all items in the item list. It is only used on equip-able items.
• Compatibility flag is no longer used on all items in the item preview. It is only used on equip-able items.
• The target panel portraits have issues resizing when the window is scaled. I have a fix for this but was told to roll it back because it exposed another bug.
• Closing the loot inventory now closes the item preview.
• Cutscenes no longer crash if their background fails to load.
• Chat no longer disappears when logging out and logging in again.
• Fixed a null error when pressing X or discard in the loot menu.
• The command list index in the chat now resets when submitting a message. Before this it didn't reset and this caused an issue where pressing up wouldn't always show the last command.
• Fixed a "Singleton not registered" bug that used to appear on the login screen.
• Fixed a "OnMouseDown has no receiver" bug that used to appear whenever the yes/no window was clicked.

• Warlic
• When switching to map cell - grab first existing spawn pad if target spawn pad is null
• Fixed local scale for custom npcs - Camera color now black
• fixed dialog storytracker
• fixed /goto player spawn monster
• Story fixes for area load
• Fixed - Clicking the Story tracker now gives you the correct quest detail.
• Open Issue - Hard Crash - Took some steps to mitigate but still investigating
• - added dead check to combatlootdrop object
• - added another death bool to combatloot -to avoid accidentally calling destroy on a null gameobject.
• - wait for end of frame to kill uiquestcomplete
• - removed Rigidbody from CombatLootDrop Prefab
• - wait for end of frame to kill uiquestcomplete
• - removed Rigidbody frorm CombatLootDrop Prefab
• Do not remove quest from quests data after complete - server will only send the questdata once - so if you need the data again (retake the quest, etc.) you won't have the actual data if it is removed.

• Workaround: avoid cached dialog data so for cutscene load. We need to revisit the Dialog/Apop flow 

• Pull Quest from Quest.questLoaded if not in player acceptedQuests - This fixes a null issue when /qreset has been used to reset a quest chain after having already pulled the quest data and it no longer exists in questsAccepted - in this case we need to fallback to Quest.questsLoaded to find the questData and push it back into questsAccepted.
• Server - remove questobjective when reseting a quest using cqstatus (/qreset).
• Added some helpful info commands /info,  /questinfo, /sagainfo, and /mapinfo - also added some feedback for /qreset
• ClickableWalk sets it z position to 1 and gets out of the way of buttons
• Custom NPCs can now spawn apopbuttons
• Added particle system toggle behavior.

 

2023.02.01.Happy February

• Warlic
• Particle System now has on/off toggle
• Map devs should add particle containers above their particle systems
• Game Crashing Bug 
• Investigated and found that the game was trying to destroy a null object and it would crash the player. Spent a lot of time chasing this bug. This turned out to be a known Unity bug that has been regressed in the latest version and only affects a specific version of Windows 10. This is fixable by rolling back to an older version of Unity and publishing. 
• Map Sorting Layers added
• Maps now have very defined foreground, mid, background, parallax layers. There are 7 in total which will ensure objects render on screen in the right order. This includes particle systems. 
• Blockers and pads no longer block the walk click
• /devmode allows devs to see the pads in the game to help with debugging
• /questinfo now shows all of the data for the current quest to help devs work on quests
• APOP (npc popups) now work properly on dynamically loaded NPCs. 
• Yorumi
• Fixed /ReloadMap
• There was an issue with the order of messages coming in from the server that was causing the maps to break for some users. Re-organized the code so that the data 100% comes in the right order. 
• Tunik
• Fixed formatting of login text fields
• Equipped tab in the inventory used the wrong icon scale - Fixed
• HUD can sometimes appear while in apops - Fixed
• Dialog Editor
• Changes to the loading process broke the dialogue editor. Spent a lot of time this week fixing those issues. 
• No error correction when you try to remove a background. Would break everything if you did it. - Fixed
• Setup screen stopped showing actors. Which means it would add them but you could not remove them. - Fixed
• You could spawn multiple text boxes, but it got confusing and they all showed the same text. So it now just spawns one. -Fixed
• If you try to change the text box colors...weird things will happen. The text box name plate would show itself every time there was a color change. - Fixed
• Some dialog items would become inaccessible when you tried to scale the text box - Fixed
• Hovering over a text box pops up an editor box. But it was z-ordering behind other objects in the scene. Possibly related to the new sort layers. - Fixed
• One un-fixed issue that causes a crash... when you call an ID on the database, if it does not exist it does not fail gracefully. 
• Artix & J6
• J6 hogged the Battleon map and would not share! XD 
• He Z-ordered the fountain and added the Daimyo statue. We are going to use a particle system for the fountain's water. 
• Removed the arrows form the map so we can add them from the engine.
• Meeting Notes / Needs
• Ok... we have our first convention coming up: Pax East. We need the game running between a phone, tablet, and a few computers. We will have power, but we might not want to rely on internet. So.... hear me out. Can you make me a private server for AQW:U? 
• Remove Made with Unity loading screen
• Facebook Login
• Spacebar needs to jump! 
• Add Joystick support (Full joystick support is not implementable in time for the convention... so we will be doing basic movement and interaction only which will allow you to loosely play on SteamDeck and with a controller. 
• Redo login screen and server select screen. 
• Remove the slide in for notification popups.... Just make it pop up
• Move Yulgar's Inn to the right so you can see the sign
• Need a /cell command to jump cells
• Big feature: We want to add the same feature Spider helped build for AQ3D to AQ2D. The feature would allow the team to dynamically create and save monster and NPCs to the spawn from the game itself. Yorumi says this is already partially working. Goal is to have a test of the commands working from tomorrow. Then we will remove all of the manually placed spawn pads form the town of Battleon and spawn them using a slash command.

 

2023.02.08."Jump! Jump!"

• Yorumi
• Most dev spawn and store in database commands are now in!
• /dbspawn id <name> <level> <aggro> <size - use this for min and max> <facing:right/left>
• /dbdelete and /dbkill
• /dbmovetome
• /dbright
• /dbleft
• /dbsize <min> <max>  (if only min is entered it uses min for both)
• /dblevel <level>
• /dbname <name>
• /dbaggro <aggro type>
• /dbclearframe (removes all monsters on the current frame form the database)
• Bug: Direction is not being saved or pulled correctly - investigating. 
• Main spawn command only spawns monster, it does not take the additional parameters. Working on those this week. But you can spawn a monster and edit the other data in the database. 
• A map reload is sent after every command
• Double checking that the maximum access level is required to use these commands. 
• Tunik
• Unifying UI style - completed 4 screens. 
• Bug introduced from layers which removed one of the physics layers.... This has been fixed. 
• Warlic
• Basic Joystick control working
• Jump added
• You can walk and jump at the same time.
• Need to fix cape animation so it does not show a weird frame when you jump.
• Need to reset values when you 
• Layer Clean up
• Spider's new Head Importer is in and works. 
• You can have a helm with color customization now
• It is similar to the armor importer. Which means Importing things is still somewhat manual. But the tools will increase the speed of masking.
• Need to make an auto importer. 
• Starting iOS Build
• Creating asset bundles
• Client able to build to an XCode Project on the Mac at the lab. At the point where we are ready to put it on a phone. We just need to do all the the provisioning stuff. 
• Note: PC & Android builds are already working. 
• Spider
• Working on combat this week. 
• BUGS & Stuff
• Major Bug: Goto and spawn reload are causing super bad issues when you are not on the first frame of a map. 
• Reloadmap
• Character needs to be exactly where they were standing (It is currently scanning for spawn pads and sending you to one of those which is bad when you are trying to drop monsters)
• Monsters/NPCs not facing the right direction when loaded from the database
• Add /dbkill as a alternate command for delete. 
• /dbaggro not working
• Cape Disappeared after jumping and changing screens
• Monster kept turning away from me when fighting

Tunik, Diogon, J6 and I are having a meeting to standardize the user interface elements. Tunik pointed out that after so many hands being in it, we ended up with quite a number of different fonts and styles in the game. We want to polish it with a uniform and consistant style that reflects the old game but it also very modern.

See you in the next update!

- Artix

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