MMORPG Day 4

On day 4 I ran into many things I hadn't even thought about.

One of the many problems is Animating the Characters model. I think I might group together many polygons and bond them with a "bone" point and when I do anything to that point it impacts all the polygons tied to it. That way by moving one vertex I can be able to move an entire part of a character (ex. Left Leg, Right Arm). I will also have to find some way to record the movement of the "bone" points in a simple text file. As stated before I'm kind of stuck there.

I also hadn't considered the Item class properly. I forgot to add any way the Item could interact with another thing. When I realised I added 3 new methods to the Item class; useonCharacter, useonItem, and useonTile. This way the Item can interact with players, other items, and the surrounding area. I have to create some kind of scripting language to create the results of an interaction. This Scripting language could also be useful with map related events. The scripting language would have to be simple, something like this:


(item)Fish+(character)Player
> Player is less hungry
> Fish Disappears
(tile)Tree+(item)Axe
> Tree dissapears
> Player gains (item)Wood
> 50% chance axe may brake


I also forgot about any kind of Levels the character may have. I think a simple array of numbers will do but I'm still thinking about it.

The thing I mainly worked on on Day 4 is This Applet. It took quite some tweaking to get the Applet to load files from the server it was stored on. I may write an Article about it later on. When you view the applet you should see a green cube rotating representing the character. It's loaded from a file and treated as a character would be. I will improve the characters visual appearance later on so don't panic =). On the top of the applet it says "3D Engine (ZBuffer: False)" which means that ZBuffering is disabled in the 3D Engine (as you may have guessed). On the bottom of the Applet is a series of letters harder to decipher. They basically represent the players character.

I'm kind of stuck on all fronts with the Character so if I don't solve the problems I'll continue on to the Map class and return later.