Orion Engine Blog

Still working on all of the spell mechanics. New avatar items have been created for each of the spells that can be individually spawned. Still trying to decide where to put the level 1 spells, like in a random chest or on a starter enemy to drop. Once you acquire a spell scroll, you can double-click on it in your backpack to learn it. There’s a list of available spells that you can attempt to cast based on your current skill level. You can also see which spells are currently active and how much longer they will last.

Also smashed some nasty bugs that were a result of changes in the client due to adding multithreading support. I also found a bug in the new list box control that could keep the last item in the list from showing up. The game feels pretty solid now, I hope it stays that way!

Finally added a list box to the engine’s 2D control library. This was needed for the Spell Book dialog in the game, so spells can be easily selected. Things are still moving along great with the spell system!

I’ve been working on the skill system. The calculations are currently used for the run speed, weapon speed, armor, and hit points. I decided that before I finish the ability to fight, I’ll get the spell system under way too. This way all of the bonuses and everything can be correctly determined as well. Besides, I need at least the war magic spells, so that you can fight with a wand. Also, I really need to create some new UI elements to implement this stuff. Hopefully this doesn’t take too long.

The new windowed/borderless option I added to the game is working great for fullscreen! All of the performance is back now. I’ve been able to tune and fix a bug with the multithreading support that I recently added. Things like input processing and networking are now offloaded to another CPU. This does add some synchronization difficulties, but it’s worth it for the smoothness and performance gain that it provides. The scene update and rendering threads work in parallel now. A synchronization barrier is used to ensure both threads have completed before continuing. Anyway, nuts and bolts aside, it seems the Orion Engine is coming back alive in a big way!