As of this morning, I have reassembled the special FX engine (so far, particles are working again--but soon to be more!), tested out the teleport spell (and nicely fixed the ranging hack) and have done some preliminary lag testing. By simulating lag on the connection using some carefully-placed delays, I have determined that this game will be smoothly playable with a ping of up to 400 ms under 30% jitter (i.e. ping randomly changing from 280 to 520 ms). Of course, the faster your connection the less lag you will experience. As far as bandwidth requirements go, the game requires (client-side) roughly 1KBps per 20 players on the screen. A 56k modem gives about 7 times that amount.
So for the near future, the plan is:
- test out new projectile spells, including VFV
- fix loose ends (display HP/mp, activate stats screen, repair key binding screen...mostly programming back-end stuff)
- get enchantments working and displaying on characters
- re-enable sound effects (should be trivial)
- add monsters back into the game
- add equipment & items
**at this point we'll be back at the current game!**
The reason that they got disabled is I was messing with the volume controls...maybe tabbing resets that?
