Act of War 2D

A same-day fix for the isometric map. Your characters carry over.

• North is up-and-to-the-left. This morning’s map was drawn as a mirror image of the world, which is why the movement keys felt reversed and some walls looked out of place. It’s a proper rotation now: W walks up-left, D up-right, S down-right and A down-left, and the walls, stairs and ground blends all turned with it

Isometric look and feel implemented and tested. Web client works. Phones in development. Your characters carry over.

State of the game

Highlights

• It’s isometric. You’ll see this before you read anything else. The whole world is drawn at an angle. The ground is laid down per sector with enough variation that you stop noticing the tiles, walls stand up instead of lying flat, and when a wall gets between the camera and your character it fades out instead of hiding you. North is up-and-to-the-right now. Everything that used to be drawn flat came with it — decor, items on the floor, projectiles, splashes, the rings around traps
• It runs on a phone. There’s an Android build and it works. It is in development, with major UI work still ahead
• A sprite audit. The shift to isometric was the right moment to go through the character art properly. We audited every sprite in the game, found a batch of problems and cleaned them up: 116 sheets redrawn across 51 characters
• Beds do something. Thirty-eight pieces of furniture have been standing around since the port as things you bump into. ROM says sleeping in an inn bed is worth five to ten times sleeping on the floor. Now it is
• Dropping your connection is dangerous again. You used to just disappear. Now your character stands in the world for a while, and anything that wants to kill it can
• You can block and report people. ignore <player> stops their chat reaching you, report <player> <reason> files it, a chat filter is on by default with noprofanity to turn it off, and deleting an account now erases it after thirty days rather than hiding it
• trap works from the toolbar. It is the only bound action that needs you to pick something, so it could not be used from a button at all. It opens a chooser now

The world, at the new angle

• Floors come in three variants per sector, deliberately muted so characters stay readable on top of them
• Edges are per-sector kits rather than one generic border, and the transitions between sectors are worked out rather than placed by hand
• Walls take their material from the room they face. Timber inside, plaster and beams outside — wooden walls make sense in a house and less sense on a street
• Roads have no edge of their own, on purpose. An edged road reads as a canal
• If a builder changes a wall while you are standing there, the server works out the new shape and the client redraws it
• Nine monsters that had been wandering around in a bare human body are dressed, and up and down answer where there are stairs

Known, and not fixed here

• Four attack animations are too big facing north — the carnoroo by about half again, the hill giant chief, the angel and the bear by about a quarter. It is a quirk of how the art tool sizes its canvas, and they will get a proper redraw rather than a patch
• The theropod and the female troll have white specks on a couple of back views
• Whips and bows still have no artwork, so you will see a weapon in your hand that is not the one you are holding
• Nobody has watched a sheathed weapon ride a walk cycle yet; it looks right standing still
• Twelve of the sixteen Undermountain races still have no body. Four do now — drow, orc, deugar and troll — which is why the kingdom is next, on 2 October

Browser play now implemented. Client size and resource utilization greatly improved. Mprogs implemented. 20/24 bugs reported fixed. Your characters carry over.

State of the game

Highlights

• Play in your browser. Every page has a Play link. The game opens in the tab, connects over a secure WebSocket, and logs you into the same characters as the download. The first visit is a large download the browser keeps; nothing is installed. Desktop browsers only for now
• The client stopped burning four cores standing still. It had no frame cap and no vsync since the first build. It follows your display now, and idles when it is not the window in front. Measured: 436% of a core down to 63%
• The client is a quarter the size. Every character sheet was a cell sized for a horse, and 94.6% of its pixels were air. Packed by outline, 2,996 MB of textures became 514, and it runs on a laptop’s integrated graphics for the first time
• Monsters have their scripts back. ROM’s MOBprograms are ported, and the 353 programs that have sat silent since the port began now fire: greetings when you walk in, lines in a fight, last words, and the odd remark at random
• Twenty of your twenty-four reports are closed. Backstab’s range, mend, shops refusing everything, autoloot, create water, the gargoyle’s human hands, damage words eating their brackets, guards who did not guard, dual wield, the pack after death, the unreachable southern row of every room, the firbolg’s hands and underwear, and the draw order of large characters
• Four additional races are animated across 8 directions, with all 4 states — mhrynn, deugar, drow and trolls, with outfits and swings — plus both player orcs and two remort women. Nine mobiles walking around in the bare human body are dressed, and the garrisons no longer look like one man repeated
• A kill can leave a body part. One roll in sixteen leaves a head, a brain, a heart, an arm, a leg or the guts, named for who it came from — and the ones ROM lets you eat, you can
• Traps are real. The room hears one spring, staff can see them, and anyone who has learned detect trap sees them drawn on the map as a ring the size the trap reaches
• Things you should have been able to click. The skill bar has never been clickable in a shipped build — the keys worked, the mouse did not. It is now. The wheel scrolls the chat log, the skillbook and the shop; /', /,, /. and ROM’s other shortcuts work; staff have immtalk

Fixed

• The kingdom guards hold their gates. That check had never been ported; a guard would shout and let you through
• Melee skills reach exactly as far as a swing, so backstab lands
• mend mends what you are carrying instead of looking for a person
• Dual wield works. The off-hand had every rule and no verb
• create water fills a vessel with water, and identify reads the vessel
• The shop serves the nearest keeper, so a room with two stops refusing everything
• Hidden and invisible characters are not sent to anyone who cannot see them
• A sleeping character stops hearing the room
• Emotes and socials float over the actor’s head, and damage words carry ROM’s colours — green, yellow, red, bright red
• The southernmost row of every room is reachable. A body’s footprint was counting its bottom edge as wall. A giant still cannot fit through a door; that is the door
• Large characters draw in the right order. Every character shared one sort key, so who stood in front was the engine’s tie-break
• The bat is an animal, the gargoyles have wings, and the shade stopped “talking” — that bubble was breath the generator drew

Known, and not fixed here

• The brontosaurus and pachycephalosaur tails are cut off (#33, #50); the generator clipped its own rotations and both need a re-roll
• The wyvern shrinks and jukes when attacking (#43); two re-rolls failed
• Beds and healing centres (#36) are a design question, still open
• Traps: a lethal fire trap leaves no corpse, a trip trap does not throw a rider, and one can be set while mounted — left deliberately
• The browser client is new. Desktop browsers only; it has been signed into on the live server from a browser once, on deploy day — expect rough edges
• Monster greetings do not fire on recall, stairs or portals, which move you without a step
• From 0.2.4, still: room transitions, a monster shot from range closing rather than fleeing, and upper floors not stacked above their buildings

Most of this release is things you can see: new ground under your feet, a new row of controls over your skills, the monsters that were drawn wrong, and every one of the thirty reports you sent in. Tier and Kael are open again, and your characters carry over.

State of the game

Highlights

• All thirty reports are closed. Twenty-five fixed, three were not bugs, two pending confirmation
• Sixteen skills you knew but could not use now work. Nine fight verbs — backstab, circle, bash, trip, disarm, dirt kicking, stun, charge and rescue — worked out who you meant, passed their own checks, then lost the target before anything happened. They spent the cooldown and said nothing
• The ground is not a flat carpet. Three floor tiles per terrain, the twenty commonest boundaries drawn as real edges, and each sector growing its own things: ferns and mushrooms in forest, tufts and wildflowers in field, rocks on hills, weeds between city cobbles
• A clock, a posture bar and a strategy bar sit over your skills. The dial shows the hour, the season’s daylight and the weather. Sleep, rest and stand on the left; flee, defend, engage and assault on the right
• Damage and healing float off heads for everyone in the room who can see it, and levelling up prints over your head in yellow
• Characters sit down when they rest, in every outfit
• Stairs stopped standing in doorways. Ninety-five flights moved, each is drawn facing the wall it stands against, and taking one fades in from black instead of cutting
• Monsters you shoot from a distance come after you instead of standing there. Hunters and guards follow far; an ordinary beast turns back at the edge of its own ground
• Nine creatures that were a man in a costume are now themselves — centaur, minotaur, theropod, triceratops, brontosaurus, mammoth, terror bird, flytrap and carno-roo. All four training-tower golems were redrawn, and treants stopped looking like wolves
• Gear is no longer refused for belonging to another kingdom. That lock was never meant to be in the game

Fixed

• The shop list scrolls. A long catalogue showed eighteen items and said “…and 8 more”, which you could not reach. Use the wheel over the panel, the arrow keys or page up and down
• Armour is drawn by where it is worn rather than every piece drawing the same breastplate
• Monsters stop healing at a resting pace mid-fight. One hit from range fell out of the fight and recovered between hits, which is what “it regens to full” looked like
• A sleeping monster wakes into the fight when you hit it
• Second attack does work, and every swing narrates
• Coins under a gold showed a placeholder instead of the amount
• Food inside a bag counts down when you eat it, and create food makes a second mushroom
• Water and food spells work from the menu as well as the command line, and say whether they worked
• A whip is drawn as a whip, not a sword
• A large body can take the stairs without arriving stuck
• Moving costs what it should. The cost was divided by the wrong number, so travel was cheap and terrain barely mattered
• The skills window is wider and in three columns, so mana and your learned percentage fit

Known, and not fixed here

• Room transitions are better and still not right
• A monster shot from range does not call for help or flee; it closes and fights
• A monster knocked off its feet does not get up to chase you, deliberately, so that bash, trip and charge keep working
• Upper floors are not stacked above their buildings; the stairs take you there

A week of work since the last playtest, and the world is four times the size it was. Twenty new zones, weather with opinions, every spell in the game built, a weapon in your hand that is the weapon you are holding — and, today, three of the map’s five remaining seams turned from jumps into doors. Tier and Kael are both open for new characters this time.

State of the game

Highlights

• The world is four times the size it was. Nine areas became twenty-nine and five hundred rooms became 1,712: haon, zen1 and seraph1; the valley of the elves and the road from Tier’s bridge to the Kael capital; tkael and moria; t55, WarCry5’s Mount Kraga and the troll den; WarCry8’s Thunder Plains, Wyvern’s Tower and alaric1’s prehistoric valley
• Kael is open, and Kael is a place now. New characters can be made there, they arrive at the Portal Gate, and when they die they wake above their own city instead of in a corner of a test map. The capital has its temple, its four guilds, the barracks, Durgis’ Weaponry and Nalic’s Bar
• Three seams became doors. The graveyard east of Tier, the training tower off Main Street, and the gnome village of Corim north of the east road were all reached by a jump; all three are now walked through. Corim’s front door is a door, which is the thing the last notes promised next
• All 108 spells are built. control weather was the last one in, and with it the six that had been waiting on a sky: call lightning, farsight, locate object, nexus and chain lightning
• There is weather, and it has opinions. Rain, snow, a blizzard and lightning are drawn; the season tints the world and litters the ground with leaves, petals or snow. It is not decoration — snow doubles cold damage, heavy rain halves fire and doubles lightning, travel costs more, a blizzard is as good as blindness, tracks wash away, and you cannot sleep in the snow
• You can see what you are carrying. Sheathed weapons are drawn standing and walking, hung at an angle chosen per class — poles on the back, the dagger in front — and enchantments show: a flaming sword burns, frost reads as rime, shocking arcs, vampiric drinks the light, venom runs down the blade’s underside
• Every body swings its own weapon. 186 swing rigs where there were 67. Before this, 119 bodies swung a painted-on shortsword that never changed
• Remort, at level 50. Six races open to Tier and Kael alike — storm giant, phoenix, aratar, high elf, mhrynn and aiel
• The thief plays. steal with its full penalty ladder and a criminal brand for robbing your own side, pick lock, and peek folded into looking at somebody
• Twenty-six commands stopped saying “not implemented”: consider, where, scan, worth, report, practice, gain, trophy, outfit, flee, help and the rest
• Getting out of town is easier. Townspeople no longer body-block you in a doorway; other players still do

Fixed

• A poisoned weapon had never once applied poison, and the message bar claimed otherwise on every hit
• Spear, staff, lance and pike drew no weapon at all, swung or sheathed, since 26 August
• The selling window did nothing. You could sell from the command line and not from the shop; the confirmation box is gone and selling works
• Movement no longer rounds itself away. Every step was charged at least a full point, so a road cost the same as a mountain and you were permanently exhausted. The cost now carries its remainder, and cheap ground is cheap again
• envenom refused the weapon in your hand — the only case anybody remembered using
• The right-click Eat and Drink rows failed on every multi-word item in the game
• Ranged spells let monsters regenerate faster than you could damage them
• sleep, rest, stand and wake were invisible to everyone but the person doing them
• Walking into a portal or up a stair now works from your body rather than from a point at your feet, and a stair no longer slides you across the map through every wall on the way

Known rough edges

• One seam in the world is still a jump rather than a door — the faerie village west of the east road. Two zones want it in two different places at once, so it needs the map edited rather than moved
• Every staircase in the game is a jump, necessarily: a flat map has no “above”. They are meant to read as stairs, and mostly do
• moria is largely underground, and underground has no tileset yet — 72 of its tiles draw as plain floor
• A cape can vanish when a character walks straight away from the camera on some bodies. The generators lose a back garment from directly behind; recorded, not forgotten
• A whip is a rigid stick mid-swing
• The client unpacks to about 2.3 GB on disk now, though the download itself is unchanged at around 60 MB. Pixel art is stored uncompressed on purpose — compressing it blurs and mangles exactly the flat colour it is made of

A same-day follow-up to the morning’s release, built from what the first hours of testing turned up. The client that died on launch one time in three does not any more, right-click works, your pack stacks, and a new character is drawn in the kit they were handed. Still Tier only this weekend.

State of the game

Highlights

• The launch crash is gone. About one build in three died on the splash screen with “level0 is corrupted”. It was never the file: a helper class nested inside the item menu was serialised wrong by the player build. It has its own file now, and nine builds in a row launched clean
• Your pack stacks. Six healing potions are one row reading (6) a healing potion. Anything that differs in fact — an enchanted vest, a worn-down sword, a half-spent wand — keeps its own row. Selling, dropping, wearing or quaffing from a stack takes one. The bank does the same
• You are drawn in what you were issued. The sub issue vest has a look of its own on every body: a patched vest over a stained shirt, one bracer, a cape off one shoulder, mismatched boots. Worn, hodgepodge, not a soldier’s uniform
• Every weapon swings as itself. A spear is a spear in your hand, a shovel is a shovel. Twenty-five weapons drawn, plus a fallback for every weapon class
• Click to target works on every body. A character is several sprite layers and the picker tested only the first; an empty layer made a whole character unclickable

Fixed

• The client died on launch one time in three. See above
• Right-clicking an item in a built client no longer drops the connection
• Clicking a character who would not become your target
• An enchanted item’s glow and hum now show in every listing; they read the template’s flags before

Known rough edges

• The sub issue cape is drawn on seven of eight facings and on every swing, and missing when walking or punching straight away from the camera on six of the eight bodies. The generators lose a back garment from directly behind; it is recorded, not forgotten
• The kit’s swing is not yet rigged for the weapon layer, so it swings its baked sword like the ring mail bodies do
• A whip is a rigid stick mid-swing
• An apple files under Armour in the pack, because the area gives it a hold flag

The second playtest weekend. Two new zones, every monster in them drawn, a weapon in your hand that actually swings, and the potions, scrolls and wands you have been carrying around finally do something. This weekend is Tier only, on purpose.

State of the game

Highlights

• Corim, the gnome village and its mine, and Sith-Kor’s keep joined the world. Both are reached by portal for now — the village’s own front door lands on top of Tier’s eastern town in the file’s geometry and is being redrawn
• Every monster in them is drawn as what it is. Thirty-seven new bodies for fifty-two mobiles: nine gnomes each dressed for their job, hobgoblins, trolls, rats and a mouse, a hermit crab, wraiths, onyx idols, a crystal construct, a demon, a balrog, a nightmare with a mane of fire, and Sith-Kor himself
• Your weapon swings. Wield a sword or a mace and it is drawn in your hand and swung from it; an empty hand punches. Monsters punch whatever they hold, for now
• Scrolls, potions, pills, wands and staves work — /recite, /quaff, /zap, /brandish — and drag any of them onto the action bar
• Right-click an item for everything it can do, with the things it cannot do greyed and explained rather than hidden
• Every item has an icon. 137 drawn this week, one per item, plus fallbacks for the types that had none, so nothing in your pack is a circle any more

World and areas

• Two areas: gnome (95 rooms, 26 mobiles, 24 objects) and warcry4 (the keep, eleven floors). Both survey clean: no folds, no endless loops, one intentional one-way trap in the mine
• The gnome village’s doorway from etier is a portal, because Corim’s streets lie south of its own entrance and would sit on etier’s town. Fixing that is a file edit, not a code change, and it is on the list
• Two ground types the new zones use have no tiles yet and draw as floor

Items and equipment

• Scrolls, potions and pills had no spells at all after import — all 130 of them. They do now. A scroll burns on a fumble; one above your level costs nothing
• Wands and staves: a charge is spent even on a miss, an empty wand used again is destroyed, /identify prints the charges, and a shop prices a wand by what is left in it
• The action bar takes items. Slots bind to the kind of item and grey out when you run out
• The right-click menu: magic, eat or drink, equip, fill, recharge, drop. /fill takes the fountain’s liquid, not just its capacity
• Heavy banded mail draws as ring mail when worn; the rest of the new armour is worn, weighed and counted, and not drawn

Art and animation

• All 32 player body-and-outfit combinations have walk, attack and a rigged weapon swing. The east-facing directions are mirrored and so swing left-handed; that is accepted
• Etier’s black bear is black now rather than orange; its drakel and spirit were redrawn; every mobile in the game fights back with its own attack
• Monsters that are not man-shaped — the demon, the wraiths, the crab — keep their shape in motion. The animator that had been used for people drifted on them and was replaced

Interface and client

• The equipment panel is laid out in columns and no longer covers most of a 1080p screen; chat shows about ten lines of sixty characters
• Only Tier is offered when you make a character this weekend. The server refuses the others too, so an older client gets a sentence rather than a Kael character in an empty land
• This client only connects to warcry. The host and server buttons are for a test build

Fixed

• Every build from 31 August to 3 September drew every character as a white square. The client on this page before today was one of them
• Right-clicking an item in a built client dropped your connection and emptied the screen. Never worked outside the editor; does now
• Wand and staff /identify numbers were wrong twice
• /newlock shuts both doors

Known rough edges

• The character sprite overlaps walls by half a cell; a spell costs two rounds where ROM charges one; dual wield is hard to equip in practice
• No monster has a sleeping pose, so one that sleeps stands
• The Fire Bat is a plain bat, and the three rats in the mine share one dog-sized rat
• The special procedures on nine of Corim’s mobiles — the casters, the poisoner, the breathers — are read and not run
• Six spells remain: they wait on weather, on a global item registry, and on chain lightning

The first playtest weekend, then eleven days of building on what it showed. Armour is drawn on you, the world went from one area to seven, and spells went from 52 of 108 to 102.

State of the game

Highlights

• You can see what you are wearing. Leather, ring mail and mage robes across all eight player bodies, drawn as dressed bodies. The head is an overlay and the chest replaces everything below the neck; boots and gauntlets are worn and counted, not drawn
• The world is seven areas. Tier, its eastern approaches, the graveyard, the training tower, zen9’s inn. Areas are placed by hand, doors between them are doors, and an exit that cannot lead next door is a portal that says so
• Fifty spells in two weeks: recall, teleport, gate, summon and portal; every breath weapon; the ten area spells; enchant weapon and armour, envenom and recharge; charm person, servant, guardian, mount, decoy and animate dead
• Movement has weight. Walking costs movement per tile, terrain sets your speed, bodies block, air and deep water refuse you without flight or a boat
• Emotes, hunting, following, clans, and pets that do not take a party seat
• The server went live with a production database, versioned builds and a downloads page

World and areas

• A room is seven cells, not one; a torch is no longer as bright as daylight
• Road, field, city, hills and forest ground; sixteen pieces of forest scenery and seven city fixtures you can stand behind; the first animated fountain
• Rooms can be left out by number without editing the area files — 55 are, deliberately
• Twenty-five flights of stairs you walk onto rather than teleport through

Combat, spells and skills

• recall, word of recall, teleport, gate, summon, portal; web, entangle and sleep now hold you, and a webbed character looks webbed to everybody
• Area spells reach six units around the target, can cross into the next room, and never hit your own kingdom. tremor and the six caster-centred ones
• Acid, lightning, fire, frost and gas breath, and firestorm. Breath damages what you carry: acid pits armour for good, cold shatters potions, fire blinds for a tick
• stun (15 to 30 seconds), mend, hunt for rangers, barbarians, bards and assassins, trap, detect trap, ventriloquate, and exotic weapons for players
• The PvP lock is armed: attacking a player locks you for 105 seconds against quit, recall, teleport, gate, summon and portal. Invisibility gives you away when you attack or cast
• Followers: charm person, servant, guardian, mount, decoy, animate dead. The decoy wears your armour and owns none of it

Items and equipment

• Per-copy item state persists: wear, acid pitting, poison, enchantments, charges. Item condition had been silently lost at every logout since 10 August
• zap and brandish; identify prints charges
• Shops: click a keeper, hover for stats, right-click to buy and sell. The bank belongs to the account
• Icons for the nine school weapons and a generic icon per item type

Movement and sight

• Movement costs points per tile; out of points you cannot leave your tile. Riding is free
• Plains fastest, then road, field, forest, hills. Forest is about 13% slower than road
• NPCs and enemies block you and you slide past along the clear axis; group members and pets pass through each other unless the server says otherwise
• What is outside your sight, in the dark or beyond blindness is never sent to your client
• Giants reach further, paths respect size, and a small character with a two-handed weapon is refused a shield

Social, grouping and staff

• 244 socials; each observer sees their own sentence, and enemies see “a NEWBIE human from Tier”. A bare social targets the character you have selected
• Follow and group as ROM does it; experience and war points shared within range of the kill; group frames down the left edge for up to five
• Clans: noclan, guild, leader, recruit, a clan channel; a clan corpse loses half its coin; poaching another clan’s member is refused
• Colour codes render in names, tooltips, corpses and chat. goto reaches any room and exits lists a room’s exits

Art and animation

• The sprite cell grew to 96 pixels so a horse would fit, and there is a horse: Tier’s two are one animal at two levels, and both human bodies got a riding pose
• Tier’s 22 named citizens, six guards and five guild trainers; the tower’s four golems; a guardian and a ghast; deer, bear, wolf, snake, water fowl and bat; etier’s imp, drakel, statue and spirit
• Every body is drawn as a state of one base character, so they share a scale and a palette

Interface and client

• The interface has a reference resolution, separate from the world camera
• Paper doll slots show icons and a second’s hover shows the identify text; action bar tooltips name the skill and its timer; nameplates sit above the creature they name
• The feedback beetle opens Bug, Typo and Idea; typing in it no longer walks you
• A client older than the server is refused at login with a sentence that points here

Fixed

• The whole world was drawn half a cell north-east of where you walk
• The ground line was four pixels too high; five creatures stood below it
• Item condition and all mend work was lost at logout
• The war tally and the banks were lost at shutdown
• web held nobody; calm was missing from the spell parser
• Typing a bug report walked the character; WASD opened the console

Known rough edges

• Boots and gauntlets are invisible — worn and working, not drawn
• Tier is 7 of 14 races covered; the giant-sized monsters are undressed
• A spell costs two rounds where ROM charges one; the character sprite overlaps walls by half a cell
• An elf’s ears vanish under a helm from two angles

The first playtest build. A week earlier combat was a handful of buttons and most windows did not exist.

State of the game

Highlights

• 79 skills and spells are pressable. Warriors: bash, trip, dirt kicking, disarm, berserk, rescue. Rogues: backstab, circle. Casters: ten attack spells with saving throws, 21 buffs and debuffs, the cause and cure family, dispel magic, cancellation, continual light
• Skills fire and go on cooldown; every spell charges first with a cast bar, and moving cancels it
• The action bar is yours. A skillbook window (K), drag onto the bar, drag between slots, drag off to clear. Radial cooldown sweeps and mouseover timers
• Windows stay where you put them, saved per account
• A clock. The sun rises and sets, darkness reaches the screen, drow burn in sunlight, and how far you can see is a rule rather than a function of your monitor
• Shops, hunger and thirst, the war, and staff commands with a trust ladder
• The beetle in the corner files a bug, a typo or an idea without leaving the game

Known rough edges

• Boots and gauntlets do not transplant between bodies yet; an elf’s ears vanish under a helm from two angles
• 56 skills are not pressable yet