Act of War 2D

85 commits. A week ago combat was a handful of buttons and most windows didn’t exist. Now there are 79 pressable skills and spells, the action bar is something you build yourself, and the world has a day/night cycle you can get burned by.

Combat has a lot more buttons

• 79 skills and spells are pressable, up from a handful last Friday.
• Warriors — bash, trip, dirt kicking, disarm, berserk, rescue
• Rogues — backstab, circle, and sneak attacks that know which skill drove the hit
• Casters — 10 attack spells with saving throws, 21 buff/debuff spells from one table, the cause/cure family, dispel magic and cancellation, continual light
• blindness works, and so does blind fighting — the counter was in the data the whole time and nothing read it

Skills fire immediately and go on cooldown afterwards. Every spell charges first — a cast bar runs and the spell goes off at the end of it, and moving cancels it. Cooldowns are per-skill on top of a shared one-round global, so using a two-round bash doesn’t grey out your kick.

An armed monster now swings its weapon instead of a pair of claws with a sword painted on, and skills reach a real distance rather than assuming everyone is in the same room.

The action bar is yours

• A skillbook window (K) listing everything you can actually press — drag from it onto the bar
• Drag between slots to rearrange, drag off to clear. Once you’ve arranged it, the game never touches it again
• Radial cooldown sweep on each button, and a cast bar above the bar
• Mouseovers — hold the pointer on a slot for a second for the skill’s name and timer: kick — 1.5s cooldown — ready

Windows — and they stay where you put them

• Inventory with drag and drop, loot window, equipment / paper doll panel
• Both character sheets — one for who you are, one for how well you fight — and training
• The war window, with a way to end a season
• Window positions are saved per account, and the main window resizes properly
• Player and target frames carry buff/debuff icons at double the old size — hover one for a second and it names the spell, its level and how long is left

Day, night, and the dark

• A clock. The sun rises and sets and the world is told about it
• Darkness actually reaches the screen, with light sources that push it back
• Drow burn in sunlight without anyone having to check a flag
• How far you can see is a rule of the game, not a function of your monitor. Before this, a taller window quite literally saw more of the world than a shorter one

Shops, food and drink

• Shops: buy, sell, value, list and repair — plus haggle, with a ceiling so it can’t become a money loop
• Hunger and thirst, drinking from fountains and springs, and one mushroom that does something more interesting than feeding you
• The floating disc and portable containers; a closed chest keeps its contents to itself
• Three new monsters and three new objects in the world

The war

• Warpoints are gross, warscore is net, and one kill is one kill
• Wired into the death path and survives a logout
• Trophies ported; raids turned out never to have existed in the source at all

Running a server

• Staff commands: goto, wizinvis, advance, set, and a trust ladder where nothing administrative sits below 71
• Bans are addresses and accounts now, not hostnames and substrings
• Six moderation commands — and six more that were left out because they would have been lies
• An owner can bootstrap themselves from one line in aow-server.cfg

Report a bug without leaving the game

There’s a beetle in the bottom-right corner. Click it and you get a form — bug, typo or idea — and the confirmation comes back as “Bug #7 filed” where you were already looking. /bug, /typo and /idea still work exactly as they did.

Groundwork, not yet visible

Equipment art. The compositing order (body → armour → overlay) works and helms and breastplates transplant cleanly between bodies. Boots and gauntlets don’t yet, and an elf’s ears vanish under a helm from two angles — accepted for now.

Quality

• 1,759 automated rules tests, all green
• Four full manual test runs this week; 190 test-plan rows have now passed, 132 are still open
• Six bugs found and fixed in those runs — two of which were the project’s own notes claiming something was built when it wasn’t