The Dreaded Lurgy

 

 

The Dreaded Lurgy is a Rare SWAG Power-up. It is an Attack Based event which causes the targeted MONSTER to succumb to the Dreaded Lurgy. The infected MONSTER is highly contagious and will transmit the Dreaded Lurgy to any other MONSTER who they come into contact with. However, after receiving the dark gift of the Dreaded Lurgy, the victim is now immune from further infection.

Annoyingly this is also a thing in real life, and I have spent the last month suffering from The Langshan-Po Lurgy - a free internet to anyone who gets the reference, but Gen-X (greatest generation) here, is probably just showing his age.

Needless to say 3D vector maths, gimbals, quaternions, cpp and general cerebral activity, has been somewhat compromised with lurgy brain fog. In celebration at the cerebral degradation - which hopefully will only be temperory - I have revised, both the icon and the in-game activation event art, for

The Dreaded Lurgy.

However during this time, Steam has snuck out a new update to Steamworks (v1.56) ... which broke previous coded SteamGameServer::getAuthentication - thank you Valve devs for the code comments which gave a good explaination of the new changes. 

The Steam update for Monsters Loot Swag is here.

It has also spent all month raining again - just like last month. So it turned out in the end there really was enough rain for April showers. In the midst of all these downpours there has been a frequent visitor, and pidgeon numbers are being reduced.

Who's a pretty boy, then?

In the world of melee combat coding I decided to try a new way of doing things and ended up on some terrible code carousel, going round and round in circles - and having the Dreaded Lurgy did not help brain function. 

I had wanted to look down a list of the target's hitboxes and check if they were within the bounds of a weapon's hitbox. This caused far more problems than I had preceived, with a total lack of being able to get the transforms and orientation of the hitbox meshes within the model. When I could get the hitbox mesh itself it wouldn't allow me to translate it to into world space because it was the wrong class, when I had world space I could not access the hitbox mesh because that was then the wrong class.

I could test a strike against the target bounds and check for intersecting but then to get the actual hitboxes still required using a raycast against all hitboxes to get their transforms and then suddenly we were into more load than I had before.

Dave is made of hitboxes and the raycast is checking alignment of the forearm hitbox

 The only thing I can think of is to create a whole series of points within each of the target's hitboxes and and then check the Box3F of the weapon hitbox against all these points --- and once again we are into even more load, and not the less I was hoping for with just intersection checks of boxes.

Giving all of this up as a bad job, I decided to use the 4 main edges of the weapon hitbox and fire a raycast down each length for more accuracy than a single, central raycast check. This has turned out to be infinitely simpler than going down a list of up to 20 hitboxes checking for intersections.

I also coded up a fatigue system for heavy attacks, sprinting and swimming, and completely rewrote how fall damage works. I started to add attribute statistics for the player, which are fairly similiar to standard RPG stuff with STR, DEX, CON, etc, and the start of a leveling and experience system.

Next up will be to code classes and jobs with bonuses for these attributes on how fast experience points boost them.

Next month I am not certain whether I will continue with the melee action RPG prototype or start porting Monsters Loot Swag to the newest an shiniest version of the engine - I expect it will be a bit of both.

The Dreaded Lurgy is finally subsiding and I am down to a dry and somewhat sore throat with an occaisional dry cough. A pox upon the ... er ... pox!