First up, I've chosen to delay the video update this year. In the video I plan to feature the new Quest and Crafting systems, and the demonstration quest I've built has revealed some deficiencies I need to address first.

Synchronized Creature States

Up to this point Antilia has been lacking a system for managing the animation state of creatures and characters. There were events and network packets that could play animations on creatures and characters, but it was very loosey goosey. In a few cases (like when a player is aiming their bow or fishing pole) the character's pose is comprised of multiple animation poses blended together - something that couldn't effectively be replicated through PlayAnimation packets.

While trying to get an NPC archer to follow the player and support them this limitation needed a solution. Without the NPC aiming their bow it was difficult to tell that the NPC was doing anything at all while playing and in video. To address this I recently added a synchronized creature state system to Antilia, and with this system in place players can finally see NPCs and other players aiming and engaged in more complex animation states.

The Synchronized Creature State system used to display a remote player aiming their fishing pole.

Quest and Combat Behaviors

After working on Creature States I returned my attention to quests and combat. I added a new behavior node "Lead Character", which will have the NPC navigate a set of waypoints, and wait at each one for the player character to catch up.

While working on the quest I noticed some problems with combat behaviors, and set up a larger combat scenario through which I could test multiple Defender behaviors and NPC vs. NPC combat. There are still a few gaps to close - such as NPC projectiles hitting other NPC targets.

Characters and creatures are starting to behave more effectively in combat, but animation transitions and effects need more work.

Debugging

I recently completed building a new development PC with the expectation that the new machine would compile the Antilia source code faster. On the old PC a small change to the Antilia source was taking on average 5-15 minutes depending on the change. A full rebuild of all Antilia source code would take nearly 40 minutes.

I have moved development of Antilia to the new PC and the improvement was more dramatic than I was expecting. Most changes now compile in less than a minute. A full rebuild can be completed in less than 3 minutes.

With compile times having improved so dramatically I then spent a week just testing and debugging the game.

New Content

In addition to the NPC behaviors, quest and combat improvements, and bug fixes I also added some new content to Antilia recently, including:

Decorative Windows

Some new "stained glass" window styles were added while working on village layouts to help identify guild halls and businesses.

Stained glass windows help identify guild halls.

Spin Attack

Two new combat skills have been added recently:

• Claw - A basic bare-handed attack from the MMORPG
  
• Tail Whip - A spin attack (Koros will have to wait for a horn-based attack.)
  

Beware of dance moves.

That's all for this update. Thanks for reading!

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