Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Weekly update

Last week was a highly productive one with many code improvements being made. The skill usage plug-in now sorts actors from enemies and puts them in a separate database. This improves the organization and will help in readability. Also in theory it will now be capable of displaying the low and the high damage that the skill has done. The code already works on the server side. However I will have to rewrite my client side code quite a bit.

Lets look at some of the things I have been thinking of:
  1. Damage from skills that hit multiple enemies; should they calculate the total damage from those skills, the damage from the first target hit or the highest damage dealt. Personally I am leaning towards the total damage.
  2. This also means it might be a good idea to grab the amount of targets hit and send that to the server.
 That being said more testing is needed to figure out the best way of collecting this new data.


Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Update plus a discussion on random events

Progress on Skill_Usage has been slow this past week. Meaning I have very little to report on that. So instead I'm going to talk about random events.


Monday, May 9, 2016

Weekly update 2 for Skill_Usage plugin

Much progress has been made since my last update. My ultimate plan for it works so far flawlessly which includes using PHP and SQL for storing the data. There's still a few things that need to be worked out however.

1. Enemy data gets stored currently in the same database as Actors. Having them get stored in their own databases will look a bit cleaner.

2. Average damage for skills will probably require a third database for storing just the skill damage so I can use the average method and return that data back into the actor/enemy database tables.

3. A how to use manual will have to be written as setting this up requires a bit of advanced knowledge. I shall try and keep the manual as easy to understand as possible.

Here's some advantages to doing it this way:

1. The client will not suffer any major performance drop as calculations and data storing is handled server side.

2. You will not have to ask your testers/game players to send a text file to you.

3. It is much cleaner i.e you can view just one actor at a time vs every one at the same time.

4. It should in theory work for any number of testers/game players. Meaning you can collect a massive amount of data all added together for you to better understand whats being used and whats not.