Hey guys,

Today I'm coming at you with another update that'll be about loot, more UI work and a scalability test I did after building a headless version of the game client. So let's get to it!

Note: As I did last time, for those who prefer the video format, I tried to condense this update into a short video which I posted on youtube. Enjoy!

Loot

So I've implemented basic loot and loot entity management in the game. The only thing that drops so far are gold piles but it behaves more or less the way I wanted it to. It's all shared loot which means that all players see the same objects on the ground and have to "compete" to pick them up. The server registers the pick-up event and adds the amount of gold to the player's inventory.

New Windows

I've spent a fair share of my time over the last few weeks cleaning up the implementation of my window management system and starting to put more pieces in place so that the primary UI components could start looking right. The skin is still totally placeholder but we're getting closer to something that looks like a game's UI. I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2 at this point because to me it's always been one of the cleanest and more importantly, most intuitive and effective in-game UI systems.

Scalability testing

I'll finish this short update (short in text, but I did log a lot of hours the last few weeks haha!) with a few findings regarding scalability. So I decided to go ahead and build a headless client, which means that I can start up a client without rendering the graphics, which is usually what costs the most resources. I was able to start about 40 of these clients on my local PC which is starting to get close to my initial design goal of 64 concurrent players in the same zone (i.e potentially located on the same screen). Backend-wise, since I'm planning on distributing my world's load across many servers (1 server per zone instance), this means that my server needs to be able to serve that many players as well.

So long story short, I have good news! So far everything is scaling just fine which makes me believe that I'm not going to have to optimize too much in order to take the code & infrastructure to where they need to be for the game experience I want to provide!

Today was a short update because I'm leaving my house in just a few hours, I'm actually going on a short vacation but I promise I'll be back on here soon with tons more to discuss!

Cheers,

-pvd