So yesterday Gaeel took it upon himself to drop into #twilightmmorl on QuakeNet and mention a few improvements to me. Specifically, he asked for configurable key bindings (because he uses an azerty keyboard), and an AI that fans out to attack rather than stacking up in a huge line. So I thought these were both great ideas, and implemented them.
The keybinding thing is something I’d thought about several times before and just didn’t care enough at the time to do, but I figured that since I had nothing better to do, I’d add it. It took a small amount of work, but now you can rebind most of the game commands. Unfortunately, you can’t use every key. Special keys like the arrow keys or function keys, etc, have multi-byte keycodes, so they’re not well-suited for being bound to, the way I’m currently doing things. I don’t see that as a large problem though.
As far as tweaking the AI goes, I just made it do something similar to when they AI finds a world feature in the way: it just picks a random direction to move in. This only kicks in for monsters with xlvl >= 30, but it’s a good idea, and makes the AI look a small amount less stupid. On the other hand, it makes the later-game fights a bit more challenging for the sloppy, but I don’t think it skews things too badly.
Thoughts for the Future
Ideas for the future include (as always) more instance dungeons, and also a way to voluntarily handicap yourself such that your level 60 character can be somewhat challenged by level 20 monsters. This would allow people to play with their fully-leveled characters, but assist their friends who may not have leveled as far. Since teamwork is what makes twilight the most fun, this would have a positive effect I think.
Tags: twilight
