MedievaLands Forums

In all seriousness, it has been almost exactly a year since I have had any meaningful updates to share. I am pleased as Punch to break the dry spell and bring some good news back to you. Today I am going to talk about a brand new way to interact with Yserbius. Then I am going to share the latest bug fixes, and give kudos to our reporting adventurers. As brief preface, this is a 'breaking update' in that it will require people with Clients older than last month's minor update to download the client from the website. I always recommend that you delete all old copies of the client before downloading the new one. With that out of the way ... let's dive into the update!

The big change to report is a complete overhaul of the user interface for exploration and combat within the dungeon. This update addresses one of the major problems I have had in introducing Yserbius to new players: the user interface. The Yserbius UI was amazing for 1992, and it is a joy to return to if you played the game back then. But for new players the dungeon interface doesn't make much sense. It's interesting to compare the first few screens you see when you boot up the game to the interface you are presented with when you enter the dungeon. The gallery and character creation screens all have very clear button, text input, and text display controls. They are early renditions of the exact same controls we see in our modern applications for desktops thirty years on. By comparison, when you enter the dungeon, the user interface design principles shift and what you are doing and what you are interacting with is somewhat obscured.

Of course, it is not fair or worthwhile to judge Yserbius by modern UI standards, and I'm not going to do that. Today we have a shared understanding of the metaphors we use to indicate interactivity. Yserbius simply came about before many of these were explored. For that reason, the UI sometimes doesn't make sense to someone who never played this old game.

You have to admit that it is hard to look at a game we played in the early nineties with fresh eyes. With that in mind, I occasionally bring in friends and family as testers. The first time I ever showed MedievaLands to one of these newbies, they made a character, and figured out that you could click on the volcano... and then they just sat there for 15 seconds before asking what to do next. I asked them to describe what they thought the user interface of the game was trying to convey. They said: "I think this is the next character creation screen. I see what I think is my character, but I don't know what to do with it. I see a bunch of items in my bag but I don't know what to do with them. There's a big black-orange blur and I don't know what that is." That big orange and black blur was the character's point of view. The "bunch of items in my bag" was a description of the icons that open up subviews: the item chest, the quest item bag, the trash can, the map, the spell book, and so on).

This new UI is meant to be more understandable for new players by relying on commonly understood modern user interface principles that advertise to the player how they may explore and interact with the game. Buttons are very clearly buttons. I added health and mana point bars to all party members and enemy monsters. I also chose to prioritize the player action of moving through the dungeon over the action of changing your equipment, since you do much more moving than equipping (particularly in the original cut of the game, without the added random magic item system). Finally, this new user interface increases the amount of text you can see on screen by 50 percent! All told, I think this is a huge update that will make the game easier to play for new players, but which is still familiar enough to returning players. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.

Next, I'll note the issues reported by our hardiest denizens of the dungeon, the bug catchers.

* Kendo found that, as a Guild leader who wanted to quit his Guild, he was in a bit of a "hotel california" problem: you could start a Guild whenever you'd like, but you could never leave. After what must have seemed like an eternity, I gave him and all our other leaders trapped in Dire Straits a way out: leaders can now leave their guild, and can also make use of the /gleave command. This is true even if they were the only remaining Guild leader.

* Svensson noted that some longer forum posts weren't displaying. This was an issue with my sprite batching solution: for each texture, I only draw at most 4000 or so sprites at once. Ideally, were there more than 4000 sprites to draw at any time, I would simply create another draw call. Instead, I was mistakenly throwing away the first 4000 sprites and starting a brand new collection to draw. This would only occur, of course, where there were many instances of a particular texture to draw... like, for example, a long forum post. Oops!

* Reginald, Stormborg, and Kheben all independently discovered that Dissipate, which should only be able to hurt undead enemies, usefully could target any enemy living, dead, or in-between. I've corrected this error, and burned the sacred herbs to the goddess of death in apology.

* Kheben uncovered a bug in the Yserbius combat engine: spells that were meant to effect entire stacks of monsters instead only hit the topmost monster. I've fixed this (and also posted the MedievaLands combat algorithm on the public github repository, if you're interested in peeking further behind the curtain!).

* Kheben also found that after bumping the level of a skill in the keep, any buffs rendered by that skill would reflect the previous skill level. Behind the scenes, the server was correctly counting things, but the client wasn't reflecting those improved stats. I've fixed this, and also fixed Kheben's discovery that Leadership gave a bonus to Dexterity instead of Defense, as in the original game.

* Kheben also pointed out that Controlled monsters did not seem to be acting appropriately, and offered a welcome perspective on how they should instead telegraph their actions. The issue was that even when only 2 monsters in a stack were controlled, any attack messages by that stack indicated that the entire stack was attacking. Kheben - I've taken your advice; thank you!

* MrPRMiller did some early testing of the hi-res user interfaces, and offered some perspective on the perspective of the point-of-view window. Following Miller's suggestions, I adjusted the size of the point of view so that things don't appear squished. Thanks Miller!

* Behind the scenes, I've tidied up the draw code to fix a memory leak; I've adjusted the drawing code to be more efficient, and I've adjusted the way that screens can fade into and out of each other to make them less janky. There's still some jank. But less so!

That's all for now. What a year it has been. My hope is that this coming year has much more MedievaLands work to report!

Until next time, take care, and keep in touch.

Zane

Many thanks for the huge update! It's great to see even classic games pushed to change, no matter if it's a fan project or official.

-Svensson

Huge update, and greatly appreciated!

For what it's worth, I prefer the old, original interface, not becuase it's better or worse, but because it's what it was back in it's day.

It would be nice to have the option to change from new to old, like you did the music (I always choose the old music, just for old-times sake)

I'd like to second the option to toggle between the original and new interfaces, if possible! There is a lot of useful functionality but I also love the nostalgia that the original brings. I think having the newer and undoubtedy improved interface as the default makes sense, since those who remember the old game fondly are the only ones who would even want to toggle *back* =P

-Svensson

Thanks for the feedback!

Band, Svensson, the two UIs work differently and it might be a pain to keep them both working, so no promises. But I will investigate whether I can easily provide the old interface alongside the new.

Thanks for considering it!

-Svensson