Devlog #67 - PxLineBatch2D

This week has mostly been about getting a lot of smaller pieces working together and starting to feel like an actual game again instead of just systems.

I’ve been working on overhead text and getting damage numbers and XP showing up above actors. Part of that was getting the positioning to feel right. It’s now anchored to the actual visible top of the sprite instead of just using the sprite size, and the stack is centered and pushed up a bit so it sits naturally above the head. The numbers are also aligned to the real bounding box now instead of being a rough guess like before, which looks a lot cleaner across different sprites.

I converted the overhead font we use in the old client, smallest pixel 7, into msdf so now both of our fonts are in the new pipeline. That made a big difference right away since the temporary font I was using didn’t really fit for combat text. I also set things up so the engine can load multiple MSDF fonts cleanly, so UI text and world text don’t have to share the same atlas anymore.

XP popups are now going through the new actor path. Normal xp, faction xp, battle pass xp, and guild war xp are all showing up over the character now. The UI side for those is still separate for now, but having the in world feedback makes testing feel a lot better.

Damage events are also hooked up. Health updates, facing the attacker, and the different text cases like crits, misses, and dodges are all going through the new system now. A lot of that work was making sure the behavior matches the old client without dragging old engine structure along with it.

I also spent some time on fight lines. They can now be morphed and animated more cleanly, which is easier to show in a video than in a screenshot, but it gives a lot more control over how they feel during combat.

As you can see, the text stack numbers over head now move smoothly as you move around. The new engine design is starting to payoff big time.

Clicking once to start combat feels kind of nice doesn't it? It's time to play around with focus/selection/combat and see if we can't make it more enjoyable.

So that brings us to an unsolved question. How do we focus/select an enemy without a mouse or finger?

I need to make this a short devlog this week.

Thank you so much to all Patrons. I can continue working on FO2 thanks to you.

Have Fun & Keep Gaming!

P.S. - Next devlog is in 1 week.