Couple of issues with combat

[Sean Ryan]

This is multi-part:

1) If you initiate an attack while out of range, you get the task window, but no other indication that anything has happened. If you then go into range of the "attacked" entity, combat will begin. This is ok, actually I like this behaviour. What would be nice though is at the combat interval, to have a notification sent to the text widget. Something like "Can not attack out of range ... " or something. This will provide some kind of visual cue to the current state.

2) Second, once you have killed something, you can still interact with it. Case in point, I killed Gorun at the sty, he still had his call outs, and responded and for all purposes seemed "alive". I got the "<charname> is victorious" message, yet I could just attack again. This might be a deliberate thing ... I don't know. I know also that his health was not empty when I got that message.

3) When the character dies ... he becomes unable to move ( which is good, dead people don't move =). But we should put in a "respawn" command to bring them back to life to save having to restart ember during testing.

[Erik Ogenvik (erik-ogenvik)]

Point 1 and 2 are mainly server side things.
I.e. when attacking, you send an "attack" op to the server, and hopefully it will initialize an "attack task". But it's just a blind send op (if I remember correctly), you don't get any info back from the server that indicates the status of your attack op.

Also, combat is very rudimentary. After you defeat something, you don't kill it, you just deduct some health from it and depletes its stamina (and then when the health has run out it dies, but that requires repeated attacks). This is made so intentionally in preparation for a more advanced combat system (taking into account all kinds of stats).

The third issue should be addressed on the client however. Currently when you die nothing happens. I just haven't had time to add functionality for those cases. Preferrably you should get a prompt telling you about this, and then you should return to the character selection screen, the world being unloaded etc.. Currently we only have perma-death, but we'll surely in the near future add more game-friendly behaviour where your avatar isn't destroyed (teleported to a graveyard? left as a corpse and the camera placed into a ghost?). One main problem currently is however that there's no good way to unload the world and have the gui being reset to a nice state. I.e. we need to make sure that it's possible to log off from a server and log on to another one, without there being dangling pointers and gui widgets in strange states.