DDO Beta

Hooray! I got into the DDO relaunch beta. The Lammania client is downloading as we speak. I'll make sure to take notes so I can post them as soon as the NDA is lifted.

Also, work on the basic character sheet for W O T A N is almost complete. I ran into a snag structuring the character creation process having to do with my noobish attempts to take my database to as clost to 3N as possible. While I believe I am structuring my database in decent (if not good) way, it is forcing me already to make certain decisions with my programming logic. In this case, the character table is divided into sections like stats, money, skills, inventory, et cetera. Each section has its own table with an ID that is written to the character table. So far so good.

But that means I either can't make the character creation process a 1-click affair, or it would be difficult for me to write it in an expedient fashion because each dependent table requires the character ID which isn't created until the character row is inserted into the character table.I suppose its a quasi- chicken/egg situation.

So I need to split the character creation process into stages. But I had each stage writing itself into the appropriate table, meaning if someone got halfway through and quit, it would create one or more orphan rows in the database. I can see this would be common user behavior, so I could also see my database growing to enormous size with junk data.

So before going to bed last night I decided I would make character creation two-stage: first the name and physical description is entered and then the user can fill out the details at their leisure. I'm not sure if it is the optimal solution, but it should work and it feels more "rp" to me at any rate.

Speaking of old-school rp mechanics and potential user abuse: I am still going ahead with a random-roll stat creation process. Meaning if you roll an 18 for strength you get an 18, if you roll a 6 ... you're gonna be one weak barbarian. Assuming I stick with this system, I know most users are going to abuse the refresh button. Rather than try to prevent that behavior I am considering just designing around it to mitigate its impact on system resources. I have a strange nostalgic feeling for this "exploit" myself, so rather than lock it down or use a distributive point system, I am going to test out leaving it in. I still might move to a distributive system, though, as it has game-play benefits beyond preventing system abuse.

I need to get back to work now, but in the next post I am going to recreate a character sheet and explain the basics of what it means. I'm not sure if it will be final, as there might be more things to add or delete, but it should be pretty representational of what the final sheet will be. If you are interested in the W O T A N project and want to give some feedback, look for the post in the next day or two!