Pleasantly Surprised

I'm currently in Germany for work this week, and I live in California where the Broadside test server is located.  This gave me an opportunity to personally test the game with some higher ping times without trying to artificially create such normal latency.  I have to say I'm quite pleased with the game's network performance even from the other side of the world.

Now it is not perfect, as there is some work with ship turning I need to smooth out, but overall I could barely notice much difference at all compared to sitting right next to the server.  This is some pretty good news for the game's performance.

Now I do have several people who are involved with testing the game in other parts of the world, and they have reported good performance as well, but nothing quite beats seeing it for myself.

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Now that enough of the Broadopedia is implemented in order to be able to properly plan things like your skill training, I'll be pivoting back towards more fundamental gameplay development.  There's 3 areas that need immediate development in order for the game to really be fully playable as a real MMO. 

* Zone transfers - When reaching the edge of the map it needs to transfer the player to the adjacent zone.  What is really missing still is the functionality of the Master Server to spin up and down the Zone Servers as needed, but most of the ground work was already done for this back in 2017.  I just need to actually hook everything up. 

* AI aiming - Currently the AI has absolutely horrible aim with their cannons.  I have an idea of where the bug in the current implementation is (when the ship is leaning from the wind I think it is compensating with aim the wrong direction, putting cannonballs straight into the water next to the ship, or aiming too high and over shooting.  Instead of fixing this bug though I'm actually going to redesign the entire way the system works to much more intelligently hit their targets. 

* Buy/Sell orders - Right now you can both buy and sell items on the market, so long as an NPC order exists for the item.  The in game economy though can't function properly until the players can add persistent orders to the market for other players to use.  Mostly what is missing is just the UI windows for creating the orders and managing existing orders, as all the backend functionality was implemented already with the rest of the market system. 

After all the above I'm going to start implementing more zones, starting with the British Isles, followed by Europe as a whole, and then expanding from there. 

Ship Types

While working on the "Broadopedia", which is a store of all the information you would need to know about the game (a play on Civilopedia from the Civilization game series), I've been going over all the information going into it.  I thought people might be interested in all the types of ships planned.  

So there are planned over 40 unique ship classes across 10 types of ships (11 if you count the Escape Class Dingy which you end up in if your ship is sunk).  Here's the 10 types.  

Cog - 2 ships

Cogs are lightly armed outdated trade vessels.  Though lacking in speed, they have sufficient cargo capacity for their purpose, and are pretty cheap.  When you first enter the game you start in a Bremen Class Cog.  

Caravel - 4 ships

Caravels are a good upgrade from the basic Cog.  An old design built for trade, exploration, and fleet escort.  While not extremely fast by today's standards, they are far faster than Cogs and are armed equally or better.  

Carrack - 3 ships

These are the long haul heavy transports.  Being another old design, they can't fit any of the more modern larger armament, so ill equipped for fighting other ship types of their size.  Still, their enormous cargo capacity means they are still as relevant today for global trade as ever.  

Galleon - 3 ships

These are jack of all trades ships built both for trade and combat.  While not the best at either, they are a good compromise for the player who wants to captain a flexible ship that can serve a variety of roles.  

Galley - 4 ships

Galleys are ships with sails but can also be propelled with ores.  This allows a tactical advantage in combat by rowing directly into the wind.  

Junk - 1 ship

The Junk is a truly ancient design traditional to east asia.  A sturdy and multipurpose ship.  

Corvette - 5 ships

Purpose built combat ships that are very fast and maneuverable.  They make excellent scouts, can act as escorts, and in groups can threaten lone ships of larger types.  

Frigate - 9 ships

The most versatile type of combat ship in Broadside.  Built to seek and destroy opposing shipping, they can sail alone, act as fleet escort, or even be the lead ship of small fleets.  A mid sized ship with good armament.  

Ship Of The Line - 9 ships

The heaviest of the heavy combat ships.  These have massive firepower, thick hulls, and a crew to patch up damage as it comes in.  They are built to both deal damage and take it.  

Gunboat - 2 ships

These are small Corvette sized ships with a small number of oversized guns typically found on Ships Of The Line.  They are built for coastal bombardment, city defense, but can be effective when swarming much larger ships.  

Added skills system

So the implementation of the skill training system is now complete.  All skill books are currently available for purchase in a country's capital port, and are treated like any other item until you use them.  When you click Add to Library it removes the skill book from your city storage and adds the skill to your character's skill list at level 0.  You can then select it for skill training. 

All skill requirements for all items that are currently in the game have been implemented as far as listing those requirements in code, and showing all items you don't have skills yet for as the item in a slight red color. 

Next in the skills system is implementing restrictions on actually using items if you don't have the skills to do so.  After that, some skills provide bonuses such as faster ship turning, faster water bailing, etc, and those will all be implemented.  The last part (which I may actually work on first), is right now the skill requirements aren't actually displayed in game beyond you have them fulfilled or not, but not what you need for each item.  I'm going to implement the Broadopedia feature which will have detailed information about every item, every feature, every game concept that is in Broadside.