The Anvil

Introduction

As you play any of the many games from Iron Realms Entertainment, you may notice that our in-game combat is incredibly complex and in-depth, featuring numerous afflictions that must be cured. Lusternia alone features over two hundred separate afflictions! Naturally when Achaea, the first Iron Realms game, came into existance, the number of afflictions was much lower and it was more than possible to “manual” – curing reliably without the aid of an external, automated system. I’m going to illustrate how curing systems used by players today act to automatically handle afflictions, curing them without any real-time input from the player needed.

Priority Tracking and Balances

The core function of a system is to track afflictions by priority. This means that afflictions which may greatly hamper an offense or cause the greatest risk of death are tagged to be cured first before those which barely impact actions. In order to do this, the most common method is to prioritize by balances. In Iron Realms games, several different balances exist for both regular actions (balance, equilibrium) and types of cures (purgative, elixir, salve, focus). The important point to note here is the balances can generally operate independently, so salve, elixir, and purgative balances can all be triggered at near-same time. A system’s job, therefore, becomes keeping these balances occupied so the maximum number of afflictions can be cured in the shortest amount of time, and the cured afflictions are those which are the most debilitating.

Systems and Iron Realms Games

This core functionality of a system can be remarkably similar between Iron Realms games. The main source of differences between the systems for each game, if built on the same general core, becomes the trigger lines and the afflictions themselves. Trigger lines are the patterns which capture important lines sent by the Iron Realms game which indicate the player now has an affliction. Because of the complexity of our combat systems, it may take a long time to gather each by hand. Several projects on Lusternia have recently been started to try to minimize this time required. We recently added an optional affliction message to display “You are afflicted with <affliction>.” in circumstances where the affliction is not meant to be hidden. This can make it almost unnecessary to gather a majority of our trigger lines. The Lusternia Lore Wiki also has been gathering trigger lines for public use. Lusternia also now has FirstAid, which is a curing system built-in to the game but requires no coding knowledge to use, just balance to consume.

Until Next Time…

Hopefully this introduction gives you an idea of some of the key concepts involved in making a curing system. In subsequent articles, I will go in depth and describe how to get coding your very own system on a variety of clients.