Features & Bug fixes-some big, some small

Yesterday was mostly a day of adding features, testing, and polishing/optimizing.

I have almost completed the status window which displays the user's health/mp/exp til next level.
Note that as the stats system evolves, this may very well change as Stamina may become just as important as Mana (more on this later). This window is still a work in progress (anyone notice the X and Y being switched around to read 'y x'?)


Another big feature that has been added (and although sounds simple was kind of a pain to code), was a Double Click event. So basically now we are able to write code that is triggered when the user double-clicks on something (I know, whoop-tee-doo right? But really this will add a lot more usability to the game). This will come in extremely handy though as we develop the UI, Items, and stats systems. For example a small but very useful little feature that was added: when you double-click on your character, your inventory pops up. This is pretty much the norm for PC based RPGs, so why should Drasil lack this luxury?

We are completely overhauling the Stats system and the associated user interface. There are going to be a lot of big changes in this regard.

Also, double clicking on any Item, Player, or NPC, etc. will bring up an information box giving a quick overview of relative attributes.

Big Bug Fixed - I have found the cause of one of the random "phantom bugs" that plagues the vbGore engine, and fixed it. If you ever got a Run Time Error 9 OR Run Time Error 91 when trying to use an inventory item such as a potion etc. before, you have seen this bug in action. It occured seemingly randomly; none-the-less, it is history now.

Optimizations - I'll overview the optimizations in list form:

• Decreased server memory footprint by moving Errcode strings and SQL query strings to external files rather than being hard-coded into the EXE and thus taking up memory when not needed.
  
• Optimized one of the server subroutines that is used to send update info about user stats.
• Tweaked some of the client's setting-loading related routines to work a little faster and at the same time reduced the memory footprint of the client.
• Misc. tweaks to the graphics.