I have been concentrating almost exclusively on spells for the last two weeks. I've made lots of progress, and plan to enable combat magic in the next release.

I will be trying to continue working on spells, rather than add new features, until the spells are mostly functional. I get a steady stream of new feature requests and enjoy adding them into DC. But, at this rate the spells will never get done. I hope this won't upset too many DC users, but I feel the benefit of having working spells outweighs a delayed feature addition.

I now have some basic combat spell functionality operational. What's that mean?

- spell targeting is working, but still can't target a map location or base it hit dice.

- spell durations are working, based on combat rounds/turns

- most spell animations/sounds are working:
cast sound/animation
in-route s/a
hit target s/a

The basics are in there. I'm sure the first release with combat magic will have lots of problems. There are lots of situations yet to be tested, such as hitting a caster interrupts the spell, and other such things.

I plan to continue working on it this week and upload a new release this coming weekend.

I am relieved to see that the efforts in DC are being focused 100% on developing a workable game designer and not trying to incorporate every idea that may cross the forum. Don't get me wrong I am all for innovation and creativity and many of the suggestions on the forum are interesting, but if they were all integrated into DC the project would never go "Gold".

The strategic vision for DC, as I understood it, was to update the capabilities of another adventure design program with up-to-date graphics and sounds while eliminating the most inhibiting limitations of the older product. DC is on its way to accomplishing those goals and is looking better than I ever imagined it could. It lacks only one thing, Version 1.0. Hopefully, when the magic is completed, which appears to be the most difficult task, we may be seeing that version 1.0 in the forseeable future.

My thanks and congratulations to the DC staff for undertaking this project in the first place and doing such a great job on it thus far.

Right back at ya Arrowhawk for everything you said in exception for the staff thingy. There is no staff except for CocoaSpud and he is only one man who is doing the miracles. Thank you CocoaSpud for everything you are doing...thank you so much...thank you thank you thank yoooouuu!! :D

What the heck * runs and gives CocoaSpud a huge hug * :D

Yes new features are nice but ver 1.0 is what I'd love to see. And any new features after that would be icing on the cake. Keep up the great work.

I'm not the only guy working on DC, just the only guy who is always working on DC. Paul has created lots of wonderful code, others have contributed bits and pieces of code. Dan and others have just about replaced every crappy piece of art I started with. Many more help with testing and bug reports.

It's a group thing [img]smile.gif[/img] I just bring the parts together for each release.

Hey CocoaSpud are you planning to increase the AI of monsters as well? [img]smile.gif[/img]

Hi Cocaspud.
Great this is the thing i am really waiting for and of course some special attacks for monsters, so i could finish my design.
Without magic and special attacks for monsters there is really no point in making a game, because its missing too much.

Keep up your great work.

Grrr!!!! Arrrgh!!! Count to ten... think of some really nice things... Okay, I'm in control. Explosion averted. Carry on.

Harri 'the maker of pointless games' Polsa

LOL!! You nearly turned Harri Polsa into a daemon. Becareful next time with what you say friend > :D

Just diffrent gaming cultural diffreces i think. There are many ways to make art and not one is the right one ;) RIGHT? (Smiles and tries to conceal axe)

For me my desings will have most of human enemies and less monster slashing. I´m not really into destroying some races just beacuese they are ´evil.´