Version 0.45 Released

This is the second release in a row that is seemingly small in changes, but really there is a lot of work under the hood. This time around, I thought I'd at least give you all a new spell to play with: Enchant Artifact. I doubt its perfect (my first run of a spell usually isn't), but I think it will perform fairly close to what you would expect. Yes, you can actually add a spell and chit to an artifact of your choosing. Yes, you can use the new chit added to the artifact to cast spells ON that artifact.

Another fairly important bit in this release, is a discovery I made to how I was handling the communication between server and client, during an online game. I realized that I was forcing these two to interact with each other in 50 ms chunks, and by so doing, causing an unnecessary slowdown, especially as it concerns messages transferring to the log window. The 50 ms "sleep" time HAS to be in there, so that the CPU can do other tasks, but it doesn't have to be in play until there is nothing left in the queue. After making this discovery, and making the change to process the entire message queue before sleeping, makes a HUGE difference.

For example, a combat I was testing with the Sorceror, Fiery Blast, and 12 goblins was taking 6 seconds to process before the results screen became visible!! That's like 6 seconds too long, in my opinion. After the fix, the combat results come up virtually instantaneously. Granted, that's running a internet connection within my intranet, but I'm guessing you'll still see some serious performance improvements when playing on the internet.

I'm going to be playing a game tonight with some friends, so I'll let you know how that goes. Here's what's new:

NEW FEATURES:

• NEW SPELL: Enchant Artifact works now! (caveat: you can still only use the artifact once per combat - I will fix this part eventually)

BUGS/ISSUES:

• Fixed a problem with "Whistle for Monsters" that was freezing the combat interface after the first round.
  
• Reworked the spell targeting logic (behind the scenes) to make it a bit more robust
  
• Fixed a problem with "Talk to Wise Bird", that resulted from changes made to the trade interface in v0.44
  
• Fixed a speed problem when playing online
  
  • This will virtually eliminate those long delays during combat when multiple things are happening at once
    
  • Everything will be as fast as your connection, instead of being tied to a speed defined in the code (at long last!!)