Talents and the Zodiac: two progression systems, wired end to end

Two of the game's deepest progression systems were, until now, windows you could open and nothing more. Both are built out this week, on the server and in the client.

Talents

The skill window's third tab is a passive tree: 18 talents per class, 72 in all, each with a top rank, bought with talent points. The effects are real:

• Passive talents change your numbers. The server folds them into your stats, so the character sheet, damage and defence reflect them — not just a tooltip that says they should.
• Points come from killing. Each kill pays a little talent experience, and enough of it becomes a point. The window shows the balance and what each rank costs.
• Rules that refuse politely. A talent must belong to your class, its prerequisite must be at a higher rank, and your level must be high enough; otherwise the server says no and tells you which.
• Tooltips that tell the truth. Hover a talent to see what it does now and what the next rank will do.
• It survives everything. Log out, log in, change maps: your talents are where you left them.

The Zodiac

The zodiac window (press Z) holds a zodiac level from 1 to 20, an energy pool that refills with time spent online, two stones that bank a share of the experience you earn, and twelve skill-training grids, each with dozens of steps that cost energy, talent points and zodiac level.

The client side is the interesting part. The zodiac window is not drawn by hand: the game's own script files, the original ConstellationConfig among them, run inside the new client and drive the window. The client provides what those scripts ask for — the grids, the buttons, the messages — and the server checks every step, refusing with the same numbered errors the game has words for.

What is rough

We will say plainly where this is not done:

• In the zodiac's Training tab, the skill icons are missing, so the grids work but are faceless.
• Pressing Select to choose which skill a grid trains — the defence-skill training and its improved version, for example — should open a list of skills. It does not open yet.
• What a trained grid does in a fight is not applied yet. Levels, energy, stones and grids all keep their books correctly; the combat bonuses are the next step.

The systems underneath are sound. It is the windows, and the last mile, that are unfinished.