So tonight, as part of bringing in the new combat system, I’ve smashed Monster Types and PC Classes together into the same thing.  That is, there’s no longer any difference between the classes that an AI subscriber can play, and the types of monsters that they can fight.  This means that it’ll be easily possible for the player to inhabit the body of a monster and test out monster attacks.  Or alternately, it should be possible to create monsters which use PC-playable class types.  (that is, if you have “Paladin”-class PCs, you should also be able to have “Paladin”-class monsters)

This is the big first step toward smashing together PCs and Monsters (and probably eventually NPCs as well) into just one thing;  this will allow easy support for PVP and similar systems.

Anyhow, after doing all this, Monsters suddenly stopped rendering once they’d been placed in the world.  They were rendered fine while the AI Developers brought them in from the graveyard, but as soon as an AI developer dropped it, *poof*, the monster would instantly vanish.  I spent about an hour debugging this today, to figure out why monsters were vanishing immediately after becoming active.  It eventually turned out to have been because the old Monster Types declared a “maximum health” value for monsters to use, while all PCs automatically had 10 hit points maximum.  Now that Monsters were using PC-style classes, they didn’t have a “maximum health” value to set their health to, so they died immediately after being placed into the world.  Oops!

On the plus side, Classes now set a maximum health.  This means that it’ll be possible to make glass-cannon mages and other fragile player classes, now!  (They still default to ten points)