Hey guys, I'm trying to find out how to accomplish spell weaving in my game that is unlike the current crop of mmo's. Here are some of the basics that are used when casting: * Spell Categories: Earth, Air, Wind, Water, Fire, Dark, Light, Plasma, Gravity. * Within each spell category there are numerous spells such as fireball or ice beam, all the way upwards to things like wind tornado or tsunami. * Players have the ability to assign spells to individual hands. Meaning that you can put a spell on either your characters left or right hand or both. Each hand is handled separately thus you can form/charge and discharge/cast each spell separately. Players will have control over when they charge and release their spells. * Players can also charge/discharge spells while moving (exception are some of the larger, more powerful spells) * Players can also change how much energy is put into the spell. Thus controlling the speed/affect area/damage/effect for each spell. Ok, now that you know the basics I can get to the meat and potatoes. The purpose of having a system like this is not simply for casting multiple spells at the same time but to have an ACTIVE SPELL WEAVING system. This means that depending on how you mix and match your spells, you affect the effect of the spell. Its hard to grasp it without an example so here is a simple one: You decide to use two spells. Fireball and Ice beam. Each respectively goes on a single hand. You have already finished prepping your spell and now it is time to fire. If you fire just your fireball spell hand, you only get a fireball. It is also the same with the Ice beam. Now lets add in power levels for each spell which range from 0-100. Say you set the fireball power to 100 and the ice beam to 20ish and you fire both at the same time. Well because of the way things work, the fire is a lot stronger than the ice thus it will super heat the ice creating a steam. So by combining the two you shoot steam out of your hands and more or less create a smoke screen. Now lets keep fireball the same at 100 and raise the ice spell to 80ish. Same effect happens but since the ice spell is stronger and can't be vaporized by the fire spell it turns into hot water. If you put the Ice spell at 100 and fire spell at some lower spell. You can manipulate the ice beams area of effect by making the beam bigger. So instead of a skinny beam, it would look more like a huge chunk of ice flying at you. Again you get more effects using the same two spells because you can adjust how much energy you put into the spells. You can also get to into effecting the environment. An example would be running forward and shooting an ice beam on the ground creating a ice slide (like in the x-men series), then jump on it and move faster. Then you could spin around while sliding and use your fire spell on the trail to super heat the ice and create a nice smoke screen behind you, so you can make a clean getaway. *************************************************** What I would like help on is what kind of effects should different spell combinations have? *************************************************** The second part I'm having to deal with is the limited amount of keyboard space one has to use all or most of their spells. Even though you can simply make a button for each spell it becomes very tedious when you have 100+ spells and only some 50 something keys. But then again, why would you want to memorize all those button positions anyway? To solve this I need a system where you can start with a base spell, such as the category, then manipulate it to form your desired spell. How fast you can do this would basically become your casting time for the spell. But it is completely dependent on you the person. This is also where some skill can come in. The only way I can think of right now is the put each spell category on an action bar. Such as {Fire}{Wind}{Gravity}{Ice} and when you press it an secondary bar appears with all your spells associated with that certain category and then you hit which one you desire. The second approach is to have a complex runic icon appear on your screen. Think of something from full metal alchemist or something like that. Then depending on how you trace the pattern you get different spells out of that. So you can later down the road unlock new ways to trace the pattern from a teacher and thus learn more complex and cooler spells to use. But tell me what kind of ideas you have and so on.

This sounds like a really cool idea. One could imagine lots of combinations with Air and Water spells like ice shards, water jets, whirlpools etc. You could take some hints from the 'Captain Planet' cartoon series.

Few other things that come to mind are if the we are using Fire:25 + Ice:80 then changing it to Fire:25 + Ice:81 should not produce a totally different effect i.e. the changes should be gradual. There should also be some combinations that do not work so well, maybe Fire:20 + Ice:20 will produce just a cool stream of water to drink :-) It should be left to the player to experiment and find what works best.

The number of spells in each category should not be too high (maybe 5 or 6). This will bring the total number of spells to around 50. This will allow for lots of combinations and considering the spell powers will really produce a vast array of spells.

A quickslot system like Neverwinter Nights should work pretty well for managing the spells.