Castle Paradox

[Shadowiii]

Ok, I know this has been done before. I already tried opening the Metomorphosis code and figure this bugger out, but I am stupid and cant. Horray for me.

Anyway, I'm trying to make my hero and other in-game NPC's be the legendary "double size" like in Meto. and Genesis. It doesn't seem to difficult, but I am a horrid plotscripter. So...how do you do it? All help is immesnly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Shadowiii]

Part 2! Is it possible to do this for a caterpiller party!

IT seems easy...I mean...yeah. But...I can't do it!
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Minnek]

Minnek shall work on this, for he believes he has a solution thingy. Minnek also will attempt to stop talking in third person. Minnek notes that this sounds very stupid. Minnek leaves now. Err....
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* SDHawk has joined #Minnek
SDHawk> AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUGH
* SDHawk has left #Minnek (Leaving)

[Dark SKell Angel]

Do you mean like having a 2 npc one on top of each other like this:

NPC1
NPC2 Wandering NPC 3

(NPC1 and 2 making a full body)

If so..I recently generated an easy code that can do that
PM me if you want it
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Yeah, I thought I was dead too.

Old skool RPGexcel member

[Shadowiii]

A PM has been sent! Much appreciated, my friend!
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Shadowiii]

Follow up: still haven't recieved a reply PM. If anyone else has any ideas please tell me!
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Me]

Make yourself a custom movement system using set NPC pixel() and set NPC frame() (I think those are the functions, look them up in the PS dictionary) and on-keypress scripts. It'll be a bit harder to figure out passblock checking (use read map block), but that was the system Moogle1 used in Metamorphosis, if I recall correctly.
And in Genesis, the doubled NPCs were just in a scripted sequence, so that was just two walk NPC(who, direction, distance) statements with no wait for NPC(who) commands.
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UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT A B START

[Mr B]

I was going to answer in an e-mail, but I'm sure you can read it just as well here. Heh.

Anyway, the ease of this really depends on what you are trying to accomplish. That is, is it just the heroes who are doubled, or is it both the heroes and the NPCs?

It is a critical difference because hero movement is easy to control -- it's always either at the player's command or at plotscripting. If it's the player, you can use on-keypress scripts to deal with it pretty nicely. If it's plotscripted, you just add a couple of function calls.

But things get groady when you do it for the NPCs also. This is because of the NPC random movement. What you will need to do if you're using NPCs is have a global script that is always running in the background that does the random movement to the NPCs. This sounds pretty simple (after all, we did something similar for Pitch Black), but there is an exponential chance of things going wrong. PB, for example, had only Julia and the spiders. Those were the only things that moved around. Easy to control. Doing FFVI with double-size walkabouts on the other hand...

Additionally, you will severely restrict the number of NPCs available. For example, you will need to allocate 4 NPCs for the heads of the heros. That gives 36 - 4 = 32 NPCs remaining. If those NPCs are doubled, you then have 32 / 2 = 16 NPCs remaining. And that's if you're not using any NPCs for triggering stuff.

Though, to be fair, you could use NPCs multiple times using plotscripting (via swapping pictures, actions, locations, and stuff), but that fits into the 'exponential pain' catagory of things...

Um yeah. Be of having der fun. :flamedevil:

[Flamer]

Mr B covered everything...
though, you may run into problems with overheads and the lot, but that can be solved if you think round the problem "a lot"
as he stated it's an exponential problem meter...
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If we were a pack of dogs, IM would be a grand Hound, CN would be a very ficious little pitball, and Giz...well, it doesn't matter breed he is, he'd still be a bitch
(no offense to anyone that was mentioned)

[Chaos Nyte]

The other problem with this, as you no doubt noticed in Metamorphisis, is that the game lags with too many NPCs, and thus scripts, running at the same time. Retro has worked around this with enemies in "IT CAME FROM BEYOND THE MOON" by having a new enemy appear everytime the first enemy was killed to keep the framerate up, but a full town of double sized NPCs would NEED to have small maps, because the overload of scripts would ground the game to a halt.

...and then there's the problem of buffer overflow...le sigh...

[Rinku]

what i don't like about games with 2-npc sprites is that often the person puts no work into their appearance. the author sort of says 'okay, i have npcs that are twice as big as my competetors! i can't lose!' when in actuality they look a lot more horrible than the average ohr normal-sized sprite. so my advice is that if anyone is going to do this, please put just as much work into drawing the sprites as you would if they were normal sized.
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Tower Defense Game

[Shadowiii]

CN - Never fear about "towns full of NPC's", this is a short and small game it will be used in, with only around 3 or so Double-NPC's for each town (all two of them), so hopefully the lag will be cut back.

Rinku - True. I've already drawn them outside the engine, and they look pretty good, so hopefully that steriotype won't occur in this instance.

BLARG I still need to write most of the code. Grr.
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Setu_Firestorm]

I know what you mean, Shadow. I'm gonna have to break that "many NPCs, same text box" curse that Sir Phoenix put on the NK series. It may take a lot more work, but hey! It'll make things more interesting.
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