Castle Paradox

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

After you drop QBasic, you'd probably have a lot more resources to work with, so I was thinking… maybe these features could be introduced in later versions of the O.H.R.?

Like:

·Sound effects
·More animation frames for Heros, and possibly for NPCs as well
·More animation frames for enemies (as someone else suggested)
·More animation steps (in the Animation Editor) for tiles
·Tile transluscency

·Even cooler, being able to fade Heros and NPCs te where they're only partially transparent (would be especially cool for creating lighting effects like on SNES and GBA games, and for making Ghosty enemies in battle, and for making dead Heros look like they were ghosts on the map! :D)
Multiple layers of tiles (say — four), all of them capable of using separate tilesets

·Specifying the size of a Hero/NPC sprite:

20×20 (default)
40×20 (2× Vertical, 1× Horizontal)
20×40 (1× Vertical, 2× Horizontal)
40×40 (2× Vertical, 2× Horizontal)
40×60 (3× Vertical, 2× Horizontal)
60×40 (2× Vertical, 3× Horizontal)
60×60 (3× Vertical, 3× Horizontal)

Possibly being able to edit seperate 20×20 pixel “blocks”

I'm well aware that a lot of this isn't going to be in the next version, but I'm just suggesting features that I've wanted to see for a long, long time. :3

[FyreWulff]

I'll try to answer some of your questions here.


Sounds effects - I seem to remember TMC saying he was going to try to implement them. The memory will be available to finally play WAVs/etc

Animation frames - possible but I think they will remain the same for simplicity. I would guess enemies might get an extra frame. Tiles would be possible too.

tile translucency - from what I remember the OHR will eventually use layers. Not sure about alpha transparency with tiles - alpha is very slow

npc tranlucency - possible and I'm willing to bet it will be implemented eventually

sizes of NPC/sprite - probably never. one, for the sake of ease of use. two, easily fakeable with plotscripting. three, backwards compatibility, and four, if you really want bigger sprites, you should also be working in a bigger resolution like 640x480, in which case you should check out engines like Game Maker

[PlayerOne]

I'd quite like to see standing frames added to the walkabouts. That would make the animation cycle smoother and would make non-moving characters look a bit less strange.

Other than that, though, I wouldn't be too keen to implement loads of graphical changes. The game currently runs in a 256-colour paletted mode, to do decent blending effects you'd need to run in 24-bit colour. You could stick with 256 colours for the game, but use 24-bit for the actual display and special effects, but that seems to be short-changing the designers. If it runs in 24-bit, why not allow 24-bit graphics?

It gets back to questions about what the nature of OHR is supposed to be. There are other RPG editors out there that cater for different targets, and if you want a super high-res multimedia RPG editor, maybe OHR isn't the best starting point.

I'm not in charge, but I do have a vision of what I want OHR to be. I see it as a portable RPG format, with the game players as a kind of virtual RPG machine, so that someone can write a player for a particular platform and gain access to all the existing games immediately. I'm thinking along the lines of the incredibly far-sighted Infocom Z-machine used for text adventures 25 years ago, and still in wide use today ported to new platforms all the time. That means, in my ideal world, that too much complexity that we would not add to OHR just because we can. I don't want to restrict it to powerful desktop machines, which means I would like to keep it fairly light-weight.

Maybe my vision is wrong. Maybe I should be starting from scratch if I want to create a portable RPG format. I don't know. That's just my hope for the future direction. Maybe I'll never get round to working on the PalmOS version I have always been working towards. Certainly I ought to finish my last PalmOS project first, and I started that over 3 years ago...

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

[Mike Caron]

[Camdog]

PlayerOne: Do you follow modern text-adventure games at all (ie new games written for the z-machine, as well as some other platforms out there)? I used to be involved in that community a few years back, and I've just recently been downloading and playing a few new ones.

[Gizmog1]

Not necessarily a Windows Suggestion, but I'm using Rusalka, and have no idea how many of the commands in the Plotscripting Dictionary are too new to work. Is there any way we could add "Added in WhateverVersion" to the dictionary listing for newer commands, older versions of the dictionary for older OHR versions, or do we already have some means of doing this (Without finding and reading through all the release notes) that I'm too stupid to find?

Did we ever get support for arrays? Or am I thinking of strings, which I know we got added in.

[Battleblaze]

Like before mentioned, an enemy attack graphic would be very very nice.

You can fake transulency in OHR.Look at Madsofts Zelda game (Elements of Power).

Adding more on to the graphic depth would jack up filesize.One thing I enjoy about OHR is being to play fun games wihout waiting nine years to download something.

I used to do text adv. before I found OHR back in 5-6th grade. MyAdventuregame.com was a good one that requires no downloading.
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[NeoTA]

[msw188]

Sorry if this seems like thread revival, but this thread seems the place for suggestions (as opposed to bugs), so I think I will begin here a new numbered list:

1. Package with the OHR an editor to make MIDIs, if these will be the new preferred music format.

2. An attack bitset 'force heroes to run away', which overrides unescapable enemies.

3. Sound Effects

4. More animation frames for walkabouts (including standing), enemies, and tiles

5. Tile/NPC graphical layers

6. Allowing user to alter walkabout sprite sizes

7. (documentation) 'Added in version x' documentation on the plotscripting dictionary
[actually, I'm not sure how important this is; if you're using an old version, why do you have the new dictionary? And couldn't you just re-download the old one?]

8. Allowing all stats to go up to 32 thousand and whatever. It may not seem to make sense for some, but now with a stat cap, the game-maker can re-cap these stats back to one hundred. If this happens, give them a default cap of 100 to avoid breaking old games.

[Fenrir-Lunaris]

[Mike Caron]

[The Drizzle]

How about a game bitset "Disable holding esc to run from battle" so that people can either completely disable running without having the CANNOT ESCAPE show up every time the user holds escape, or people can use the "make heroes escape from battle" bitset to make running a hero spell.
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[msw188]

In reference to #2, the current attack bitset 'cause heroes to run from battle' does not make them run when the enemies are unescapable (the "CANNOT RUN" box appears instead). I would like a new bitset that overrides this. Or is this a bug with the current bitset?

I really was not kidding about the midi editor. Is it just assumed that everyone already has one, or knows where to get one? In any case, thank you for the link, I'll check it out once I get back to a computer closer to home.

[Mike Caron]

I dunno about the bitset, I thought it was unconditional.

As for the midi editor, we would have two options for that:

1. We code our own midi editor, and distribute that. I think everyone will agree we have better things to do than something like that.

2. We distribute someone else's editor. To my knowledge, I don't think there's any editor that would let us do that, much less a GPL'd one which we could hack on to perhaps make this looping stuff easier.
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