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Newbie_Power




Joined: 04 Sep 2006
Posts: 1762

PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 3:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
All those graphical improvements will just make it harder to make the graphics. More pixels... more colours.
Let me give wisdom on this matter.

A good pixel artist is not going to use more colors than they actually need, which will rarely be more than 20. More colors is not a burden since they won't actually be using all 256 per sprite.

On the other hand, this can only help people that create sprites through other means, such as Blasted Earth's hand drawn sprites.

Quote:
320 x 200 is the best resolution ever.
I like 256x240 better. I also highly prefer 320x240 when it comes to DOS resolutions, to have more vertical screen space.

Screen resolutions where the pixels are not square are pretty cool too.
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 11:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

James Paige wrote:
@24/32 bit color. - Technically the OHR already supports 24 bit color, but only 8 bits at a time are accessible. It will probably stay that way. 8-bit (256 color) sprites instead of 4-bit (16-color) sprites are definitely on the horizon.


Switching to non-paletted colour depth has many benefits and should we should just get on with it:
-we could use transparency and fades (eg. enemy death animations)
-more than one master palette could be used at the same time. Currently, backdrops imported with their own master palette have limited and difficult use. UI colours could be choosen from their own palette.
-Custom could switch to using hardcoded colours instead of UI colour indices. Creating a nice looking user interface using a tiny set of unknown colours is impossible! I find myself wanting to use colour hints for things all the time; this is really frustrating. Plus no more worrying about showing errors/messages while the screen is faded out.

I'm not suggesting supporting sprites using more than 256 colours. That would be too much work anyway.

James Paige wrote:
@Longer maptile animation - My plan for this one is to allow you to hook maptile animation up to a global variable, then you can make maptile animations of theoretically unlimited length. And yes, the current animation interface sucks.


I just can't figure out how to best improve tile animations. Probably letting you give individual tiles their own animations (and allow an unrestricted set of tiles to which each animation pattern is applicable?). Seems like a good idea to have a second "palette" (ie. tileset) of animated tiles to paint with. It also seems logical to at least try to (re)use sprite animations.

Pixel based movement: I hope this happens this year (hope)

NPC paths: I planned for the past year to add this around now. But I've run out of time; I guess I'll put it off until some time later this year. (Why do I want to implement paths when they can be scripted? Because I feel the OHR is meant to be user friendly and no-programming-required, and ought to aim to be an allow-as-much-as-reasonable-without-scripting game creation engine with powerful scripting capabilities)

Script multitasking: my central goal for the next release

Items: I think the items system could do with some improving. I also think the limitation of allowable item option combinations unnecessary.
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Meatballsub
Divine Bovine




Joined: 16 Jun 2003
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 10:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I did think of something the other day that I thought would be nifty. I'm not sure if it can be done easily though.

I was thinking about how time consuming it can be to create interior graphics of houses in some games. I thought how it would be kind of neat if you could do a "cloning" type command in the map editor. You could basically clone a set of interior graphics on a map, paste it elsewhere, and change it up as needed. I can definitely live without such a tool, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyways.
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Pepsi Ranger
Reality TV Host




Joined: 05 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 1:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you mean like "group tiling," where a dining room table and four sets of chairs (taking up six tiles) can be laid down in one click? I think Bagne once suggested something like that for his trees, and I for one would third this suggestion. I think it would save a lot of headaches, and cut map construction time in half.
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Meatballsub
Divine Bovine




Joined: 16 Jun 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 5:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yep, that's it. Would be awesome feature in my opinion. Glad there are others that would appreciate it too.
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Sh4d0ws




Joined: 06 Nov 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 11:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's great to know that most of the suggested features have a bright future.

And "Group Tiling" would be an awesome addition. I definitely fourth that.

And now, two more suggestions:

1.) Engine accessible "Hero speed": I know this is painfully easy to do with plotscripting, but I really think most features like this should be integrated into the engine. Also, having hero speed independent per hero would be cool, too.

2.) "Idle" frames for NPCs and Heroes.: Nobody stands with one or both of the legs stretched out. I know this can probably be done with plotscripting, too, but as with everything else; I think engine integration would be great.
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




Joined: 19 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd like to add that while group tiling would be super, super, super sweet (especially if you can make a template from multiple map layers), sprite-like map features would accomplish the same goal, while also making it easier to implement large walkabouts (I discussed this with TMC a while ago: large walkabouts are very difficult to use under our current layering system).

If we ever had such a system figured out, I would imagine that the OHR might open up to many new possibilities - I'm thinking of scrolling beat-em up games like TMNT Turtles in Time.
In theory this is already possible with slices, but map sprites would have to be added in in real time using scripts, and that's really inconvenient.

Oh, and also ... I'm curious: When we have pixel-based walking, are there any plans of having walls that aren't just perpendicular grids?

Like, diagonal walls or something.

If you really wanted to go off the deep end, you could even define walls graphically like this:
I want to make a wall have a rounded wall, so I edit a wallmapping graphic which designates "walkable" vs "unwalkable" pixels.
Sort of like this:

#OOOOOOOOOO
#OOOOOOOOOO
#OOOOOOOOOO
##OOOOOOOOO
####OOOOOOO
######OOOOO
#########OO
###########

This method might make it hard to implement a "sliding along the wall" mechanism, but I think people would love it for making platformers with bumpy terrain.
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Baconlabs
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Joined: 15 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bagne wrote:
This method might make it hard to implement a "sliding along the wall" mechanism, but I think people would love it for making platformers with bumpy terrain.

By "bumpy" terrain, do you mean something like... this?

Because that would be incredible.

But whoa, whoa, why did this image come up in a thread about the OHRRPGCE? Is the OHRRPGCE on its way to becoming a multi-purpose engine instead of an RPG-devoted engine?
EDIT: Probably not! Bagne, your imagination almost had me fooled.
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




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PostPosted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I wasn't picturing anything quite so fancy, but yes, that's vaguely what I had in mind.

Re Multi-purpose engine: Lol, I can't tell if you're joking.
But yeah, it seems to me that with slices, the OHR is becoming a lot more flash-like - and everyone knows that Flash is only good for making RPGs :-)
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Baconlabs
PURPLE IS MANLY




Joined: 15 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Flash? DID YOU SAY FLASH

THAT MEANS WE CAN DO DAAAANCING GAMES
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
Probably the Grand Poobah or something




Joined: 19 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 5:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harmtiles being defined by current tile instead of first tile in an animation is definitely something I'd want to see put in eventually. So we'd be able to have spikes that pop in and out, or electricity/fire type traps that turn on and off...

Same thing with passability. Not sure if it's different now, but I seem to remember animated tiles always using the first tile's passability, instead of changing to fit whichever tile it was on (I know it was that way when I was working on the sewer in Okédoké, because I had to use NPCs for the "solid" parts of the gates that can be opened/closed with switches.)
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




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PostPosted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Those traps etc are already pretty easy to script, and will be a lot easier once the multi-threaded scripting is brought to life.

What kind of situation would you want an animation which changes passability? After working with my game, I've found that altering wall passability creates annoying problems, especially if there are NPCs within the area.
Problems like heros and NPCs getting stuck when they're standing on a tile that becomes impassable. You can make the NPCs move out of the way, but how do you know that they're not walking onto another tile that's about to change? (any suggestions? :-D)
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




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PostPosted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 11:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's some things I would find useful ...
I'm wondering if anyone else would find these useful - anyone?

I'll eventually be using several key-press scripts which interact with the map. (the hero hops over rocks, but not through trees etc).
It would be extremely *extremely* useful if map tiles could store user defined data.
I would use this kind of thing to define a bitset which I've named "unlandable" (for my hopping scripts), then use custom to designate which tiles have this bitset, and my scripts would read this bitset.
Currently, I'm doing the same thing, by reading mapblocks map layers that are graphically invisible. This works, but it really stinks to use, both in custom and in scripting.
User defined data would make scripting and map editing for these scripts way, way easier.

A second idea would be to have similar user defined data for NPCs.
I haven't thought about this much though.
Basically, I'm just thinking that when I have scripts that need to identify NPCs, it would be handy to have a way of distinguishing bad guy NPCs from other kinds of NPCs: good guys, map triggers, animation sprites, items, etc
This could be done with user defined data - or here's another idea:
If the hero starts playing the fiddle, I want all fiddle-music-lovinig NPCs to dance. So, I loop over all the NPCs in the area, and I check their "loveToDance" bitset (which I defined), compile a list of dancers, then play the music and animate the appropriate NPCs.

Come to think of it, heros, enemies, and attacks could all use something like this.
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




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PostPosted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 4:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tile Groups: This has been suggested many times before. We once had a lengthy discussion on it in a previous suggestions thread here on CP, which I'll dig up later. Unfortunately we couldn't agree how this should be done. We badly need a Plan on the wiki for this.

Idle frames for NPCs and Heroes: Yes, this will be part of the new sprites/animations system.

In-Custom Hero speed setting: Good idea. Each hero already has their own speed, but the caterpillar party moves with the speed of the leader (I don't think it would work to do otherwise). When you disable the caterpillar, they each move at their own speed.

Finer wallmapping: I think James suggested that the wallmap could use tiles of a different size (such as 10x10). Diagonal walls would definitely be beneficial. But pixel-based walls could be expensive. I think you'd want to place a lot of constraints on how you're allowed to paint such wall tiles. Sounds like far too much trouble. I I don't know how the walls in games like Sonic and pinball are commonly implemented. Moogle was working on scripting such a system for a pinball game. Wonder what happened to it.

Quote:
It would be extremely *extremely* useful if map tiles could store user defined data.

Yes, I am planning on adding user Datamaps, which would have an edit mode in the map editor. Might allow a custom number of bits per tile, and maybe even arbitrary data per tile (any valid script object, eg. strings). This was a chief goal of the recent map layer work.

Quote:
A second idea would be to have similar user defined data for NPCs.

Are you thinking of per-NPC-ID or per-NPC-instance? Well, I guess we should do both. Attaching arbitrary script data to all kinfs of things is part of the script interpreter rewrite.
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msw188




Joined: 02 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

NPC extra data would be helpful.

I wanted to mention to Bagne that map data is basically easy now with layers. Just have a layer with a blank tileset, and you've essentially created a 'layer' of data to endow upon the map. Even better, you can give the tileset meaningful graphics, to be shown in the editor but hidden in-game, to be able to see what you are doing.
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