Castle Paradox

[Pepsi Ranger]

[Bagne]

[msw188]

Hi Pepsi Ranger! I'm really glad you found my argument arguments helpful, haha. Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look into the details, but I can try to give a small-scale explanation of the 'concept' of "extra data", in case it is helpful for you (or anyone else reading this).

I'm going to refer to NPC extra data at first. When I think of NPC extra data, I think of extra pockets. See, NPCs can be given all kinds of properties and tools in custom under the Edit NPCs menu (things like being one-time usable, or set to pace back and forth, or being able to call a script and pass it an argument). But what if you'd like the NPC to have (or know) more?

This is harder to think of scenarios for than arguments, but imagine there is a part of the game where the player can give items to NPCs. The issue is that the player is going to be allowed to choose which NPC to give their item(s) to, and also be allowed to choose which item(s) to give. Accomplishing this flexibility with global variables is possible, but rather painful. On the other hand, the item-taking NPCs could be set to call a script that would place the item ID into that NPC's "NPC Extra Data". This is like a built-in way to ensure that that specific NPC, and no other, has access to the ItemID of the given item. In this way, the 'extra data' acts like a kind of extra pocket for the NPC.

As a game author, this kind of thinking can quickly be transformed into a concept of something akin to having lots of small filing cabinets. See, it's one thing to store information in one long row of single, numbered, cubby holes (this would be how Global Variables work). It might be more helpful to store information in a row of numbered cabinets, each cabinet having three drawers. In this analogy, the cabinets would be NPCs, and the extra data slots 0,1,and2 are the drawers.

Now it is certainly true that NPCs (in other words, which cabinets are available for storage/recall) depend on the current map, and having to worry about that might be more trouble than it's worth. There is a reason that global variables have been around and considered indispensible since the dawn of hamsterspeak, while extra data is fairly new and more of a 'bonus'.

Menu extra data is even more helpful, although you can no longer use the 'extra pocket' concept, since you can't think of a menu as a character per se. For me, I have been using menues to simulate shops, where each slot on the menu is an item for sale and the extra data slots hold info like the sale item's actual ID, and selling price. Still, this is only because the normal shop setup doesn't work for my game. In general, Menu extra data can be thought of as yet another way of storing information. Here, imagine that instead of a row of cubby's (global var's), or a row of 3-drawer filing cabinets (NPC extra's), you have an entire hallway of numbered rooms, each room with its own row of the filing cabinets. In this analogy, the Menu is a numbered room, while each menu item is a filing cabinet having 3 extra data slots (drawers). Does this make any kind of sense? As always, please feel free to keep asking questions!
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[TMC]

[Newbie_Power]

I would hate to edit plotscripting in custom (textboxes are bad enough), but being able to compile by selecting an .hss file in custom would be excellent.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Ravenshade]

Actually, I'd probably ask for text boxes to be removed from Custom. They're so difficult to use, writing them into the script itself would be more than enough and would prevent confusion. (I'm still trying to work out what I'm exactly supposed to do).

Only thing I'd recommend is the ability to tie scripts to particular objects. (No doubt that can already be done however)
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Campaigning to change the name of OHRRPGCE to Orph anage, because it's just better and easier to pronounce!

Campaigning for Linux! Down with Win.exe!

PS. It's mean to replace words just because you don't like them ¬_¬ moderators...

[The Wobbler]

[Bob the Hamster]

Yeah, removing text boxes would be craaaazy, but being able to create a textbox's text purely in scripting would be pretty slick. I think that will be pretty easy to implement once we have a real honest-to-goodness string data type.

[Pepsi Ranger]

[Bob the Hamster]

Being able to store a string in a variable or an "extra" slot is the most important part.

The limit of 40 letters in strings should already be gone, but there was a place in the documentation where it still said there was a limit even though there isn't.

Of course, the only way to make a string wrap over more than one line is to copy it into a text slice

[J_Taylor]

'nother few things...

how about more characters for items?

or more than 16 colors for hero palette?
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Elemental: .75%
Heart of Darkness: 0% (crash)
The Mansion: .05%
Shattered Alliance: .05%

See a pattern forming? I do, dammit.

[Bagne]

[Bob the Hamster]

Here is a modified version of the script that should work better. The original version was exiting early unless you included all 7 arguments

[TMC]

Whoops. Originally the script set 7 different strings displayed on screen, and I modified it without testing. Should have said so, but I was overconfident ;)

[Bob the Hamster]

Eventually I am going to re-write the items menu to be based on a slice collection. The area where the columns of item names appears will be a gridslice. The number of columns will be customizable. Then it will become possible to increase the name length limit for people who are willing to let their items lay out in just 2 or 1 columns.

And also the ITM lump format will need to be updated to allow longer names.