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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 518
Location: Halifax

PostPosted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

How many zones would be allowed per map?
You'd be able to edit them in custom, je?

Any idea when zones will apparate? I think they'd resolve a major obstacle in making my game.
OmygoshIlovezonesandtheydon'tevenexistyet!
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer




Joined: 22 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

TMC will have to correct me on this if I am wrong (cause he is doing all the hard work on these) but I think there will be a very large number allowed per map (thousands?) but any given tile on a map will be limited to belonging to a maximum of 16 overlapping zones.

I know he is making very good progress on it, but none of it is checked into subversion for the nightly wip builds yet.
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 8:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

James Paige wrote:
That would be great. I do hope to add the ability to jump to the textbox editor directly from the NPC editor.


I'm looking forward to it :)

Pepsi Ranger wrote:
I think he was inspired by the unreadable plotscripting mess that I use for triggering local ambient sounds and other "zone specific" things in Powerstick Man XE.


Nearly. It was the unreadable plotscripting mess in Entrepreneur that you use for figuring out which property you're mowing the lawn of, and then later I remembered a whole lot of similar unreadable plotscripting messes in Powerstick Man XE. (Hmm... lawnmower... lawnmower scripts... Uh oh!)

Actually, I've had an embryonic form of the idea for two or three years: that long ago, when I was planning to add NPC paths to ease scripting of Eldardeen (obviously never got around to it), I wanted paths to be composeable of pieces (see below) including areas. But they are much more useful as a separate feature.

I'm not sure about the number of zones. Currently I've set an artificial limit of 9999 incase I later want to use some spare bits for something, but I could change it to 65535 if I can't think of anything. And the maximum number of overlapping zones at a tile is 15.

I'm about an hour of work away from checking into SVN the (draft) zones editor, however I have to go to bed and be up early. No matter, currently zones don't do anything anyway :)

Bagne wrote:
Know what would be killer?
Of course you do:
If you could store NPC paths.

So ... use an invisible NPC to calculate a path, and use the path for when moving the Boulderbea— ... um ... when moving slice sprites around.

Killer diller.


I think you mean that you want "paths" not just "NPC paths", and you want to be able to create one by calling a pathfinding function, and to be able to store paths in a variable?

Luckily for you, that is what I want as well. And I'd like to be able to use (some kind of) paths for slice movement, especially in-battle sprites. I feel like there are really two different kinds of paths that would be useful. Here is my ill-formed idea for paths thus far, feedback from people of what they actually want to do would help:

A path: composed of pieces (segments) connected end-to-end. Each segment is either a straight line or a some sort of spline, like a Bezier curve :) and can have an associated velocity (maybe define the velocity at both ends and interpolate linearly).

An NPC path: a type of path that is placed on a map. Its segments can be joined not just end-to-end, but can contain branches. At each joint, you can define tag-based or random conditions for which branch is taken. Joints could also contain other commands like "run a script" or "wait 10 ticks" or "face south". (I'm copying this feature list directly from the scripted NPC paths in Eldardeen.)
Segments of an NPC path could have additional data attached to them such as "thickness": how far from the path NPCs can stray according to random variations, or walking around obstacles.
Maybe NPC paths should disallow spline segments.

I don't know how distinct these two types of paths should be, but I think they could share a lot of code and be implemented at the same time.

I would love to go work on paths immediately, but I'm pretty sure I need the new script interpreter before I can do them properly.
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




Joined: 19 Feb 2003
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Location: Halifax

PostPosted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 9:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

James wrote:

16 overlapping zones

Awesome! That will do!

The Mad Cacti wrote:

... and to be able to store paths in a variable?

Exactly. Maybe an NPC needs to repeatedly navigate a certain area, or maybe you want to record a history of your movements for some reason.
I never thought of slice paths, but that's cool. Saay ... if the user could easily define a Bezier curve in custom, they could easily assign complex movement patterns to attack graphics. In this case, it would be especially useful to scale and rotate slice paths.

The Mad Cacti wrote:

Segments of an NPC path could have additional data attached to them such as "thickness"

I was wondering about this.
Say you have some sort of A* algorithm that allows NPCs to navigate the map. If we start making big monsters by using 40x40 sprites, or stamping slices onto NPCs, you might want to ensure that your paths are 2 or more tiles wide.

NPC Bezier paths would pre-suppose non-tile-based movement?
Say, I'm curious: are there plans for diagonal hero and NPC movement?

Movement along a series of end-to-end Bezier curves makes it difficult to conserve movement speed, no?
I started laying out plans for a monster that had sprites moving along a Bezier, but I couldn't find an easy way to calculate the length of the curve. It would be nice to ensure uniform movement speed along the curve.

Oh, one last thing. While we're on the topic of defining slice movements:
...
I've recently started using Blender, it's open source software that does 3D rendering. I was quite interested to discover how 3D animation uses "armatures", a skeleton-like construction with pre-defined joints. Animation is done by pre-defining a set of armature "poses", and interpolating between poses through time.
As it turns out ...
when building the Boulderbeast, I (by accident? by necessity?) ended up developing an equivalent system. The only difference is that Blender has a fancy visual method of defining the evolution of poses through time, while my Boulderbeast script hard-codes the gestures into a long, confusing string of commands.
So ... I'm thinking this:
Slice "armatures" (either 2d or 3d), would be extremely cool in the OHR, especially if there was a Blender-esque pose timeseries editor. Multi-slice mega-boss graphics would be easy to create and animate!
The only catch is that this kind of animation would be rather clumsy without slice rotations being implemented.

Okbye!
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




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PostPosted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 4:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, what I said about there being an hour of work left to do was way off (eg. I decided to rewrite all the saving+loading code), and I've had a lot of real life distractions, but the zones editor has been in the nightlies for a few days. You can't use zones in-game yet (over the next week, hopefully), but I'm looking for feedback on the editor, because it's a bit of a mess, UI-design-wise (but hopefully bug free).

Next project is a tool to let you draw rectangles (in all map editor modes).

Quote:
Say you have some sort of A* algorithm that allows NPCs to navigate the map. If we start making big monsters by using 40x40 sprites, or stamping slices onto NPCs, you might want to ensure that your paths are 2 or more tiles wide.


Haven't thought much about it. If such a path finding algorithm is not too difficult to write, then I'll probably write it.

Quote:
NPC Bezier paths would pre-suppose non-tile-based movement?


I don't think it makes sense for NPCs to move in curves at all (of course, you could still do so with scripting: just move their slices).

Quote:
Say, I'm curious: are there plans for diagonal hero and NPC movement?


4-directional movement is pretty heavily ingrained in everything. It would be nice; I'd definitely go for it if I see a possibility, but don't get your hopes up.

Quote:
I started laying out plans for a monster that had sprites moving along a Bezier, but I couldn't find an easy way to calculate the length of the curve. It would be nice to ensure uniform movement speed along the curve.


There's a standard integral for curve lengths, but it may well be that it's not analytically solvable for Bezier curves :P. Also, sometimes you'll want uniform speed and sometimes you won't.

Quote:
Slice "armatures" (either 2d or 3d), would be extremely cool in the OHR, especially if there was a Blender-esque pose timeseries editor.


This just seems too advanced to build into the engine. Hopefully with the new version of HS (and the in-game script console I'm hoping to add) it'll be far, far easier to code, though admittedly it'll still be long off an actual editor. You could script your own editor, though!
I've been thinking about how to let people define multi-slice sprite animations, and it seems pretty difficult.
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Pepsi Ranger
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 1:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I downloaded the nightly last night to test the zone layout and it somehow gave me the version that was updated on Sept 1st (aka, the last time the OHR community showed any kind of pulse on Castle Paradox or Slime Salad). I'll be happy to give it a try once the nightly becomes nightly again.
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer




Joined: 22 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 1:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The nightlies were broken on the 5th, and I fixed it this morning around 9:00 am pacific time, so if you checked before then, you did indeed get an old one.

Download again for sweet delicious Zones.
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Pepsi Ranger
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ah yes, I finally got to test them. Nice work, TMC. Much better in action than that cluttered screenshot I saw led me to believe. I still find the <,> buttons a little inconsistent with the +,- we use for switching layers, and I find that awkward. But the depth to which you managed to cram all this zone work into such a manageable package is impressive. Can't wait to apply it to Entrepreneur's messy lawnmowing script, since the scripted zone will never quite live up to this. Good job.
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Bagne
ALL YOUR NUDIBRANCH ARE BELONG TO GASTROPODA




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PostPosted: Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Question to whomever may know the answer (probably TMC?):

Any change in status with
1) arrays in scripts
2) multi-thread scripts
?
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




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PostPosted: Mon Oct 25, 2010 4:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't worked on the new script interpreter in a long time, as there was so much else to do. Once I resume work on it, maybe in a month, I'll probably work on it to the exclusion of everything else. Hoping to switch to the new interpreter, with multitasking scripts support, before the end of the year. The type system will come afterwards but looking very unlikely to be before January.
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Pepsi Ranger
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 8:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just designed a piece of body armor that protects my heroes from poison, and I just noticed that there are no equipment bitsets that actually allow for this to happen. All the elements are accounted for, but not the status effects like poison, stun, etc.

This should be remedied.

Also, attacks like Transmogrification could really benefit from specific enemy tagging. I realize that certain attacks turn enemies into other enemies. But what if that attack is meant to turn an enemy into an invisible enemy (same stats but with invisible picture)? What if a hero's attack is designed to revert the invisible enemy (that he wouldn't normally be able to detect because the creature is invisible, unless he had a special item or weapon that can reveal it) back to normal? Right now, transmogrification, and pretty much every other current feature, does not make this easy, if even possible.

For now, I have a complicated attack design that requires the hero to choose his high-agility target and store it, increase his aim to exponential numbers in order to catch the invisible enemy, unleash the revealer item that reverts the invisible spider back to the normal (and far less agile) visible spider (assuming that the hero knows which target to attack), and then lower his aim to normal so that he doesn't spend the rest of the battle as a superhuman.

And no, it didn't work the way it was supposed to. He was still able to target the invisible creature with normal weapons and still attacked another creature with the item that's supposed to convert the invisible enemy into the visible one.

In short, it's a mess.

But that's my workaround.

So, little things like that would make battles nicer. Bitsets that allow the user to select source and destination enemies would also be helpful.

EDIT: And it seems that enemies that are supposed to flee instead of die don't actually run if they are designed to kill themselves (unless maybe because it's a transmogrified enemy?). My "runner" enemy just stands there after he's taken out of battle.
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Fenrir-Lunaris
WUT




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PostPosted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 11:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pepsi Ranger wrote:
Just designed a piece of body armor that protects my heroes from poison, and I just noticed that there are no equipment bitsets that actually allow for this to happen. All the elements are accounted for, but not the status effects like poison, stun, etc.

This should be remedied.


Vikings works around this by assigning a "Hex" element to all status effect attacks, and having armor protect against that one element (so that the status effects fail). Unfortunately, this means that all status effects share the same exact element. Hence, my request for an extension of the Elemental bitsets to 16 or 24.

So until that gets fixed, you ONLY get Ribbons....


(and not star pendants, white capes, and goggles)

(not that goggles DID anything)
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Newbie_Power




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PostPosted: Sat Nov 27, 2010 8:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pretty much every single game that uses the default battle system would benefit from more elements, so +1 more elements.
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Blacklight_Studios
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 12:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not sure if this was already brought out as a suggestion, but:

what about enemy animations? Wouldn't animating the enemies in the battle make the games more realistic to the audience? I know it'll just add one more thing for people to make adjustments for, but I think it's be cool to have it is a switchable function, meaning that the editor can turn the enemy animations off or on depending on whether they're making a Final Fantasy style RPG, or a more complex, almost turn-based game, like Pokemon Coliseum. that would bring me to my next point.

Battle system. this monster of a feature is, in my opinion, the driving force behind what makes a good game, second ONLY to audio and graphics. right now, the OHRRPGCE is only capable of semi-turn-based battle system, unless you script it differently. (which i would assume is a pain in the arse) I would like to see optional battle systems built into the engine, so you could change it from what we have now, and full turn-based combat.
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PostPosted: Thu May 05, 2011 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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