Can OHR do this?

Hi. I'm new, and not sure if I should ask my questions on the ohr mailing list, but I guess some of you might know. Could I script ohr to have the following:

* hit damage to body parts
* displaying hit damage on a HUD
* splash damage e.g., creating an explosion across a grid that kills the player if stood in the red zone, severely injures in the orange zone, and slightly wounds in the yellow zone
* basic support for shadows and stealth e.g., giving enemies a line-of-sight, and making the player less detectable when in shadow

Cheers.

Edit: ok I've already found Jailbreak which seems to use some sort of line-of-sight system for the guards to spot the escaped character.

That is all doable, but you will have to script it yourself. The engine's built-n features are geared more toward making RPGs.

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

With scripting, just about everything is possible.
However, not in the built in battle system. That's were things break down and become some what limited. So, if you want to make a non-rpg. Then yes, all these things are doable. But then again, if you want to make a non-rpg, another engine might be better for you. Anyways.....

What kind of game are you making? Naming a game that is similar would be helpful. From, what you've said, it sounds like some sort of Zelda type game.

Yes it would be a 2d Zelda type game, but with some things added to make the combat more advanced than just hack and slash. As I want to keep the combat in real-time, I wouldn't need a built-in Final Fantasy type combat system.

I've looked at some other 2d game engines that aren't specifically rpg, but I can't find any with a long record of producing quality games (that also runs on Linux). ohr already has plenty of games released, so I can look through the plotscripts for inspiration.

I know I'm asking a lot, but it would be nice if I could figure a way to do even some of the following:

Damage to body parts

If you've ever played Deus Ex you will know what kind of damage system I want; only a severed head or torso cause the death sequence. I've also found a small 2d game written in lisp called Bunny Slayer that demonstrates how this could work in a top-down game.

Stealth

Jailbreak's plotscript shows that some of the things I want are possible. This game checks if you are behind a wall, too far away, or crouched behind a movable container; if you aren't, then the enemies spot you and a life is taken away.

Local lighting tutorial shows that it is possible to draw shadow on the map dynamically as the player moves, but I wonder if it is also possible to permanently define tiles on the map as being in shadow. If so, I want to make the enemies behave differently if my player is standing on a shadowed tile.

For example: if the hero is stood on a dark-gray tile, the hero is hard for the enemy to spot up close. Or on a light-gray tile, the hero is hard for the enemy to spot farther away.

Conversation system

I want a conversation system that emulates the game Kingpin. There is a positive key, and a negative key. Pressing the negative key gives abusive chatter to npcs, making them more aggressive - and changing the way they speak to you - until finally they attack. Is branching of conversations supported?

Explosions/splash damage

I want the hero to drop grenades to kill enemies. After a few seconds the grenade detonates, making a blast radius, and damaging any in-range NPCs. I'm not sure if the npc in range script can help get me started with this?

Yes, you can make branching dialog. You can use the choice box of a text box to do simple two-choice branching, or you can use menus for more advanced branching. I did something like that for Bob the Hamster in the Crypt of Baconthulhu.

The short answer is that if you have a decent programming background, you can do pretty much whatever you want. The OHRRPGCE has some limitations, but you haven't begun to touch on them. So suffice it to say that everything you want to do, you can.

What I'd recommend is first, if you haven't done so already, play a game or two to get a feel for how the engine basically works, then fool around with the editor to get a feel for what's built-in. Then you can start on your own game, scripting what you can and asking questions on specific issues if you run into any problems. We are generally a very helpful bunch here as long as you're not asking us to write your game for you

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Not that I am trying to talk you out of using the OHRRPGCE, but if you are going to be programming most things anyway, you might want to consider a game programming library like pygame.

The deciding factor may be whether or not you want to do the work of re-implementing features that OHRRPGCE already does well enough for your purpose, like scrolling tilemaps, or textboxes, or easy-to-edit menus.