Controlling Harm Tile with a Tag...

I know that the Harm tile is one of the least used features in the engine, but perhaps nobody uses it because it cannot be customized. I personally like using it for lava and poison swamp type tiles where it will harm the player.

I would like to control if harm tiles hurt the player with a tag, because say if the player is equipped with a set of boots or something else to protect them, they should be-able to walk through the harm tiles unharmed. I know this type of thing could be scripted, but why should it, we already have the ability to place harm tiles on the map, now all we need is a tag to turn it off or on, like how the battle formations can be turned off or on.

I am making an area which is protected by "harm tiles", I calculated how far the player could walk until they would die if they're level isn't high enough. Since this is on a world map type area, I am hoping the player will save their game before attempting the feat.

Harm tiles originate from old school RPGs like Dragon Warrior and the Ultima series, I am not sure if Dragon Warrior allowed the player to safely pass by some means, but I know it added some nice strategy to the world map. I could say, quickly get somewhere or walk around. The quick route was very risky as it could mean my life, but I could make it safely. When I am a higher level, passing by it was nothing.

Harm tiles also don't seem to take the player's stats into account, and just harms an absolute value... Why haven't the harm tiles been improved upon since OHR first introduced them?

I don't know about fixing up harm tiles to be customizable. Zones can already do pretty much what you want to happen. And the scripting isn't all that difficult either. For me, zones made the harm tile obsolete, but then again, I can see your point how it would be easier for a newcomer with no knowledge of plotscripting.

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I think people don't use the harm tile effect because not only do they not often think "hm, I think I should make this tile KILL the play for stepping there", and also placing a harm tile is really strangely obscure. Like, one would think all you'd have to do is in the tile editor press H to set to harm tile placement, or at least place a harm tile, but no. You go to the....wall editor? and then press H. I'm sorry, but I don't think of walls when it comes to editing tiles to do harm, I think the tile editor. But whatevs, I still go out of my way to try and remember the obscure way of doing it, as I usually have plans for them. Like in Merciful Mungbeans.

I find they have some strategic uses in terms of "how much do you want this treasure?" or "do you REALLY want to take that shortcut?"

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Ultima did it well I believe. Where you'd get poisoned and slowly lose your health, but that was only in places where you would logically get poisoned. But that was Ultima-style play, the only JRPG style game I can think of off the top of my head that had harm tiles was Tales of Phantasia. And that segment was more annoying than anything else really.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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Most if not all Dragon Quest games have harm tiles. There's two kinds, typically, a poisonous bog that harms 1 hp a step, I think, and there's a more destructive electricity tile (that, in my opinion, originally looked like ice so I was like "why is this making me hurt, am I slipping and falling on each step?". That one seems to vary, from 15 HP a step to 75 HP a step (yeowch). It varies between games, I think the main series sticks to 15 or 25 and the Monsters games has it at 75, since monster HP can be incredibly high in that game.

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Thank you for your replies, it looks like there are mixed opinions on the "harm tiles". The only 2 JRPG games I can recall with harm tiles are Dragon Question, and Dragon Warrior(the original NES one for sure).

The idea is being able to easy use harm tiles, there should be no need to use Zones or plot-scripting for this.

Also, it does make sense to place Harm in the wallmap, as to some extent it is a wall, but if the player chooses to pass it, they will be harmed. It's a "conditional" wall, I guess, since the player has to make a choice if they want to pass it or not.

The other way to implement harm tiles without plot-scripting, but being able to customize them, is to use a formation set with a very high frequency, so that every second step would cause a poison monster to attack, or a lava creature to attack. They could be killed of course. If the player has a special item equipped, this encounters won't occur. This is the only workaround I can see for not being able to use tags with harm tiles.

I kinda of feel like this is a good example case of when the engine should have built in features and when things should be more scripting based.

No matter what, while developing a game, you're sure to come across something that you'll be trying to do that's not built into the engine. This doesn't mean that it should be built in. In fact, it should be seen as more of a small gateway into scripting. I think harm tiles are a great way to introduce non-scripters into scripting, and so I would actually be completely against this suggestion. ( Not to mention my opinion on harm tiles in games without HUDs, or any sort of system telling you how much damage you're taking without having to go into your status, remember how much hp you had and then step on a tile and do the math )

Also, I'd personally prefer the OHR engine coders to be working on things like resolution, battle scripting, and other things that can't be done with scripting. I mean, the map editor stuff was pretty nice, and there have been a couple other built in features that are all really cool. But what this all really boils down to is: Harm tiles? Really...

Sorta like the semi-invincible swampclaw of cognitive dissonance: between two times.
Except, there's already harm tiles about, it'll just emerge if you meander too far into the poisonous swamp.

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Illusions uses harm tiles on the lava tiles, just to inflict a little damage just in case the player wants to see if they can walk on lava.

And as of this post, all choices are equal.

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Some very good points, especially with the HUD. Dragon Warrior didn't have a HUD, but the screen did fade to red when you were running really low on life. This effect is sort of HUDish, as it's a queue for the user to be more careful.

Yes, this could be a great gateway into scripting for those who haven't experienced it before. I am quite good at scripting, and could easily build a script to fullfil this need. However, my current project is being made to challenge myself and see what I can create with no scripting whatsoever. So far it's coming along very nicely, the plot moves forward using tags, and the many built-in features are more then enough for a retro feeling RPG game. After experiencing game development like this, it has changed my views on what I should be using scripting for, and what I shouldn't be using it for. My last project overused scripting, and lots of stuff was scripted, stuff that was built into the engine. The community really got on my back for re-inventing the wheel, which is why I brought up this harm tile issue, as scripting it is back to my old ways of re-inventing a while... Harm tiles are already built into the engine, so why should I re-implement them in a script?

Hmmm, here's an interesting question which is related, before Zones were introduced, did anybody emulate zones using harm tiles? Since you can check if the tile the player is on is a harm tile, you can sort of emulate a simple zone.

I do like the idea of a tag to enable/disable harm tiles, but i won't be doing anything with it right now because:

1) The general map data has not yet been converted into a flexible format

2) I think TMC had a plan for how we could convert harm tiles into zones. I don't know for sure if we really want to do that, but we need to decide that first.

As for option #3 in the poll, when have y'all known me to ever delete a feature ;)

I think harmtiles are pretty common in OHR games. Spoonweaver has a good point, they are annoying: I always go to the trouble of calculating the amount of damage they're doing.

Also yeah, I have in the past used the extra wallmap bits (A, B, H, and even O with overhead tiles disabled) as a substitute for zones before they were implemented.


Really James, that's not an excuse; we are adding stuff to the .MAP lump anyway! RELOAD doesn't actually make adding that sort of data field any easier, provided the lump is already binsized, and provided zeroed out data is a good default value.


I don't think we want to do that. Zones are so much more complex than wallmap bits so are more annoying to edit, and writing upgrade code is just plain a bother (I would raise the limit on zone IDs to 10000 and use ID 10000 since we can't really safely pick an unused zone ID with total confidence).

On the other hand, we could add harmtile effects as a type of zone trigger. Then you can have different kinds of harm tile on the same map, and with tag checks as requested to boot. (Naturally all zone triggers will have tag checks, like textbox conditions.)

So the benefit of converting existing harmtiles to zones is removing a little bit of clutter.

Oh, man! You blew up my perfectly good excuse! Now I have to think of a new one ;)



Yeah, I was thinking more about this last night, and I realized that even if we did convert harm tiles into zones, we would still need backwards compatibility for readpassblock, and that would add even more complexity than any complexity that might be removed, so I am now fully in agreement that we should do it.



Yeah, this sounds really cool. Zones are a great feature, and they have so much potential for things like this.

This reminds me. Now that we have the ability to confine an NPC to a zone, I really need to work on the NPC movement type that makes them walk along the edge of their allowed area.

So does this sorta imply that soon we won't need scripting to work with zones as much? I like the idea of adding textbox-like conditionals to zones and have the engine act upon them, so you could make a wall that is conditionally passable without scripting or using the hackish NPC method(which I admit I use... Yes, a door is an non-player character!). In a sense a zone can be turned into a large massive NPC! You could place a large slice on the map for a super large sized NPC and use a simple zone conditional to make it react to the player(me like).