Spreadsheet view of Enemy list

A small suggestion for the engine which would improve on the enemy's screen. I know this can also be done in a REAL spreadsheet, but having an option in CUSTOM to list all the enemies in a nice list with all their stats and rewards all side-by-side would be awesome. This will make it easier to look at the balance between enemies and see which ones need to have higher or lower stats.

It would also be really spiffy to see a screen where I can say, Hero is at level 14, and it will display the hero's stats, and below I can go through an enemy list to compare which enemies the hero should be fighting at this level to keep the balance.

I am debating on creating such a tool myself, but it won't work with the engine, it will just allow me to enter in the hero stats, both starting and ending, and it will do the calculations for me. Then I can compare those stats with my enemies in custom.

Another idea is to add a battle preview option within custom, where I can choose a hero, his level, and equip him with gear and say I want to fight this formation. This will make testing out balance so much easier.

I actually already do that with an actual spreadsheet program. I doubt it would be useful in the OHR, as with the amount of information available, the screen would rather rapidly become a wall of unreadable text. An external tool would be neat, but I'm happy with my spreadsheet for now.

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

Using Editor version wip 20170527 gfx_sdl+fb music_sdl

There is a tool for importing and exporting data from/to spreadsheets, though it is crude: tabulate.py. I'm 90% sure that it still works with Beelzebufo, though the Windows .zip is out of date. Also it won't be supported long term.

A built-in table view of enemies and other things would obviously be neat.

Also, regarding battle testing, that's something I want to make easier to do with better live previewing and debug options. Currently only attacks are reloaded in the middle of battle, not hero or enemy stats. There's already a debug key to trigger a battle (F8) but what I'd like to see is a way to set your party and their levels. What else would be useful?

Perhaps the ability to choose which character/enemy takes its turn.

Yup, that's the tool I'm using to import/export data as spreadsheets. And I am absolutely in love with it, heh. Makes working with enemy stats and whatnot so much easier.

As for implementing it as an in-editor feature within Custom, I'm not too sure it would work. Just working with those spreadsheets in Gnumeric is overwhelming enough, and you've got a whole lot more screen real estate there. A built-in import/export tool would be neat though, but I'm not sure how doable it would be. Besides and external tool already exists, so there might not really be much of a need for an internal one.

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

Using Editor version wip 20170527 gfx_sdl+fb music_sdl

I personally think it is good to have this as an external tool. The resolution really makes something like this a lot harder inside custom.

The resolution will be bumped up soon, or so I've been hearing, and that is why I made this suggestion as we'll soon have lots of new screen real-estate to play with. I am so excited to finally make 1080p games in OHR, it's always been my dream. With super large map to explore. I want to make an old skool like game, where only the world map scrolled, and when in towns and dungeons, no scrolling. Since a town can be as big as 96x54 and fit perfectly on a 1080p screen. It'd be awesome! Also think of multiplayer games in 1080p, using one keyboard on a large playing field. Turn-based multiplayer RPGs here we come!

Heh, bumped? Very likely. 1080p? Not so likely.

The OHRRPGCE is software rendered, and pushing that many pixels through a software pipeline ain't easy. I expect that an OHRRPGCE game running at 640x480 is realistic but when you got much beyond that I would expect lag.

This so complicated by the fact that we want also want to "bump" the frame rate too, which means those pixels might need to get pushed even faster.

Dirty-rectangle update schemes might be able to help a bit, and a (purely hypothetical) gfx_opengl backend could help even more, but tilemap scrolling efficiency on large maps is a hard problem to solve, even when you have full hardware acceleration, so don't expect to do 1080p in the easily-foreseeable future.

bumping up the frame rate? battles already launch by at blinding speeds, I don't want to blink and have an entire round over with.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

How would you know if you don't try? Like the teacher on the Magic School Bus said, Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!

I took a chance when I built that tile editor, which works rather nicely at really high resolutions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eg6TeCO3nM
Watching this video really makes me want to finish the map editor! Seriously, look how fast I'm placing those tiles! Scrolling doesn't seem laggy either, this is at 1280x800. I may try it at even higher resolutions soon. The tile editor uses SDL, just like OHRRPGCE uses.

Update: Wow! Since I made the map editor, much has changed in the map's format -- well the MAP file added Zones, after a few adjustments I got the map editor to work with the new format. Here my game's world map displaying(all blacks are transparent -- proper transparency is not yet working, but will still display perfect in CUSTOM/GAME):

There's more, the map is larger than 1280x800 resolution the editor produces.

I am disappointed you can't quote Ms. Frizzle by name.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

heh, I thought it might be a copyright violation if I did.

I dared not hope for this to come soon, but I'm very encouraged to hear that. Even if it just ends up being 640 x 480 that's still a lot more space

tabulate.py will not be supported long term. Pretty much all the files it imports/exports to are planned for replacement, so it would need a total rewrite using the new nohrio version, which I don't think is ready yet. I don't know if I want to spend so much time on it.

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I'd love to see that map editor finished as an alternative to the built-in one. Further changes to the map file formats are coming down the road, especially to replace the .D, .N and .MAP/.MN files completely.

To call out James again for a phony excuse, I just tried higher resolutions in the first town in Vikings on my (low end 3 year old) netbook. Running with a window size 1280x960 I get 48fps when running at 2x zoom (actual resolution 640x480), or 37fps when running at 1x zoom. I'm surprised it's that fast. But anyway even if our rendering code were too slow all of our graphics backend libraries have much more highly optimised software blitting routines than our own ones, as well as hardware rendering, and we're hoping to switch over to those soonish.

Better reasons to worry about enabling higher resolutions is that we wouldn't want anyone to make a game that won't run at less than e.g. 1280x1024 -- have you ever seen a game with a requirement like that? I haven't -- and the interaction with the zoom ratio, which is controlled by the player. I don't know how you would design a pixel-art RPG which supported running at more than one resolution. Or which ran at either 1x or 2x zoom depending on the player's screen resolution.


Increasing the frame rate won't make things happen faster, it will make animations and camera scrolling smoother.

wouldn't that also require more frames FOR animation? seriously, I could use 5 frames at times. especially since the oscillate animation doesn't seem to be working correctly, it just seems to act like a cycle forward and stop halfway.

edit: I see Tantagael has got in a fancy new dock, and Dracolord's castle has moved to the Bahamas.
What's up with the darker trees? Is that, like, thick forest and the lighter trees woods? Are the green little blotches tiny bushes or are they marshland?

Honestly, this overworld is awesome. You're makin' me wanna play more and more, how dare you exploit my favorite RPG series as my weakness. /shakes fist playful fury

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x