OHRRPGCE feature requests/suggestions

You're the bomb.

- adding text tools to the sprite editor, maybe when editing large images or smaller font/text becomes available

- oval tool to actually draw ovals, not circles. Maybe toggle?

(actually, I think the sprite editor could be made more versatile if it had "layers" like the slice collection editor, or could use same to create sprites)

- I personally think it would be cool if NPCs could display graphics, slices etc., in the same way that textboxes work, complete with conditionals.
Textbox editor to display slice collections would be awesome.

SUMMARY

- slice tree views - at the same time as editing so you can see the effect on children

- toggle hiding slice information in tree view (position, size, type)
- globally (all slices) or locally (slice + children)

- optional custom labels/names for slices instead.

- a mouse/button driven interface for editing slices?

- for simple(r) operations, being able to select multiple slices might be useful when you want to edit many slices at once.
Not sure how that would work, it would possibly have restricted functions, but it might be useful for deleting, moving, flipping, visible'ing etc., lots of slices at once.

EDIT:
For future incarnations of CUSTOM, I'd like to see menus and shops integrated with the slice editor, so that users can configure them to appear however they would like.

OK, cool, one less thing for me to worry about :) and that would make the game look more unique.


I wrote a general purpose ellipse drawing routine years ago, so the problem is creating the UI for a tool (which I've always wanted). I nearly started on it just now, but it's not trivial even to calculate the parameters from the control points. I think a toggle to switch between circles and ovals is best.

But Neo argued years ago that it's not worth sinking a lot of effort into the sprite/tile editor, since it will never be able to compete with external graphics tools. We should spend the time what's fundamentally necessary to improve the engine. I still agree with that. For that reason, I have no plans to add major features like layers (but would be very happy if someone else did!) Of course you know how unfocused I am; I might just feel like adding it one day and find it's not hard.


I would agree that you should be able to display slice collections without scripting.
What you said about NPCs sounds like "textbox conditionals without the textboxes", which is more like how other game engines allow scripting-without-code (GUIs, visual programming). I don't know how to go about that. Just add a textbox option to skip displaying a box? Separate out the conditionals in a separate editor (and allow attaching them to NPCs, spells, items etc instead of textboxes)? Textbox conditionals are very important for making the engine usable without scripting, and we need to add more conditionals.


So you want to be able to see the list of all slices in a collection at the same time as editing a slice? Why? The only information to be seen are the sizes and positions of the children, but you can already see that by looking at the slices themselves.

I think the slice editor still needs lots of improvements, and agree with the other suggestions.

Sometimes I want to see what's happening to child slices whilst i'm editing the parent.
It's not a big deal, I usually edit, then look at the tree, then edit, then look at the tree etc.,

I agree about the sprite editor. It's not quite "full-featured" but it certainly has enough to create reasonably complex works. I like it how it is and I enjoy doodling in it.

I don't think I would like "layers" for the sprite editor.
I think I prefer the slice editor in that regard, but it has no option to draw a sprite (for example)
It would be easier to be able to draw sprites from the slice editor and export as an image (or something)
This would also remove the need for a copy-paste board (re: graphics) because you could have as many graphical slices and turn them visible/invisible, and store them in collections, keep them (arranged) in containers and more.

For the textbox conditionals thing, I think it might be neat to have an option when creating a new "textbox" to allow preset configurations like:
- blank (for conditionals. textbox hidden)
- textbox (displays textbox)
- slice/image (displays slice collection)

or something like that. Maybe there should be a hotkey that does that automatically so that textboxes can be configured/set up in a few keystrokes?
Such as 't'extbox toggle, 'b'ackdrop toggle, 'c'onditional editing and stuff like that. If they allowed you to enter data in the relevant fields as well that'd be cool.

EDIT:
A drawback to using textboxes is having to manage them from the textbox manager. It would either need links to editing that textbox, or some system of arranging textboxes (maybe something to do with textbox trees... dunno) or assigning labels/codes/names to textboxes so they can be looked up easily or something like that.

I'm still using standard stores for most stuff, but for this one part of the game where there's a ton of items to pick, going custom was the right move. It's a pretty elaborate system I'm looking forward to showing more of soon!

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

I previously made optimistic remarks about the possibility of swapping heroes in and out using global variables or slices to bypass the OHR's stodgy Hero limit. Unfortunately, the command I intended to use would only allow you to go from the 41 heroes allowed in the party to the 60 heroes definable total... not much of an improvement. I also misread this command and thought it would allow you to alter the stat growth curve of heroes, which doesn't seem to be the case.

There's still options. You could use those 60 heroes as like.. "classes" of monsters, so Pichu -> Pikachu -> Raichu would all be the same basic hero just with a different picture.. except they'd gain the same abilities at the same time and have the same stat growth curve. That's boring. You could get around that, but you'd have to write your own level-up plotscripts (Probably one for each type of monster) and at that point you're so far through the looking glass you might as well not even use the default progressions.

You're also going to want to record the heros full spell-list, in case TM or HM type items had been used to teach them spells beyond the normal for that class and.. kind of a nightmare at that point.

I'm not sure what your skill or confidence level is with plotscripting, but this is going to be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and for very little effect. Sorry to have gone off half-cocked and gotten your hopes up, but I'll keep thinking about it because I swear there's something important I'm forgetting.

OK, I've heard this request too often, so I've just increased the limit on hero definitions from 60 to 512. I will lift the party size limit too (which should be easier).
I plan to add a "change hero ID" command, which is what Giz really wanted, I think. It will be very useful for creating class systems, as I'll give it arguments to control which hero data to keep or reset.
But that command is more work, so it might take a little while to get to it.

Hah! I tricked you! There was a perfectly good way to do it the whole time, but I knew, kneeeeeeeeew that as soon as I made it work, you'd implement the feature! Revenge for text-wrapping! In your face, you feature implementing goatherder!

I'll get you back for this, Giz! I'll obsolete your next contraption before you ever get it working; I just need to predict what you're going to invent next!

- If we get a hotkey to "enter text" in a text slice, could we also get a hotkey to toggle the "outline" of text slices? I almost always turn it on because it looks much more readable, and I think it should be on by default (my opinion)

- Could we see some kind of slice that alters the visibility or bounds of slices it shares position with?
You could use it to cut holes in slices to make things behind visible, or to shape a slice in to complex... uh, shapes...
okay, not sure really. But I would like to be able to alter different parts of a single slice somehow, maybe a modifier/handler slice could manage it into distinct sections or something? dunno tbh

Whoa!

This is great news. 512 hero definitions should be way more than I'd need for Puckamon; as soon as the reserve party size gets bumped up into the triple-digits too, I'll have to start working on expanding the game to have more than 55 possible monsters and slipping some new ones into a few areas that are a little short on variety (I'll probably end up aiming for somewhere in the 100-150 range similarly to how many new monsters most generations of Pokémon add, depending on how many evolutions of existing monsters I end up adding in.)

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

How about a blinking cursor for textboxes?

It might look like this:
https://68.media.tumblr.com/e1ae940836b5aba1ff2fd4c504384c0f/tumblr_ooh63wsElw1sqlugvo1_1280.gif

Or it might be an I-bar to simulate a computer terminal input, or something like that.

Not really a serious request, just an idea. Animation, flashing or blinking draws attention to textboxes, making them easier to concentrate on (and therefore notice its contents)
It also stops dialogue scenes from seeming completely static.

I think various animated doodads or blinking/flashing icons would make games seem much more futuristic, sophisticated and high-tech than they actually are.

That's really a design thing though.
For example, I like using cycling select slices to do little animations, but its a pain to script each instance.
I would like to see a select slice option to cycle through children by time. You could nest them to create slightly more complexx animations (but really, we should be using the animation editor for that. I think)

This is a longshot request, but how about the ability to commit to and pull from git repos from Custom?

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I did some work on raising the reserve party size limits, but got distracted.


That's the sort of thing I hope will be implemented after the textbox overhaul.


Are you just cycling between different sprites at the same position?
If animations are builtin, I don't see much use in having auto-cyclnig of select slices. I suspect that longterm, select slices will become largely redundant.


I agree, actually. I looked into it and it wasn't trivial to change it due to back-compatibility (it would have to be special-cased in the editor). So I may or may not end up doing so.


Oh, interesting that you ask for that! For a long time I've been wondering whether stencil masks would be a useful feature. Basically, imagine a new Stencil Slice which is a black-and-white sprite used as a mask: the mask is not drawn on the screen, instead its children are only drawn at pixels where the mask is black (or vice-versa):

You can already use rectangular masks, using "Clip children"

However I'm not going to go to the trouble unless a number of people say they want it. Especially because it might be a major headache to support if we switch to accelerated graphics. It can be done easily enough in OpenGL, but might be difficult and very inefficient if using a graphics library on top of OpenGL.

Major uses for this would be transition effects for sprites, menus, textboxes, the whole screen, etc, and reflections.


I've been wondering the same thing! It would be ideal if the engine could perform the merging (and conflict resolution) of .rpg files, otherwise using branches is infeasible. If we could do automated merging, builtin integration with a version control system would be very useful for groups of people who are collaborating on a game. Ideally you wouldn't need to know a thing about git or whatever.
The pipe-dream I have (considering OHRRPGCE 2027 here) is two people both editing a game simultaneously on two computers, sending changes back and forth with a keypress. Mind you, git may be a bad way to implement that, because the latency is huge if you don't have a persistent connection, and you don't want to do a commit every minute which you save forever. Probably better to use a networked filesystem.

(Also there's the question of: should we use git? Mercurial has a reputation for being simpler and easier. However, I'm not actually very familiar with it.)

Basic VCS integration without merging is of course more reasonable, but what about all the other files like scripts and .bmps which you want to check into version control? Seems like you might be better off doing it manually.