OHRRPGCE feature requests/suggestions

could we get hero and enemy extra data and the ability to use it in damage formulas?


THOUGHTS ON THE BATTLE ENGINE: ANIMATION AND GRAPHICAL EFFECTS



flash
-flash screen
-flash attacker
-flash target

trajectory
-arcing projectile
-accelerating projectile (starts slow and speeds up)
-multiple projectile (one target) in spread pattern or fired sequentially
-hang/pause projectile (hangs in the air or pauses. then fires. for dramatic effect. an example would be a fireball that pauses in the hands of the attacker, appearing to be charging, before being fired)

through
-same as 'attacker "dash-in" animation' but attacker moves through the target to the other side.
Faster movement + Further distance = appears to be more powerful
edit: oops, meant dash-in, not strike. also, it would be nice to have a spinstrike but jumping/near the target

pause
-having a pause or delay in an animation makes it look like they are charging or concentrating the attack

sound
-nice to have a sound effect play on certain attacks like critical, or playing the sound effect more loudly, or quietly if it misses, or something like that

All purpose animations?

shockwave
-shockwaves to denote impacts, played on the base of the target, over the attack animation, the attacker, through, behind or over the target
-damage effects, like blood spurt, really almost the same as shockwave, but in a different colour and for a different reason
(one could add these "effects" to an attack animation anyway, I guess)

magic animation
-all purpose animations to go over magic casters. Just an "effect" such as crackling light or aura, elemental wreath or the option to make our own :p
(one could add these "effects" to a hero animation anyway, I guess)



may have suggested some of these already. in which case never mind... maybe something to mull over for later? a few simple effects really enhance the battle aesthetic and create a much more dramatic and anime-esque flair, especially just adding "flash" and "pause"!

Could there be a "don't return to position" kind of thing for combo attacks, similar to "jump" but the attacker stays in front of the target, and intended for follow up strikes, without returning to their normal position (don't know if this already exists or what)




edit:
MORE THOUGHTS
please add some functions to the battle engine.
It would be nice to have the ability to store, pass, and transform values.
For example, one could pass a value to an ally, who could use that as the basis of another attack.

Currently this can be done by inflicting damage, say on an ally, using "show damage without inflicting" and using "last damage to target" or something to use that value, but there are issues with turn order so it wouldn't work reliably.
Also, if it could use "damage" to do this, an enemy might interfere or it could be prone to abuse.

I'd also like to see more "stored target" kind of things, but specific ones, not just one general one

Also, is there any way to make a gameover if a specific hero dies in combat?
Might be a nice bitset option for heroes (gameover if death)



EDIT:
I also noticed that the walkabout sprites included in the engine have the wrong "arm swing". The arm should be swinging on the opposite side of the body!
You can test this out yourself by watching, walking, or indeed, googling it.
Not complaining. I really like the walkabouts included with the engine. Wish there were more of them :p
It could actually be correct, but that would mean they are doing some weird lunging step.
If they are "walking normally" the arms swing forward on the opposite side of the forward leg.
Both arm and leg forward on the same side implies a kind of side-stepping motion,
Not sure if that's the intention or just an oversight... Still looks cool though :p

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"Imagination. Life is your creation."

Not sure if this has been requested before, but has anything been said/planned regarding the sorting of shop items? I like to keep all my shop items alphabetical, so I manually edit all of them when I add a new shop item, which is getting inefficient. Either a manual order listing or just an "arrange alphabetical" option would be super nice!

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Shop item sorting:
I was going to say I've never heard that one before, but I found it on my todo list. Good idea, but don't expect to get to it soon...

Animations:
Several of those ("shockwave", "magic animation", "pause", "flash") are things you should draw/define yourself using animations, once they are implemented.

Attack animations ("trajectory"), conditional sound effects, etc
Would all be nice. Some of these might be added eventually. Don't have time to add everything; we need battlescripting to handle these requests instead.

Attacks which store values:
You could try to use the unused CTR stat to store temporary values so that you can do multi-attack calculations. It would be nice if you could do that sort of thing more easily and reliably using attacks without needing battlescripting. But I have almost no idea how to best go about that.

I think the trickiest part of shop stuff sorting would be that we also have to sort the shop stuff stock data in saved games... Or sort in a display-only way that does not change internal indexes

So basically the same problem that faces all lists of data in the ohrrpgce.

We need some kind of display-only sort abstraction. Shop stuff just happens to be a rare case where we want it in-game too, and not just in the editor

Yes, I nearly edited to say that we could use the same reordering I was discussing with Wendigo, but also use it in-game (and ignore the grouping of shop items into a tree, linearising them).

But I don't like my todo list growing to infinity, so I just went ahead ignored that and implemented real reordering with a workaround for the problem James mentioned, which is probably a lot simpler than display-only reordering anyway.
Gosh I'm terrible at this. When will I learn to prioritise features.

Edit: this might be prone to bugs. I realised I only tested buying, not selling, and sure enough I'd broken selling.

that is a really cool and handy feature though!

I like the small improvements as much as the big ones.

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"Imagination. Life is your creation."

Totally awesome, thanks!

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

- snap portrait position to textbox
- a shadow or highlight for the font
- staggering selected entries in the databse (move it a step forward out of line)

(are these done? I am really impatient for dwimmercrafty)


- PLEASE let us preview hero/weapon attacks somehow!(!!!) ;_;

- Please change the item editor to show both A/B frames of a weapon (and hand position)

- to set the hand position in the weapon graphic editor.. might save time...

- a debug feature that allows access to all items, heroes, things like that.


- Change the layout of enemy graphics to run horizontally or in columns. Hurts my eyes.

(p.s. sorry for repeating myself so much.
Thanks for accepting my feature requests. It's really cool to see them get turned into a new thing in the engine.

I'm trying to format my posts better. Forum needs improvements too.
I think the text entry box is too small... expandable spoilers would be nice.
Whenever I click on a button I lose my position. Ctrl+B should Bold text etc.
I'd like to see a preset format that you click on to create headers/titles/bars for posts)

- edit: is it long till animated enemies? I would like to see something like "attacks without returning to original position" to make nicer animation stuff. This is also a general request, as there are quite a lot of places I could think to use it.
I'd also like an option to set the speed of battle. Currently frames display very briefly, which is okay if you're trying to hide the poor animation, but awful if you're trying to show off each frame.

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"Imagination. Life is your creation."

Don't know what you mean by "staggering selected entries" or "portrait position to textbox". But no, nothing is done.

Weapon handle/hand positions is a big problem we have to solve. Those ought to be defined in the graphics editor, not the item and hero editors. But the handle for the same weapon or hero graphic could be defined differently in different item/hero definitions sharing the same graphic, so translating the data isn't 100% reliable

Handle positions could be generalised and used for many different things, like where to place attack graphics on an enemy/hero, where to fire projectiles from, where to place the cursor, and scripted uses like overlaying equipment sprites on a hero.

Debug menus to add/remove/manipulate items and heroes would be really nice. But for now it can also be scripted.

"attacks without returning to original position" would be really great for chains. But if we just add that bitset and another to return to the starting position afterwards, you'd still have almost no control over movement. Have to think about it.

Unfortunately I'm too busy right now to get much done. It's been a month since I worked on animations, although I've done a bunch of other low-key OHR work during that time (which amounts to procrastination)

If you want to harass Mogri with suggestions, there's a separate thread for that :) What's wrong with the text entry box? You can resize it.

Just curious: Anyone else having sound issues in games? It started for me a couple of days ago, I downloaded the latest nightly and still no music or sound is playing while in a game, but they play correctly in Custom.

Version: 20170403 gfx_directx+sdl+fb music_sdl

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Oh, lovely. Is the in-game sfx volume greater than 0? Does changing the music and sfx volume have any effect? Do you have any MIDI music?

No MIDI. I messed around with the volume settings for both music and sound effects and no change.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Couldn't reproduce it in a VM. Could you please post your g_debug.txt file. c_debug.txt might also be useful to compare. You'll probably have to copy the files before quitting game/custom due to autodelete.
Also, roughly what was the last nightly you tried that worked?

The last nightly I downloaded that worked was maybe a month ago? I hadn't downloaded any new ones until last week.

G Debug


C Debug

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Running low on ideas...
If you go into the Windows volume controller, game.exe isn't turned down, is it? I don't know if you can even adjust the volume permanently.
If you still have a copy of the last working nightly you had, does it still work? And what date was it?
Does it make any difference if you launch game.exe yourself instead of using Test Game?
Try toggling the new "Don't stop music when starting/loading game" general pref bitset. Aside from that, the last time which there were any changes to audio that I'm aware of was a bunch of stuff up to Feb 21.