Slime Salad

This is what Ken looks like when wearing his "Special Weapons And Powers" uniform armor. Now I just need to write the scripting for the sprite change when he equips it (or just copy/paste from Vikings).

I think if I put him in any other games, he'll be wearing those goggles(despite the fact that they do nothing).

Why does he only put the sunglasses on when he dies? Did someone make a pun?

But that looks really awesome. The blue armor gives much needed contrast.

It's taken me a little while to find the time to compose, but this has been a long time coming. It is a string orchestra arrangement of my theme for Blu Eternal. In case any of you are wondering, yes this is the type of music you can expect to hear throughout the game.

<a href="http://www.garageband.com/mp3/W__James_ ... awZ2o">Blu Eternal Main Theme (String Orchestra)</a>

Hope y'all like it!

This is just a short update about my work on the menu system.

This one is the main menu. In the game, as it opens, the Heroes' Health Meters drop down from the top of the screen and the Main Menu slides in from the left side. It's spiffy!


This one is of the Status menu. When you select 'Status' from the main menu, it pops up from the bottom, displaying your first slot Hero's information. You can then scroll through each Hero in your active party by clicking the left and right keys on your keyboard.


This last one is of the Goods menu (or item menu). Like the Status menu, it pops up from the bottom. Each page shows 12 items at a time. The default is 50 pages (or 600 slots) and you can navigate through the pages like you do with Heroes in the stat menu.


More coming soon! Just have to find the time to program it all. Also, if anyone is curious, the Goods menu can have fewer pages based upon the size that you set the inventory to be (if you just felt like fiddling with my .rpg file when I release a demo).

Holy crap, that looks nice. I love your menus.

Your menus look great. I'm jealous...

Slick!

Wow, I think that's the first time I've seen someone completely restructure the menus like that (though I guess I could've missed other games that did something similar, since I don't play a whole lot of OHR games.)

I like the little health-meters... and the status/item menus not filling up 90% of the screen is a nice thing to have, too.

And if longer item names are ever an option, you'll already have some extra space for them on the menu.

It's rare to find an ohr game that i'd want to play as bad as a commercial game.

This game looks pro, please release a demo soon

VampiDucki, question:

Are your menus primarily scripted using slices, or using menus, or using a combination of both?

Are there any particular difficulties that you have had to overcome to make your menus work? Any pitfalls to warn others who might be considering making their own fancy menus?

Do you have any suggestions for new engine features and/or plotscripting commands that would make your job easier in creating and maintaining your menu screens?

James Paige, Answer:

1) My menus definitely use a combination of both slices and menus. I find them to be most useful and pretty when used in conjunction.

2) The main problems I ran into were plotscripting errors... LOTS AND LOTS of plotscripting errors. My biggest pitfall was when I decided it was ok to NOT make my containers global. yeah... that was made of LOTS of fail.

This is my advice for that one: Take your time, plan things out, and make ALL your container slices global variables. Also, make sure each of their contents displays by separate scripts. By doing this, you can manipulate the location of them at any time and redisplay their contents with an easy 'run script by id(number)'. It might also help to assign that number to a global variable so you can call them by a name instead of having to remember the number all the time.

Also, that 'Edit Screen Layouts' feature may not be fully functional yet, but it sure as heck helps when planning how to code flashy menus and where to place all the pieces. USE IT! It will be your best friend while making custom menus, battle systems, etc.

3) As for suggestions, I only have a few. The way slices actually work is extremely efficient in my opinion. The only thing that would make it easier for me would be to have some larger graphics to work with as slices. HOWEVER, this really isn't a huge issue in my opinion and could really be updated at a later time. I did just fine by piecing together the 80 x 80 enemy sprites and it only killed me a little on the inside. Don't worry, James. I can walk it off.

A much more useful feature, especially when it comes to the Item and Spell menus, would be the ability to get and/or set any of the item or spell data such as descriptions, costs, effects, etc. As of right now, I'm defining them in the plotscripts, and creating a way to store and check all that data is rather exhausting. It's actually taking me more time to develop an efficient way of doing that than it did to get the menu to where it is now. (I believe this one is already listed as a feature request.) And a get and set on Heroes' portrait graphics would be great as well.

Another useful feature would be the ability, in Custom, to select a script to be run instead of opening the main menu when you hit the ESC key. Otherwise you kind of have to do some unnecessary plotscripting to "deactivate" it.

Sorry that was so long-winded, but I hope it helps anyone looking into this. If any of you have specific questions about it, feel free to send me a PM and I'll help you out as best I can.

And thanks, everyone, for the kind words! I'll release a demo as soon as I can get one up and running. I just want to get the engine to be a little more stable first.

Oh, and James, this is going in there too, just for funzies.

VampiDucki wrote:... Also, make sure each of their contents displays by separate scripts. By doing this, you can manipulate the location of them at any time and redisplay their contents with an easy 'run script by id(number)'. It might also help to assign that number to a global variable so you can call them by a name instead of having to remember the number all the time.

"run script by id"? Are you using that for callbacks? Or for some other purpose?

VampiDucki wrote: Also, that 'Edit Screen Layouts' feature may not be fully functional yet, but it sure as heck helps when planning how to code flashy menus and where to place all the pieces. USE IT! It will be your best friend while making custom menus, battle systems, etc.

Cool! I am glad to hear that. Although I plan to remove it from the menu for the Ypsiliform release (because it isn't done) maybe I will keep it accessible via a shortcut key for that purpose.

VampiDucki wrote: 3) As for suggestions, I only have a few. The way slices actually work is extremely efficient in my opinion. The only thing that would make it easier for me would be to have some larger graphics to work with as slices. HOWEVER, this really isn't a huge issue in my opinion and could really be updated at a later time. I did just fine by piecing together the 80 x 80 enemy sprites and it only killed me a little on the inside. Don't worry, James. I can walk it off.

Hehe :)

I don't know if you already did it or not, but piecing together multiple 80x80 sprites is less painful if you make them children of a container slice, since you only have to position them once.

In the long term, the <a href="http://gilgamesh.hamsterrepublic.com/wi ... mits">Plan for raising sprite frame limits</a> will eventually make direct support for other sprite sizes easier.

VampiDucki wrote: A much more useful feature, especially when it comes to the Item and Spell menus, would be the ability to get and/or set any of the item or spell data such as descriptions, costs, effects, etc. As of right now, I'm defining them in the plotscripts, and creating a way to store and check all that data is rather exhausting. It's actually taking me more time to develop an efficient way of doing that than it did to get the menu to where it is now. (I believe this one is already listed as a feature request.) And a get and set on Heroes' portrait graphics would be great as well.

I'll be working on the item and attack commands. Party what is holding that back is the need for more code cleanup, but also partly what is holding it back is the desire for a way to make the scripting interface easy to keep backwards compatible when we add/change features.

For example, we have commands to read and write enemy formation data, but unfortunately the way those are implemented will become pretty awkward next time I make upgrades to the way enemy formation data is stored.

VampiDucki wrote: Another useful feature would be the ability, in Custom, to select a script to be run instead of opening the main menu when you hit the ESC key. Otherwise you kind of have to do some unnecessary plotscripting to "deactivate" it.

Ah, yes. That would definitely be good.

Oh, and that OHR logo looks awesome :)

Yes, I am using "run script by id" for callbacks. it makes it nice and easy and slims up my scripting.

Yeah it would be AWESOME if you at least kept the Edit Screen Layouts available at least by some shortcut key. It helps a LOT when doing anything with slices. I often keep it open, while scripting, and use the info to plan everything out. i like to be very exact.

Yes, I do use container slices to piece those 80x80s together. I absolutely love the container slice feature! that is actually helping a lot with the battle planning and scripting. ;) Also, I really like this plan for raising sprite frame limits. That should be fun, but I know these things take time to implement.

And I understand it takes a lot to implement new features too. I'm actually quite amazed at how far the OHR has come. It's becoming so customizable that developers' games each have an extremely individual look, which i think is great!

Thanks for listening to my crazy crazy rants, James. And happy holidays, all!

Totally off subject, but it's on subject for the thread subject. Props if you followed that.

I quit working on four out of the five games I was working on originally, because, due to the worst of luck, my computer crashed AND my backup broke.

However, the fifth out of the five was only in 'design' faze, so that one's still going. And I'm working on another one. I might have a few teaser pics up soon, even if the game isn't due out for QUITE a while...