OHRRPGCE feature requests/suggestions

[TMC]

Wow, not only are these totally recognisable, when the code is so short it actually looks more maintainable than the modern editors!
So would cowbobs be older, since you needed a sprite editor before a map editor?
It looks like gungnir also had a map editor, but comparing it to the one in bob2 which became the OHR's, there's so little similarity that it might have been rewritten from scratch, while the maptile editor was inherited from gungnir (bob2/mapblock.bas and gungnir/mapblock.bas are identical except for filenames).

I was wondering what grungir was, so I googled it and found your explanation here.

Also James, I swear I've pointed out before that http://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/ still lists the OHRRPGCE as a DOS program last updated 2008... which is weird because you updated Bob the Hamster VGA for its Windows port!

[Bob the Hamster]

Yep, cowbobs is older.

Gungnir's maps were strictly vertically scrolling, which is probably why i started from scratch on the bob2 map editor... In fact, I think the gungnir-era version of allmodex map scrolling code didn't even support horizontal scrolling

And I had forgotten that hamsterrepublic.com/dl/ even had an ohrrpgce entry. I'll fix it next time I am at a keyboard. Thanks :)

EDIT: Oh, that DOS icon... I gotta make a WindowsLinuxMacAndroid icon. That ain't happening today ;)

[SwordPlay]

Is it possible to get an "extra data" type dealy, but for tags?
Would help give them functionality akin to variables, and might reduce the number of tags one would need to use

edit: it would be nice to be able to use and call this feature from text boxes, such as setting a tag, and its extra data
i dunno, not a coder, but it would be nice to be able to handle it from the text box manager...

Perhaps stuff could be done to the "Tag names" menu?

It'd be nice to color code things in CUSTOM as well, to make large projects easier to manage and display visually.
I don't really want to use a spreadsheet AND CUSTOM. I just want to use CUSTOM!
I already use a spreadsheet for planning my game crap!
No one wants to refer to and update 2 (or more) sets of data!

Perhaps CUSTOM could benefit from a note section, or document type dealy to help plan game stuff. If this became a feature tied to the engine, it'd make managing game info a doddle. It'd be like a project overview. I realise that's ambitious, and that there's no need to add a note section when a good text editor will do, but who doesn't want to keep all their files together?
Perhaps CUSTOM should have the ability to import/export .txt? I dunno honestly

edit: I don't remember... did I ask this already? I'm confused and excited for Dwimmercrafty :p

[TMC]

Is it possible to get an "extra data" type dealy, but for tags?
Would help give them functionality akin to variables, and might reduce the number of tags one would need to use

I'm having trouble understanding this request. But I think that what you really want is the ability to use global variable conditions instead of tags. Then you can have a value that counts upwards as you reach each step of a quest or a dialog chain, instead of needing a whole lot of different tags which become really hard to keep track of could even end up inconsistent with each other. I know that other RPG engines use numerical variables instead of tags. I think this is a good idea, and I played around with it before, but it'll be quite a bit of work to implement throughout the engine and I worried about making the user interface more complex.

It'd be nice to color code things in CUSTOM as well, to make large projects easier to manage and display visually.

Colour what exactly?

Perhaps CUSTOM could benefit from a note section, or document type dealy to help plan game stuff. If this became a feature tied to the engine, it'd make managing game info a doddle. It'd be like a project overview. I realise that's ambitious, and that there's no need to add a note section when a good text editor will do, but who doesn't want to keep all their files together?
Perhaps CUSTOM should have the ability to import/export .txt? I dunno honestly

That reminds me of reading someone write that they kept notes by editing the help pages.

Adding a global editable Notes page (to the F9 global menu) would be trivially easy.
Maybe it would be better to have separate notes for each of the main editors, like tags, enemies, and sprites. Or better still, separate sections of the same document, so you could scroll to see it all and don't forget about parts. Is this actually useful enough to bother adding? Seems like there's a lot of sense for there to be separate sections for different maps, but separate sections for each item may be too much.

I was previously thinking about a Notes field (a text page of unlimited length) on each individual enemy, attack, song, etc. To record any information that you don't want to appear in the item description, for example.

But, what you said makes me think that having all these blocks of text hidden inside an .rpg file would be bad. I think it would be better if the notes were instead stored in external .txt files which you could actually read and edit separately.

[SwordPlay]

colour coding? anything, the title, the background etc. of an entry.

notes? It'd be nice to have 1 global note thingy, but what you just said makes me feel that using a spreadsheet is probably a superior solution, even if you do have to jump back and forth. Spreadsheets are cool B-)

[TMC]

Hmm, but what would be the purpose of the colour coding? You made it sound like it's not displayed in-game. Just somethign to instantly recognise, say, which attacks are damaging vs buffs vs debuffs vs special chain logic, and that sort of thing?

Yes, note-taking should be built into the engine only if it has advantages to using a spreadsheet. But I think that the best place to put a note is often right on the piece of data it's about. Most notably, you can't actually record the author or a song or sfx (or license information or other data) unless you squeeze it into the title. On the other hand stuff like todo lists definitely ought to be in externally accessible, if it even makes sense to allow viewing/editing from inside the engine at all.

[SwordPlay]

re colour coding, it's as much for the game developer as the player.
Currently, entries in the database can't be moved around.
It'd be nice to change their colours to make it easier when skipping through them, to make it obvious if it has been dummied out, incomplete, belonging to one group/set or another (as defined by the game maker, not necessarily showing up on the player side)

[Wendigo]

Feature Request: virtual folders / hierarchy

Managing lots of maps, textboxes, npcs and stuff can get quite messy in bigger projects.
How about adapting the hierarchical indentation from the slice editor to other areas.

So you could create something like this for "Edit Map Data":

Code: Select all

Urka Town
  Weapon shop
  Armor shop
  Item shop
    Item shop cellar
  Church
    Tomb level 1
    Tomb level 2
    Tomb level 3 boss

If the maps would be Organized like this it would be clear on first sight which map belongs to where. I think using it just for the visual presentation in Custom would be enough.
Adapting it to the text boxes one could even use it instead of the "next" parameter to define following text boxes.

Something else I was thinking about. Do text boxes really need to be global?
If they were tied to a certain map there would be far less to keep track of.
Having a look at Vikings of Midgard, there are 2866 text boxes in the game, thats a huge number.

[Nathan Karr]

Something else I was thinking about. Do text boxes really need to be global?
If they were tied to a certain map there would be far less to keep track of.
Having a look at Vikings of Midgard, there are 2866 text boxes in the game, thats a huge number.

I think making them global makes them easier to manage than per-map would, though I think it'd be nice to be able to call up the textbox editor from the NPC editor as a shortcut since for me the hard part is flipping back and forth between two menus so distant from each other.

[SwordPlay]

Wendigo mentioned that in the map tile drawer, it'd be nice to see the surrounding tiles.
It'd also be nice to see what the current tile looks like when it's, uh, tiled. Like a preview.



I agree with Nathan! Flipping between distant menus really hampers the flow!

::JUMP IN THE ENGINE:: (jump, jump, jump around)
It'd be nice to have global hotkeys to jump to a section directly, or some kind of shortcut/hotlink feature.

I think Textboxes/NPCs is probably the most important link to make.
After that, it'd be nice to be able to jump to the graphic editor from editing a Map, NPC, Hero, Enemy or Attack.
Also, it'd be nice to jump to the attack editor from editing Heroes, Enemies, Items.

I think having a menu pop up with shortcut/bookmark options could work, especially if it were configurable, or returned a preview of the section.

An all purpose Copy/Paste board would be SO SICK MAH BROS but it'd make sense to have one for each graphics type, or have more than 1 board.

I know you can type numbers to jump (really cool feature btw), but some people (me) have a lot of repeating graphics so I sometimes get lost in hundreds of similar looking entries. Same for attacks where there are only minor differences.


::MANAGING ENTRIES: WITH ICONS:

::MARKING ENTRIES WITH AN ICON::
Some ability to mark entries, with an ICON perhaps, or colourising the title/body would be helpful.... If you could enter Icons, from the Font editor (Good god, CUSTOM really does have it all!) for example, or being able to expand the number of icons as much as you'd like...


::PLEASE MAKE COLOURISED ICONS::
A key point here is that colour is more useful than graphic form.
Ones eyes immediately see and recognise different colours.
Icons, sprites, text etc. takes a little longer to register in the mind.
If we could select a colour for an ICON, for example, it'd be helpful.
PLEASE PLEASE ADD SOME COLOUR OR ALLOW USERS TO COLOUR SOMETHING IN THE ENTRY.
Being able to select the colour from the palette would be awesome.

::PLEASE GIVE US LOTS OF ICON CHOICES::
Please add at least 10 Icons. 3 simply won't do, and 5 would also be lacking.
Ideally, one would be able to extend the list of Icons indefinitely, or be able to draw it from a large pool, like the characters in the font editor.

::WHAT KIND OF ICONS?::
Perhaps CUSTOM needs a new graphics type? Would be a PITFA to add a whole new type though....
Please don't make Icons too small. They should be eye-catching!
Maybe it should be a subset of Font? You could add an extra row or 2 and let us draw Icons from there, or simply from Font directly, like entering text.

Again, please allow us to add colour to such a feature :p Really really important and simple thing that would make it much easier to mess around in the engine.
Just one block colour or some presets like that should be plenty fine I think

On a side note, being able to search by an Icon, or organise by Icon would be a great feature... As would being able to search all entries in an editor by text.... No idea how that would work tbh....
If something is marked by an Icon, having CUSTOM recognise or organise it in a list would be a cool feature!

::SHOULD ICONS BE EXPANDABLE OR PRESET?::
Even if you were able to select icons for use from Box Graphics, or Walkabout, that'd be fine. Kinda messy though.
We could expand the list indefinitely using the graphics editor!
That'd be nice, but I don't envy the task of adding a new sprite type!
Adding a new row or 2 in font is lazy, but effective. Actually, you don't have to add a new row, we could just draw Icons from the Font editor! But that might mean less special characters for use in a game, for example.

::WHERE SHOULD ICONS GO?::
It'd be nice to add Icons in every menu/editor, especially Attacks, Textboxes, maybe even Tags!
Other good places would be Enemies and Battle Formations.

::JUMP TO ENTRIES MARKED WITH AN ICON::
It'd be nice to jump or scroll through all entries marked by an Icon. Maybe you could use it as a bookmark?

Oh, and I am waiting every day for the battle engine to get some new features, especially protect/guard/bodyguard kinda thing....
Being able to take or receive damage on an allies behalf is a key feature of combat!

Maybe when CUSTOM gets overhauled a little, eh?

edit: just occurred to me, could we colourise the entries in the editor using box styles?

[TMC]

==Hierarchical organisation of data==
This is a really interesting request and I'd like to discuss it. People have requested the ability to reorder records a number of times, but that's difficult to implement and doesn't really do enough for organisation.
Instead, I was thinking about the ability to tag records, and give you the ability to views groups by tag. But referring to 'tags' is confusing, so I'll call them 'groups' instead.

Comparing tag-grouping vs a hierarchy/tree:
- I'm not convinced that hierarchies make much sense for things aside from maps and textboxes. E.g. if you want to organise your tags, a tag typically doesn't have another tag that could be its 'parent'
- It would be possible to let you put a record in multiple groups (e.g. a map in 'outdoor', 'nighttime', 'Westhaven'), unlike a hierarchy
- However, naming groups and entering their names (or picking them in a menu) is normally more work than arranging stuff hierarchically (eg using the slice editor interface). But... if you have hundreds of un-grouped records, scrolling through them to find the parent to assign could be slower
- Naming groups doesn't let you reorder records, so everyone who wanted that is still going to be upset
- Group names would be reused for all data types, eg maps, textboxes, etc. So it could be used for a unified tree-based view of all game data... however this might be far too messy to be useful (eg a huge number of tags and textboxes and npcs one on map). And anyway the same thing could be done with trees.
- Groups could be arranged into a hierarchy too
- Grouping/tagging is partially redundant to searchable 'info' strings.

Maybe you could create labels in the hierarchy which don't correspond to records. This gets you the best of both worlds, since you can arrange things into named groups, if you want to. For example (lines without 'Tag' are just labels):

Code: Select all

Urka Town
  [Tag10] talked to weaponsmith
  [Tag11] talked to paul
  [Tag5] can leave Urka
  Collected items
    [Tag13] got silver ring
    [Tag14] got deed
+[5] [Tag 14] Urka mayor dialogue    # a collapsed tree with 5 children
[Tag6] Started harbour quest 
  [Tag7] Finished harbour quest 
  [Tag8] ...

'Info' strings for tags don't make much sense, but if these were textboxes or NPCs you could imagine that being appended to each line, and being able to search by name or info.

Right now I think this hybrid idea looks the most promising, and I'm looking forward to implementing something like this!

==Icons==
You can already put icons in the names of things, e.g. look at the Items menu in Vikings. So I'm going to interpret this request as the ability to name things like NPCs, and to attach editor-only info text to various items (similar to how textbox preview shows for NPCs), which you can search for. (And you'll also be able to change the colour of text eventually too, so you can colour the name or info text yourself.)

I think that the font is the place for icons. In future, you'll be able to draw coloured variable-width characters, perfect for icons. Variable size font unfortunately requires updating the placement of text on-screen in a huge number of places. I also want to increase the amount of font characters. (BTW, this is the canonical example of me implementing something but not finishing it. Don't expect font improvements to make it into Dwimmercrafty either, but I really need to aim for E???.)

[SwordPlay]

eh, thanks for the reply. that's not quite what i meant or intended, but that's okay, because you answered it previously anyway.
I was actually referring to making some grouping ability, and you called it "tags or groups"!
At least, I think its the same thing :p

Basically, instead of creating a group with a name, and marking entries as belonging to that group, I wanted it to be a graphic instead of text, simply because it is extremely easy to recognise at a glance...

I hope that makes more sense!

[TMC]

But you can put icons in text, so a tag/group name, or the info text, could just be an icon. So I don't understand why it wouldn't work; could you maybe show a mockup of a screenshot of what you want?

[SwordPlay]

yeah, the tag/group name would basically be the same thing, really.
Not much point in making a mock up, but I had a go... don't really like how it turned out, which is telling, but still.

:ICON DESIGN:
I was just thinking it could be preset coloured shapes like a crescent, a star, a halo, that kind of thing.
Reason being it sticks out and is much easier to see at a glance...
Can do that with font anyways.

(If there is an overhaul to CUSTOMs layour, I'd like to see information broken up with, for example, lines or underlines, titles in a larger font, in bars, and colour.)

Now that I'm thinking about it, it'd be excellent for the icon to be font-sized, so it could be displayed next to the name of an entry in other parts of the editor

e.g. enemy entries in the formation editor, all with their own icons next to their names, or when choosing an attack for a weapon, it would display the icon next to it.

I didn't include any titles/labels, but you could also have the name/title of the group next to it.
Obviously, it'd be great if we could see which entries are in a group, jump to them, and manage them somehow.

The primary advantages of using an icon is that it is much, much, shorter than a group name, allowing it to be displayed next to the entry name wherever it might pop up in the editor.
The other advantage is that it is much more immediately obvious as to which group an entry belongs to.

Frankly, "group names" would work well using font characters, but maybe colourised.

Are pop-up info windows planned? It might be nice to show relevant icons or group name when selecting entries.

[TMC]

Cool! I was thinking of creating a mockup too, but you spared me the effort, since you drew what I had in mind :)

However, the icons shouldn't be shown in the preview of the battle menu, since they're not actually part of the battle item name/caption, right? You can already put icons in names of things if you want.

Yes, it's true that icons have the advantage of length. However I can't think of any place where length is very limited: names of heroes, items, attacks etc virtually always appear at the end of the line, with the rest of the line to themselves. There are a couple of 'previews' where space is limited, but again icons should not appear in previews, since the whole point is to preview what is actually shown in-game.

However, icons could be treated specially: if there isn't enough room to show the full info text, then the engine could show just the icons and remove all the words.

I guess that group names could be shown in addition to the info text. I hadn't been thinking of doing that, but if there's enough room for both...

Little pop-ups with more information about something that you're selecting would be nice, but it seems like a lot of work. Features like that could be implemented if we switch to using the editor-editor which James started implementing, which is probably going to be very important for generally improving Custom. But I think we should be able to use multiple fonts, colours and styling in menus without a rewrite.