character exclusive inventories

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Dani :)
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character exclusive inventories

Post by Dani :) »

Is there any way to imitate the Earthbound/final fantasy the 4 heroes of light (a underrated DS game) idea of inventories in which every character has their own separate item pool?
I suppose not, but i figured might as well ask
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Not really, not if you intend to use the standard battle system

I do like the idea, and I think it would be a nice feature to add in the future, but we don't currently have any implementation plan
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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

I remember MSW put a lot of work into custom-scripting such a feature for his game Tales of the New World 2. I really like the idea, but I don't have the ambition to go through the kind of scripting needed to implement it before it becomes a supported feature.
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msw188
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Post by msw188 »

Well, I sort of take a look through these forums at random intervals, and what do you know?

It has been years, but I remember my solution being all sorts of complicated. Here were some of the techniques involved:
1. Item-use in battle used the LevelMP stat. I couldn't think of any other way to do it. This has a couple of unfortunate side-effects:
1a. Item inventories capped at 8 per person
1b. Can't use LevelMP for anything else

2. All item acquisition, including from chests, shops, and battles, had to be scripted by hand. With special loops set up for finding a required item when everyone's inventory was already full.

3. Selling items was kind of clever - I think I repopulated the normal built-in item menu for that purpose which allowed me to use the standard selling feature of shops... I think...

4. Item use outside of battle was entirely scripted as well. Which meant pretty much every usable item had at least one script dedicated to it... I think...

So to Dani :), if you like the idea of spending hours on scripting the feature, I can try to share my experience. But if you're just looking to get started making a game, then I'm afraid you're best off using the built-in item menu.
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Post by TMC »

Oh, nice to hear from you msw!

Heh, Level MP is an ingenious way to accomplish that. But very limited.

Per-character inventories have been requested a lot over the years and it's certainly something I wish we had, but there's the opportunity cost of not working on zillions of other potential features instead.
I think most of the work would be in having to update the builtin menus and add new menus to allow moving/assigning items between characters, adding new script commands, deciding who gets an item from a textbox, handling overflow, etc. But it would be possible to do a quick partial solution where we just add per-character inventories in addition to the party inventory, which could be accessible in-battle, and you have to script some menus around it yourself. And then at a later point we can finish adding the new menus to make it usable without scripting.
Last edited by TMC on Mon Feb 03, 2020 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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