OHRRPGCE feature requests/suggestions

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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

Oh cool I actually didn't know about that command. With that and a few others, scripting a more mouse-friendly menu wouldn't be that hard. Still, it'd be nice to have menus cooperate more with the mouse without scripting. There could be reasons it's particularly difficult to make the two controls cooperate; my comment is purely a suggestion.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

I'd love to have more tag conditionals than just the two for making NPCs appear on a map
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Hedera
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Post by Hedera »

This is probably a ways down the road, but can we get left/right facing versions of hero sprites in battle, so asymmetrical designs don't end up looking weird?
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Post by polkakitty »

Building on that, since a lot of people have made games that show battles in a Phantasy Star-style perspective, with your characters seen from behind and the enemies shown in front view, I think it would be good for those games if you could set the direction heroes move when they attack. (Or there's False Skies, which is the only OHR game I've seen that has your party drawn facing south during battles, but it might be helpful for that game if there was an option to have heroes move south when they attack.)

The way this could be implemented is, in the Edit Battle Formations -> Edit Hero Formations menu, there could be an option to set a facing direction for each hero. Whenever a hero used an attack with the "Strike" or "Cast" attacker animations, they would move in that direction, and whenever a hero was hit by an attack, the "flinch" animation would have them move in the opposite direction from their facing direction.

(I think it would also be cool if there was a way to have battle formations with "pincer attack" and "side attack" setups with heroes or enemies being attacked from both sides. However, that would be a lot more complicated to implement, and would need to interact with actual game mechanics (you'd want characters to change their facing direction depending on who they attacked, and take extra damage if they're attacked from behind,) so that's the kind of thing that will probably have to wait until battlescripting gets off the ground.)
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Post by TMC »

Sorry, a lot of unanswered requests piling up here! I've been neglecting this thread.
Hedera Helix wrote:This is probably a ways down the road, but can we get left/right facing versions of hero sprites in battle, so asymmetrical designs don't end up looking weird?
Yes, and not far actually. Animations and more frames is a current project.
The Wobbler wrote:I'd love to have more tag conditionals than just the two for making NPCs appear on a map
A while ago I was working on implementing tags which are autoset based on multiple other tags (or global variables). While maybe a bit less intuitive this is a general solution which lets you set conditions based on multiple tags anywhere, without us having to laboriously update file formats and editors one by one. Of course you'll be able to create a new autoset from within the tag picker.
It's one of those numerous things I want to dust off and finish.
kylekrack wrote:Is there a reason the menu item under the mouse cursor doesn't become the "selected menu item"? It looks confusing, depending on the game, when one menu item is flashing: selected by keyboard cursor, and one is tinted: hovered over by mouse cursor.
For a while it actually used to work like that, but I changed it to current behaviour because it was quite unpleasant in practice at least in Custom: briefly move the mouse over the window, or bump the mouse if it's over, and the selection changes. Although that old behaviour is the same that modern GUIs usually work, in a keyboard-heavy program it seemed quite wrong.

So I think what the proposed behavious should actually be is that the "keyboard selected" item is remembered but hidden if something else is selected by mouse hover, and if you press an arrow key or the mouse leaves the window, the selection jumps back to the previous keyboard selection.

I don't know whether that behaviour should be the default in Custom, but I suppose there could at least be an option to use it in a game (and maybe also the way you described it), and maybe an option for Custom too.

I think it's probably not hard to implement.
Nathan Karr wrote:I'd like to at least be able to choose the textbox style and transparency setting for all the standard special screens like Status, Spells, etc.

As it is, I usually change all the box styles to be all black with the same colored outline for consistency. I've never liked the "translucent box" setting for a number of reasons.
Of course, editing all those builtin menus as slice collections is in the works (and well-advanced). We really should finish that.

This is something I've deliberated about before. I think maybe we should add some global settings to control which box styles are used by the builtin menus (or at least the couple tyles that are used for many purposes), simpler than but redundant to editing the slice collections. This would require making the rectangle slice style settings even more complex... (Note: builtin box style usage is documented here).

However it's not a great use of time to add features that are redundant to other features.

I also want to add more settings to each box style, beyond the three we have. One of those would be whether the default "translucent" version of the box is chequered ("fuzzy"), or blended transparency, and also what percentage transparency/fuzziness. So you could set the default percentage to 100% to disable it in all the builtin menus.
Hedera Helix wrote:Could a bitset for attacks be added where, if the attack misses or fails, it doesn't display the "miss" or "fail" text strings? I made a couple things that use dummy attacks to check if someone has elemental effect lesser than 50%, basically to determine whether they're wearing reflective armor, and fails if they don't. It works fine, but it keeps saying "fail" even after telling it to not display damage.
Yes, that's a clear lack. So I just added two new bits, since it was easy.
kylekrack wrote:I noticed there aren't any dissolves that apply much horizontal transformation. I was thinking of cheating by making some swaying grass/leaves using a sprite dissolve, but none of them worked in this context.

All that's to say, I don't know how much effort it takes to add new sprite dissolves, but something with horizontal movement would be a great addition to the list!
Sounds like you want the wave effect I showed off last year but never added. I didn't finish that yet because I wanted to add parameters, but dissolve effects don't support parameters yet. Come to think of it, there's no reason I can't add the parameters later.
Secondly I think some distinction between "dissolves" and "effects" is in order.

The effort in adding a dissolve is almost entirely in imagining something, coming up with the code/equations to achieve it and tweaking it to look good. Many existing dissolves are very simple. I'm happy to adapt effects written in other languages (including shader languages) to FreeBasic, if you can provide something.

More responses later.
Last edited by TMC on Tue Mar 16, 2021 2:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

Both of those responses are great. I'll look for existing effects in other languages and send them your way.

As for mouse controls, I don't think the controls in Custom should change at all, I think they work perfectly in there. However, while playing a game the independent controls don't translate well, in my opinion. I'd reckon the difference is that when editing a game, I switch between mouse and keyboard fairly often, but playing a game I usually choose one and stick with it.

Actually, can you disable keyboard control of menus without disabling mouse controls? A "enable mouse even if control of menu disabled" bitset would be cool.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

I just saw a video on the newest features coming to Aseprite 1.3 (aka, the tilemaps update), and it mentions another program I've heard of and looked at but still haven't fully explored called Tiled.

Both of these programs combined could really improve the presentation of our games, but I'm not sure how well we can import the results. I believe Aseprite exports to PNG, which the OHR can handle, but a program like Tiled is most useful when we can import the entire map as designed. So, my question is whether you guys have looked into Tiled as a source for creating and importing/exporting maps, and whether it can become a source if it's not yet compatible. Again, I haven't researched it fully, but maybe it can give you some ideas for upgrading the engine's import abilities.

Here's the video:

[yt]TL_JZIuydas[/yt]

Here's Tiled.

And for completion's sake, here's another tilemap editor called LDTK that's gaining popularity, from the creator of Dead Cells. This one would be much harder to adapt to this engine and probably not worth the trouble, but it's still a program of note for anyone using Godot or an engine that can use all of its features. It's adaptive design suite is quite impressive.

I imagine these apps would be most useful whenever/if the OHR can handle tile sizes other than 20x20, but I still think the flexibility they offer map designers is worth considering. Again, it's only useful if we can import entire maps, but these programs make map design so much easier (and faster). If they can be adapted into the OHR workflow, the OHR itself would become more powerful. Just a thought.
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Post by kylekrack »

I've used Tiled. It exports .json data, which is pretty easy to parse in general, but someone would still have to translate that into the engine. Aseprite is also not required to use Tiled. You can use any image editor you want. That being said, a number of artists already use Aseprite with the ohr, myself included.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Yeah, I thought some users were using Aseprite for sprites, but its integration with Tiled (meaning create the tiles in Aseprite and use Tiled to lay them out in a map design) would speed up the workflow of any game design engine that can import Tiled tilesets, especially now that Aseprite will be able to update all instances of a specific tile regardless where it sits on the tilemap (which is useful for building multi-tiled structures).

In fact, YouTuber Gamesfromscratch just released a video about Tiled today. Apparently, it's gotten a 1.5 release. You can find out more in this video:

[yt]QItIKnQjznk[/yt]

Also, if you haven't seen his YouTube channel, he's the go-to source on everything in indie game design, so it's worth following his channel if you wanted to know what's new, what's up-and-coming, or generally what's useful to improve what you're already working on.
Last edited by Pepsi Ranger on Thu Mar 25, 2021 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by The Wobbler »

Any chance of having transparency effect settings on attacks/NPCs? Not a high priority at all, just cool to have if it's doable
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Post by Hedera »

When choosing to export a map layer as a pixel-a-tile image, could there be an option to have the tiles correspond to the first 160 colors in the master palette, in order to better distinguish ones that use similar colors? Also, can there be a thing at the bottom that shows, in palette index order, which colors/tiles in the set were actually used?
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Post by Andrusi »

So here's a feature I was 100% sure already existed until I went to try to use it: death sound effect for heroes. Currently there is the ability to play a sound effect when an enemy dies, but not when a hero dies.

Unrelatedly, I was trying to set a hero's hand positions earlier, and it reminded me that CUSTOM can be very sensitive with inputs--in this case, I found myself hitting up-down-up-down as the cursor kept skipping over the desired pixel because I held the key a millisecond too long and CUSTOM thought "ah, yes, move two pixels, got it." I sometimes see a similar effect trying to navigate menus in GAME. I don't know exactly what would prevent this from happening (at least not without potentially causing the reverse problem of cursors moving way too slowly) but I figure it's worth bringing up.
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Post by Hedera »

Could it be possible for, in the default items menu, to have an option so that instead of (or, seperately from) discarding/deleting an item, the player can sell them for the default price?
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Post by Hedera »

what about making it so that, after winning a battle, you can just gain a level (or levels) instead of (+ in addition to?) getting experience
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Post by TMC »

polkakitty wrote:Building on that, since a lot of people have made games that show battles in a Phantasy Star-style perspective, with your characters seen from behind and the enemies shown in front view, I think it would be good for those games if you could set the direction heroes move when they attack.
I actually owe Feenick this for HotOHR for False Skies. But I'm still not 100% sure how it should work. I want to support "pincer attack" and "side attack" formations as you mentioned, so it should at least be an option to determine the attack direction from the target's relative location. Maybe if you select the candidate directions (left, right, left+right, 4 directions, 8 directions, etc) it'll pick the most appropriate one. Doesn't require battlescripting.
kylekrack wrote:Actually, can you disable keyboard control of menus without disabling mouse controls?
That would be useful. I'm currently working through how to allow fine-grained control suspension.
Pepsi Ranger wrote:Tiled
Years ago I started writing a Tiled python plugin to read/write OHR maps but I got nowhere because I couldn't find documention.
I'm not sure whether it would be better to write a plugin, or add an importer/exporter into Custom. It is something I like the idea of.
Pepsi Ranger wrote:LDTK
Cool, hadn't heard of that before.
It sounds like you can already use LDTK with the OHR, by importing/exporting tilemaps as images, one pixel per tile. It also looks probably easier to write an importer/exporter for than Tiled.
The Wobbler wrote:Any chance of having transparency effect settings on attacks/NPCs? Not a high priority at all, just cool to have if it's doable
I actually hadn't thought of putting opacity options in the graphics sections of NPC/attack/enemy/hero/etc editors. I'm not sure whether to, considering that the animation system is planned to also allow you to do this in a universal way for any sprite by defining a "setup" animation.
Hedera Helix wrote:When choosing to export a map layer as a pixel-a-tile image, could there be an option to have the tiles correspond to the first 160 colors in the master palette, in order to better distinguish ones that use similar colors? Also, can there be a thing at the bottom that shows, in palette index order, which colors/tiles in the set were actually used?
The way the colours are picked isn't ideal and it was a bit of a stop-gap feature. Adding a display to show what the mapping (or modifying it) isn't a small amount of work, so I'm not keen to do that. But just adding a different method of picking the colours, like using master palette colours, or even requiring a minimum distance, is not too bad.
Andrusi wrote:So here's a feature I was 100% sure already existed until I went to try to use it: death sound effect for heroes.
Good idea. Onto the todo list.
Andrusi wrote:Unrelatedly, I was trying to set a hero's hand positions earlier, and it reminded me that CUSTOM can be very sensitive with inputs
Thanks for mentioning that, I've fixed it (not in nightlies yet).
Andrusi wrote:I sometimes see a similar effect trying to navigate menus in GAME.
You definitely should not see that problem anywhere in the menus in Game or Custom! Keyrepeat doesn't start until a key is held for 500ms, which is more than long enough to prevent it. However people often script menus in a way that suffers that problem (use "keypress", not "key is pressed".) Is there some specific place you saw it?
Hedera Helix wrote:Could it be possible for, in the default items menu, to have an option so that instead of (or, seperately from) discarding/deleting an item, the player can sell them for the default price?
Interesting idea. Are there any games that do this? Once we allow running scripts inside the Items menu people could script it themselves. I think that's a better thing for us to aim for.
Hedera Helix wrote:what about making it so that, after winning a battle, you can just gain a level (or levels) instead of (+ in addition to?)
getting experience
Well, interesting idea. That be a setting in the battle formation rather than in the enemy data?

Come to think of it, being able to set XP gained in the formation rather than the enemy data would be great. Fighting two sharks at once is more than twice as hard as one, so just summing up XP is a bit dumb.
Last edited by TMC on Tue Apr 20, 2021 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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