Walktall.rpg concept taken to extremes -- is it possible?

[Foxley]

I'm definitely planning on incorporating the 'walktall' sprite replacement scripts into my next game. I was wondering, though, has anyone made any attempt at sprite replacements with larger sprites, e.g. 80x80 enemy sprites? Also, could hero sprite replacement possibly be applied to battle situations? (For that matter, is it even possible to use slices in battle yet?)

[Spoonweaver]

Right now, using anything but hero sprites doesn't really work for walk tall because nothing else has frames. So you get frame errors if you do it. Hero sprites just so happened to have 8 frames so it works perfectly.

You can of course write your own script in order to get bigger walkabouts, but you can write a script to achieve basically anything. Which brings us to your next question.

No, right now you can't use scripts in battle at all. IF you want to do something like that, you can either write your own battle system script, or wait till battle scripting.

[Foxley]

Thanks for the info. I figured that the walktall script would at least need to be altered heavily to accomodate that sort of thing, if not rewritten completely or approached from a totally different angle.

I might play around with the possibility of scripting huge walkabout sprites sometime down the road, though it'd probably require a lot of awkward and user-unfriendly tweaking and hard coding if it were pulled off.

[BMR]

Just a note though, I'm already using walktall for Legacy, and while I'm really liking it, you do run into the problem(?) that you'll see relatively less on the screen as the rest of your graphics will probably be scaled to match the proportions of your larger sprites. The bigger your walkabout sprites, the bigger this problem will get. If you plan on using 80×80 sprites on a 320×200 screen, you're not really going to be able to see all that much.

On the other hand, you could keep everything scaled to the 32×40 sprites, with the 80×80 ones representing giants or something. Still, something that big will take up a whole lot of space on the screen, just something to keep in mind.

As for in-battle sprite replacements, Spoon's right that you'd either have to make your own system or wait for battle scripting. On the plus side though, if you're using walktall, then you can pretty much use your 32×40 walkabout bases for your battle sprites. As they're the same size, there'll be less work (theoretically) in drawing the sprites for combat.

[TMC]

With all these people waiting for battlescripting for years, you would figure that one of them would just implement it themselves!

The main problem in writing a custom walktall-like script which uses something other than hero sprites is that the script interpreter runs before the engine updates the direction, frame and position of walkabout sprites/slices. To get around this you can either reimplement all hero and npc movement yourself, or (basically the same thing) predict how the npcs and heroes are about to move, or wait for the addition of per-frame script triggers. If you're lucky I might get that finished by the next release.

With per-frame script triggers it would be pretty straightforward to use enemy sprites as walkabouts.

[Sparoku]

With all these people waiting for battlescripting for years, you would figure that one of them would just implement it themselves!

I would have if I knew more about coding.

[sheamkennedy]

I have attempted larger walkabout sprites (80 x 80.) One thing you must consider asides from the fact that this occupies a large amount of screen space, is the fact that the characters and NPC's are still spaced 1 tile apart meaning that everything will have a major overlap if you decide to exceed the tiles width. A small overlap is fine, I'm actually working on some larger walkabout sprites right now for my game and like how they look and interact. Once I'm further along I'll upload some game screenshots. Hopefully that will inspire others to try out 'tall' sprites as I would like to see more games utilize this in the future.

[Spoonweaver]

It's not really that hard to place an 80x80 sprite on the screen. But what I have to question, is why would you want to?

I mean look at how big these things are. Would your game really be enhanced by a jumble of massive npcs?
Also, as sheamkennedy says, these massive npc's or heros, wouldn't interact correctly on the map anyways.

So, to anyone thinking of using massive sprites, I have to suggest doing something else. Maybe you could just have animated map tiles construct your npcs. This way you could have them activate the way you want them to and it doesn't even require scripting.
Aside from this, there are several other things you can do to make larger then normal looking characters in your game. So try not to get hung up on this one crazy idea.

[Foxley]

It's not really that hard to place an 80x80 sprite on the screen. But what I have to question, is why would you want to?

I mean look at how big these things are. Would your game really be enhanced by a jumble of massive npcs?
Also, as sheamkennedy says, these massive npc's or heros, wouldn't interact correctly on the map anyways.

So, to anyone thinking of using massive sprites, I have to suggest doing something else. Maybe you could just have animated map tiles construct your npcs. This way you could have them activate the way you want them to and it doesn't even require scripting.
Aside from this, there are several other things you can do to make larger then normal looking characters in your game. So try not to get hung up on this one crazy idea.

I was thinking of using it for very specific scenarios, e.g. something similar to Eve or Dungeon Man from the Mother series. Definitely was not considering it for a general walkabout NPC/hero replacement script.

Was also considering the possibility of making a script that creates artificially enlarged hitboxes for the NPC or hero to fix the overlap issue that would result. Maybe by spawning extra NPCs in a radius around the huge NPC.

It's all just conceptual of course, but I think that it could be a really neat visual effect if implemented and then used properly.

[charbile]

I think you're looking at this in too narrow a way, Spoon. Like when you assume a wide banner image making text run on means the user has a low resolution, when it can also mean some people don't like to read paragraphs with 100+ words per line.

I've used 80x80 and 256x256 for walkabout sprites. Just because you have more space, doesn't mean you need to use it all. It's a mistake I see a lot, because we're used to having to deal with 20x20 being not enough room and having to fill it out.

For example, it's nice to have extra space for a cape flourish or when someone needs to swing a sharp stick like they tend to do in RPGs.

The walktall thing is great, and I've used it to code a custom setup complete with custom collision boxes, more than 2 frames per walk cycle, free movement. It's great and I wish more people would go for it. The smooth action and girth will amaze you. The only tricky part is dealing with NPCs.

*edit: and by that, I mean having to define NPC things in script and out of editor, like custom walk behavior and 3+ walk frames