OHRRPGCE feature requests/suggestions

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guo
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Post by guo »

Oh great!

Obligatory " will the npc pimit be increased for maps?"

Cheers
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Yes, it will be. Don't ask me when!
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Mefisno
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Post by Mefisno »

Hi

Two things.
first a bug. When I try and hide the health stat I get a mass of jumbled letters on the status screen(see pic).
2nd a request. Is there anyway to hide the health numbers for one character in battle?
I want to be able to see three of my characters health numbers in battle (the little ???/??? at the top in battle) but I don't want to be able to see the ones for the character in position one.
I tried to hide it by creating a blank enemy for every battle formation that was just a blue line to cover it but the numbers show through that :D
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Thanks for the bug report. That should be an easy fix.

Hiding hero HP in battle is a really unique request! As is wanting to display one hero's meters differently to the others. What's the intended use for that?
Letting you customise the appearance of the ready and health meters is definitely on the TODO list for the not-too-distant future. Hero-specific customisation wasn't, but once it's customisable you could easily hide or cover one HP bar, similar to the way you suggested.
Last edited by TMC on Tue Oct 30, 2018 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Mefisno
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Post by Mefisno »

No problem :)

The reason why I want to hide one characters health in battle is to tidy up the battle screen a bit really.
The game im working on has three characters in battle who can attack and one character (the one in the first slot) controls the others.
The one in slot one cant attack enemies or be attacked, but I am using the new hero counters (in the nightly) as a way for the hero in slot one to "control" the others actions in battle. By having them counter attack on enemies from commands issued by hero one (I hope that makes sense).
As this hero cant die it just looks a bit weird that they have health displayed.
Not a huge issue if it can't be done though.
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Post by TMC »

The Status screen bug is now fixed in the latest nightly builds.
Also, it finally occurred to me that because we already have a setting to hide the HP stat in the Status screen, it could also hide the HP display and HP bar in-battle too, so I added that. (Sorry, I thought you were requesting an entirely new setting for that).
However, affecting the HP bar isn't in Windows nightly builds yet (only Mac and Linux).
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Chronoas
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Post by Chronoas »

So, with the ability to set sprite width and height now for an attack sprite, I've had some thoughts on implementations for location-based Attack Animations.

My initial thought was to simply have the option for animations that appear centered on the left half, center, or right half of the screen (so, with a 320x200 resolution, we could center the animation on 80x100, 160x100, and 240x100, respectively). The two considerations that need to be made for such options, of course, is whether the location flips when an enemy uses it, and what happens for focus vs. spread targeting. Obviously, "Location-Center" would simply target the center regardless. However, in the case of left and right, I can see potential desire for both having the location flip for certain attacks, or remaining static for others. For example, if I have a huge flame strike the left side of the screen where the enemies are, obviously I want the flames to appear on the right side of the screen when the enemy uses it on the hero. However, I could see the desire for, when I say I want an animation to appear on "Location-Left", I want it on the left side, period, regardless of who is using it on whom.

Alternatively, if the sprite editor is made to support drawing large enough sprites (at 320x200, namely), one could simply use a "Centered" animation, forgoing "Left" and "Right" entirely, and draw in only half the sprite's area. Then the "Unreversable picture" bitset can dictate whether it flips the location or not. Given that, it probably would make the most sense to have the animation draw the same regardless of focused/spread targeting in either solution. The downside to this option, of course, is that it provides no method of allowing the location to swap while preventing the animation graphic itself from reversing. Location-based animations that use any kind of symbol/writing in the graphic would be pretty much impossible.

The second option, which I think would probably be the best initial implementation, is to do an "Average" animation. It would simply average all target's X and Y positions on the screen and center the attack at that location (obviously, ignoring any non-targets, including untargettables). If used for a focused attack, it would simply appear centered on the target like the "Normal" attack animation. If used as a spread attack, however, it would center the animation roughly in the middle of all the targets, i.e., if you have an enemy at (56,80), (137,96), (71,138), and (127,152), the average position is (97.75, 116.5), so it would center the animation on (97,116) or (98,117). There are no real downsides that I can think of to this option, beyond that it doesn't cover all situations where location-based animations could be useful, such as for doing Summon animations.

Regardless of implementation, better support in the sprite editor for large sprites would be very appreciated, but I'm sure you guys are well aware of that. :D
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Mefisno
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Post by Mefisno »

TMC wrote:The Status screen bug is now fixed in the latest nightly builds.
Also, it finally occurred to me that because we already have a setting to hide the HP stat in the Status screen, it could also hide the HP display and HP bar in-battle too, so I added that. (Sorry, I thought you were requesting an entirely new setting for that).
However, affecting the HP bar isn't in Windows nightly builds yet (only Mac and Linux).
Thanks! for the additions :) I look forward to puting this to good use!
Oh by the way I noticed another bug.
If a spell has the "Target class: Ally Not self" on and the "useable outside of battle" bitset turned on then it will target all allies, including the user, outside of battle.

Edit: I forgot to mention "target setting: Spread"

Thanks and keep up all your good work!
Last edited by Mefisno on Sat Nov 10, 2018 1:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kefyrra
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Post by Kefyrra »

I know I've mentioned this before, but it shouldn't be too tricky to make it so that ohr games can be distributed as html, or playable on browser.

It'd be a good way to advertise demos for bigger, future games. And it saves people the trouble of downloading short games and deleting them soonafter.
Last edited by Kefyrra on Sat Dec 01, 2018 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TMC »

Kefyrra: very tricky, actually. But possible. I do want to.

Mefisno: thanks for the report; by conincidence I actually investigated target settings for out-of-battle attacks soon before you brought that up, but I didn't consider spread attacks, so I didn't notice that bug.

Chronoas: thanks for the ideas. I've been wondering about that myself.
I want to get rid of the assumption that the enemies are on the left and the heroes on the right. Many people put the heroes at the bottom instead, and it also ought to be possible to put them in the center or left or elsewhere. (But there's a lot of animation code that needs updating.) The simplest solution does seem to be the option you suggested, to place the attack animation mid-way between all the targets, plus other options to center it on the field of battle or to have it at a fixed location on-screen. Hmm, maybe also "left-most/right-most/etc target".
You can already import 320x200 attack graphics from a file, though the sprite editor will be visually broken.
However I still haven't checked that non-standard-size attack sprites are positioned sensibly in all cases.
Last edited by TMC on Sun Dec 02, 2018 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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SwordPlay
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Post by SwordPlay »

So, this is kinda possible already (I think. And sorry if it's already included somewhere and I didn't notice) but...

Sometimes you want to refresh players on important info, or complicated battle behaviour.
Often, a line of description or attack caption is not accessible enough.
I guess one could use a dummy attack in a special spell list, with info written in the attack description. (Is there a better way to do this?)

There's either too little room to show info (attack description), no display option available at all (from the battle menu), or uses up a turn and progresses automatically instead of waiting for the player (using attack captions).

On top of that, selecting an attack doesn't return you to the battle menu you were in.
An idea might be to give attacks new bitsets and settings that allow them to e.g., display longer captions, remain on-screen indefinitely, alongside graphics, wait for player input, and return to the menu you came from.

I propose the use of pop-ups from the battle menu instead.
Don't get me wrong, I would like extended display stuff for attacks anyway, but it's not exactly easy or simple.

A pop-up, or special menu, accessible from the battle menu would be simpler, not use a turn, allow the user to remain in the menu etc.,
Basically, a pop-up could allow contextual information without interfering with the battle system.

This pop-up might be in the form of a confirmation message, or toggle-able information, accessible by the player whenever they like, or against their will.

Actually, it might just be a heavily modified spell list, rather than a separate pop-up!
It could have customised items and layout to allow multi-line descriptions, and an area to display persistent/dynamic information

It could display persistent and/or dynamic information, such as attack info, enemy state or battle details.
Maybe for debug purposes!

It could be spun into a bigger thing, and allow more complicated battle scenes, such as multiple choices, in the vein of SMT negotiations, or to add some flair/variety to battle menus.
The pop-up might allow fancy battle menu/attack selection stuff.

DIFFERENT TYPES
There might be a few different types, and maybe not remotely the same.

- confirmation style pop-up when you select an attack
- hideable pop-up, accessed by pressing e.g., left/right on a battle menu item
- contextual pop-up that displays automatically when selecting an attack, enemy, etc., and can be toggled on/off.
- a menu pop-up. Well, it's not a pop-up, it's just a battle menu or spell list which is heavily modified.
- a reaction pop-up, that displays in response to something the player or enemy does. Like an enemy begging you to spare its life, or opening up the possibility of an all-out-attack, or other complicated battle choices. Maybe like a modified attack caption
Last edited by SwordPlay on Mon Dec 10, 2018 4:28 pm, edited 11 times in total.
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Longer item descriptions is a HotOHR request (which I will be working on once I have the time in a couple days); really, attack descriptions and captions should be longer too.

I'd really like to allow textboxes in battles; that would be a powerful feature. They would wait for input before continuing. Of course they should let you show backdrops, set tags, give items, chain to other textboxes, and show choiceboxes. Certain textboxes conditionals like running scripts or using doors would not work. Supporting adding/removing heroes is... probably doable with a little extra work! Displaying a textbox from a battle menu item is a nice idea; that way it wouldn't consume a turn, unlike a textbox triggered from an attack.

Ultimately I would like the Items and spell list menus to be customisable (as slice collections) and able to display much more info, graphics, and other slices as you select items/attacks. Will probably happen for items before spells. James has already done heaps of work on customising the out-of-battle menus.

A better battle debug mode where you can mouse-over enemies to see their stats and other info, like the NPC debug mode, made it onto my TODO list a couple days ago.
Last edited by TMC on Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:03 am, edited 2 times in total.
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guo
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Post by guo »

I'd like to be able to alter the ATB/Health bars in battles. Even just setting dimensions for height, placement, transparency.
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Post by Feenicks »

A 'flash' attack type for attacks would be greatly appreciated, even if it's something as simple as flashing the sprite a single color once or twice. It may just be an issue I have, but being able to be really obvious about which enemy is using which attack would make some battle stuff a lot easier to deal with.
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Post by TMC »

As I said before, it's crazy that the OHR doesn't already have a flashing attacker animation. That's one of the first things I want to work on once I get to work on battle animations. Which is defintely something I want to work on soon after Fufluns gets released.'
even if it's something as simple as flashing the sprite a single color once or twice.
What would be a more complex animation? Parameters for number of flashes and flash duration, I guess. But I can imagine even more parameters, such as using a palette instead of a single color, or tinting the palette by a certain color and amount.

Customising the battle ready and HP bars would be part of converting the battle UI to slices, which is something I hope to do somewhat soonish. (Unless James beats me to it.) So many people over the years have worked around the fixed appearance of those bars with clever battle backdrops.

Sadly, lately my progress on OHRRPGCE features is very slow...
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