Finally done with the help file! Woot! Massive, the file was over 2Meg in size. Oooh... and I'm also done with the assistance of two fellow RMers on their massive projects. Yikes.

I took a break, but cracked open RPGMaker late at 6pm yesterday and decided to look at my Lycan ABS and see about some tweaks... particularly creating and storing its essential ABS object (its engine and data variables) within the Game_System class, so I need not have to create it separately. Now it is created when Game_System itself is initialized. That did require me to rewrite a hella lot of script calls though. Oh, and I'm not yet done.

I'm probably going to spread myself thin. I have a few things to take care of... Resources, scripting, pizza, shopping, etc...

Did some work on my ABS, but not done yet. I intend to rework the system that runs party member functions; the Companions. But that is a serious undertaking, so I am doing little things to get back into the game.

It had been so long that I did any element tagging, that I had a refresher and made two GROUPING scripts, one for Items and one for Skills. Shorter than before thanks to some techniques, and has a cleaner set of Config modules that should be much easier to understand. The layout is fixed... no facelift applied, so it is still RMXP default in appearance.

Of other work, I'm tinkering with my old CharGen Ex tool. I eliminated DLL dependencies, though one feature requires a rewrite on how I handle RGB color shifting. Tone adjustment is no problem. But getting the RGB system to function... Well, I just figured out how to handle RGB color shifting, It might not be perfect... hopefully it will. It will take a while to do proper coding.

Development of CharGen Ex is nearly completed. Originally, the final product had a solid-color background which you needed to eliminate. But the system will now generate your characterset with an alpha channel transparent background. In fact, this works even better as the tool does allow individual opacity levels for each item you may apply.

I used a totally different script to create the actual .png file and this required a totally new version of a tone/rgb color adjustment feature. Yep, I needed to make my own BITMAP RGB code... surprisingly an actual 100% match to what RPGMaker's own Tone class generated. Er, this was needed because Tone works on the Sprite class, and mine works on the bitmaps itself. That took a while to figure out.

I fixed up the 'zoom' feature. And it works on charsets larger than even the viewscreen itself supports.

It'll take a little bit more time before it is out.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I wished to continue and promote the Half Kaiser Battler Project, and get more resources and more artists. It turns out, I need to rework the templates a bit more.

The original base battler templates were not of my design, and not all were properly shaded. So I had to work on finishing the last of the battler frames using a technique called pillow shading. And nope, I am not an expert pixel artist, though I might have done a pretty decent job.

But there is yet another complication. I discovered that the amount of space around the individual battler frames wasn't enough to satisfy any spriter using these resources. To be specific, battlers that had large weapons such as spears did not function too well. The animation for the battler was fine, but it gave only enough space for a very short spear that extended a basic 5 pixels from the user's hand. Yeah,that was more like a twig!

Hrm... I don't wanna manually cut/paste resources to redo all the battlers, both male and female. I guess I'll start coding a little fixer-upper to do it for me.

Actually, I found some time to work on my game and I now decided to add faces in the message box.
That might be the only thing where RMMZ inspired me.
Beside that, RMMZ is the same mess than MV. It's actually even worse since there aren't many plugins and Yanfly isn't working for MZ.
The only other good improvement is the mapping but that's it. In my 2 weeks test period it crashed more often than RMXP in 10 years. (Around 10 times while writing dialogues)

I don't just make software to make games... I make actual 'Tools'

It was when RPGMaker VX came out that I made a tool to reintroduce the terrain tags that enterbrain removed.

It was quite some time I made CharGen Extended, and not long ago made a simple tool with events and minor scripting to make a Half Kaiser viewer tool for the HALF KAISER BATTLER PROJECT.

But I now have plans for a new tool. Actually, it is a rather necessary tool for an endeavor. And the functions of the scrolling windows that I used within CharGen Extended are not up to what I need; scrolling windows with a scroll bar and capable of double-clicking select items for pop-up choices.

Amazingly enough, I am now getting to THAT point.

I just crafted scrolling windows that actually operate like you would expect in a Microsoft-type application; only highlighting the list's object when the mouse hovers, and only scrolling up/down the list with scroll-bar arrow keys. Accidentally scrolling a window based on the mouse's placement has been a bane, and now will not occur.

And it has been *gasp* three years when I posted a very simple skeleton for pop-up windows which I can use to craft pop-up choices. There's that, and I have some decent 'test entering and replacing' code so entries in some of the lists may be renamed by an end user.

Now? I think I can take a break.

(09-26-2020, 08:18 AM)Melana Wrote: Actually, I found some time to work on my game and I now decided to add faces in the message box.
That might be the only thing where RMMZ inspired me.
Beside that, RMMZ is the same mess than MV. It's actually even worse since there aren't many plugins and Yanfly isn't working for MZ.
The only other good improvement is the mapping but that's it. In my 2 weeks test period it crashed more often than RMXP in 10 years. (Around 10 times while writing dialogues)

Could you elaborate on this? I never bothered with any post XP makers after the mapping engine took a swan dive into the asphalt in VX.

Well you have layers again. 4 in total. That's really nice. But the RTP looks horrible so I guess you would have to import your own graphics first.
And beside that the Maker is really buggy and slow. I lost 3 times around 200 lines of dialogue due to crashes while doing message commands.

Yeah, its graphics are terrible for they keep no consistent style. Some battlers or busts look larger than others or they're just weird or you can't make any sense of them. Others are slightly decent. Yeah, the chibi style didn't seem to disappear at all, at least that's how it looked like last time I checked.

(10-07-2020, 12:09 AM)kyonides Wrote: Yeah, its graphics are terrible for they keep no consistent style. Some battlers or busts look larger than others or they're just weird or you can't make any sense of them. Others are slightly decent. Yeah, the chibi style didn't seem to disappear at all, at least that's how it looked like last time I checked.

So.... what would you think about a Front-View battler template thread where people can make resources for battlers... mix n match?