What's up, RMers?

[DerVVulfman]

Hi Ho! It's Kermit the Vampire Frog here! Let us give a warm and welcome Muppet Show greeting to that Resident Werewolf we all know... DerVVulfman!

*DerVVulfman strolls in.*
*DerVVulfman trips and lands face first on the stage*

"...ow"

*DerVVulfman looks around the room.*

Who put a green rag doll in the middle of the floor!

*Kermit groans.*

Thank you... thank you... thank you... Thank you one and all. It's a pleasure to be here.

Seriously? A frog M.C.? That's all we can afford?

*Cough*

Well ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a new Lycan update. The battlesystem's basics are relatively done. Besides working on a new ABS that replicates every feature that MrMo's original ABS v 4.5 has, it now includes most of the features I wrote for his system.

Not long Monday night, I finished the adaption of Jessie's Spell Barriers, my system that lets you create a spell that can create a wall of stone or moving wall of flame. A fairly fun spell if you want to torch up all the enemies in a corridor with one shot. It's different from the system I added to skill and weapon missiles that let the bullets or magic blasts spread out in a cone. Instead, the barriers system creates a solid wall of a fairly fixed width with the only thing preventing the wall's creation are objects in the way. That means, if you wanted to make a 7 tile wide wall within a 5 tile wide corridor, it will only make it 5 tiles wide. Enemies and companions that are in the way will block you too.

Tuesday, I kinda got called into work, but not before I inserted my battle cries system. I know I mentioned it the last time. But to be truthful, it took less time than before since I have all the player and enemy 'struck' actions within one simple method and the combat death in another. The method one configures the individual cries per character is different than it was in the MrMo system as it's been streamlined. I did not include randomness to the cries, so a mummy being hit will only issue one groan effect. So... no current surprise there. But once I get everything fixed up, it shouldn't take much effort to create a second system that allows for multiple random cries for each effect.

When I got home, I began more work on CSS decoding. Fun stuff. No... really... Ask Metal! I really tore into it.

But the next morning, I began working on one of my favorite systems... Landmines.

I began with an early version that was in the original MrMo ABS 4.5 demo that I've been hosting. But Marissa's Landmines did not account for some things and what I crafted within the ABS Ultimate worked much better. However, what I crafted within ABS Ultimate wasn't fully compatible because that version relied on a totally different combat missile system than what I made for Lycan. It didn't get done overnight. This time, it took a couple days as I performed one helluva rewrite on the Landmines system which, by chance, made it even smaller and more reliable than before. I had issues with the 'sensitive' landmines system that let you actually SHOOT the mine to set it off. The death triggering system didn't want it to die. Well... who DOES? It didn't. took some time, but I got it going just fine.

I went back and covered a few little issues involving the party rotation system. Nothing really big except handling of party rotation when you leave a party member on another map, alive or dead. Though he wasn't on the map, he would flare up with a 'collapse' effect for a short time when rotating. Because of that, I needed a little quick-check system so I can more easily identify which member was the party leader without messing up the map spriteset, so I quickly sketched up a mini-hud. Nothing fancy... just the name of the party leader in the corner. Once I got that done, the party member flaring issue was a quick fix. After that, I went back to the barriers system and made sure that solid barriers remain solid even if they're drawn over the corpses of invisible party companions. It was a bit of an annoyance walking through a brick wall because it was drawn where a party member died and vanished.

After that, I added compatability with my own Minimap system, including party members both alive and dead, issuing different graphics for the dead ones in the map. And it didn't take that long to have graphics for both treasure and barrer effects to show in the minimap too. I could create more effects for the minimap, adding graphics for missiles. But since they fly across the screen, why bother?

Then I felt it was time to add other things. Wyatt/Como's BattleMusic script for MrMo's ABS wasn't fully complete until I figured out the last bit that was missing. And even then, he said it was fine for anyone to use it. He didn't really care if anyone used it or not. Now how's THAT for a nice attitude? So, this simple system has been added too. And with that, you can have the music change from the field music to that of a more ominous tone as you would within some of the Elder Scrolls games.

There are more things that I plan to add, more adaptions and a few more rewrites as well as some script cleaning. But I have the basic systems of MrMo's Ultimate rewritten without the inherit flaw that I found within MrMo's original ABS that neither I nor anyone else I know had noticed until now.