What's up, RMers?

[DerVVulfman]

GROWLLLL---*

Yep, with a dual sheet sideview battle system. It takes two spritesheets contained within the 'BattleCharSet' folder to handle the 13 action poses per hero.

[kyonides]

Well, I was thinking that some games are kind of unrealistic because their storekeepers either sell you stuff or they simply don't based on switches or fame points and the like. Isn't that a bit boring?

What if some shopkeepers could actually... extort you out of nowhere for no good reason?
Wouldn't that make the interaction a lot more realistic?

Oh and I don't mean here that this has to ever interrupt your shopping at all, he, he.

Fine. Forget about discussing the idea. Why? Because I already started working on this project. :D

This is how it would work.

First you would need to call the script to preset up to 2 values, namely the active variable and the extortion one. You would also need to configure a game variable that would hold the percentage used later on as a "tip percent" or extra charge or blackmail if you prefer.

Then it would let you open a normal shop. Business as usual you would think. Not quite. Once you try to buy or sell stuff, a message window will show up. Why? Because the script would have called a common event at that point. Then you'd see something like this picture:

Nope, it's not a mockup but an actual screenshot of the script doing its job.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

That would make a interesting if a little aggravating mechanic.

As for me... It finally happened: it seems my decade old desktop PC finally kicked the bucket. It's been on its last legs for years, I recall mentioning here the issue with the fan that caused overheating. That kind of fixed itself, but now it seems it bought the farm for good.

As for my project, fortunately I routinely made copy to a old laptop I own in case of situations like this one. I just lost a map and some events I was working. Nothing serious. Still, it's crying shame.

Rest in peace little buddy. You'll be miss.

[DerVVulfman]

Well... when you think about it, the Elder Scrolls games have shops where you are permitted to haggle with the shopkeep. Or at least haggling occurs insofar as an available option in their versions of shop systems. With that, the shopkeep's distain or favor towards the hero can modify a price.

So why NOT have a system where the shopkeep decides to pull a fast one?

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

That much is true. The closest thing I can think of is the discount system from the Shadow Hearts games that involved a minigame that would force you to buy everything at full price if you screwed up. Essentially you are punished if you try and fail to rip the shopkeepers off.

[kyonides]

I'm busy with a custom but simple version of a chest script where you can add a chest's initial items via your usual event commands.

[DerVVulfman]

Ya know, your chest script had me reminiscing about my chest script and how I wished to include more TES (The Elder Scrolls) operations and conditions into the RPGMaker Environment.  Conditions like equipment weights, durability and various costs have been introduced.  But one condition has not.

Did you STEAL it? 

Whoops!  This may ruin your JRPG looting runs.

In the Elder Scrolls games from Morrowind on up, items purloined from others would appear in your inventory with a symbol indicating it is indeed someone else's property.  That symbol would often be a 'red hand'.  And your typical shopkeeper would not in inclined to buy stolen goods.

And how would they know it was stolen???  Well, that's called game logic.

So if you have something stolen, you could either use it up, or you had no choice but to sell it to a very specific shop that could move it out... a fence.  Or if you were somehow busted with these items, you'd lose them all.

Right now, I'm more in a pondering mode... wondering about implementation.  But I foresee a few things I would need to do for this to work.

1. The need for separate  items_stolen and gold_stolen arrays in Game_Party
   
2. The need to update the  add/remove items/gold methods to handle stolen items
   
3. Updates to the Window_Item and Scene_Item class to both show and use stolen items.
   
4. Update to the Gold window... your ill gotten gold, guys.
   
5. Updates to Shops for fencing operations
   
6. Update to the Equip menus so one can equip/unequip stolen items without losing its 'stolen' condition.
   
7. A simple test script call to see if the party has stolen loot (for NPC guards or such)
   

This, just off the top of my head. Re-directing item IDs into a different 'bag' of sorts beats cloning an item as its own separate object for the sake of labeling it stolen any day.


Link woulda been behind bars decades ago if this concept was put to use.  Seriously, he's the biggest kleptomaniac in Nintendo and video game lore.

[Remi-chan]

I've been having some great fun implementing these gab windows to read out the vocal lines of your opponents and sometimes even you~!

The Visual of Sound






And these have been implemented all the way back through. From Disk 0 to the end of Disk 2, every fight which has voice acting from the opponent has seen use of these Gab Windows.

And I have a video here, now at present the text lasts a bit longer, but yeah- I reformatted this fight, and now it doesn't lag in the slightest.

Nine Tails Terminus

Using the boss event to activate the projectiles by coordinate matching is a laggy way of doing it, it turns out! So I opted simply to base it on waits, with each projectile fired off within 5 seconds, at intervals of five frames.

[kyonides]

 I've been thinking that probably I should add some awful feature to OpenChest XP, namely the  stolen chest items!
The only thing that keeps me from implementing it is whether it should let the  thief take away all of your belongings or just a few of them.

[DerVVulfman]

Looking into my stolen items concept are we?

What I have planned should make adaption easy.

I only started piddling with it a couple hours ago, and I already made it possible to steal items using the default gain_item like commands within RPGMaker XP. The only thing need changing is a special flag I defined within Game_System. Likewise, stores may be defined as fencing operations with the same flag.

I spent more time just working out clean methods for the items.

Now I must deal with the Equip menu. Stolen weapon and armor currently do not appear within, so the party cannot equip stolen gear. I need to fix that. But likewise, I need to ensure that the items remain 'stolen' when equipped and unequipped.