What's up, RMers?

[Taylor]

@DerVV: The trouble with the dice deal is with its application: in battle. The dice is rolled during damage processing, which happens before animations. The 'cut in' for the dice system pops up after the animations and so after things have been determined. i.e. survive at 1HP what would've KOed.

[DerVVulfman]

Guess that's a different matter then.

But now, it's time for the Lycan Hour! And here's your host, DerVVulfman!!!

Greetings, friends. The Lycan ABS is coming along, though I did notice a couple of problems with my system. These issues were discovered when I was attempting to install the personalities system which would let enemies back away from the player if things got too hairy for them. Needless to say, I didn't install it as yet... but soon.

In order to ensure a few things, I had to use a recycling refresh-the-events system. That had the drawback of refreshing the enemies on the screen if one had died. That's not really bad, but if you were taking on two enemies, one would reset to his original stats and be cured once the other got killed. It would really suck if you fought a very big boss guy and got his 50,000 HPs beaten down to a measly 12HP, only to have a party member kill a puny bug on the screen... and your boss guy resets! AARRRGH!

Now, you may wonder why I even had a recycle-the-events system. Such was necessary when an enemy may (by chance) respawn after being killed or the event that held an enemy's data could change if the enemy was killed and went to another event page with a new enemy being born.

Well, it wasn't the only thing that was a pain. Though one could call it a cheat, I call it a problem. I found that if an ememy had the default red-out death, the player could still attack it while it was fading out. You'd get the experience and gold for killing it again and the collapse effect would start over. You could do this again and again and again. However, you could be attacked by the so-called 'dead' enemy while this occurs. This too was a result of the recycling refresh-the-events system and had to be rectified.

Now I was curious when I was working on the 'dead player still gets killed' problem whether the issue was merely with my melee attack system, so I tried it with the missile system too. Meh... it was with missiles too. I disabled the trigger system and set it to full automatic (something I'll have as a feature for guns later), by changing the trigger to a Input.press system. Man, bullets can fly fast! But... that reminded me that my Mousie system still didn't have a 'pressed' mouse-button system. You can click, but that was it.

Anyone see where I'm going here?

Yep, I decided to take a look and see how to make Mousie allow for pressed mouse button functions. I didn't want the automatic weapons to only work from the keyboard while you can hack n slash with both keyboard and mouse. My first step was to make a mirror copy of the trigger? method in my script and rename it press? Then, I just changed every instance of trigger? to... well, you get the idea. But that didn't do it. I still needed to poke into the actual hardware code of Mousie. I had a routine to check actual mouse clicking and even double clicking, but nothing as yet for mouse pressed. To be honest, it didn't take that long. However, I felt like a goof for not seeing the solution until now. How long did I have Mousie in development?

After changing the version number and adding a little more instructions for the user, I decided to edit the demo. For those who wonder why they can't move the player with mouse clicks, it is because I have it set to 'Mouse Event' control. That means, you can move the mouse over the events and click on them like the old adventure games such as LucasArts: Maniac Mansion and Full Throttle, Sierra's Kings Quest series or Police Quest. The demo lets you actually turn it all on or off and the NPCs explains the features when you first click them.

[DerVVulfman]

Another day chugs along and yep, I'm still working on the ABS. I'm not going to teach the system who's boss. I'm going to teach it who's GOD! It will know that I am it's master, it's creator. The Lord Numero Uno. The Ayatollah of Rock n Rolla. *Cough* Sorry.

Now before I go and talk about the ABS, I should mention that I did one more update to Mousie. I totally forgot that the original version of MrMo's ABS and some other older ABSs out there used Cybersam's Full Keyboard script. And rather than he coding an Input.press? command like he did for Input.trigger?, he instead made an Input.pressed? which meant that anyone using it would need to do rewrites for every press-based menu systems and the like. No. No no NO! I didn't really like that when I first encountered these ABSs. It meant I would need to edit Mousie when it came to the new mouse press method I wrote. Rather than that, I added another routine into Mousie to detect and take care of Cybersam's Input.pressed? method.

Now that Mousie is out of the way...

I wasn't going to be satisfied with Lycan if I 'required' Cybersam's input script one day and then had to go through the script and perform edits everywhere for another input script. So, I did the next best thing. I made an adaptation value within the configuration page. It looks like this:

Code:

# Customized Press Input Call
    PRESSED_KEY     = "Input.pressed?(keycode)"

With that statement, it recognizes the use of Cybersam's Input Pressed system and reads a predefined keycode such as Input::C or the like. And if I wished to use my own input script, I merely need to change it to this!

Code:

# Customized Press Input Call
    PRESSED_KEY     = "Input.press?(keycode)"

At least this time I made it mirror the default Input.press? command.

Now that did take me a while, but what took me longer was to reintroduce Cassandra's Personality Edits from the old MrMo Add-Ons that I created a while back. Though they are similar in many respects, Lycan has a different Enemy Attack system, so it wasn't the easiest to convert. Making the enemies run and cower when a fellow enemy target was killed was easy enough, and making them take a step back when hit was almost a mirror. Making them keep their distance so they can perform ranged attacks was now even easier. Making them Hunt their prey if the player gets out of their vision and hearing range was hard. However, I may add a visual touch later so enemies who are actively hunting can use a different graphic (like a wolf with his nose to the ground trailing its victim). I also came up with an algorythm so enemies don't just run away at whatever speed they're set. They move in the same Move Speed / Move Frequency pattern that they normally do.

Hit and run tactics for enemies was a fun one to add months ago to MrMo's ABS Ultimate, so I obviously wanted it back. Likewise, I added custom enemy MASH rates because no two enemies should be able to attack the player with the exact same speed. A slow and meandering Zombie from the Black and White 'Night of the Living Dead' should have a long mash rate compared to one of the speedy buggers from Zombieland. And I put back my enemy range system. An enemy with a long pointy spear should be able to hit a guy 2 tiles away compared to a little willowisp with a small pointy stick.

And lastly today, I only realized that every time I was hit by an enemy... I got knocked back a tile. Waitaminute. I realized at that moment that I never coded a kick/knock-back value for enemies.... ever! Surely no pathetic slime can have the same strength to knock a warrior back the same distance as a Minotaur with a BattleAxe!!! Oh, I HAD to do something about this. Now, each enemy can have their own 'Kick' value. A Ghost Event may give a 0 kick value which makes the player merely jump, a Kobold Event a value of 1 as he has a nice heavy club, and a pathetic enemy Slime has a value of -1. Sorry, no nil values allowed in the config. A value of -1 just indicates that the guy won't get kicked back.

Whew. Now to relax.

[MetalRenard]

"And this week in the "What's Up RMers" thread, DerVVulfman showed the extent of his insanity and his delusions of grandeur."
- The Save-Point Weekly Gazette

[Samven]

I've done more proper work on Deceit x Justice, mostly cutscenes and tweaking maps and whatnot. I've also thrown together a few maps for that Ace test-game I was making. I'm thinking of making it a dungeon crawler. Nothing too fancy. Just a simple thing to demo what I can do with the new maker.

Although I'll still do my best to give it a good story. ;D

[yamina-chan]

I just realized that the party of two menu script thingy I had in a project of mine was causing all sorts of errors.
So I have to look for an other one that'll work and not look incredibly stupid. Great.
The plan was ignore the bug in the main project for a few days and work on the one without glitches. Didn't quite work I guess XD

[kyonides]

I've been working on my KBoom bombing script for RMXP, it's quite simple but I could place as many bombs as possible in just a few seconds and sometimes I preferred not to get away from the explosions to make sure the RPG heroes really got hurt by the impacts. It'd be more sadistic if the RPG hero could actually throw the bomb away for good but "sadly" I didn't manage to make it possible, yet. The script already reached version 0.3.0 and is fully functional. The demo is available for both English and Spanish speakers. Oh, I'm sorry, yamina-chinchan, there's no future plan for releasing it in German. (I know you don't care about that especially since there's an English version already available.) Later on I'll check whether or not the script deserves to get a post of its own.

[KasperKalamity]

what's it do?

[DerVVulfman]

Pretty much what I did with "Marissa's Landmines" I wrote months back. You can place explosives like landmines as events wherever, even timed landmines, sensitive and proximity mines, and triggerable pipebombs.

[yamina-chan]

@kyonides: To be honest, I feel confused as to why you felt the need to apologize and tell me that there would not be a german demo. Have I ever said or suggested that I would prefere to have one? XD'
And I am not the only one from Germany on the forum, so...er...yeah, I'm confused about this XD

I was thinking about finishing up the townmap I'm working up, but seeing as the day has allready worn me out to a level that I could fall asleep right now I better do that an other time.
Also, I need to come up with a good solution about the menuy still.