What's up, RMers?

[DerVVulfman]

Quite a while ago, I undertook the job of making my own ABS since the one I was maintaining had a problem. I looked at my old Containers system which was massive and clunky and I gave it a helluva rewrite. Now I feel it's time to retool the Vehicles system.

Hey, why not? After having an older system, I feel I can probably streamline the heck out of it. And with using SephirothSpawn's Event Spawner system, I think I can permit the user to take a vehicle from one event to another and park it wherever they want!

My starting point is bare-bones, but I already have something functioning with merely 200 lines of code rather than 1400 (not including add-ins). I'm going to try to include every feature from my original and make it work with my ABS at the least.

[Kain Nobel]

This screen grab (which is slightly outdated) is a preview of the next chapter for Belly of the Beast! Enemy statistics and AI are already somewhat balanced and plotted out, it's mostly just the graphics work that is going to take the most time. I'm still going to keep the RTP maps and actor battlers, meaning enemies and battle backs are going to be my biggest focus.



These are some of the new battlers to hopefully appear in the next version of Belly of the Beast. All frames for the first three are done (cheers!) but I've still gotta finish the Fire and Ice element ball dudes. Not to mention, some custom skill animations have been framed out as well, but I'm just going to show the battlers themselves.



Oh yeah, here is some new tracks I composed for Project : Echoside (my secret project lol).

Content Hidden

Keep On Rollin'

Keep On Rollin'
I did a classic battle tune just like this back in 2009, which is strange to me considering this very track was composed from scratch. The classic one was deleted because it didn't flow as well, I consider this one a revival :D

Coup D'etat

Coup D'etat
Taking over a government by force is not easy, but it must be done if the people want hope during the...

Rise of a Tyrant

Rise of a Tyrant
General August has gone mad and taken over Rydelle City, Mirania. The populace has been taken hostage, demands and negotiations are being discussed via hijacked news satellite.

While I plan on rewriting my vehicles script, I first wanted to make some new vehicle sprites.

The car is slightly faster than traveling on foot, but is restricted to roadways and bridges. While wild encounters are disabled, you still have to watch for police and unfriendly military personnel.



The submarine is used for underwater transportation and national defense campaigns. This particular sub has some extremely powerful arsenal for being a rather soft target.

Also, a mission objectives menu is in the planning, but thus far I only have the icons made.

• Objective in progress.
  
• Objective completed.
  
• Objective failed.
  

[kyonides]

Well, I recently finished a script that may allow you to deflect damage to your attacker right at the same time he or she or it is hitting you. The skill may deflect physical or magic attacks or both of them depending on what skill did you use before. And this is not over yet, it also lets you increase or decrease the damage taken or dealt by your hero, well, the monster's hp may also be affected by your damage increase boost only. There's more, the critical and the evaded damage had been modified so you will never now for sure how much damage was inflicted or dodged by your hero or any monster stalking you in the dark. The only downside is that it was made for the default XP battle system, he, he, he, rero.

I call the script KTalents.

[Taylor]

Well that must've been the weirdest bug I've ever seen. In general I've been messing around with VX Ace, trying to shift my XP project to it to take advantage of under-the-hood improvements and all that. It can be a real headache though when things don't work or certain scripts are not clear-cut at all on how they function. (And asking about things is pointless through the crowd of newbs in comments bawwing.)

Anyway, after a character in battle had had a turn - so from the second turn onwards - the magic menu would cause a major FPS drop. Although it didn't seem to be terribly noticeable, seeing 45FPS instead of 60FPS in testing got on my perfectionist side. I spent ages messing around with Animated Battlers, ATB, my Window edits, Spriteset edits... couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Sometimes it vanished, only at the cost of removing a particularly useful bit of script. Was it due to a combination of scripts?

...

It turned out it was because of the gold+playtime window that updates once a second. I had modified the Gold window to also have playtime, and for it to update once a second as would be seen in the main menu. I was vaguely aware of this window being called by Window_Message, but didn't notice any real issue elsewhere, like on the map. Why it was ticking away when there was no message window on-screen, and problematically while the skill window was up, I have no clue. But I changed my edited version to "Window_MenuGoldPlaytime", so the message window now asked for the original non-one-second-refresh version, and no lag.

HOW WAS I EXPECTED TO REALISE THAT WAS THE ISSUE

*curls up and whines*

[kyonides]

Not being visible doesn't mean it's not working in the background, Taylor. Never call something every single second if it's not really needed. Window_Message is always there on the map, it's just hiding till an event ask the interpreter to display the message box.

[DerVVulfman]

Well, wherever you have a @message_window.refresh statement.... mebby it should be:

Code:

@message_window.refresh if @message_window.visible == true

That way, it only does the refresh schtick when visible.

---

Now I got one.....

Normally, to read a special event name like this ( EV003 [MyObj 2] ), I have a configuration thingie like this....

Code:

CUSTOM_FLAG  = 'MyObj '
CUSTOM_FORMULA  = /\[#{CUSTOM_FLAG}(?:ECT)?[ ]*(\d)\]/

And I read the data like this:

Code:

# Set Default value to 0
data_type    = 0
# Obtain Data from event name
data_type    = $1.to_i if @event.name =~ MOD_DERVV::CUSTOM_FORMULA

The only problem is... the CUSTOM FORMULA only works with numeric data. I can't figure out how to make it read string data like this, EV003 [Custom 'Fred'], and I so wanna be able to get the 'Fred'.... er... string data itself.

[MechanicalPen]

Isn't it just

Code:

/\[#{CUSTOM_FLAG}(?:ECT)?[ ]*(\w+)\]/

That can get numbers as well as letters.

Or if you really want to grab numbers or strings with single quotes around them, you could do.

Code:

/\[#{CUSTOM_FLAG}(?:ECT)?[ ]*'?(\w+)'?]/

(I used http://rubular.com/ to test this out. Very helpful.)

I use a lot of regular expressions in my current project to do all sorts of cool things. Such as a Message Window that word wraps, automatic capitalization in case I forget, and also use it to vary messages the player has to read often so they don't get bored.

[DerVVulfman]

Dude, thanks HEAPS! That really helps in making what I want to be simple and (nearly) fool proof. Though there's always a bigger fool. It's for the rewrite of my Vehicle script and I didn't want to use the old Visual Basic parsing technique I previously used. This is so much simpler.

I knew there had to be a way.

[kyonides]

My script KTalents, the one I told you about 6 days ago, now also includes some HP boost for Knight class or similar. I also added another curious feature, the EXP books or scrolls that let your heroes earn some fixed amount of exp by using this special items. It wasn't hard to implement the latter though.

[DerVVulfman]

Had a couple VEHICLE bugs to work out. New system... new bugs. It gave me issues boarding new vessels after disembarking old ones. Some values didn't get cleared, so I made a carte-blanche routine that wiped everything out... basically re-initializing the vehicles. After that, I somehow found one... JUST one... vehicle event not erasing properly. Oh... the headaches of adding next if event.erased.... along with making @erased a value that could be read outside of the Game_Event class.