What's up, RMers?

[kyonides]

Guess what? I have updated KPortrait XP, it has reached version 1.0.4 (not 5 as I have posted on the shoutbox earlier today). It mainly includes a small fix some Bleach like character that every so often lurks the forum's bushes had noticed a couple of days ago. It also includes a small code rewrite in case some parts of it can be further automatized than in its previous versions. I cannot tell you I did succeed since I am lazy and I was not able to test it myself.

[DerVVulfman]

You NEVER test it yourself!

Guess what? I'm probably 1/3rd the way through the Configuration section's 3rd page. I'm about to cover things that makes skill and item attacks move across the screen, and then I'm going to talk about action hierarchy.

Meanwhile, I got in contact with Blizzard. Looks like his hiatus from RMing is over and he's doing stuff again. It turns out that the Soul Rage demo I've been posting has a WAY out of date version of his system. Majorly out of date. His new one has WEREWOLVES! HOWUUUU!!!! Erm, yeah. I'm gonna have to test the new version of Animated Battlers with this build.

[kyonides]

As I had told you in the chatroom once before, I have been busy compiling lots of stuff lately. The new KPortrait XP release was just a plus to be honest with anybody around here. Right now I have finished compiling and cross compiling my test rubygem game.so or game.dll depending on your operating system. In order to be able to test it, you would need to have installed Ruby version 2.3+ on your OS. If you are working on a Windows box, then you might pay a visit to Ruby Installer Website. In case you are using some Linux distro, it might have been included with your OS from the very beginning as it is the case in Debian based OS's.

[DerVVulfman]

Okie dokie! Configuration pages have been WRITTEN! And for a particular demo reader; yes, I know I kinda blew it when I discussed The Attacking Pose hashes. I just rewrote it.

But not only have I finished that, but I just completed the Glossary. Of course, that's assuming I don't get any more questions about the terms I've used in the help file.

And I just went through all the posts from Creation Asylum to garner over thirty questions for the Q&A section. Unfortunately, Animated Battlers no longer exists at HBGames, and the Wayback Machine cannot access older posts because their Scripts board is protected. But 30+ Q&As are good for now.... though I might be getting some more questions pretty soon:

SNEAK PEAK:

QUESTION (Virus Chris - Aug, 2008): Where is the code to flip-flop the battle-view so the Actors are on the left side of the screen and the Monsters are on the right side of the screen?
ANSWER: The script call is '$game_system.sideview_mirror = true'. Set it to false or nil to turn the flip-flop back off.


QUESTION (Virus Chris - Aug, 2008): How do I make it so that the Monster Animated Battler aren't transparent!
ANSWER: Check the Transparency Control Center in the first page, and look for the TRANSLUCENT_ACTOR and TRANSLUCENT_ENEMY arrays.


QUESTION (Jaberwocky - Aug, 2008): Don't you ever get tired of repasting sections from the first post, DVV? :P
ANSWER: Ya think?

[kyonides]

Well, I gladly announce that mkxpplus project, a mkxp fork, now not only offers an increased window resolution for your RGSS based games but also a small feature you might realized it was missing till now, the Y mirror or flip sprite flag! Yes, now you are able to flip your sprites vertically if you call Sprite#mirror_y = true or Sprite#flip_y = true anywhere at any given time. Class# is a notation to denote that you should use an existing instance of that class to call that method, i.e.

Code:

@sprite.flip_y = true
@sprite.mirror_y = true
# Or...
@sprite.flip_y = false
@sprite.mirror_y = false

Using nil instead of false will also deactivate the sprite's vertical flip.

By the way, the original mirror method was aliased as flip as well. (Yes, it is the original horizontal flip method, guys.)

If my limited knowledge and experience I have gathered in the short time I have been dealing with C and C++ languages allow me to add more features, I will see if I can add masks or anything the like.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

I don't suppose anyone saved PK8's Database Limit Breaker 1.2? The links on the forum thread are dead and it'd be a crying shame if it is basically lost forever since it's like the only database breaking tool I've stumbled across that also manipulates the character's stats.

[DerVVulfman]

Hey, Steel. Is it me, or is every dropbox around dropped? So far, I haven't seen one that DOES have valid links nowadays? So the links that PK8 liked to use are now alas gone.

Now for some good news. His own thread pointed out that the credit for the Limit Breaker belonged to woratana, and that the only thing he did was to port the script over to an event system. So... I went on a hunt for the script.

EDIT: STUPID ME! We have Woratana's actual XP and VX Limit Breaker scripts right HERE. Good thing too. His links at HBGames go to his blog site which has been down for almost a decade. I think we have the only official copy left.

It was the basis for PK8's work... and should suit your needs.

Hrm...... and now on a sideview battlesystem note: I forgot to check how many questions were asked about the workings of Animated Battlers in this forum. So, I grabbed all the pages and examined the questions or comments. Lo and behold, the Q&A Section of my new help file will boast FIFTY QUESTIONS! That's a LOT! Okay, some questions became repetitive. But we got some faces in there like JayRay, Hanetzer, Holder, Jaberwocky and Pia Carrot just to name a few.

Surprise surprise, a couple questions actually made me think... WHY NOT? So I JUST added two new features to my current rewrite. Easy to implement and easy to describe in the help file.

The demos are coming along fine. Though I've been stalled by some minor scripts needing corrections or cleanup. They aren't actually Animated Battler scripts, but niceties that I had written over a decade ago. Still, I have roughly ten demos to upload when all is said and done. And a help file with wonderful screenshots, examples and at least one gorgeous illustration of sorts.

[Steel Beast 6Beets]

A thousand thanks DerVVulfman! Alas, woarana's script doesn't have what I was looking for: breaking the cap on the characters' stats i.e having more than 9999 HP/SP and more than 999 STR/DEX, etc.

Still, it CAN break the cap on the rest of the database and that should come in handy.

EDIT: As for Dropbox, mines still seem to work: the Wizardry Dimguil collection is still available.

[DerVVulfman]

My Animated Battlers is PRETTY MUCH DONE. But some of the support scripts need to be cleaned. And one demo has scripts that I wrote when I was in RMXP.Org (now HBGames), so yeah... they're old and not up to my standards.

I JUST finished changing how they operate (2 minutes ago), but I do need to rewrite how they work. I will say that they should be easier to use than before and have less problems.

Ooh! Yeah. I might be adding an extra flourish in the demos. Just thought about it!!!

[kyonides]

While working on the cross compilation of mkxpplus in order to run it on Windows later on, I met a strange guest, the mingw ld linker app. As you might know a compiler isn't just a compiler, you need a toolchain to compile stuff in programming languages like C, C++, Objective C or C++, C#, Fortran, CPython, etc. AFAIK it requires a cmake utility, the make applet, probably a subset of cmake or vice versa, the "actual" compiler, if it's not a link to the cc or c++ library install on your system, and the linker, a small app that will let you merge everything into a single shared library, static library or binary executable (bin, so, exe, app, appbundle). Sometimes stuff like ar utility might be called out to make an object file called a or ar file, or there's some utility to compile a resource res file as well. Everything was going as... usual still this guest of mind came up with its own plans for the weekend: it would refuse to find required libraries, making it impossible to link the involved files and let them become one as I once expected. I can't completely blame it, I still need to fix one last bug to make it work normally (hopefully). Even so it caused me severe headaches whenever it refused to find zlib or gmp or Ruby libraries that have been there for quite a while now. Curiously the default Linux ld app didn't have any problem with looking for the equivalent versions of those libraries. Of course the binary executable wouldn't work then because it was linked as a Linux like executable file.

Yeah, I filed a bug report to the very same maintainers' bug list, if I didn't make any mistake there, just in case they can tell what the hell happened to my mingw ld linker that has become a stubborn kid for no good reason. =_=