Castle Paradox

[Tisteca]

I know you can't learn spells by watching/being hit by them in the OHRRPGCE (meaning you'd have to learn them from items like with Quistis in FF8), but what would be good ideas for Blue Magic-ish spells (by that I mean spells that wouldn't exactly fit in White Magic, Black Magic, etc.) that would work in OHR?

Here are some that I've come up with:

Grand Boost (Increases all stats)
MP Split (Cuts MP in half)
MP Cripple (MP = 25% of current)
Cost Down (Increases MP~)


Any other ideas?
_________________
Placeholder until I can think of something.

[Newbie_Power]

[Moogle1]

[Newbie_Power]

[Moogle1]

Well, if you can cast the MP~ on other characters, then Blue Magic isn't necessarily more efficient than other types.

You could approximate Step Mine by using the Counter stat. Raise the stat cap to its max, then add 1 to Blue Mage's Counter stat every 100 steps. Make an attack do Pure Damage based on Counter with 900% extra damage. This is close enough to the real thing that it doesn't really matter that it goes up 10 at a time.

(Edit) You can also fake the Lv? series with bitsets.
_________________

Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Newbie_Power]

[Tisteca]

[Moogle1]

[msw188]

There are a couple of (minor) problems with the current tag-based system for learning skills from enemies (I am trying to do a similar thing with a character in my next game, so I have been thinking about this). Some have fairly easy workarounds, for instance, the fact that the tag for an attack will be set regardless of whether the hero who would learn the attack is in the party or not. There is also potential trouble if you have more than one hero who can learn the same attacks. Checking for the tags, as well as resetting them after every battle, seems to be the most effective way of getting around this.

The problem that I can't see a solution to is that if the hero is dead when the skill is used, then he/she/it should not have been able to observe it. However, the tag will still be set, and if the hero is revived BEFORE the battle ends, there does not seem to be a way for your plotscript to know that the hero was dead when the tag was triggered. It seems to be a fairly rare scenario though, so I'm not too worried about it.

Another possible problem would be lag. After all, in this setup, you would have to have an after battle script everywhere that checks possibly very many tags after every battle. I haven't tested this, but it seems possible that something like 40 if checks in a row might upset game.exe a little. Then again, if you know that only certain areas have enemies that yield certain skills, you can specialize your scripts... just throwing out some ideas to keep in mind, that's all.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Cube]

Oho~! Had to reply to this, as Blue Mages and their magic is one of my favorite job classes/type in an RPG.

I actually did this very thing for the new job system I made for a game I've been slowly working on these past... Eh, few years I think it's been.

Moogle1 said it. You have an enemy use a spell during battle and have a tag set for it. Just run an after battle script and boom, blue magic! As others have mentioned as well, there's currently no way to check if said hero was dead when the spell was used... And the fact that you'd have to make two of every spell if you didn't want other heros to learn the spell when heroes used it.

I personally would like the tag options to be expanded a bit. We currently have "On [Never] [Use] [Hit] [Miss] or [Kill]" to activate tags through spell usage. I think "On [Enemy Use] or [Hero Use]" would be great to have, not only to solve the issue of having to make more than one spell, but for other interesting things that you could use these two triggers for. Maybe if we bug 'em enough they'll add it? *shrug*

At any rate though. In my game, I decided to make Blue Magic more to how FFXI handles it. In FFXI, Blue Magic is divided up into two different catagories; Physical and Magical. Physical has a variety of properties, like multi-hit attacks, added effects like poison, stun, sleep. Magical is elemental damage, and a variety of debuffs.

So, what are some ideas of Blue Magic you can use in the OHR? Well, obviously multihit attacks would be really cool. Spread physical attacks too. You could also play with the equations with certain spells, like make STR vs INT, instead of VIT.

Magical will have a few elemental spells, but I like the idea of Blue Mages being more self reliant. Self haste, protect, and cures that're more potent than other jobs are an interesting throw into the mix. I like the idea of a mage that is powerful, but can't help anyone but itself. And why not? That's what white mages are for.

[Newbie_Power]

You can probably use the is alive and is in party now tags that you can set in the Hero editor, unless those are tags that have options and aren't implemented yet.

As for lag... I just tested by making a for loop from 0 to 32767 that calls a check tag (#) every time it loops... And I placed it in an every-step loop. This made game.exe hiccup for about a millisecond or two (as opposed to full seconds). I changed the number to 40, and the game was running smoothly again...

And that was for an each-step script. The script that checks for new spells is only run after each battle, making things lag even less.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Blue Pixel]

another method that this might be able to be done in is having the monster drop an item after battle that allows you to learn the spell.

personally im using that style for one of my games in order to make a summon like effect so the monster shows up in 1 attack then he uses the attack in another frame.
_________________

[msw188]

The Dude's idea is, I think, actually less effective since the enemy will drop the item regardless of whether or not it uses its attack, and does not solve the problem about the hero being dead.

The lack of lag is somewhat reassuring for me (thanks for testing that, Mr. Power). I'm hoping that the if's don't slow it down at all. If something goes bad, I also have an idea about having an ongoing global variable that will tell the after-battle how many attacks have already been learned, where the tags are in a row, so that it can start from the first unknown attack rather than check through a bunch of already learned tags. If I can plan out every single attack that will fall into this category, I can also put them in order in the attack editor and have a nice, clean-looking for loop to cover this entire mess, rather than having to type out each attack check line for line. Boy, that'd be nice.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Newbie_Power]

Oh, and I thought of another idea, which would require some player cooperation to work properly.

If an enemy has an attack that a Blue Mage can learn, there will be two copies of it.

- One copy sets the tag, and can only target hero slot 1.
- The other copy doesn't set the tag, but targets hero slots 2, 3, and 4 (but not hero slot 1).

After the tag is set, the game will check to see if the Blue Mage is the leader of the party (I think this can be done without tags). If he is, then the Blue Mage can learn the spell.

If the tag is set, but the Blue Mage is not the leader of the party, then the tag will be set to off again.

If another hero besides the leader was targeted, then obviously the tag never gets turned on.

So yeah. This will require that the Blue Mage's special ability only working if he is the leader. This will have to be advertised as a "feature" of the Blue Mage.

EDIT: Oh, and if a Blue Magic attack is multi-target, you don't need two copies of it. Just one that sets the tag and keep checking to see if the Blue Mage is the leader.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[msw188]

Whoa, I had totally forgotten about attacks working by slot. I now believe that the death problem is able to be worked around (although this would be horrendous if there are many enemies and many skills to learn in the game). Here is an outline of how to accomplish this:

1. Before the battle, check to see what slot the learner is in. If he is in the party, and has not yet learned a skill that the monster has, change the monster's attacks to correspond to his specific slot (this will require four versions of EVERY learnable attack). If the learner is not in the party, or has already learned the skill, give the monster a version of the attack that has no slot restrictions (that is to say, skip the chain described in #2 below and just give the actual attack).

2. The four slot-specific versions of the learnable attack are actually chains. The first attack in the chain is the attack that can only target Hero Slot #X, and sets the tag stating that the attack has been used. This then chains to the actual attack that can be learned, which itself reselects its target. This way, the actual attack can target anyone, but only occurs as long as the learner was able to be targetted first.

3. Give the enemy the first attack in the chain, and NOT the actual attack. This way if the learner is dead, the enemy should not be able to select the chain, so the tag will NEVER be triggered while the learner is dead. The only downside is that the enemy cannot use the attack while the learner is dead, but only before the skill is learned. This should hardly affect most gameplay, unless you planned on having most skills learned by bosses perhaps.

I'm not sure if you can change an enemy's attacks mid-game using plotscripting, but you could always just have five different versions of all of these enemies. Either way, I really believe that this would work. But maybe there are some problems I am not thinking of just now...
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com