Castle Paradox

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

First of all, there are so many cool new features in Ubersetzung that it is really enough to make one's head spin. Most of us have been using nightlies, and might forget that this is the first release since what, hasta? Layers, sound effects, map-state saving...

So what is one to do? Rejoice by making some new suggestions for the next release, naturally!!! That's what this thread is for. There are already a lot of feature requests on Bugzilla, and now with the voting feature we can see what people care about the most (come on people, vote for bug 74!!! It breaks half of the healing spells in the game I'm working on!). But here is a place to discuss some ideas for new features, and maybe for some honorable mentions for bugs you'd like to see fixed. As before, I will try to keep a numbered list and after some time I will take it upon myself to enter our ideas as suggestions in Bugzilla.

Now for myself, I think that the two biggest things that should be focused on for Vox (besides general bugfixing) are the battle system functionality and the menu editting. There are already lots of feature requests concerning the battle system (bugs 117, 122, 252, 319, and 391 seem like the biggest to me) but let me start some discussion on menu editting.

1. Spells should be able to trigger out of battle effects only (like triggering a text box or plotscript). I'm thinking of warping spells, but I'm sure the uses are endless.

2. The author should be able to define individual item menus for each character, including a maximum carrying capacity, in addition to the standard item menu included now. This will make item acquisition a whole new beast, unfortunately.

3. The author should be able to define individual equipment menus, with more than five slots. Each slot should also be able to be disabled (so that the player cannot see it).

4?. Ideally, if the user could set up their own submenu for their own purposes, that would be awesome. Not sure how this would work yet. But that's what this thread is for!
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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

Fenrir-Lunaris · **WUT** Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 1747

Misteroo was intrigued by the possibilities of calling sound effects from textboxes without having to use a script. Alas, this feature is not available at this time.

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

I voted for some bugs, but I think the thing I would like to see most is a lot of chaining delays removed completely, so that many attack graphics animate MUCH more closely as they're intended, as well as status registration that are chained to attacks seeming much more instantaneous.

The reason I want to see this aspect looked at, is because I see a lot of games have effects such as a projectile of some sort thrown at the enemy, then an 'explosion' following it with damage. The problem is, the attack ends up looking like:

- First attack animation
- Short pause which the graphic disappears
- Suddenly, the next attack animation appears from nowhere

It also doesn't help that enemies and heroes tend to flinch on the part of the attack that does no damage, making things look even weirder.

If a user wants a delay, then they can set a "chain delay", or something like that (unless the "Delay Before Attack" already does this job when it comes to chaining, then we can just use that.)
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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?

JSH357 · Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 1705

tl;dr for the moment, but awesome thread title. Talking Heads foeva!

Iblis · Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 4:35 pm Post subject:

You should be able to set a piece of equipment to be equippable to more than one slot. So you could have, say, two accessory slots and any accessory could be equipped to either slot. As it is now this is impossible. This feature could also potentially allow for a character to wield two weapons, but that would be more complicated.

Editting menus is definitely the coolest upcoming feature, so I think once bugs are dealt with that should be what's most focused on.
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OHR Piano

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

I really like Iblis' suggestion. Here is another smaller suggestion concerning equipment - what if items could have a bitset of sorts to disallow unequipping? (I've been playing Dragon Quest V, and thinking of cursed equipment in that series.) While we're on the subject, default equipment for all the available slots would be nice.

I was thinking about user-defined submenu functionality some more. Imagine if each user-defined submenu was its own entity (defined in an "edit submenus" section in custom). When an author creates a new submenu it gets a unique ID #, and he can name it. This name will be its .hsi name. The standard menus all get ID's and hsi names as well.

Any submenu can have up to N slots (chosen by author up to some memory limit, N is unique to each submenu). Each slot can do one of two things: Either call another submenu or call a script (much like how a text box can either call another text box or call a script). There would be plotscripting commands:
open submenu(menu:"user-defined name")
wait for submenu
current submenu #to return the current menu onscreen
alter submenu (which menu, which slot, ???)

In addition, the main menu would have an optional slot for one usesr-defined submenu (the user could call this submenu "more..." if they wanted it to link to a whole additional menu system). Further, all submenus on the main menu should now be optional to the author as well.

It would be nice if each menu slot could be assigned to do different things based on tags (similar to how door links work, where any slot can be given multiple functions based on multiple tags).

Finally, I don't know what tl;dr means, but '77 is a pretty good album for the opening and closing songs alone.
_________________
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

Komera · Joined: 07 Feb 2003 Posts: 711

TwinHamster · Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 7:40 pm Post subject:

Regarding dual-weapons, I've been thinking about just swapping items when a weapon is used.

So using a sword would trigger a script that would replace it with an off-hand replica that would only be wielded by a select few.

Then you could play with some tags to alter hero images and such.

JSH357 · Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 1705

Moogle1 · Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 8:59 pm Post subject:

PlayerOne · Joined: 07 Sep 2005 Posts: 143 Location: UK

I posted about this on the mailing list a while ago, but something I'd quite like to do, if I ever get back into OHR developing, is spruce up the text support a bit:

(1) Support multiple fonts.
(2) Add some kind of inline markup to allow fonts and/or colours to be changed in the middle of a text box. You could show important words in bold or in a different colour.
(3) The main problem with (2) is the fixed line length. Using a handful of characters for markup would leave you with a short line. The solution is to wrap text automatically instead of the author having to arrange it.
(4) Following on from (3), add proportional font support.
(5) Allow fonts to use the 16-colour palettes for added fanciness.

RedMaverickZero · Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 8:33 am Post subject:

I'd like the sound effects through a text box thing a lot. Also, giving the hero more spells in each menu, and like, a way to crop off part of a map and make all of those tiles animate instead of having to go through each individual tile and make it animate. That's why my world maps don't have animating water, is cause there's too much of it to animate.
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---------------Projects----
Mr.Triangle's Maze: 70%
Takoyaki Surprise: 70%

TwinHamster · Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 8:44 am Post subject:

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

It is in whatsnew, its just marked as a bugfix (because it was a feature request in Bugzilla). I'm talking about the hiding of spell lists. I just found it yesterday as well.

Also, you nearly saved the queen with the ctrl+[anim seq #] comment. If only I didn't use two different animations for water! Still, this might make things a little faster. I know what you mean, TH - my map is 220x144, so it takes forever to animate all the water. I usually just try to do a couple rows at a time when I'm eating or something. In this way all the water gets animated after a few months...

Multiple fonts support (especially in-textbox) would also be quite nice. What if instead of in-line flags, there could just be that many more actual characters, and keyboard shortcuts existed to switch between sets of them at any time? So a red letter "R" is not the same value as regular "R" with a color flag, but rather is just a totally separate value? Or is this an incredibly silly way to do such a thing?
_________________
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 · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Judging by what TwinHamster said, we could probably use a "Press F1 for list of key commands" deal.
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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?