* Scenario3 RPGMaker Update *

David; Drink more water! 64 ounces a day!

Also, get all your vitamins. They've got some great ways to do that now. Here in the pacific northwest we can just go to the store and buy a Viso. You can probably get some through DrinkViso.com or whatever. Tasty stuff!

Love the witchy picture!

Hi Ayelis:

* Thank you, yep, I need to drink more water, but I think I'm going to need to buy bottled water cause after I drink stuff from the tap here, it doesn't stay in me very long.



I'm on the VISO website and looking around now.
Holy Fl!p ! There sure are a lot of vitamins in those drinks, click on the NUTRITION button at the top.

. . .

Where have I been and what's going on ?

Quite a bit, first off I got the C R U D. And if any of you know what that is, it's not good, kind of a croupy coughing virus flu that smacks you in your chest.



Also looked at a few virtual worlds, one of which FUNKEYS is interesting, bought one of the figures at the 99c store and had to look it up. It connects to the internet with a USB plug.



Not terribly pleased that it requires you to purchase more of the figures to explore more of the world, but hey, I'm starting to see something here that I haven't seen before.

If something is free, given freely away, it loses value, unless given by the heart, and that's kind of hard to do with software. FUNKEYS is a big company, uses the little toy figures to explore the worlds within it, and the artists, musicians, programmers, everyone gets all paid by the work they do.

It's like when I visit my friend, Mr. Chris, he was going to mow the grass and asked if I would sweep his deck and front porch, and I said, sure, that's fine.

The week after that, he gave me some garden gloves to wear, and him with a saw, and me with hedge-clippers went over the branches that fell down in his yard last storm-day. It was a joint effort.

We were both working and that was a great thing; good friendship all around.
I work and have worked on S2 in the past and a lot of the feedback kept me going about what to do add to it and what to do; is why it runs so well today because of Y O U, your interest in my project, and my interest in your requests for it.

. . .

Dorothy (my step-mom) is moving pretty quickly now, I went through rows of Dad's books, she said, that which I do not take for myself, my sister will get, well, I remember sitting in Dad's lap years ago while he read some Isaac Asimov science-fiction prior to really TV, I was 12 when Dad finally plonked down and bought a real B&W TV for me and my sister, Michelle to look at.

Well, the house is going through major changes and I can see Dorothy really can't stay in it. So I must expect the expected. I don't want to, but it has to happen.

When you acknowledge something MUST happen and then it does, it makes it easier in your head to accept it. I have 5 boxes of Dad's old Sci-Fi books and nearly all the Apple ][ stuff. I may not have too much room for it right now, however, these are the best memories I've had with Dad and I am with them now ...
. . .

Life goes ever on. I see things are going to be very simple in the future now with a money manager, so I get my allowance each week as normal, and have the chance to work on S3, and muse and be confused by all the other curious games and programs out there in the world on the internet.

The Process:

* As I delve into writing S3 in BlitzBasic, I have to come across a few important issues.
What is it about other RPGMakers that make them difficult or cumbersome to use, for instance, with a cinema scene ?

Years ago, I had an idea for a RPGMaker scripting to be done like laying out a play or play-write. While you could indeed use the Sprite Messenger to design a complex story using the Shadow command and others, for a really complex scene that involves multiple moving sprites, a kind of moviemaker ability would be useful.

You would highlight all the "actors" involved and one movie frame would be a step for a player, with ability to go half or double speed. You would have text frames that wait for a keystroke or change over a short time, and you could go forwards or backwards for the frames in the developing of it, and tell who moves where with arrow keys you place above each for each frame.

This will be difficult to write, yet is still missing from all RPGMakers I have seen thus far, and thereby vital for advanced animation in storytelling.
. . .

Additionally there is the puzzle of the players. If I am indeed trying to write a superbly simple RPGMaker, there needs to be simplicity of data for the players.

Many action-adventure games for the PSX use a fixed weapon for the player type.
Lufia for the SNES did this, and as such, it would due away with the complexity of which weapon goes where and to whom player.

While 4 players may be desired, I'm going to limit the frame to 3 for multiple reasons. As planned earlier, the 1st player can do 50% damage and 50% magic ability. The 2nd player does 100% damage and no magic ability. The 3rd players does 25% damage and 75% magic ability. I may add a degree of configurability to this later.

Some limits would have to be set. Does the player gain natural magic ability through levels, are the spells purchased, or acquired some other way ?

I'll be pondering this as I start to write (and hopefully finish) S3 in the year following.

CAN I SAY AUGH !!


WHY oh why didn't I check to see if images locked on the screen automatically ?
Apparently they do, and I could've written TileMaster MUCH easier had I applied that knowledge.

As much as I am terribly and sorely tempted to rewrite TileMaster with this wisdom, I am going to continue working on S3 and remind myself to check for such simple things in the future of graphics command.

Structure:

* When I wrote S2 years ago, I didn't have a basic structure to the system.
Yet, by doing this, it still worked fairly well.

I took another look at RPG Maker VX by Enterbrain, their menu structure, their database toolbox, and I'm still seeing undue complexity.

Proposal:

* When you bring up the current engine, you are straight into the map editor.
No definitions are made of anything except just a few.

Press "0" to make starting place for player.
If you press [Enter] when highlighting the player, you can change their (more than one player) stats.

Tile definitions are fixed, but you have 1024 to choose from, and they will have unique properties such as animate 8-steps, 4-steps, 2-steps, random animation step, icy-floor, weak ledge, warps, etc.

While I think it is uniquely possible to have the entire world on a single 256x256 map where only areas are visible (what the player can travel on), I think I'm going to maintain the standard 63x63 with 31 maps (and use the 32nd inaccessible to hold important world data)

If you press [Enter] normally, you can make a Sprite, a MACRO (like a lock, treasure, etc) or a CINEMA scene, where you tab each sprite around (including players) for who is going to partake in this cinema scene.

NO items are defined, no weapons, armor, spells, absolutely nothing.
When you meet a merchant that is selling items, THEN are items defined.
This follows a little bit of the CYLUR principle. There is no Weapon or Item creation menu.

This will also allow for infinite variety of items, and may introduce custom animations for each (included in the merchant's description)

Critters are the same way, 3 kinds, visible, invisible, and marked.
If a critter is marked on the map, the player can never see or touch it, but based upon the attributes you placed on that defined critter, it is included (and starts if there isn't one) a random encounter percentage.

There is no Critter or Boss creation menu.

I'm going to hold off on transports such as boat and airship until I get this far.

PHEW !

That's a real brainweave, but I think this will help in the long run and allow for great diversity without locking things down to fixed defintiions of weapons, armor, spells, critters, and abilities.

Build the world as you go, and quite obviously I will need to have an ability to save off custom weapons, armor, spells, as individual files so you can import them to different merchants in the same world, or merchants entirely from other world files.

Just a few notes, for both me and you:

* Gelatinous objects.

The more I experiment in BlitzBasic the more I see the structure to allow a non-structured graphic environment. I've always wondered what would happen if you had a 48x48 sprite trudge down a 32x32 tile corridor and now I may have my chance.

I'm going to borrow probably every piece of RPG image art I can find and then create an engine to construct the "source code" (stay with me on this), to write the coding in BlitzBasic to allow rapid access to what looks to be over 2,000 PNG files including tables 24x32 font (fixed), sprite set default to 32x48 for sprites but expandable up to screen size, so BETA objects entirely possible, I'll probably need to draw the map in layered sets drawing the smallest tiles first, then the next size up, etc. Also I need to analyze the images coming in and save their sizes off in a separate array so a "center" can be found when any of them are plotted.

This is pretty ambitious I know but the more I look at the RPG-VX and RPG-XP system, the more I want to allow any-sized images with any # of elements like it apparently can do.

Tiles will animate. If I have to get out and wind up their motors I will.
. . .

Also recently saw, "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" really a good funny film and like most CGI movies, you just might learn something from it.

I'm posting to say that I will post again. This is all looking good, though.

Regarding graphics, I've never yet gotten into the mechanics of layering, nor sprite construction and moving, but should...
It's very interesting and what you've posted there, David, seems to be sound structure.

What would help you?

Hi Jed:

* Sorry I hadn't written earlier.
It seems this engine to create the partitions so I can have this mixed bag of element-ability for imaging is written in GFA.

Fortunately, once it is done, I won't need it again.
It's inserting pretty close to 2500 lines of source macro-code directly into my S3 BlitzBasic project. Then it will be possible to have sprites or critters of any size or shape and number.

That's a good idea, David!

To infinity and beyond.
I like the concepts of no limits, as long as there are pre-fixed definitions and skeletons of every type of data/object.

What is the CYLUR principle?

When can I try a prototype, or in fact, can I grab the latest engine and give feedback or should I wait for the next one as it's been a while since I've posted you've no doubt got a lot of code to implement since then.

Hello:

* No, I haven't forgotten about you. I've been very bizzy taking care of Dad and House stuff. No doubt about it, dorothy is getting the house setup so some people can visit it and give a price on it. I requested this very old lamp that you see when you enter the house to the left. It originally burned a gas light, but was fitted to do a lightbulb. It is old beyond measure and I'd hate to see that go. Dorothy and John helped me get it over and now I just need to install it in the ceiling.
. . .

I've also noticed a LOT of programs use mouse-control. Scenario sadly wouldn't (or couldn't ?)

I had a suggestion. I have FunKeys which I play with sometime and every single motion is all done by the mouse. Who is to say that Scenario couldn't be mouse-driven solely during gameplay and map editing for pressing buttons and moving the player, and the player wouldn't move in a tight + grid but true long diagonals or wherever you click the mouse, sliding along a wall if there is one in the way. I'll make a demo pretty soon to show how that is done.

And this opens up the ability to lift visible items when at a merchant's by holding down the mouse button, dragging, and then drop them in your basket for purchase, or to lift items from your own bag and sell them to the merchant.

There are a large # of games that are solely mouse-driven and while S2 did quite well without it, I will hit a larger audience if it is driven mouse-friendly.

P H E W !



Forgive my yawn but MAN am I tired !

* OK, FINALLY got the sourcecode inject program finished.

Here are the results:

http://sites.google.com/site/scenario2009/...les/storage.zip

Basically this means that you can add any # of elements of any media kind to the system.

The "dir.txt" is a raw tree-driven directory search of all the files in media.

The "merge.txt" is the output results of my source-code convertor, and before you ask, NO, you can't use a loop with INCBIN or any other variable defintiions, is why I had to write it this way.

On the inclusion directory filenames, if there is a "_" then it reads the next data as x-pixels across, y-pixels across, and n-number of elements. Some defaults are recorded when in the "\spr\" sub-directory.

There are 16-frames per sprite so you have true UDLR facing with =4= animation steps. Yah, I thought you'd like that.

I'll be posting that mouse program I have in mind pretty soon to demonstrate the sprite movement.

Oh, and before I forget:

Good Evening:

* Here is the Linear Mouse Test.

The next stage will be to have it circumvent walls in the way.
And yes, default sprites are 32x48, not 32x32, and yes, they can be any size or shape now.

http://sites.google.com/site/scenario2009/...arMouseTest.zip