Yeah this was really my first time writing anything with VERGE. I've halfway been around since VERGE 1 but never really did anything.

I had "playtest" on my todo list but by the time I got to it I just didn't want to deal with actually playing it anymore...

Quote:Originally posted by Zip


SnowScape Battle System:
Nice, but everything kept getting stuck on me so didn't seem particularly playable.


what got stuck on you?

I liked the text battle system a lot. Very solid, nice work. Snowscape was nice but isn't that useful as a generic BS lib.

Some miscellaneous comments regarding Lufia-esque:
First of all, the locked frame after battle isn't a bug, it's a consequence of a silly trick I used to get around a requirement. For various reasons, my BS uses entities to represent the players in combat, but these entities are not supposed to be the same ones used to walk around on the map. One thing I'll be getting done tonight is a function called from InitMap that spawns four entities offscreen at the start of every map, and uses them as the battle entities. This is how the system was designed to work; I just didn't get around to it. It's kind of a weird way to do it, but there's no way to destroy entities so I can't spawn them on a per-battle basis.

There'a a bug that prevents some enemies from acting once an enemy has been killed in battle. It was a retarded bug and I fixed it post-compo by deleting an exclamation mark. Also, MP don't get reduced by casting spells, though you all probably noticed that.

I apologize for the slapdash character of my submission, and especially for the lack of a readme; I was going to do docs last, but I decided to throw together a hardcoded ability system at the last minute, and that prevented me from doing a proper docfile. You can get a decent idea how things work from function comments, but it's kind of a pain since there are like six vc files.

I'll have the BS looking a bit better by the time the next compo starts, for the benefit of anyone who wants to use it there. There was a lot I had to hardcode messily here that will eventually be customizable and modular, though I'll still have a lot on my to-do list by the time the next compo starts. My current peiorities, roughly in order:

• Fix running so it has a chance to fail and displays a short message regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Add a StopMusic so that the music doesn't keep playing after you run.
  
• Add the entityspawning system deszcribed above. Add a string array for each PC containing the movecodes for his various animations, so you can do EntityMove(pc.anim[THIS_ANIM]) rather than entering the specific string by hand.
  
• Include damage set constants based on context. The damage sets are the different colours for the damage numbers that appear -- if you pass DAMAGE_SET_RED to MakeBouncyNumbers, you get red digit, and so on. When I say context-specific, I mean a critical would use DAMAGE_SET_CRITICAL, healing uses DAMAGE_SET_HEALING, and so on. THis is mosrly for if you want your critical hits to be red, or your attacks an enemy is strong against to be blue, or what have you.
  
• Attributes, which is to say elements. They're in the code, but the damage equations don't account for them at the moment, so being strong against ice won't reduce the damage dealt by Icebonk. This is probably as far as I'll get before the next compo starts, unless Grue decides to give us much more than four days.
  
• Tear out all the existing ability code and rebuild abilities from the ground up. This is the big one, and it will take a while. First, I'm making a file containing ability statistics, possibly one that uses a non-VC format and gets parsed into an array of structs at the beginning of the game. Rather than passing an ability type and subtype, functions will pass an index in that array, and you'll be able to look up the index via AbilityIndex(string abilname) or something of the sort. At this point I'll fix MP so they actually function the way they're supposed to.
  
• I'll be making a generic menu system and using it in place of the horrible hardcoded menu I'm currently using for magic selection.
  
• Flags need to be implemented. Currently a character has a bunch of flags for various things, but the various things aren't in there. Abilities also have flags that are likewise ignored.
  
• Some status effects should be added. I'll toss in a few sample ones and try to make some sort of system for people to make their own, though it'll be a bit code-intensive.
  
• I'll be including another two more arrays of integers in the PC and NPC objects. One array of integers will contain the chance the character has of inflicting a given status effect on a normal attack use. The other array contains his current condition: positive and negative status effects. I might include another flags variable for status immunities; I haven't decided if there's enough room for those in the main flags var.
  

Troupe, another suggestion for your battle system. Get rid of the following message at startup:

"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor."

Consider yourself contacted. :)

No, I haven't. It's probably just one of the many problems unique to me, if nobody else has mentioned it.

Yes, it does, and changing it has no effect anyway. I guess it's just one of those things.

Well! Everyone likes unique things, but this is for a public library, so wanting to see something unique is kind of futile here since the ultimate success of a BS in this compo would be for it to be used by lots of people. That said, it is fucking sweet.

Quote:Originally posted by Gayo

Well! Everyone likes unique things, but this is for a public library, so wanting to see something unique is kind of futile here since the ultimate success of a BS in this compo would be for it to be used by lots of people. That said, it is fucking sweet.

Ah yes, but some kind of innovation is surely desired. Having to wade through literally thousand of bog standard combats has been the bane of my rpg playing life.

Zip

"Thanks to Gayo for helping come up with that name. We hope you enjoy this most heinous resolution (which my monitor does not display properly). "

Wait...that made...no sense.

yeah I understand it too, which is unusual =p