Before I begin, forgive me if I don't use the proper terms for everything, as I'm still learning this stuff. Anyway.

After a few years of noncommittal lurking, I've finally decided to start work on my own game. My eventual goal is to recreate the look and feel of the SNES installments of Final Fantasy, especially FFIV and FFV, complete with 16x16 sprites and tile-based movement.

The .chr files were easy to make, and playerstep=16; has been a godsend as far as tile-based movement is concerned, but I run into a problem whenever my character bumps into a wandering NPC. Specifically, if I collide with that NPC halfway through its step, I end up standing on the border between 2 tiles. After that, my character remains off-center until I collide with a stationary obstruction, which lines him back up.

I tried searching the site for an answer, but couldn't find this specific problem addressed. Is there a quick fix that I'm overlooking? Barring that, does someone have a complicated fix they could teach me?

Now, I've never worked with maps before, so I'm afraid I can't offer any specific chunks of code, but let me offer some ideas that might help you out:

1) The program checks on each iteration of the game loop to see if the player is stopped at a position other than one he should be at. I assume that this would be any position that is a multiple of 16. So, if the character isn't moving and he's on, say, 12, write a function to nudge him back to 16 automatically.

2) Do you have a way to detect collision of player and npc? If so, you could reset the position of the player on a collision.

3) Find a way to recognize if an NPC hasn't completely moved out of a tile yet and don't let the player move to that tile.

I'm looking forward to seeing a demo. Gambatte!

Quote:Originally posted by Varius

Arkhan:

I'll chalk that up to the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing.

Hey, join the club! :)

i just gave up on tile based movement altogether.

It suits the game anyways since its inspired by Lunar, Vay, Cosmic Fantasy................ all those CD based RPGs from back in the day!



I kind of like the lack of tile movement for some reason now that Ive got it going.

I also recommend you don't use my demo. I just now tried it under Vista -- got a new laptop, haven't run anything under Verge on it yet -- and it runs hideously; something's wrong with the timing.

I suspected that before, due to posts from other testers, but I couldn't solve the problem; it worked fine on my XP laptop. But now I know something's definitely wrong.

I haven't looked at it in a long time, and the implementation had other shortcomings (unable to use V3's zones natively). Maybe I would be able to fix it now, but I don't have the time. Sorry for the letdown, hope you get a solution running though. :)

The SVN's user/pass is anonymous/anonymous for read access.

As for the playerstep issue, the answer is "anywhere in the vc".

If you want your whole game to be playerstepped to 16, you can just put it once in your system.vc's autoexec function like so:

void AutoExec()

{

	playerstep = 16;

}

There are some big caveats with using playerstep, though. If you want predictable behavior, you should only only only use the standard obstructions (ie, a solid brick and the two diagonal slashes). If you make any half-tile/quartertile/etc fancy obstructions, your characters will get set "off the grid" when they walk into them. This doesn't "break" verge any, but it does break your game's aesthetic.

This would be a good subject for me to make a tutorial on. Time, time, my kingdom for some time.

playerstep defaults to 1. Remember: as a system variable you aren't declaring it, you're just changing it.

At 16 it's not really noticeable. You have to look for it.

To experiment, turn it to 32 or 48 or somesuch, recompile, run, and tap one of the directional keys. :)

As for menu code, if you're a beginner, you might want to hijack the Sully Chronicles menu code and alter the insides for your own devious purposes. No need to reinvent the wheel, and you can always change the whole thing later. ;)