Nah, i remember him telling me he hates RPG battle engines... but i also remember him telling me he likes them (i think he hates turn-based, and likes real time)
Bah, first time I've used excessive punctuation this year. Those battle engines are everything that's wrong with the Click Community (besides platform engines).
First, someone should upload a FF-style battle. I think a lot of people did, even Phizzy. The problem is, most, if not all of them are retarded. I hate bashing the same buttons over and over again, waiting for the enemy to run out of hit points and potions. Now if someone actually took a battle engine and improved on it, the whole goddam problem with these repetitive battle engines wouldn't be a problem, but my main grudge against game developement is that Everyone's too damn egoistic to use and improve on someone else's code.. and even those who copy code defend the weaknesses of the system out of fanaticism
FF would be a good game, if only they let you program some AI into automatically doing the attack styles you want. It's easy enough to code, but NOBODY EVER DOES IT. Even worse, nobody even tries to simplify the UI when it can be done so easily.
I've made my attempts at making a battle engine (based on real-life combats, not stupid cheerleaders systematically hitting each other), but mostly failed due to lack of planning and the lack of data storage/decent encryption in MMF.
However, as you RPG people like quests so much...
I'm willing to make the most realistic (turn-based) battle engine the Click Community has ever seen under 3 conditions:
1. The battle engine would be relatively open-source, so no one should ever have to suffer the task of creating the Ultimate Battle Engine from scratch again.
2. I have to be given credit for it.
3. Most importantly, someone has to help me with a certain ambitious game of mine. At least enough help to cover up for the time I spent on the battle engine.
Very simple conditions. Yet so very few have the commitment to even try. If you're really ready for a RPG, here's your chance to prove it .
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Oh, wait, a few more conditions:
4. There's got to be a LOT of new stats... about similar to the numbers of stats X-Com 2 has.
5. Someone in the team has to know how to encrypt the external files I'll need, without slowing down the game or slowing any autosaves, etc.
BTW, there's a good article on the FF-style battle engine around here. You might wanna take a look at it.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Give me a few months and you won't have anything to complain about Muz! Well, I shouldn't say anything, seeing as mine won't be open source.
I never understood why all of the battle engines so far have been so elementary. Even the paradigm of battle engines, the various FF incarnations, have always seemed a bit thin, imo.
The most tedious aspect of the engine is going to be incorporating all of the graphical effects. I'm still debating if I should make the currently equipped armor and weapons visible on the sprite as well. Not that difficult from the programming perspective but unless I find an artist it'll take forever.
And please, if anyone decides to undertake an open source engine, PLEASE make it easily scalable and customizable. Having such paramaters as party size, damage equations, enemy AI (if any),etc...thrust upon people will only result in numerous indistinguishible, lackluster games that will ruin the image of a potentially useful engine. I personally feel that anyone capable of utilizing an advanced open-ended engine would already know enough to build their own from scratch, thus eliminating any potential hang-ups of adopting someone elses engine, each with it's own aspirations and shortcomings.
~SoS
Current Project: Undertaking the design of my mammoth RPG. Utilizing all of the knowledge gained while coding the now defunct "Shadow Reign".
The problem with the example engines is that they have preset everything and no way expanding without basivally doing it all yourself which is just as bad as starting from scratch.
You usually get a one on one battle with a set amount of moves and no inventory or way to change the party or enemies.
Actually making an rpg is just too complicated for one person, i really could make one but my interest in it would fade too soon.
If a decent group project ever came up i would consider joining.
I'll be looking to assemble a team in a few months. Right now I'm working on a series of the core engines. These will be full fledged engines, easily customizable and easily expandable. I will probably release them open source some time after the release of my game.
As far as help needed, I'm really better at the data side of things, so I'll be looking for assitance with graphics music and sound. Making a game that uses 20 different stats that can be tailored by the player, where each one might interact with the other in a variety of ways, is not really that hard. Just time consuming. Spriting up a simple swing animation that looks cool...IMPOSSIBLE! It always ends up looking like a drunken midget swinging an oversized stick at a pinata..or something. Man do I suck at graphics.
Current Project: Undertaking the design of my mammoth RPG. Utilizing all of the knowledge gained while coding the now defunct "Shadow Reign".
Nothing against DaVince, but I disagree with his notion that you should leave out stats and other design elements until you've got the engine finished. Implementing them at that point is akin to pinning the tail to the donkey. If your lucky it might look okay.
The only way I'd say to keep things simple is if you don't have a firm grasp on all of the objects and extensions that you need to create the engine. When learning these it is best to make a standalone application and try and utilize the object or extension to do whatever you intend for it to do in the final engine. This way, once you've learned how to utilize the object with good clean bug free code, you can more or less copy and paste those events into the engine.
The key element to a complex RPG engine is to spend a good deal of time developing it on paper and with pseudo-code. Every minute spent working on a good design is worth more than 10 minutes coding a bad design. First write down all of the features you'd like to include. Then elaborate on each feature and determine how you think you could implement it. You can break this down the the level of individual events, if necessary.
By doing this you'll run across a lot of different problems that you wouldn't otherwise hit until well into coding hte project. Sometimes these problems are huge, and might require you to redesign or overhaul an existing system. With enough pre-planning and development time, most of those types of problems can be avoided from the start.
Current Project: Undertaking the design of my mammoth RPG. Utilizing all of the knowledge gained while coding the now defunct "Shadow Reign".
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