Post by Tiagox in Witch Hat & Ears of Cat comments

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Ohhh congrats xD

And don't worry. I still have a lot of edits to make before catching up lol. Should get to it soon now that Spirit Arrow's demo is out tho!

And well... I really wanted to do that, but I don't think it's possible without some plugins. The best I did was give Lianna and Jeanne a debuff when fighting wargs that make them more likely to be targeted, but I don't think I can use the player's stats in the enemy AI. I can only make enemies do stuff like use Mana Drain when their own MP is below a certain threshold and such. The only way of doing what you said would be scripting an event in the middle of combat like a cutscene that would check each character's MP and then decide if the enemy will make an extra turn using Mana Drain on one of them... Which I don't really like either.

Endr1 year ago(+1)

imagine a coding program not having an if/than/else script…

Tiagox1 year ago (1 edit)

Oh no, you don't get it... RPG Maker HAS plenty of if/than/else stuff. It's just that it's VERY restricted on how and when we can use those. Usually cutscenes are very free, but scripting stuff in combat, while it uses similar code to cutscenes, can get pretty clunky thanks to how it loads events in a certain order and thus can skip another, and enemy AI is defined by a very small set of parameters with thresholds and probability.

For example, with liches I set their enemy-specific AI to only start using Mana Drain from their moveset after they fall below 50% MP. That's how RPGM's combat coding works best. It can only get values from the enemy itself, however, and not from other enemies or the player characters.

Meanwhile with ogres I had to write the code down in the event windows of the fight itself, like it was a cutscene. Those scripted OUTSIDE their AI tab. What I did was set a debuff on Jeanne at the start of the fight that makes her 900% more likely to be targeted than Lianna or Mao for lore reasons, it has an automatic event that plays once it reaches 50% HP or lower so it uses the Wild Rage skill, which it also uses at any time you try using Cindy's Incense inside the fight. Those scripted events have a lot of programming freedom, letting me get variables from any entity inside the combat or even global switches/variables (like checking where in the story you're at), but since they work like cutscenes they play on top of the actual turn-based combat, and whenever I force an enemy to take an action it's essentially an extra turn. RPGM tends to glitch out when I stack several event windows that uses different parameters so in a cutscene-heavy fight like the liches it's not a very good idea, in my experience, to force the liches to take certain actions.

Maybe there's a solution for this without plugins, but in the end it was too much trouble that it's worth. Plus, you can consider it an extra layer of strategy to keep your characters at low MP to troll the liches lol. Anyway, I hope that clarifies things.

Endr1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

So the only way you can make it take action based off the player characters stats is by making a break in the combat sequence and editing the player characters based off what the enemy should be doing at that point in time, which I’ve already learned 1, persists to the end of the fight or otherwise terminated by another command which itself again has conditional limits, 2, fails when a character dies. RPG Maker is a headache lmao I don’t blame ya. Guess we can’t look a gift Ogre in the mouth. (Ew, that’d be a gross gift)

In other news, accidentally lost my save yet-freaking again. I remember why I was struggling to come back to this.

(Don’t worry, it’s not your game, I just don’t think Safari is saving things right, I’ll use a different browser)

Tiagox1 year ago

Yes that's about right. RPGM is great for people with zero coding skills and who just want to make a game with little attrition, but that also makes it pretty limited. For me it was very worth it, but there's a reason I'm using a professional engine for the next game xD

And oh gosh... Unfortunately playing in the browser has these risks.

Recently I learned you can even play the PC version on mobile with an emulator. I wonder if I should tell people playing the browser version on mobile that.

itch.io

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