For the last week or so, I have been working with TheoAllen on his antilag script, mostly swapping ideas and code back and forth. Some of my ides and code made it into his script and some didn't, and while I was working on my own personal copy, he started added his "insane" optimizations, really trying to be able to support as many events as he could. I on the other hand, decided to try more for compatibility and speeding up sprites. Doesn't include the "insane" optimization for large numbers of events, so Theo's script is definitely faster when there are more events on the map, but mine might work better for people when there are fewer events or when there are compatibility issues, so I will post what I have so far here:
You should probably turn off OPTIMIZE_EVENTS_XY for any pixel movement or ABS scripts but give it a try with it on! This is not meant to compete with Theo's script and is only meant for better compatibility and/or to possibly speed up maps with fewer events.
Here is a little script I was working on for my test game made to count tallies when each stat is used and randomly raise them after battle. It's kinda like the stat leveling system in Final Fantasy 2(j) and the SaGa series, but it works a bit differently.
Mostly it is different in that experience levels still exist and are used both to determine your max over all stat level, and whenever you gain a level you get a big random boost to your stat tallies. The actor class's stat growth curves also determines how much each stat level is worth.
Anyway the basic idea for how it works is stat tallies are used as percent chance that that stat will level up after battle, so if a stat is tallied 100 times it will always level up, but if it is tallied only 10 times you have a 10% chance. Tallies are remembered across battles but the level up chance only happens at a battle's conclusion. If a stat is leveled up a flat 100 is subtracted from the tally, and it can go into the negative. This practically means stat increases are random but predictable over a large period of time, and since your level acts as a cap for how many stat increases you can have and your class acts to show how many each are worth, the fact that the stats always grow at the same rate is not as important.
It's probably not going to be useful for most people's needs since it doesn't try to exactly match the system used in the old games, and is mostly me just experimenting with the mechanics. It might be useful as a base if anyone wants to do something similar though!
Here is the script:
Here is a thing I wrote randomly trying to sort out my feeeelings:
Allow me first to set up the context. Context for what I am not sure. Maybe my whole life. Right now it is nearly 3:00 am on October 8th, 2014, and will no doubt be much later by the time anyone reads this. If anyone reads this. If I even put it in a place where anyone would possibly see it. But I feel like typing it anyway. No doubt anyone reading this in the distant future, if anyone even can besides myself, may well be able to understand, in retrospect, the strange period of history I find myself in. I am betting the next few decades will be a period of great change for humanity. I have heard predictions that The Singularity will come as soon as 2045, though I am personally not quite convinced, even if I am rather hopeful something interesting will happen by then at least. I have heard not to long ago that robots capable of doing most of humanity's work may come about even earlier, and nanotechnology may be right around the corner, provided the drug corporations don't put a stop to it.
Personally though? I think corporations are starting to decline. Large corporation just can't sustain themselves much longer with the bloated budgets and short-sighted money grubbing management. Smaller, more flexible companies I think will thrive and, while a few big corporation will survive, they will not be as powerful in general as they once were. Cloud funding, while sometimes being scams to be sure, will come to be the easiest way to get anything done. I honestly think it's likely for computers to reach the upper limit to how far they can be pushed fairly soon, and nanotechnology will probably be the next big “revolutionâ€. How far nanotechnology is able to go I couldn't say, but hopefully far enough that humans are able to become practically immortal and immune to most disease. Then of course, growing populations will probably push us into space, and after that all we basically have to do technology-wise is mega-structures.
I think AI is probably possible, but I am not sure it will ever exceed the capabilities of humans except in specialized areas. Achieving a kind of meta-consciousness with an AI that can create sentient sub-programs may be possible, as is the ability for humans to partially or fully automate our brains to do the same thing may be possible... in a way we already do this, creating programs and tools to do things for us, and dividing our attention to multiple things at once. It seams reasonable that with the right tech we could simply create copy minds that processed stuff for us and reported back, but we still have yet to make much progress on AI in general.
So basically right now there is all this “cool stuff†that may happen within the next few decades, and I am sort of wasting away, just waiting for it, without a job, or much money, or anything I have really done in my life that is really worth much to most people. I kinda want to just get out of this body and into a new one already, to at least get some of my problems fixed. But all I have is a possible future that is still some time away. And I sort of just find myself completely unable to really love in the here and now. My mind is always somewhere else, either hoping for the future, or lost in a world of imagination. It's not that I hate the life and times I live in, I just can't really get myself to spend much time there. And now it is almost 4:00 am... sleepy...
...
It is now the October 26th, about 3 and a half weeks since I wrote the above, and it's bound to be a lot longer since anyone reads any of this, if anyone ever does. The above is only half of what I originally intended to write. I wrote of the future and now I must write of the past. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and I think there are many alive today that are bound to it or blinded by it, and I am not sure I am an exception. It could be the now is always going to be a place where people feel unconformable, and they always look to the future or back to their past. But, I am not sure that is actually what is going on here. I am not sure how notable it will be in the due passing of time, but things are happening and have been happening for the past few years, perhaps since the beginning of the millennium, that seem to be threatening a lot of things I hold dear. Of course a lot of good things are happening too, and even a lot of the bad things may end up being good in the long run.
Avoiding the whole “war on terror†thing, which recently seems like there is a chance it may flare up again, I mostly am concerned about the state of various forms of media. Perhaps that you could accuse me of being childish, and perhaps I am, but it seams to me like media is the very framework we use to conceptualize our ideas, to share our thoughts and out feelings, and to experiment with new ways of looking at things. And to be quite honest, I find myself uninterested and unimpressed with most of it, finding most of my time is taken up with watching random youtube videos of other people playing games or people reviewing things, and sometimes read fanfiction or online comics. Not that there isn't value in that mind you, but it does make me wonder why professionally done books, television, and film, as well as playing the games myself, can't really compete with that. I think I have come out of it a bit more lately though.
Fact is, I think maybe the entertainment industry in general, and especially the game industry in particular, are heading right for a crash. And the sad truth is... maybe it should. Game publishers crank out squeal after squeal, spending billions of dollars for games of inferior quality, or flooding the market with shovel-ware, and movies and so on aren’t that better. And yes there are real gems in there, and I won't deny that or try to say all new games, movies, television, books, and such are crap. Because they are not. But there is too much big business and cooperate greed squeezing every penny out of them, and trying to control everything about them.
There is, of course, a lot of promise in crowd-funded projects and things like Steam and Netflix and Ebooks to let people self publish faster and easier then ever, and that is fantastic, but we still live in an industry mostly run by money and big corporations that muddle and control everything. And really this has been the way it has always been, but it sure seems worse now. Maybe because people are just complaining more and refusing to accept it. Maybe because the corporations are getting more and more frantic to make a quick buck as the walls crumble around them due to their own mismanagement.
But really it's bigger then that. When I look back at all the things that were once dear to me, so many of them have gone away. Granted, a lot of them were pointless to hold on to in the first place, but still. My parents moved from my childhood home a few years ago, and mentally, I am not sure I am over that. I still have dreams of going back there sometimes. Even before that so many things from my child hood are gone... old toys my parents got rid of, old files locked on a decaying broken hard drive from who knows how many years ago, that sort of thing. I even remember when I was a kid making some very silly books about my adventures with my stuffed animals... but I don't know what happened to them. All gone now I suppose. I had a bunch of cassette tapes I used to keep in my nightstand, some I recorded myself... I think they are all gone now. I kinda wish, I had more backups, more data, transferred more things to digital formats and such, but it really is all kinda silly, but still.
And even going further back, before even my own birth, oh how much history I have missed! Those strange days in the 60s and 70s where so much happened and so much changed, the whole history of the two world wars and their bloody aftermath, as awful as they were. How much the while world has missed!.Before little more then a hundred years in the past not one person living was even alive! Those times and those people will never be again.
But of course I can't change the past, or even view it as more the someones reconstruction. But to be honest I don't really want to. What I want, I guess, is even if this time period right now isn't to great, I want to live through it... I want to see the future and know I have seen this past. And I don't really want to every stop living, not even after the stars go out and the universe grows cold. I want to find a way to open a rift and move somewhere new then... and even if I can't... I am not sure... but I think just living alone in a dead universe would be enough if I can remember even a fraction of all that, if my imagination still works, if my mind still operates I could create my own worlds in my head. Maybe it's already happened... but... well... we will see what happens won't we?
Since some people wanted it, here is a list of links to most of the scripts I have scattered around the site I don't think I have actually released that much of note, but hopefuly some people might be interested!
Important scripts - These are the scripts I think every project can probably benefit from:
Word Wrapping Script - Makes stuff in message boxes and item descriptions (and anything else that uses draw_text_ex) automatically start a new line if the line is too long to fit.
Cache Back - Improves the RPG Maker VX Ace cache system so that games should run faster and use less memory.
Note Field Hash - The script I use to load note tags for most of the scripts I make that need it.
Other finished scripts - Scripts with complete documentation and usable features that I think are suitable for release:
NEW! - Crossfade script - Script to change the fades to use fancy crossades like battle transitions do.
Unfinished, undocumented, and/or scrap scripts - These are mostly experimental ones I haven't gotten around to formally finishing:
Simple Database - A fixed up version of my old NPC Database script.
Alternitive Antilag - A possibly more compatible variant of Theo's new antilag script that also may be faster in maps with few events. Doesn't include the optimization for large numbers of events yet though.
Frame Buffer Battle Swirl - An effect when entering battle sort of like the whoosh found in Final Fantasy 7 and other psx era RPGs. (Undocumented, but should just work without any fiddling, may update and formally release soon.)
Free Party Turn Order - Changes battles so party members can act in any order. (Unfinished and undocumented, may be buggy.)
Accent Generator - An attempt to do something like Chrono Cross's where each party member can say a piece of generic dialogue differently (Undocumented, some of the functions are kinda obscure)
Icon Event - Short script to make an event look like an icon. (Undocumented, uses the note field hash script with the :icon_index key.)
Custom Item Menu Scripts - Some scripts to change how item menus work, requires some other scripts. (Unfinished, undocumented)
Final Fantasy 2/SaGa Series Inspired Stat Leveling System - A experimental stat leveling system that tallys stats when they are used and randomly levels them up individually after battle.
Script demos/collections - Tech demos and/or base games for more complex collections of interconnected scripts:
Super Dungeon Demo - Everything related to my modification of Saba Kan's Random Dungeon Generator. Adds a lot of new features and rewrites a lot of the old ones. Also includes my modifications and add-ons to Khas Awesome Light Effects, my old Event Battler script (which was released independently but seems to have vanished from the site for some reason), my autotile update script (which I wrote for this) and lots of other stuff, most of which isn't really that useful on it's own. Lots of documentation available here.
Super Skill System - Based mostly around extensions and modifications to the Graphnode Install script and my own custom skill system to create a modular system to add extra effects to skills. No documentation yet.
Feel free to play around with these and use my code if you think you can do something interesting with it! I like to fiddle around with other people's scripts too so it's only fair.
Here is a sorta weird demo of a skill system I have been working on for a while. It's based on a modified version of this script with lotsa extra features.
skilldemo.zip
It's main extra fetures are the ability to attach skills to other skills, restrict stuff so you can only attach some skills to perticular skills or skill types, some extra animation stuff, and my own custom skills system that lets you have multible copies of skills, each with there own name and configurations of add on skills. It's kinda complex and the menu may not be as easy to use as it should be. I do think it's pretty neat though.
It's probobly gonna have a ton of little niggly details and strangeness I need to iron out. I think for the most part, if you know how to use the grathnode install script, it's more or less the same except you can make skills grathnodes... but there are so many little details to talk about... I may write more documentation later.
Some more info:
Edit: Made it so it didn't check the grathnode's/metaskill's occasion anymore, so you could have items and skills that are set to never and still work as grathnodes/metaskills. Also merged the "Grathnode Tweaks" and "Metaskills Apply" scripts since they overlap a lot, and made my weird minimum tp cost thing it's own script so it could be tweaked or deleted.
Edit 2: Custom skills now cost MP/TP properly now.
Since some of the features of my dungeon demo are even more obscure then Saba Kan's orginal and at least one person was confused enough to comment, here are some notes on various things:
1. Map Tiles
Mostly the same as Saba Kan's but with some added stuff. You need to set tiles in rows from the top left corner of the map (or x,y 0,0). All rows are read form left to right starting at x 0 and read until a blank tile is found, though some only the first tile is valid.
The basic set up:
row 0: One or more floor tiles, The first is the normal floor, any others are alt floors. These are placed in rooms and corradors, basicly anywhere you can walk.
row 1: The edge tile, only first valid. Any empty tile adjacent to a floor or wall becomes a edge tile.
row 2: the wall tile, only first is valid, but may be blank to create outside maps. A obstructing tile with a floor below it becomes a wall.
row 3: the "object" tile, only first is valid, not really needed in outdoor maps. Any wall that has a floor over it becomes a "object" tile instead.
row 4: the empty tile, only first is valid. This is the default tile.
row 5(new): room detail objects. Randomly placed in rooms.
row 6(new): zone detail objects. Randomly placed on a type of tile. Set the zone for this row to control what type o. 0 for floors, 1 for walls, 2, for objects, 3 for blank, and 4 for edge tiles.
row 7(new): room pillar objects. Set this row to the lover halves of any two tile high decoration such as trees to be randomly placed in rooms.
2. Events
Like Saba Kan's orginal code, event names are importent. Normaly events are named with a number followed by a symbol.
The number is how it appears on the minimap, and the symbol is what type of event it is. Events with a 1 in the thousands slot will have a hole in the middle on the minimap (used for exits mostly) one with a 1 in the hundreds will never vanish from the minimap once you see it once. The tens and ones didgets control the color of the manimap square (based on your system/windowskin colors).
The symbol is for marking the event as a special randomly clonible event. There are three kinds, enemys marked with * chests marked with ! and traps marked with $ but you can also have no symbol for a event that is just randomly placed somewhere like exits. Enemys, chests, and traps differ mostly by how many of them spawn. By defualt a number of enemys will spawn equal to the "Steps Average" encounter rate of the map in the map properties of the map, a number of chests equal to between that number and 1/3 that number, and a number of traps between that number and 1/2 that number. The number goes up the larger the dungeon floor varible is.
3. Map Note Field (mostly advanced generation options)
Just a list of most of the tags.
Map Generation Options:
:min_rect - Minimum size to cut the map into.
:min_room - Minimum size of the room in each rect.
:room_margin - Minimum distince between the room and rect edge.
:couple_rate - There is a one out of this number chance to make a new corrador between rooms
:max_splits - Max number of times the map can split. (So max number of rooms + 1)
:max_splits_dir - Max number of times a rect can split horizontally or vertically.
Event Options:
:enemy_num - Number of enemys to spawn, overides "Steps Average"
:chest_num - Number of chests to spawn
:trap_num - Number of traps to spawn
:enemy_rate - How much each floor adds to the number of enemys.
:chest_rate - Ditto for chests
:trap_rate - Ditto for traps
:chest_rand - Set the factor chests can be randomly decreased by.
:trap_rand - Ditto for traps
Detail Options:
:detail_chance - 1 out of this number chance to add a detail to a room tile
:pillar_chance - Ditto for pillars
:region_detail_chance - Ditto for zone details
Other:
:blank_chance - 1 out of this number to randomly add blank tiles in a room
:cave_automata - array of two numbers, a birth and a death value, used to make the cave and swamp maps
:exit_path - Set to true and the exit will lead out to the edge of the map
:exit_event - Set to the event used for the exit, so the event will be moved to the right place.
:grass_walls - Makes higher layer autotiles count neerby walls as the same autotile.
:floor_format - sprintf string foir appending the floor number to the map display name.
There are a few more things related to my ai script and such but I think that will be it for now.
I decided to release a small demo/base/thing for my modifications of Saba Kan's random dungeon scripts. Attached here is a very striped down demo, but hopefully some people will find it useful as a base or something.
dungeondemo.zip
Included are seven different maps that hopefully show off some examples of different types of levels. Look in the map properties notes for some of the different options. There is only one type of enemy and a dummy chest item for examples in each map for now, and some maps have traps. There are things I wrote that I didn't include here like dungeon enemy level scaling and randomly choosing items for the chest just to simplify stuff.
(Made some basic documentation here.)
Edit: Updated to make traps work right, and added the blank tileset for dummy map.
Edit 2: Few more bugs due to left over code fixed.
Edit 3: Added code to randomize rect devision more, and to subdevide blocks more. Updated the sample dungeons to reflect this (mostly Dark Place, it's insanly cramped and maze like now). Also traps shouldn't spawn on top of other traps anymore, and the entity placement may be faster.
Edit 4: Fixed a big bug related to room lights not being disposed and makeing games not save right.
Edit 5: Added code to make paths across map edges for wraping maps.
Edit 6: Small fix for using this with the new version of my Cache Back script.
Edit 7: Fixed shops and added the missing script to fix the debug shop work.
Here is a little script I did a while ago. I think I posted it somewhere but Tsukihime had use for it and couldn't find it, and said here would be a good place for it... so!
Anyway it's a script that updates autotiles, properly setting them as if they were placed in the editor. I made it mostly for the random dungeon scripts I am working on, to make more varied terrain.
Wowsers, been a while huh? Anyway here is something I did the other day... a fancy Final Fantasy 7-9 style frame buffer battle swirl effect! All sorts of cool effects could be done with a frame buffer.
Edit: I updated the above with a more up to date version with a slightly different effect and the ability to set $game_temp.special_battle_swirl to true for an alternative swirl for bosses. For completeness sake I am putting a version of start_battle_swirl that emulates the old effect here:
Hi there internetland! Been a while I know!
Here is a WIP script I have been wanting to do for a while... it's intended to work with Yanfly's Battle Engine, and it basically makes it so party members always take their turn in the order you input their actions. The party is sorted by agi at the start of a battle, and using left and right to select different party members allows the player to control the order they go in. Of course, if a slow party member is selected to go first, it's highly likely monsters will move before anyone.
The biggest problem I ran into is I for whatever reason couldn't get the action icon displayed in the corner of a player's face with YBE to update right, and for some reason when I tried to print a number on top of it to indicate the order it was selected it would misalign the text like crazy. Right now pressing the cancel button when inputting orders will cancel all the orders. I was going to have it cancel only the last one, but because of the above problems there is little visual indication it. Also the battle system doesn't seem set up to handle multiple actions very well at all, since the turn order is determined by an actor's speed not the speed of each individual action. That basically means two actions will always be done right next to each other. I haven't actually tested multiple actions though.
This script is actually sort of inspired by Unlimited SaGa, even though Unlimited SaGa gives five actions across the party no matter how many players are in it. If I get into changing turn order to be based on each action individually it wouldn't be hard to do that though. I like it this way myself. Might be fun to add something like the Press Turn System or SaGa-style combos. But that's sort of extra stuff.
I decided to record a video of my current sideview battle and formation system scripts. Also uses an experimental system for using animation cells as movement directions (for example the step forward when attacking for actors is done with a cast animation that moves one cell forward and has the actor sprite follow it). Take a look!
I took the time the other day to fiddle around with my accent script I posted before, and use the note field hash script to load words and stuff! I could still add more to it and document it some before any final release though. But yeah.
For those curious, here are some notetag examples:
For Isabelle, who, like, I don't care what anyone, like, says. She, like, totally looks ditzy to me and junk!
:surprise => "Oh my gosh!":interjection => ", like,":auto_interjection => ", like, ":prefix => "Like, ":suffix => " and junk"
F-For glub the, um, slime girl? I-I am not sure... I-I was experimenting mostly, glub.
:surprise => "Glub glub?":interjection => ", um,":suffix => ", glub":stutter => true
I have been experimenting quite a bit with the grathnode install script, and made more then a few changes and additions to how it works. The main differences I made is allowing skills in addition to items to be attached to skills, allowing attaching stuff to "Attack" and "Guard", a minimum skill cost, and only allowing grathnodes to be attached to some skill types or skills I also made a module for searching note fields on grathnodes.
Here is the code I have so far:
Also speaking of note fields, I have been using a version of this script to get a note hash. I posted a little of my changes in the thread, mostly changing the regex to not need to surround existing notes with anything.
Here is the version I am using:
It should be 100% backwards compatible.
I have been working on my own item menu replacement for a while, since I am not quite happy with any of the others I have seen.
Some screen shots:
The menu is actually spread out over three scripts. Well two if you don't count the small weight display script.
First is the trait/info window script (uses this script to display traits):
Next is the itemlist/category script which is based on this script with some stuff removed and some bug fixes and other tweaks:
Last is a little weight/item total display for FP Inventory Plus (it probably could be merged with the first script actually):
Phew! That's a lot of code! I am not sure if anyone would be interested, but there you go! Still needs to be cleaned up and stuff if I want to release it for real. I have some other scripts as addons to this too, such as a version of Tsukihime Inventory Script and a script the replaces the "draw_other_info" method of the trait window to display different stuff (such as the "Enchantable" text in the screen shot, and other custom info). So yeah.
Uh hey there everyone! I thought I would start a blog for anyone interested in stuff I am doing that I may or may not end up finishing or may end up being too niche to interest many people, that way I can learn if anyone has interest in me releasing full scripts or not.
So first off, here is something I have been working on lately. Namely a "accent" script inspired form the system used in Chrono Cross!
It's just an unfinished experiment right now. It can turn text like "\vg[| |I think we should try and go around--.]" into "Like, oh my gosh! I, like, think we, like, should try and go around and junk." or "\catgirl[| |I think we should try and go around--.]" into "Nya! I think we should try and go around, nya." Maybe I will generalize it and give actors notetags with verbs and interjections and stuff.
