The Second

Not much work happened over the holidays, or the days leading up to them; now that they are behind us however, I can focus more time on this project. The basic layout of the City of Crypts has been finished, though there is still a lot of work that needs to go into the map and several tile edits to make things look cleaner. Also, events, NPCs, and sub maps need to be made.

Looks like I missed out on the demo, unfortunately. Anyway, looks like you're making some good headway, and the updates promise some interesting features. I look forward to the next demo release.

I knew there was something like this around, but couldn't remember where I had seen it. Thanks for the link.

You're looking for custom parameters. Try looking at Yanfly's JP Manager. So far as I can tell, there are no other custom parameter scripts out there, though you can take a look at the Master Script List to see if I may have missed something that may help you.

"When you deal damage, you gain more tp according to how high your damage was, to a maximum of say 10 per attack" If you want the tp earned to be based on raw damage dealt, "[@result.hp_damage * 0.1, 10].min * tcr", Adjust the multiplier according to your character's damage output. The magic bullet here is the .min function, which compares a set of values and returns the lowest. "When you take damage, you gain more tp the lower the damage taken was, also to a maximum of 10" "[@result_hp_damage * -0.1 + (mhp / (mhp * 0.1)), 0].max * tcr", This is a little more complex. First, we take mhp and convert it to the maximum amount of tp we want to award, in this case, 10. Multiply the damage taken by a negative number in order to get the inverse ratio, then subtract the ratio from the tp award. Return which ever value is greater, either the result of the formula or 0, via the .max function.

@ KilloZapit - Why not pick the lesser of the two evils? Anyway, you have a point, my writing is a bit (read: very) contrived. Let's look instead at Promised Land, a movie with no real plot, no real direction, about characters no one really cares about. Compare it to The Wind in the Willows, a book of stories with no central plot. but characters who's motivations drive the story's direction. In the first case, there is a contractor, a city council, and a conservationist; pretty bland characters, no plot, who cares. In the second case, you have a naive but earnest mole, a rat with a sharp wit and good conscience, an antisocial, but kindly, badger, and a foppish toad; no plot, but characters who, while not always exciting, are nevertheless compelling. They give the story direction; they are, in essence, the plot. Because the readers care about the characters, they continue reading to find out what the characters will do next. So, if you are going to write a story for a movie, a book, a game, or anything else, ask yourself, 'Are my characters going to be interesting enough to carry this?' Be honest with yourself, get some input from those you trust, and then, if the answer to that question turns out to be 'No', give your characters a reason to exist. A plot, even if it is contrived and cliched, gives the your audience a reason to keep reading, or playing, or watching. @ Heartfelt - A plot never controls the characters. A plot is there to give characters motivation, something to do besides stand around being their bland selves. Anyway, plot is a tool which, when used properly, will save your characters from mediocrity. However, it can be used poorly as well; a poorly conceived plot can bring even Hercules to his knees. @Jay Heartay - No matter how you tell a story, if you want people to listen, it must be interesting. @MindBlower01 - The real beauty behind FF6 isn't the plot, it's the characters. The first half of the game, you are given a plot - stop the Gehstahlean Empire from ruling the world - but it's a red herring. The real story here is that of Kefka, a nihilistic, psychotic madman bent on garnering enough power to destroy everything he hates. It's the story of Terra, a young woman know, 'Am I human?' and 'What is love?' The story of Locke, who is haunted by the ghost of his fiance, and a compulsive need to rescue damsels. Sabin and Edgar, twin heirs to a throne neither truly desires; Cyan, a man who has lost everything except honor. But, not everyone is Yoshinori Kitase or Kenneth Grahame. As I said before, plot is a tool, not a random bit of useless baggage to be tossed out of the window on whim. If it is used it, and used well, it will enhance a story. Don't wield it like a mallet, use it like a artists brush.

If I might make a suggestion for practicing poses, what I do when I have a difficult pose is take the old digicam into the bathroom, make the pose into the mirror and take a snapshot. Then I practice drawing over the pose until I fell confident enough to draw it freehand.

I hear it all of the time - 'My story won't and or doesn't focus on plot, it focuses on the characters.' My answer, 'Really now. Doesn't sound like a very interesting story to me.' Let me illustrate my point with examples. First, let's take a look at a story without a plot, shall we? It was a bright, Sunday morning in the Normal household. The birds outside were chirping, welcoming in the new day, and Father Normal was at the table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of fresh, hot, black coffee, just as he had done every morning for the last thirty years. Mother Normal came down the stairs from the bedroom of their lavish two story house, dressed in her usual Sunday morning attire of a pink, terry cloth robe, a hair net, and fuzzy white slippers. Beneath the hairnet, Mother's long, deep brown hair was wrapped in a tight bun. "Good morning, husband," Mother said as she crossed the breakfast nook on her way to the kitchen. She paused at the coffee maker and poured herself a cup of coffee, then added three teaspoons of sugar from a white ceramic cat that sat nearby. "Good morning, wife," Father replied without looking up from his paper. Mother made her way to the breakfast nook and sat down at the white painted breakfast table. She took a sip of coffee and smiled. From upstairs came the sound of footsteps. Shortly after, Daughter Normal came down the stairs wearing a black, sleeveless dress and spiked heels, her hair dyed bright pink and tied back in a pony tail. "Good morning parents," Daughter said, "I'm going out. I'll be home late." Father and Mother said, "That's nice Daughter." Hmm, let's mix things up a little, shall we? It was a bright, Sunday morning in the Normal household. The birds outside were chirping, welcoming in the new day, and Father Normal was at the table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of fresh, hot, black coffee, just as he had done every morning for the last thirty years. Mother Normal came down the stairs from the bedroom of their lavish two story house, dressed in her usual Sunday morning attire of a pink, terry cloth robe, a hair net, and fuzzy white slippers. Beneath the hairnet, Mother's long, deep brown hair was wrapped in a tight bun. "Good morning, husband," Mother said as she crossed the breakfast nook on her way to the kitchen. She paused at the coffee maker and poured herself a cup of coffee, then added three teaspoons of sugar from a white ceramic cat that sat nearby. "Thank you for making coffee." "Good morning, wife," Father replied without looking up from his paper. "It was nothing. How was work last night?" Mother made her way to the breakfast nook and sat down at the white painted breakfast table. She took a sip of coffee and smiled. "It was work," She said lightly, "more of the grind I go though day after day." "Wife," Father said, folding the paper and turning his full attention to Mother, "You should really find a better job. Your talents are wasted at that factory. Why, with your skills, you could be an astronaut." Mother nodded. It was the same conversation they'd had every Sunday. The fact was, she liked her job at the factory, even though it was a daily grind which often had her working Saturdays. Mother was about to speak those thoughts aloud when, from upstairs, there came the sound of running feet. Shortly after, Daughter Normal came down the stairs wearing a black, sleeveless dress and spiked heels, her hair dyed bright pink and tied back in a pony tail. "Good morning parents," Daughter said, "I'm going out with Tough Biker. I'll be home late." Father slammed his coffee cup down in the table hard enough to cause the coffee inside to slosh over the rim of the cup. "I told you never to have anything to do with that Biker, didn't I?" Father said. "And what exactly do you think you're wearing, young lady. You march yourself upstairs this instant and put on some clothes." Daughter struck a defiant pose in front of Father. "I can see whoever I want!" she proclaimed. "I'm eighteen years old, for God's sake! And what I wear is my own business!" Mother sat at the table, a hand over her eyes to hide the tears. Now, which story would you rather continue reading?

That's a darned good hand. And yes, hands are hard. I tend to use loose fists or pointed digits since I'm too lazy to practice. Only critique I can see is that her hand seems to be disembodied. I think I can see where the arm extends from the top of the wrist, but from the angle of the hand, we should also be able to see the lower part of her forearm as well.

I decided to do a little investigation into the .jp blogs to see if there's a correlation between the English and Japanese communities in regards to number of blog hits, number of comments, and amount and freshness of content. What I found matches up remarkably well with your findings, that even the most popular of blogs seem to have heavy traffic, but generate few comments. This, to me, is a little backwards. If we take a look at, say, cooking blogs, the most popular of them tend to have at least one, and most likely, dozens, of comments on each entry. Why the extreme difference? Does it have to to with an ungrateful or unfriendly community? I don't think so, as most blogs with a 'like' or 'thanks' button on each blog entry tend to accumulate quite a lot of 'one-button praise'. Then I thought about community size. The cooking community is huge... everyone needs to eat, after all, and everyone who eats want's to eat good, satisfying food, and a variety thereof. The RPG Maker community. on the other hand, tends to be far smaller. I also thought about the types of resources available. Most blogs that feature art resources of some type generate few comments, even those that feature new content on a regular basis. On the other hand, blogs that feature scripts tend to generate many comments, especially those with large collections of scripts. However, most of those comments are not from a community of regular visitors, but from visitors to the site looking for help and support, or to report a bug. So, what does it all boil down to? We aren't an ungrateful or unfriendly community, we are a small, close knit community. There tends to be other ways to interact with the bloggers in the RPG Maker community then simply leaving a comment on their blog, such as the forums, private messages, and, since the community is so small, most regulars are likely present in one or more IRC communities as well.

More writing practice, yay! Dialogue is by far the easiest for me to write, and to paint a scene with. Somehow, I find it difficult to set a scene with my own words, so I prefer to speak through a character. ** In an average tavern settled in one of the more seedy corners of an average settlement sat an average man and an average woman. The conversation, however, was far from average. Roderick 'Roddie' Fine and his partner, Janine 'Jeanie' Rough sat in a secluded corner of the establishment, discussing their next job. "So," Rodrick said, crossing his legs under the table as he spoke, "The thing about this next one is... Well it's... Let's just say it's a little, um... complicated." Janine, a woman of stout muscle and strong sinew, leaned forward and placed one meaty fist on the table. Her massive frame neatly dwarfed the stool on which she sat. She needed to balance herself or she risked toppling to the floor.. "Roddie," she muttered, her voice dripping venom, "It's always complicated. Last time it was a dozen slot-nosed geats in a dwarven brewery." Janine shuddered at the memory. She hated slot-noses more than anything. Always with the snuffling, their long snouts dripping mucus, and those eyes. She swore, every slot-nose she ever encountered seemed to be trying to undress her with those beady little eyes. "And the time before that," Janine continued, "What was it, the fire barnacles? It took a month for that patch of hair to grow back in." Rodrick sat up and flailed his narrow arms, trying in vain to distract Janine from her current train of thought. Janine continued on, listing one job after another that had ended with her misfortune. "Jeanie, please," he whined, "You know I do my best to find us easy, clean work. It's just that... Well, it's that..." As Rodrick stammered, he absently brushed a lock of long, auburn hair behind a delicate ear. Talking to Janine about a new job always made him uneasy, and this job especially. "You see," Rodrick said, still adjusting his hair, "The easy jobs just don't pay enough. Like the time you wanted to go rid that farmer of his barn full of scourge rats. He only wanted to pay two Royal a head, and, well... Well, a dozen Royal isn't gonna pay our bills." Janine reached across the table and grabbed the front of Rodrick's elven embroidered tunic. "Twelve Royal would go a long way if you'd stop buying this damned fairy garbage and buy a set of real armor for once." Janine let go of the tunic. Rodrick, who had been nervous the entire night, now found himself completely discombobulated. He rolled backward off the stool and onto the floor, quivering like a perch tossed on a riverbank. Janine sighed in frustration. How was it that this scrawny idiot was able to go toe to toe with a wyvern-shark but couldn't stand being touched by a woman? "Get up," She growled, "You're making a scene." Rodrick hastily scrambled onto the stool. Janine's amber eyes flashed as she spoke, "So, spit it out already. What kind of mess have you gotten us into this time?" Rodrick tried to smile and failed miserably. "You'll love it, really," he said, knowing full well that she wouldn't. "Seems a nest of hydra ants took up residence in the duke's hunting sanctuary. And he's --" Before Rodrick could finish his sentence, Janine rose from the table and, in one fluid movement, grabbed Rodrick by the scruff of the neck and threw him across one of her massive shoulders. "Hydra ants?" Janine raged as she made her way toward the exit, a panicked Rodrick flailing and gurgling from his unflattering ride. "Gods thrice damned hydra ants? Pay for this better be worth it or I'll quarter your scrawny arse and sell you to the ents for fertilizer." Rodrick squealed as Janine ducked through the tavern's entrance and out into the night. "But Jeanie, it pays three hundred a head!" The tavern door swung closed and silence closed in on the average tavern in the average settlement. ** And one more. ** It's half past three AM and I'm exhausted. I don't know how long I've been sitting here typing at this damned computer, maybe I should have paid more attention to the time when I started this but Wait. Let me start at the beginning. My name is Sharon Rodriguez, I'm eighteen years old, a student at Fred Rogers High School in Upcreek Illinois, and I'm the hostage of a computer. Yeah, sounds insane, doesn't it? How can somebody be held hostage by a computer? I don't know, I really don't. All I know is, I can't get up form this desk, I can't look away from this monitor, and I can't stop typing. That last part is the hardest. My fingers feel like they're going to drop off, but I can't stop. Even when I stop focusing on on the keys my fingers keep moving like they've got a mind of they're own. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap, around forty words a minute, I think. So, bet you're wondering how this happened. It started after I met Jimmy Wallace and his squeeze Marian Ball in the hallway after class. Jimmy was looking positively spooked, and I stopped to ask what was the matter. "It's the lab computer," Marian answered softly, as if she might collapse if she tried to speak any louder. "It's... It's..." Marian let out a long, keening wail that sent shivers up and down my spine and slowly sank down to the floor. Jimmy seemed to not even notice, he just stood there, his eyes focused on nothing, his mouth hanging partway open. "Marian, hey. Come on, hey, it's alright," I said, trying to get her to stop screaming. I knelt beside her and pulled her head against my shoulder. Marian just sat there, her wails slowly turning to broken sobs. "Come on now," I soothed, "Tell me what happened. What about the lab computer?" I rocked Marian gently as her sobs subsided. It was a little while before she could speak, and when she did, it was in a fragile, haunted whisper. "Jimmy wanted to go look up something after class," Marian started, "Something about the Salem witches or something. So i went with him, and he sat down at the computer desk and typed 'Salem Witches' into Google." Marian shuddered weakly at the memory. Her body felt cold, like she'd spent an hour in the deep freeze. I pulled her closer to me; her cold body seem to suck at the warmth out of my own, but I held her close, trying my best to warm and calm her as she told her story. "When the links pupped up, the top one was all garbled, like... Like all random letters and numbers and symbols, but... But it was in some strange font, and the symbols were like... Like upside down crosses and eyes and wavy lines and... And Jimmy clicked it... and... an... a..." "Marian," I said, holding her rapidly weakening body against mine, "Marian, come on. Come on, stay with me, Marian." I was rapidly loosing my cool; it took everything I had to not let loose with fractured screams of my own as I rocked back and forth, cradling the body of a girl that I knew only by reputation. I kept calling out to her, trying for some response, but there was nothing. She was gone. I gently laid her down on the floor of the hallway and looked up at Jimmy. He was still in a daze, unblinking, unmoving. I stood up from the floor; I felt sluggish, as if I had aged a hundred years. I walked up to Jimmy and put a hand on his arm; he was cold, cold like -- He was cold, I'll leave it at that. "Hey, Jimmy," I coaxed, my voice quiet so I didn't spook him. "Jimmy, what's going on? What did you see? What happened?" Jimmy's turned his face toward mine in slow motion, like I was watching him on a DVD that'd had it's data all scrambled. "Jimmy," I hissed, "What is it? What's wrong?" Jimmy's eyes met mine; for an instant, just a split second, I saw something in his eyes, something that made me gasp in shock and stumble backwards. A face. A hideous, deformed face. The moment I stumbled, Jimmy howled in and clutched his face in his hands. "She's alive," He screamed, "She's still alive!" A moment later, he was on the floor beside Marian. He had fallen beside her, his right hand outstretched toward the girl he had dated for more than a year. It was almost like he was reaching out for her, as if his only desire was to touch her one last time. I backed away from that scene, until my back touched the wall. Still, I pushed against it, the rubberized soles of my shoes squealing in protest as I tried to will myself through the solid bricks. In my mind, I kept telling myself it wasn't real, this couldn't be happening. But the scene in front of me wouldn't let me delude myself. it was real. So terribly real. I had to get a hold of myself. I forced my eyes shut, forced myself to stop moving. I stayed like that until my racing heart calmed and my breathing slowed. I'd been hyperventilating and hadn't even realized. As the my body's rhythms evened out, so did my thoughts. Something horrible had happened, something that had taken my schoolmates. I had to stop it before anyone else got hurt. Stop it or... Or something. I made my way up the steps from the first floor to the second, where the lab was located at the far right end of the building. My feet were heavy and my footsteps sounded as loud as thunderclaps as I made my way to the door that shut off the lab from the rest of the building. Step by step, I drew closer to the lab. I could see through the door's narrow rectangular window into the room beyond; it was dark, except for the bluish, electronic light emitted from the lab's sole computer. My arm felt like lead as I reached for the doorknob; the metal was cool beneath my fingers as I gripped the knob, turned it. The door opened easily, without even a creak. Beyond, the room was chilly. I took a deep breath and entered, hoping I wasn't going to make the last mistake of my life. The computer sat on a desk in the center of the room, it's monitor glowing in the darkness, casting an eldrich glow on the surrounding room. As I approached it, I could hear the hum of it's cooling fans, and I could make out what was on the screen. A blank page, like an HTML document was on screen, it's input cursor flashing with a steady rhythm. Before I know what was happening, I was pulling the chair away from the desk. "No!" i shouted, trying to throw myself away from the machine that had already taken two two people I had known, but I wasn't in control. I watched, numbed with dread, as my body sat down in the chair, scooted closer to the computer desk, laid it's fingers on the keys, and started typing. The symbols that were input were like nothing I had ever seen.before. Like Marian had reported before she passed, they were weird, arcane symbols; an eye; a bird; wavy, horizontal lines; ankhs; pinwheels. I could make nothing of it, yet my fingers seemed to know exactly what they were doing, typing away, inputting line after line of illegible gibberish. I tried fighting against myself, tried to will my hands to stop moving, to stand, to look away and deny the existence of this occult machine, but it was no use. I was a prisoner. I was being used. And here I sit, still typing. No longer on the weird HTML interface though. I may not have the use of my hands, I may not be able to get off of this chair, but I can still move my torso. And so, after far too long, it dawned on me than I could trick this damned machine. So I leaned down, and with the tip of my nose, hit the escape key. it was a long shot, but it worked; the interface closed and I was looking at the computer desktop. A few carefully timed keystrokes later, I've got the notepad open. And so long as that HTML interface isn't open, it seems that it I can enter whatever keystrokes I want, so I typed up this document, just in case. Because I'm about to try something else. I can just reach the power button from here, and maybe, just maybe, I can turn this thing off and finally be free. But, just in case, this document is going to be here, a record of what happened. Just in case... you know. Well, wish me luck.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind comments. @Tsarmina, I've always loved the name Persephone. I'd decided that if I ever had a daughter, that's what we'd name her.