(Deleted by The Zerowarrior)

(This message has been edited by zerowarrior150 (edited 08-12-2003).)

Quote

Originally posted by Rubber Ducky:
**I don't know what your situation is and what you're trying to do. If you give us a brief description of what you want to do then perhaps we can help.

**

okay, here goes:
there are 5 apples on the screen. there can be up to 8, but you start with five. your apple meter, like life. when you get hurt by bees, your apple meter goes down by a certain amt. what i'm asking is how do you do that and how do you change the meter when you grow up (level up) so it can go up to eight. how'd they do it in ferazel's wand?
thank you.

Quote

Originally posted by nitemime:
okay, here goes:
there are 5 apples on the screen. there can be up to 8, but you start with five. your apple meter, like life. when you get hurt by bees, your apple meter goes down by a certain amt. what i'm asking is how do you do that and how do you change the meter when you grow up (level up) so it can go up to eight. how'd they do it in ferazel's wand?
thank you.

While you're at it Rubber Ducky, you can kill two birds with one stone with my question about this as well:
How do you do a status bar with how much life and magic is left and as it gets used, it goes down, you find items to recharge, it goes back up.
I have somewhat of an idea on how to do this, I understand the 'make different pictures for each phase of stamina missing', but I got lost after that. If you could, just clear up what myshkyn and blacklite said: i know they are on the right track, but its like greek to me. You're the best.

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-The ZeroWarrior

Quote

Originally posted by nitemime:
okay, here goes:
there are 5 apples on the screen. there can be up to 8, but you start with five. your apple meter, like life. when you get hurt by bees, your apple meter goes down by a certain amt. what i'm asking is how do you do that and how do you change the meter when you grow up (level up) so it can go up to eight. how'd they do it in ferazel's wand?
thank you.

First off, Ferazel's Wand was not done with Coldstone and I have no clue as to how they did it, and I've never played Ferazel's Wand so I don't know what it looks like either. The status in Coldstone is done with Health Points (HP) and only shows up as a status bar for NPCs. The hero's status is at the bottom of the playing screen.

You can have a 'manufactured' status bar appear on the map by using a stamp control tied into a keydown event. You would have to create eight pictures (1 - and if these were done as animations of a series of the same picture followed by a completely white picture then the stamp would stay on the map for a short while and then disappear. These could be tied into PlayerX and PlayerY co-ordinates to place the stamp just below the hero.

You will need a global for life and a global for level. (gb_Life, gb_Level)

Keydown: "L" calls event "Life status"

"Life status" event:
Conditional: If gb_Life = 1, then stamp control places anim-Life1 at PlayerX, PlayerY + whatever. (To put the status bar just under hero's position.)
Conditional: If gb_Life = 2, then stamp control places anim-Life2 at PlayerX, PlayerY + whatever.
Conditional: If gb_Life = 3, then stamp control places anim-Life3 at PlayerX, PlayerY + whatever. And so on.

Set stage event: Set gb_Life = 5, set gb_Level = 1.

Hero gets stung by Red Bee: change gb_Life minus 1.
Hero gets stung by Blue Bee: change gb_Life minus 2.
Hero finds and eats apple: Conditional: If gb_Level = 1 AND gb_Life < 5, then change global gb_Life plus 1 (or whatever.)
Conditional: If gb_Level = 2 AND gb_Life < 6, then change global gb_Life plus 1.
Conditional: If gb_Level = 3 AND gb_Life < 7, then change global gb_Life plus 1.

I really don't know if this is what you want, but Coldstone does not have an easy way to put a status bar on the map so you have to be inventive.

To zerowarrior150 - As far as killing two birds with one stone, I'm not sure if I even seriously wounded either of them. "Tis the best that I can do. ~RD

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My Doctor said I was having too much wine, women, and song - so I gave up singing because 2 out of 3 is not so bad.
The (url="http://"http://www.evula.org/rduck/")Kingdom of Garendall(/url) sectional map is easily printed from gif format pages.
(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-redirect.pl/damsels.sit?path=pog/addons&file;=damselsV1.1.sit")Damsels in Distress(/url) - A plugin for PoG.

i think you answered my question. you are a lot of help.

Quote

Originally posted by nitemime:
i think you answered my question. you are a lot of help.:)

Yeah you have RD, and thanks to a few of these posts (along with myshkyn and blacklite), I am getting the hang of coldstone a bit. But I'm a fraid I have been a bit misleading about my status bar question, and I'm at a loss about some of these replies(I think myshkyn may have pointed me in the right direction. Let me see if I can clarify things a bit:
What I mean for the status bar is, like they have in a fighting game at the top of the screen, and shows how much life the fighter has left. I'm not talking about on the map, I'm talking about on the map interface, where the player's stats are located. I am sorry if I seem like a pain about this subject, but there are 5 critical elements that I need to see if they can be achieved while using this coldstone platform, and the status bar is number three. I still need clearance for: multi-characters (even the fake multi character party where you can only control one at a time is fine), hurt animations, (status bar, which I already have said), workaround for the long pause during spell casting, and how to keep the game spanning across from one disc to another. I thank you all for your time and patience, and your working effort. I will credit all that contribute, and send small donations to those people who I believe have out and out tried to go over the top to help me out. Thanks guys.

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-The ZeroWarrior

(This message has been deleted by the ZeroWarrior.)

(This message has been edited by zerowarrior150 (edited 08-19-2003).)

I was being lazy. Here we go.

First of all, you should know before hand that your status bar will not do exactly what you want, it will be a pain to make it exact, and adding a MP status bar to your HP bar will increase the complexity exponentially. The closest thing to a HP bar that I have made (and been halfway satisfied with) was actually a row of heart containers a la Zelda.

This method uses the Player Portrait, the only Map Interface graphic that can be dynamically altered during gameplay. So the first thing you will need to do is design your HP Bar and give it a place in your Map Interface. When you're done, move on to step one:

Let's say your hero has 10 Hit Points.Create 10 status bar pictures from 100% full (10 hp) to 10% full (1 HP). Put these in your Portraits subfolder in the Player folder.

THE EVENT
Create the following event:
Action 1: Conditional
If Stamina equals 10, change Player Portrait to "100.png"
If not, do nothing
Action 2: Conditional
If Stamina equals 9, change Player Portrait to "90.png"
If not, do nothing
Action 3: Conditional
If Stamina equals 8, change Player Portrait to "80.png"
If not, do nothing
...and so on, until all bases are covered. At the end of this sequence, add a "Refresh Screen" action.
This is the event you will call whenever your hero does anything to change his HP.

Now, give your NPC a weapon for its attack. In the "Hit" link of the NPC's weapon, use the Call Event action to call the event above. The "Hit " event is called right after the hit takes place and damage is done. Your HP bar should lower according to however much damage your NPC did.

If your hero takes a potion of healing or casts a healing spell, you will have to call the same event for each situation.

GAINING LEVELS, AND RAISING THE MAX HP
You can do this one of two ways. One: keep the bar the same length for the whole game and have it decrease/increase in smaller increments as the hero advances; or Two: have the bar lengthen as the hero's max HP goes up.

Keepng the bar the same length would require you to make a seperate event for every time the hero's Max HP went up. Using 10 HP as an example, if the hero leveled up and his Max HP went to 15, his damage would not show with the above event until his current HP got below 10. So you would have to switch to a new event each level.

If you are going to have the bar lengthen as he gains levels and raises his Max HP, you would need to make the first action in the above event the check for highest HP amount he will ever have, and run it all the way down to almost dead. Then you could use the same event his entire adventuring career. The only problem with this is he won't have any thing in the graphic to show his current Max HP. If you wanted to show that, you would again need more events: a new one every time the hero's Max HP raised.

HP AND MP BARS
Now the main problem with wanting both a HP and a MP bar is the fact that you have to use the same Portrait, because there's only one. It's possible. But let's say you were using increments of 5%. That's 20 conditionals to an event like the one above. If your MP Bar was also using 5% increments, those 20 conditionals become 400. Because with every check on the HP bar, you need to make 20 checks on the MP, or vice versa. Plus different events every time the HP max went up, everytime the MP max went up, et cetera.

If you want a HP/MP bar, you maight have to rethink the entire damage and HP scale of your game, just to make it all manageable. If this still wasn't clear, I could probably reproduce my experiment with the Heart Containers and send it to you as a HP bar. But, as I remember, it worked but it still wasn't very pretty. The hearts flickered and didn't always update immediately.

Maybe somebody will come up with a better way. Good luck.

myshkyn

PS. JUST FOR FUN:

If Coldstone recognized decimals, we could do it this way:
Create a new global. Call it "work".
Create the event like this:

Set gbl_work to Current Stamina
Divide gbl_work by Max Stamina
If gbl_work is greater than .90 but less than .99, then change Player Portrait to "90.png"
If gbl_work is greater than .80 but less than .89, then change Player Portrait to "80.png"
If gbl_work is greater than .70 but less than .79, then change Player Portrait to "70.png"
If gbl_work is greater than .60 but less than .69, then change Player Portrait to "60.png"
and so on, with the Refresh Screen action at the end. Then, you would only have to make one event, no matter how many times your Hero raised his Max HP.

But Coldstone does not recognize decimals. Alas.

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"I'll give the fans just what they want, and nothing else at all."

Quote

Originally posted by myshkyn:
**
If you want a HP/MP bar, you maight have to rethink the entire damage and HP scale of your game, just to make it all manageable. If this still wasn't clear, I could probably reproduce my experiment with the Heart Containers and send it to you as a HP bar. But, as I remember, it worked but it still wasn't very pretty. The hearts flickered and didn't always update immediately.

Maybe somebody will come up with a better way. Good luck.

myshkyn

**

Sure, send me a myshkyn tutorial ( ) but send it to this address for now:
mtserve@hotmail.com
That's the only empty e-mail I have so far.( You got to keep it under 2MB. If it is bigger, let me know and I'll clear away another of my accounts.)
Just do me a favor though, just put a quick message at alanx15@hotmail.com when you do send me something so I don't forget to check .

I just need more visuals, I think. I partly understand the concept (and why not? You're tried to explain it three times now!!! ), but I am at a loss when I halfway crate this monster stamina bar 'project'. I understand the different pictures for the bar, but confused as to globally check and link them, and when leveling up. Thanks.

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-The ZeroWarrior

(This message has been edited by zerowarrior150 (edited 08-21-2003).)

Go ahead and email me, Myshkyn.

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-The ZeroWarrior

sorry about the bad english before, webboard people, My brother typing wanted to type out my stuff. i didn't know that he couldn't spell that well, so I'll do it myself. A question has arisen when I was working with a night type map. It has been fortold before, but i was looking for maybe a different '"stragety'". When you place transparent tiles over the map, it shreds the fps. Has there been a method that has produced no loss of fps speed or minimal if any at all. I can't have the game be this slow!!! :eek:
What do I have to do?

(This message has been edited by nitemime (edited 08-21-2003).)

Quote

Originally posted by me:
s there a way to display a different 'hurt' animation when the enemy or
main NPC is attacked? )

Stark, I KNOW you know how to accomplish this

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-The ZeroWarrior

Quote

Originally posted by myshkyn:
**Here are the one's I have answers to:

Is there a way to display a different 'hurt' animation when the enemy or
main NPC is attacked?

I don't think so. You can give all your weapons a spell that does nothing but place a blood splash animation over your targets (this works for ranged weapons too: just give the animation a couple frames of blank to give the missile time to visually rreach its victim) but there are no "flinch" animation options in CGE's animation system.

Is there any way to 'attach' a sound to an object or animation in the game,
and while in the game, it can get louder and softer as you leave it and get
closer?

No. The best you can do, as far as I have figured, is treat the sound in question as music, and place event tiles of "set music volume" actions at decreasing volume levels in pond ripples around the object.

Is there a way to change the colors for the numbers and words that pop up
during battle (Font or color) or picking up an item?

No. I have a faint hope, though, that if the Marathon:Evil people were able to change the font in a mod of that game with a little hack several years ago, font options are somewhere in the future. Be warned that I am constantly chided for my optimism.

Can you send a certain item, say a rare one, to a certain to another
inventory screen aside from the normal items? Can they be sent to a
diffrerent screen altogether?

Make a Main Location for your Special Items screen and use stamps to represent your items. The only way to catagorize item types in the inventory screen is with your own naming scheme.

Can you have the game on a day and night timer, and have the graphics change
accordingly?

There's a timer in the add-ons section I think. But CGE can't change color tones or brightness levels. You will have to make a sperate map for day and night, or use an "above all" transparent stamp to darken the screen, which will seroiously affect your framerate.

Can the map interface be altered multiple times times during the course of
the game?

Only cosmetically, and only if you don't mind using the Player Portrait to do so. The problem with that is you can't change the positions of the statistic fields.

Can there be a health meter instead of just numbers for HP?

Yes, by using the Player Portrait, and ample "Change Portrait" and "Refresh Screen" actions placed in the "Hit" event of every weapon every NPC uses.

Can the 'HP bar' that appears under NPC's be 'turned off'?

No.

Is there a way to change all button configurations for the game, including
changing the X and Z for Attack and Block, say to J and K instead?

You can add buttons, but you can't change the ones that already exist.

myshkyn

edit: I suck at html**

I THINK you can make a new inventory screen but to do so you might have to copy the Inventory files and REplace as a duplicate in the inventory folder or something like that. Beats me .I've only had C.S. for 8 days.

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joe shmoe

Something else I have come up against with in my travels with Coldstone:
Can you set up a certain set of keys for movement like for example-
I
J K
M
I: For north animation
J: For west animation
K: For east animation
M: For south animation
It would make the games created by Coldstone feel more 'game-like', like it would fit like a console game, and less of a computer game.

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-The ZeroWarrior

I have asked that question before (I think :-o) And I got an answer like this:

You can create keydown events to cast spells and such, but not change the movement keys, no.

So thats what I know:P It might be possible, but I dont think so ;).

(EDIT)

Quote

I THINK you can make a new inventory screen but to do so you might have to copy the Inventory files and REplace as a duplicate in the inventory folder or something like that. Beats me .I've only had C.S. for 8 days.

Ofcourse you can! just go to the your game's preferences and change it under the "Layouts" tab

P.S You should go through the tutorial No offense...

(/EDIT)

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(url="http://"http://www.ledorax.da.ru")Ledorax Land(/url)
(url="http://"mailto:ledorax@spymac.com")mailto:ledorax@spymac.com(/url)ledorax@spymac.com

(quote)Originally posted by Ledorax:
**I
P.S You should go through the tutorial

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-The ZeroWarrior
**

Quote

I hope that was not directed to me Ledorax: as of the time of this writing, I have about about 8 copies of the manual, 7 that are in b/w, and 1 in color, (For me of course). The others I have scattered around, so when others help me out, they can just pick it up and refer to it. It is my bible, along with Starks, Ellrx, and Stray's stuff I need from time to time. Believe me, I read the manual, and if I forgot something or can't remember it ( or maybe lost a copy, I've done that already, I don't know how) I have a few other copies of the manual to turn to. The question is do YOU read and go through the manuals?

Heh, no it was directed to poger because he said something very basic

To Poger: still no offense

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(url="http://"http://www.ledorax.da.ru")Ledorax Land(/url)
(url="http://"mailto:ledorax@spymac.com")mailto:ledorax@spymac.com(/url)ledorax@spymac.com

Quote

Originally posted by Ledorax:
**Heh, no it was directed to poger because he said something very basic:)

To Poger: still no offense

**

Noted.

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-The ZeroWarrior

(quote)Originally posted by Ledorax:
**Heh, no it was directed to poger because he said something very basic;).

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joe shmoe
**