do you think its possible to have monsters/enemy's to "notice" you?
(ex: you're character is walking along and you see a monster on the
other side of the screen and as you walk behind it, it whips around
and see's you, and attacks...or you get by without it knowing you were
there...) or do all enemys just see you at all times? (this would
be good for a turn based game, so you don't have to fight every single
monster)

Akero Manero

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There are three types of people in this world, people who make it happen, people who watch it happen, and people who wonder what happened.

I'm pretty certain you can set the distance that the monster can "see" you from.

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Quote

Originally posted by theGlueBubble:
**I'm pretty certain you can set the distance that the monster can "see" you from.
**

but i mean like, if you slowly moved past it it wouldn't notice you and you got
past, but if you ran past it could notice you easier.

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There are three types of people in this world, people who make it happen, people who watch it happen, and people who wonder what happened.

Quote

Originally posted by Akero Manero:
**but i mean like, if you slowly moved past it it wouldn't notice you and you got
past, but if you ran past it could notice you easier.

**

Hrm, not sure about that.

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Fortress of Die Nacht: An upcoming game from Aviary Productions.
(url="http://"http://www.aviaryproductions.f2s.com/downloads.html")Go take a look!(/url)

I'm not quite sure either, but it is definitely something I'd like to see... or the ability to set it so that enemies won't notice you if they're facing the other way.

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People who claim the sky is falling obviously aren't aware the earth is falling, too.
--
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --Benjamin Franklin.

-Or can you edit what monsters/npcs/whatever actually do when they 'see' you?

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Quote

Originally posted by sanehatter:
**I'm not quite sure either, but it is definitely something I'd like to see... or the ability to set it so that enemies won't notice you if they're facing the other way.
**

Exactly! and if the monster was facing the other way and you made
to much "noise" the monster wold notice and turn around to face you.

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There are three types of people in this world, people who make it happen, people who watch it happen, and people who wonder what happened.

Well, I think it would be pretty easy to do, actually. You'd just have to set up a "field of vision" sort of thing, according to the x and y of the NPC and the hero. I made diagrams. ^_^

(Figure 1)
The purple monster of impending doom cannot detect the hero, because it is not within it's "field of vision". The field of vision could be set to an amount of space (like from the monster's middle to about 10 points right and 10 points left) near the monster.

(Figure 2)
When the hero steps within the alloted area, and event would be triggered so that the monster would attack the hero.

The area could be expanded or narrowed as "smart" as you want the monster to be.

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For every beautiful answer there is an even more beautiful question.

Nice diagrams, shari.
But I'm not sure how easy the field of vision would be to implement via Coldstone.

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I'm just your average run-of-the-mill demon possessed, bloodsucking, headhunting, cold-blooded, hot-headed, pyromaniac.
My name is Legion, for we are many.

i wonder if you could make it so when hero is in the field of vision the npc talkes to the hero.

Well, I think you would simply have to make a different system for NPCs, where the resulting action would be a message rather than attacking.
Boy do I ever wish I my hands on a copy of Coldstone. I want to experiment and test it's limits!

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For every beautiful answer there is an even more beautiful question.

Well, I hope so, at any rate. The monsters in PoG tend to be on the stupid side. I was taking my Ranger (er, um, oops) out for a spin and was able to kill a few Wyrms without them even noticing me.

My hopes for the field of vision thing are more because I'd like to incorporate some sneaking around elements into my game, similar to certain parts of the last two Zelda N64 games, where the object is to get from point A to point B without being noticed. One thing I'd really like to do in my game is avoid the "your character is so powerful he can take out the entire Storm Giant village!" mentality that pervades CRPGs.

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People who claim the sky is falling obviously aren't aware the earth is falling, too.
--
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --Benjamin Franklin.

hmmmmm, I love storming storm giants villages... that is only when I carry my trusty pocket knife and bag of infinite looting.

no, rilly, just kidding around

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Quote

Originally posted by sanehatter:
**Well, I hope so, at any rate. The monsters in PoG tend to be on the stupid side. I was taking my Ranger (er, um, oops) out for a spin and was able to kill a few Wyrms without them even noticing me.
**

Yeah, I was hoping coldstone could create smarter monsters. I'll have to add some puzzles to offset this.

Quote

**
One thing I'd really like to do in my game is avoid the "your character is so powerful he can take out the entire Storm Giant village!"
**

No kidding. The fun is over. It isn't worth playing anymore. That is what I didn't like about Cythera. I was stronger than any monster ever was in less than a week.

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V-16 Twin Bombers: $800,000
1 Aircraft Carrier: $4,000,000
Battlecruiser loaded with marines: $8,000,000
The look on Bin Ladin's face when we get him: Priceless...

I think it would be a neat idea to "auto-level" monsters, that is, if you gained a level, the monsters around you would also gain levels, thus making the game consistently challenging. No more going back to the Start Village to beat up blobs to gain levels!

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For every beautiful answer there is an even more beautiful question.

Another approach to this problem is to think of different means of character growth. In real-life combat situations, no matter how strong you are, you're still human, and if you take a mortal wound, you're gonna die. Many game systems fail to take this into account.

Anyone remember the Pen & Paper RPG Shadowrun? They had a rather cool way around this, which essentially made it near impossible to improve your "Hit Points," but gave you a rather flexible system to improve character stats and skills. Some of these skills helped to insure you wouldn't be hit quite as often. I don't know how easy this would be to implement in Coldstone, though.

So... if you're not furthering your transformation into a miniature god with each level up, how else do you grow the character so that the player stays interested? Ideas?

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People who claim the sky is falling obviously aren't aware the earth is falling, too.
--
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" --Benjamin Franklin.

Quote

Originally posted by sanehatter:
**So... if you're not furthering your transformation into a miniature god with each level up, how else do you grow the character so that the player stays interested? Ideas?

**

Well, presumably, if your game takes a linear route, with no backwards tracking, then it's just a case of predicting how strong your character gets per area, and then increasing the monster skill a-lá diablo. This might involve making several copies of the same NPC/monster, but it would be preferable to boredom.

Another method of course is changing the monsters in each area. It's likely that most monsters wouldn't inhabit the whole world, they'd be different nasties in each area (just as they're are different species in different locations in the real world). In my game, the first chapter involves you trying to escape from a governers palace. There wouldn't be mutants and boogie-men wandering around the closely gaurded hall-ways would there? Thus, I would make the palace guards (which you have to fight) an appropriate difficulty for the character at that level. The next chapter, will be in a nuclear waste land, so I'll make the mutants and general nasties that inhabit nuclear wastelands stronger than the palace guards. This system would mean throughout the game, most monster will be as strong (if not stronger) than you so each fight will be a game of skill.

Of course, there would be a way of scripting a skill increase for each monster as you gain levels. You can specify and event when you change levels, so you could set up an event tree that increase each monsters strengh, speed, agility etc by say 10% when you gained levels. However, this would be a lenghty event string if you had a lot of nasties (I plan on at least 50 basic types of monster, with 4 or 5 different breeds for each). In my game that would be at least 200 different NPC's that would need altering. Sure it would be a timely procedure and quite hard to test (there's no way of checking the monsters attributes in-game), but it would be very effective if it worked.

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-29°

Killable town's people with no reprucussion's ...we all want them.
(unlike in most pc rpg's were the town's guard goes bananaZZ and starts manglin' you)

if you've ever experienced 'drone jam' (where the dud npc/townsperson bloX the door/path), then you want this

In FF adventure(and Zelda...(b)the chickens(b)) you could strike npcs and they would move/run in fear is it possible to program this event to eliminate (temporarily and permanently) Npc's (y'know the one's who say the same thing through out the whole game) ??????

+29°

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...go fall on something sharp.

Quote

Originally posted by chill_rx:
**In FF adventure(and Zelda...(b)the chickens(b)) you could strike npcs and they would move/run in fear is it possible to program this event to eliminate (temporarily and permanently) Npc's?
**

I'm guessing yes.
If not, you could always make an option in your conversation dialog that says something like "move it"
You could do some other stuff with enough creativity that would get the NPC's out of the way. You could probably script them to run in fear as soon as you put a bomb in front of them. (or something)
I would vouch more for a distractive option, that removed the townsperson temporarily.
Perhaps, have a possesion of theirs nearby (but not to close). If you tried to take it, have the villager run over and tell you to keep your hands off. Then have the NPC remain there the entire game. (or until you exited the current map)

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V-16 Twin Bombers: $8,000,000
1 Aircraft Carrier: $4,000,000,000,000
Battlecruiser loaded with marines: $8,000,000,000,000
The look on Bin Ladin's face when we get him: Priceless...

You could create an item, like say "Chicken" then have that added to your inventory.
Then you could create an NPC event triggered upon wheither you had a "Chicken" in your inventory. The event would make the person come up to you and scold you for taking the chicken. The event would also decrease the chickens in your inventory by one.

Or something. It's late.

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For every beautiful answer there is an even more beautiful question.