dragon warrior style combat:
yes
for roaming unseen monsters, use a white pict file to represent as it will be rendered invisible.
create npcs that are passive, starting hp of 0, and have them set to try to reach the player.
in their player contact event, give them a teleport action this takes you to a map, with a hostile version of the npc waiting for you.
(url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/articles/vault/turnbaseP.pdf")http://www.geocities...t/turnbaseP.pdf(/url)
rather than me rewrite an entire page of it, its 9 pages and its all in there, if you have questions email me.
your main goal will be to set up the perspective, i suggest using a low resolution, 640x480, as your battle sequence will require moving seemingly large graphics, and memory can add up against you. however most enix games really only used small effects and made the enemy npc shake or bounce.
if you want the action to be truly first person, then switch the player grpahic to one that is a white pict as well, make sure to give it the full compliment of attack, range magic, block etc,(remember they must loop back to the walk index) but use white picts.
place the player where you want the effects to flow from. use range weapons, give them effects, for the most part they will use the "instantly hit" option.
i have recently come across a simpler way to do turnbased that doesn't involve way too much work:
the player aand the npc have range attacks, yet these weapons have conditions. just toggle attack ability back and forth between the two sides using "conditional...only allow if". basically when you use your weapon, in either the frame of animation,
the use event link, hitting the end turn button(cough RTS one man against an army ) the value of the global
gb_side is incremented and when its the NPC side detremented. I suggest using division tests, or just adding 1 after the plaayer finishes and subtracting when the npc finishes
(problem for multiple foes unless it subtracts the number of npcs present at the beginning of the fight, do what's best, i suggest a single strong foe.)
if you want to prevent the CGE savvy user from hitting the z key to defend . Use magic only and switch/exchange/dedicate one of the resistances and damages to natural defense.
revision two do not lock any of the combatants completely in place by blocking access, set the npc ai type to aggressive caster, have them "walk around initial position, with a range of 0", let the player run wild.
just divide the screen in 2 and you can let the npc run wild as well.
make sure the player and the npc has a range equal to the size of the battle map, just play with the dexterity, perception skills etc to insure misses, give the magic a greater damage range something like 20% + -.
---Extra:
if you let the battling npc run wild, do not give it a visible animation. simply place a looping breathe animation
( ie if the npc hovers; bat, plane, bird, flying castle, place a hovering loop picture of them ) you'll need to use a staamp action to properly address and destroy the imaage when the npc dies, so in the local map initalization event, place it with a name like
"baddy"
then in the npc death event link, give it a stamp action that deletes the stamp called "baddy".
don't forget to lock the camera onto the action...why because it doesn't make the game play look so antiquated.
remember low res, saves you space and ram, and won't burden the engine so much.
....
multiple party, living entities that think and react and attack, not at all.
not unless you can set target values and make them change appearance based on conditions...
currently an almost certain no.
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... bwahhaaaaahaaaaaugh fooooolish sammurai.
{ edit : sorry Keith }
(This message has been edited by ellrx (edited 09-04-2003).)
