Current Project: RPG Toolkit, codename "M3"

[Destructionator XV]

Very early stages of the first map editor.



Still have a lot to add, but this is where I am now. You can see this is an wholly custom UI, which looks like crap, but is faster and easier for me to make, so it is what I am doing for the first attempt.

On the left, you select from the pool of loaded tiles (also, hovering the mouse over it enlarges it). Then you go to the map on the right and click away / drag the mouse to put them down, using the horrible looking scroll bars to move around your map.

Things I will be adding in the coming days: different brushes (so you can draw a big rectangle at once and stuff like that) and the rest of the needed controls to actually do the fun stuff.

I'll keep you posted.

[Destructionator XV]

Suggested improvements to tile editing: naming conventions.

If a series of tiles are related, they should have similar names to the map editor can use them more effectively. Example:

water-1.tile
water-2.tile
...
water-9.tile

Can be the 9 tiles needed to make a full box of water (8 around the edges, 1 in the middle).

Or when loading animations, if there is a series all in one file, be able to break it up automatically. If not, check for water-1.png and water-2.png and so on.



This is just a file name recommendation, you can ignore it if you want.

More details as I work them out.

[Destructionator XV]

Making more progress on implementing the fancier map features. Time to explain a new one: all maps are now double layered with tiles.

Lemme explain. What you do is create an under layer and an over layer on every square. If you don't care about having them, you can just set the under layer to be completely transparent (which is the default anyway), and it will be the same as it doesn't exist.

There are two things I had in mind when creating this, and another one popped up while I was playing with the idea:

1) More reusability in tiles. Consider a water tile. If you make one partially transparent, you could draw anything you want under it, without needing to make special use tiles for each of those occurrances.

So your under tile might be sand, and your over tile be a semi-transparent water coast, and boom, beach. Or your under tile could be grass with the same water coast, and you now have grass going right up to the ocean.

It gets better. I decided to add a simple flag you can use to flip the top and bottom tiles with ease during the game. This enables the following:

2) Have indoor sections. Consider you are making a town. If you have buildings in this town, you can allow the character to go inside them and see the building, while still being on the same map.

Your under tile would be what is inside the building, and your over tile would be a roof. When the character goes to the door, you flip them: now, the roof is obscured under the inside (hence, not visible if you didn't use transparency up top), and the inside is on top, visible and ready for your character to explore.


This has even more potential: if you had a two floor dungeon, instead of breaking out the two floors into two maps (the generic normal way to do multiple floors), you can make each floor just one of the layers, and make the stairs flip them. (The limitation is map events are the same on both layers, but if you wall it off underneath, this can work. Or maybe I'll change that. Depends if I can get it to fit in the bits. Also, the fights on both floors would be the same for the same reason.)

That brings me to a potential problem - where are townspeople drawn? They should be visible, thus on top. I think the most generic solution is to add a flag telling what layer the event is for. That would only take two bits, but also only allow a single script per square per layer. So if I allow the script to branch... yes, that will work. More on this later.

Another use of the same idea would be to have a map that changes its layout on certain steps, just by again flipping the layers. It could make a brutal maze. (Using the script to alter the dungeon's layout is another possibility for doing this, but not sure if I want to do allow that. Alternatively again is using override events. More when I get around to explaining scripts and events in detail.)





In any case, the two layers can offer some flexibility. The only rule to remember is whatever layer is on top is the one used for rules checks - it determines if the character can walk on it, etc. This can also be used for some flexibility if you wanted to get creative.

[Destructionator XV]

Very exciting threshold today - M3 now runs entirely off its own files, no more dirty hacks.

This also lets me play with some of the cooler features.

If I can keep up this pace, just a few more weeks to preview release time.

[Destructionator XV]

Here, you can see a couple of the things made possible by the advancements in the last couple days.

I started with the Dragon Warrior 1 world map, then started playing with it in my map editor. To the left of the character, you can see a hole in the ground with clouds showing through - that is a demonstration of transparent tiles and a map wallpaper (image stolen from Windows 95). On top, you can see the map overlay, drawing pipes (image stolen from Phantasy Star II).

Under all that is a picture of Crono, which I am using now to test the drawing of tall characters. You can see he looks ok there, but I still need to work on the transparancy in the image a little more.


What you can't see here is you can now walk one pixel at a time if desired, while still working with the tile system - just like in the real Chrono Trigger. Futhermore, you can hold x and run, again like in the real games.

It gets better - if you are at the edge of a wall, the character can walk around it automatically, and you can move diagonally.

In short, the movement engine finally doesn't suck.

Oh, and everything is potentially animated.


Next up, I formalize the beginnings of the character files and write the battle engine.

[Destructionator XV]

Ace requested a shot that shows more possibilities with the translucency, so here is one:


The grass tiles now partially see through to the clouds beneath, and there is a semi transparent layer of fog on top. You can also better see how Crono's head looks when standing in front of something.

[Destructionator XV]

It's been several mostly dead months again. In August, I created a space RTS which is really cool, but it also stalled at about 80% done, but it is quite playable and awesome.

I spent a few hours in the last week switching from binary file formats to text based ones - editable in things like notepad. I found this to be highly successful with the RTS, and am hoping it will help here too.


I want to have this playable finally, but I've not been devoting that much time to it all. I can't give any estimated dates for the next update, but I do want to just say that the project is certainly not dead, and not even frozen - all the files have remained open on my computer almost constantly for a year or so now, getting little additions and changes here and there. I'm working very slowly, but I am working on it.