Getting started

[orius]

Ok, so I've been playing around a bit with the game for the last two days. It's pretty good, but there's a lot of stuff to absorb.

Also played a little bit of fu-ma, but it is very very bland. Like a cheap copy of Dragon Quest without anything that makes DQ good. I have to say, Gobli was a much better example game, it wasn't much on its own, but the story at least was something original and amusing.

I've got basically a small test game going where's I'm going to learn how things work. I took the beginner presets, set the difficulty to normal, and got rid of some of the files I know I'm not going to use. I dumped most of the maps (some where very interesting as a way of showing what could be done, but likely I'd never use them in an actual game), the encounter setups, since I'm going going to set the monsters on my own, and the most of the starting party. I redid the preset world and town maps into new maps of my own, and kept one of the starting characters, but going to give him a different model and customize the look. I made a very basic dungeon (read: big square room), and connected the town, world map and dungeon together. I just redid the preset scripts that connected the town and map and reset the coordinates, and I also added a new feature: instead of just entering the town from the world map when the town is touched, I put in a Yes/No prompt for entering the town. Next up will be adding monsters probably.

There's a few things I want to know about the system.

Is there any suggestion on how I should set the initial stats for the characters? In RPGM1, the usual advice is to have the stats add up to 30 (35 if MDef is used), or an average of 5 each. I know from my own experiences that a higher curve of stat growth makes the characters gain power a faster and it tends to destroy challenge and game balance. Any such advice here? Also, I know in RPGM1, the character's base stats determines stat growth. So, if the character has a base Str of 6, he gains 6 Str every level. How does stat growth work in this game, is it simple like this, or more complicated? From poking around I also know classes affect the stats, it looks like it adjusts stats by a percentage.

I found a listing of the damage formula in the sticky:

Normal Damage = (Insti ATT - (Target DEF / 2)) * [1 - (Enemy Wpn Resist / 100)] * [(Damage Rate A) / 100]

Ok, I understand most of that. The first part is (Attack of attacker - defense of target) / 2. Right, that's the same damage formula RPGM1 uses. Second part looks like a percentage based on resistance to damage type being removed from the total damage. The third part I don't understand. What's Damage Rate A signify?

[orius]

Re: Getting started

Ok, never mind about the character stats, I found that in the game. That actually looks pretty easy to set up.

And I was off a bit on the damage formula, it's actually a little different from RPGM1 (no wonder the numbers weren't working the way they were supposed to in the game). The basic formula is similar enough though.

[BlueSenshi]

Re: Getting started

I don't have the game open at the moment, but it looks like Damage Rate A allows you to specify an additional parameter for damage. If you wanted to make a certain type of weapon do more damage - Axes do 10% more damage than Swords, for example - you would set Damage Rate A to 110 for Axes and 100 for Swords.

In general:

Giving a weapon a higher Damage Rate means you are not able to damage enemies with higher Defense, but damage increases at a faster rate as the gap between your Attack and the enemy's Defense increases. This will generate more Normal Damage against enemies that have low Defense relative to your character.

Giving a weapon a higher Attack stat means you are able to damage enemies with higher Defense and your damage increases at a constant rate. This will generate more Normal Damage against enemies that have high Defense relative to your character.

So it really depends on how you want to balance stats. If you're just starting, keep it simple.

[orius]

Re: Getting started

I'm wondering if it's supposed to be that rate parameter under Direct Effects. I can't think of anything else that would fit, but when I put the numbers that the default data used for it it doesn't make any sense at all. Like they use low numbers like 1, 3, 5 in some of the equipment IIve been fiddling with but that makes the math all screwy from what I can see. When I ignore the Damage Rate A part of the equation and just use that first part, the numbers crunch alright. The weapon resistance I haven't played much with because it doesn't matter if the enemy doesn't have any resistances, but it seems to work as I expected after I played with it on some skeletons I made.

[orius]

Re: Getting started

Ok, I've been looking at the damage formula scripts and from what I can tell it is the rate under Direct Effects, but I'm supposed to add 100 first I think. It sounds like it would work right in the equations.

I played around with some scripting too. I found where I could add custom commands on the menu for the player, so I added an option to adjust the camera settings. I don't really like the default camera view in the game, I can't see squat with it. So I set up a script that placed the camera into a high overhead view and put a menu command into the game to activate it. It went off very easily, I did everything right the first time without having to fiddle with it (a lot of times when I work with stuff like this I have to play with it a few times because it doesn't work the way I think it's going to work and I have to figure out how to do it). Then I added two more similar menu commands for a low camera angle and to restore the default. Then, to make things more efficient, I tried a script that allowed the player to adjust to any of those three after a Yes/No prompt, and it too worked perfectly on the first try. That made made me more confident about using the software. After removing the redundant individual commands, I went for an encore by putting in a menu command to display the map screen without using an item, and it also worked perfectly.

The camera views aren't really perfect, the overhead view has some slight issues with the draw distance in the upper corners if the map is oriented diagonally and of course the low angle make the really narrow draw distance in this game pretty obvious, but they're both still better to me than the default view.

I also learned something important about the map editor. What I was doing is using the default Preset Map that all the modes start with. I erased everything on the map and made my own from scratch. The problem I had was that the colors on the mini-map didn't match the textures properly. I placed a desert type terrain and it looked green, grass looked black, and really nothing matched up, it looked like a big dark blob and nothing matched up. Basically, everything had the proper color for the texture above it in the texture selection. This was no good at all, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. Finally, I moved the snow texture down to the bottom of this list and voila! everything looked the way it was supposed to.

Anyway I just looked through the texture settings for one of the default beginner maps and a map made from scratch and I think found out what the problem is.

According to the game help, there's 16 different map textures, and 6 of them are reserved. The reserved ones are for bare ground, snow and 2 slope textures for mountains, and two sea bed textures. The thing is, the reserved textures looks like they're supposed to be kept at specific spots on the list, but the user can moves them around. Really, only the 10 customizable textures should have been moveable. The problem is that the Preset Map, which is on all three difficulties, has Snow up in the sencond position; looking at fresh maps seems to indicate it should be kept at 14th (labeled 13, since they're numbered 0-15). So what happened, if I'm right, whoever made the map played around with the texture positions and didn't put Snow back where it was supposed to be. That's why all the colors on the mini-map were all screwed up.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: Getting started

Good job on the figuring out how to control the camera through scripts. But you might be interested to know that RPGM2 actually has an option to customize the default camera angle and distance in General Settings. Or Game Settings. It's one of the Settings. In the "Advanced" tab (viewable if you're on Hard). Still, it was worth not knowing the option existed if you were able to get it to make the camera go to multiple angles.

Also, very useful info for the texture issue.

[orius]

Re: Getting started

Oh, I'd noticed that setting already. I played around with it a little bit, but I went with the scripting because I know people have their own camera viewing preferences. So instead of just locking the camera into one spot, I feel it's better to let the user have some choice.

I also figured out how to adjust some of the battle scripts to play a victory theme at the end of battle. It's mentioned in the first post of the sticky here, though I figured out how to do it on my own (not like it was really complicated, just requires some very slight tweaking of two scripts).

I've been looking into classes too. It's a bit annoying that you can't restrict classes to some characters, and that classes requirements are just other classes. RPGM1 had some decent options here, as it allowed classes (skills in that game) to be open for certain characters and allowed for requirements like ability scores. I don't know why this game simplified things; an option under the custom tag where you create party members with check boxes for all the classes would have been fine, and they probably could have had ability score requirements on the same page as the class levels.

So because I don't necessarily want all characters to take all the classes, I looked at how I could restrict things. First thing I thought was to see if I could set level 1 in the class as a requirement for the class and give a level 1 to the character who I want to take it. This would be for the initial starting classes. So I go to the requirements section under the default wizard class and see that "Wizard" is grayed out.

Me: "Goddammit."

Ok, I don't really want to try working on a custom class changing system, and the script commands related to classes don't have an obvious way of doing this anyway. So my guess would be to create something like 3 or 4 classes that are requirements of the initial classes. So there'd be a Fighter class, and 1 level in it would unlock say Warrior, Barbarian, and any other basic fighting class. But then I'd turn around and make the requirement for the Fighter 8 ranks in the other classes I'm using for this and just to avoid as much bypassing as possible, max out the number of victories and experience needed for each rank in each of those classes so no one would ever be able to take them. Then anyone who I want to take the initial classes gets a single rank in the class needed to unlock them.

Doing some poking around, I see BlueSenshi has already written an FAQ on this subject, and his solution seems to be similar to what I just described above. Well, if my tinkering doesn't work, I know where to look.

[thefinalrune]

Re: Getting started

I also learned something important about the map editor.

As a shameless self plug I recommend checking out my map editor guide if you want to know more about the map editor and using it to its fullest extent.

[Jeremy]

Re: Getting started

Oh, I'd noticed that setting already. I played around with it a little bit, but I went with the scripting because I know people have their own camera viewing preferences. So instead of just locking the camera into one spot, I feel it's better to let the user have some choice.

I also figured out how to adjust some of the battle scripts to play a victory theme at the end of battle. It's mentioned in the first post of the sticky here, though I figured out how to do it on my own (not like it was really complicated, just requires some very slight tweaking of two scripts).

I've been looking into classes too. It's a bit annoying that you can't restrict classes to some characters, and that classes requirements are just other classes. RPGM1 had some decent options here, as it allowed classes (skills in that game) to be open for certain characters and allowed for requirements like ability scores. I don't know why this game simplified things; an option under the custom tag where you create party members with check boxes for all the classes would have been fine, and they probably could have had ability score requirements on the same page as the class levels.

So because I don't necessarily want all characters to take all the classes, I looked at how I could restrict things. First thing I thought was to see if I could set level 1 in the class as a requirement for the class and give a level 1 to the character who I want to take it. This would be for the initial starting classes. So I go to the requirements section under the default wizard class and see that "Wizard" is grayed out.

Me: "Goddammit."

Ok, I don't really want to try working on a custom class changing system, and the script commands related to classes don't have an obvious way of doing this anyway. So my guess would be to create something like 3 or 4 classes that are requirements of the initial classes. So there'd be a Fighter class, and 1 level in it would unlock say Warrior, Barbarian, and any other basic fighting class. But then I'd turn around and make the requirement for the Fighter 8 ranks in the other classes I'm using for this and just to avoid as much bypassing as possible, max out the number of victories and experience needed for each rank in each of those classes so no one would ever be able to take them. Then anyone who I want to take the initial classes gets a single rank in the class needed to unlock them.

Doing some poking around, I see BlueSenshi has already written an FAQ on this subject, and his solution seems to be similar to what I just described above. Well, if my tinkering doesn't work, I know where to look.

Script 0275 Reduce HP is a good place to go if you are wanting to influence the damage abilities do. Just create variables or flags that correspond to different abilities when they are used and you can add w/e damage formulas you want there without having to rewrite the entire system.

If you want to restrict certain classes to certain characters, all you would have to do is create a variable or flag that corresponds to that character, and make it to where that variable or flag has to be correct for that class to start.

Classes are really nothing more than glorified indirect effects, and you can influence them in almost any way you please.

[orius]

Re: Getting started

Unfortunately my PS2 has been refusing to play this game since March or April.

Again.

[Jeremy]

Re: Getting started

Unfortunately my PS2 has been refusing to play this game since March or April.

Again.

Same thing happened to me. I called Sony and they replaced my PS2 for me, so you may want to try that. Might be worth a try. Lot of the earlier machines had issues with reading certain discs.