PEPSIOTAKU'S DYNRPG PLUGIN EMPORIUM!

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Well the reason why I haven't released a save/load template yet is because it IS really complicated, haha. It would be a nightmare to separate from my game because there are so many specific switches & stuff that it requires, and if you were to even look at the code, you'd probably think I was crazy.

So over the past couple of days, I found a simple way to implement XInput (XBOX 360 Controller API), mainly so I could add D-Pad support without using an external program like joy2key or something. In the process of implementing this, I found out how to add force feedback! Not sure why you would need it in an RPG Maker game, but it's kind of cool, so I'm going to make it controlled via comment commands and release it (along with that system graphics plugin I promised).
is there a plugin that enables more than 4 characters on the menu.
No. Unfortunately that's an engine limitation that's so engrained in the system that it's impossible (as far as I know) to get around.
You could solve that with a custom menu, and maybe something that stores character info into a variable. All of this would be rather complicated, but could be done with switches and variables, without even using a plugin.

- Make a picture menu
- Make a cursor
- Make a series of facesets (optional)
- Make name and number pictures.
- Have a switch turned on if you have a member in the party (joined) but not in the party (as in, in reserve), and turn it off in favor of a second switch if they're in the party. You'll need to run a few complicated display codes.

A plugin might be helpful with simplifying the codes a bit.
You would basically have to rewrite everything. You wouldn't be able to use any of the default systems since they wouldn't recognize more than 4 party members, so if you have the skill to do so, go for it!

Update about the Xbox controller/force feedback plugin I'm writing:
-Rumble works perfectly. You can specify the total rumble time, or rumble until an additional command shuts it off (for exact timing). You can specify a fade-in time, a fade-out time, and a delay time before the fade-in starts. I've already made this configurable in DynRPG.ini

-D-Pad support works perfectly. It gets bound to the arrow-keys.

-Keyboard to button mapping works perfectly, but I just have to make them configurable.

-Added a feature that detects if the controller is plugged in and turns on a switch.

To do:
-Triggers
-Analog sticks
-Possibly some kind of direct input implementation of force feedback if I can.
And 5 in battle?
Like in lufia 2 with the capsule monsters
I have a feeling that this is even harder than just 5 party members xD
With picsinbattle and variables for hp, attacks and no idea xd
There might be a way to "trick" the rpg_rt into not realizing the party max has been reached, so you could just keep adding party members. You'd most likely have to use pics in battle and a pic pointer patch to display their stats, but you probably would be able to control and target them. Then you could do cool stuff like FF4 style parties, playable summons without removing party members, using characters as monsters, etc.

Though I have no idea where you'd find that particular byte in the hex, but I'm willing to bet you could do it with quickpatch.

Hmmmm...I just thought of this since I never did this in my game yet, and it's not for battles but...is it possible to make a plugin so that if you have a specific piece of equipment on, used an item, or have a specific party member in the party, that it could increase/decrease specific things? For instance:

1) You have the accessory Alarm Earrings on, which prevent the enemy from getting Back Attacks and Pincer Attacks on. The only other way would be to change the tiles associations.

2) You have a Ninja in your party. Having this character gives the player a +15% increase to getting Initiatives. Again, only way to change this is through tile associations.

3) You used the ability Sight, allowing you to view the current map. I haven't figured out how to do this yet (I'm sure it's not as difficult to do, but very tedious to do) so...there's that.

4) You used the skill Piercing Sight in battle, which gives the user/ally/party Ignore Defense on their regular attacks for X turns/until status wears off/etc.

Just various things like that, or even making it so that when you use a specific ability in battle (say Weapon Bless or Armor Bless), it would temporarily grant that element to the weapon or armor (in other words, finding a way to get around having to make millions of copies in the database in order to swap things out and make sure every possible combination is doable, which takes foreeeeeever to do...I know...).

Just some ideas is all. ^^;
@LizardKing: Unfortunately not. Let me explain:

There are simple values which can be changed, that's the case if they are used in an assignment/calculation/comparison, or defining a memory block's size {i]at runtime.

For example, changing the picture limit works because there is a call to memory manager which allocates some memory for the pictures at runtime (where we can change the size), and a few loops iterating over all pictures to draw, update or erase them (where we can just change the value the loops are counting towards).

However, there are also some values which are very very hard to change (i.e. almost impossible with quickpatches or similar means). These are values which impact the size of some objects/memory blocks at compile-time. For example, the battle scene stores some status information about the party. This information is in a fixed-size array in the middle of other data (this means, there is a structure like .....|some other info|some other info|hero 1 data|hero 2 data|hero 3 data|hero 4 data|some other info|some other info|..... just like this in memory). So, in order to add more "slots" for more heros in there, we would need to move all the other data after the hero slots, and update all parts in the code which references their old positions, etc.

You can imagine that the memory is a hand-written list on lined paper. For the pictures, there is a line "look in drawer A-82 for infos about the 20 pictures" and we can just exchange drawer A-82 by a bigger one and strike-through the 20 and replace it by 100. But the battle scene has a list where the information about the party is written directly as part of the list, between other stuff. And there is no space to squeeze additional things in without messing everything up, because accessing those lists works like somebody saying "have a look at my list, line 123, the information is right there".
There is a thing you can do for 5 party members. It's called guest party members. It takes a bit of programming, and you can't make it work on monster mobs with more than Monster Size. That is, if you have two guests, because the total number is 8, you can have at most 6 monsters on a mob. You then have to make a custom skill that can attack the monster with other monsters, and another that can attack monsters using the guest. You also have to kill the monster at every battle end, or have them flee.

The good news? Monster animation works on this. You can make it so on zero hp, the guest monster behaves like a character and falls over.
Hmm, I'll believe it when I see it. There's a big difference between "a bit of programming" and rewriting an engine. You'd be better off using VX Ace if you want more than 4 party members. DynRPG certainly doesn't hold your hand with stuff like that, so if you miraculously got it to boot up with 5 party members, you would have to rewrite all of the logic associated to that (battles, animations, item use, menus, etc). At that point, you might as well build a new engine from scratch.
Oh well, what a pity. :)

What about moving the stats windows around in the battle mode? I managed to alter the traditional battle mode and move stuff around, but I was wondering if I could literally move the whole window to the top of the screen with the alternative. That way, I could have the battle window alternate between the top and bottom of the screen like in Chrono Trigger.

Possible?
Yes! Bugmenot has a quickpatch for that I believe. There's stuff about it in this thread somewhere I think: http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/10254/?p=33#posts
Something like this: download TopAlt ?

Traditional layout up top when switching to the alternative battle layout (there was a plugin for doing that mid-game, wasn't there?). Any graphical changes to the traditional layout carry over.

Just be sure to not have any of the QuickPatches (or InfoDisloc.ips) that alter the position of the windows for items/skills/actions/enemyStatus/ItemDescription/SkillDescription.
Has anyone experienced exceptional lag on their maps by using DynRPG and/or any of these plug-ins?

This is currently my issue. It might have to do with having a few too many parallel process events functioning at once somewhere on one of my maps (a larger map, at least in event count, that I've been using to prototype puzzle elements). However, this particular map worked 100% bug-free and without lag before I patched my RPG_RT.exe file using Cherry's DynRPG v0.20. So I then added several plug-ins/patches as follows that PepsiOtaku (or Cherry) has released:

RPG_RT_noautobattle.ips
battle_mpstat_display.dll
faster_atb_advanced.dll
game_clock.dll

I have tried removing the patches and plug-ins and re-testing my game, but I am still getting the same lag. Therefore, I think it has something to do with how DynRPG is making its function calls during runtime. However, what kind of things would cause lag outside of the default battle system?

I kept the previous version of RPG_RT and I can easily switch back to the old one by renaming them and the older one still works fine. But the plug-in functionalities are just too good to pass up! :)

Besides this lag on this one map, these plug-ins have been working great! One small gripe though is that if a hero battler has HP AND MP restored from the same spell/item, there isn't much time between showing the HP and showing the MP that you sorta lose sight of what the number for HP was. Could you possibly add a (larger) wait time of some sort to space these out a little better? Thanks.
In your parallel process events, are you showing any pictures? If so, try this:


Create an autostart event of some kind for when you first enter that map, use it to Show ALL of the pictures you need, but give them an transparency of 100% and turn on a switch to disable the autostart event from looping.

Then, in your parallel process event (which should be turned on with the same switch as above), use move picture any time you would use show picture, and set the transparency to 0 or whatever it needs to be.

Simply put, Show Picture is most likely the cause because every time it's called, it reloads the image in memory. If you're doing this with a ton of images at once, it's gon lag. I have around 30 dynrpg plugins in use that don't cause lag by themselves... maybe ever so slightly in a couple of them, but it's too small too notice on modern PC's.
Okay, thanks. I don't think showing pictures is the problem. In fact, I already reduced some lag that was present before using Move picture (although your way of just leaving the picture in the right place but at 100% transparency and then setting it to 0% transparency later sounds better/simpler than doing show picture and placing it outside the borders of the game display at first (which is what I did)).

I'm doing a pretty good job of keeping parallel/autorun events off when they are not currently in use.
Hmmm.... I mean if there are ANY pictures being shown constantly via parallel process, it'll create some kind of lag. I can tell you it's not DynRPG though because you have 2 battle plugins that don't do anything outside of battle, and 1 plugin that only activates when you have the menu open. I still think it's a show picture command somewhere in a parallel process. Those are the only commands that I've seen to cause significant lag.