"COMPLEX" WEAPON/AMMO SYSTEM PROBLEMS.

Hey guys, I've got a wickedly tricky (to me at least) problem I'm trying to work around and I'm not sure if I should scrap the entire idea or not. I have an over-ambitious weapon system in mind for Rpgmaker.

Not even sure which order to begin explaining the issue!

I'll attempt an overview of the whole deal and see if anyone has any clue what could possibly be done.. Otherwise I'll have to remove some aspect of the "system" in order to make the whole work better.

(in my game the idea is that your survivability is highly dependent on how many blows per turn you can manage to land, you only have ONE playable character throughout the game)

My game uses a lot of guns. Guns have different ammunition (the calibre of a gun in my game is directly related to it's critical hit percentage).. This shouldn't be too much of a problem and as in real life, some weapons share the same ammunition yet will use different quantities per attack. Also, some guns get more "attacks" per attack command and generally use more ammunition per attack. This shouldn't be TOO much of a problem. it's just a matter of sharing variable references. I can get THAT to work.

Problems: I am using this ammo script http://uirpg.com/tutorials.php?act=view&tutid=119. Which is all good. BUT my character is meant to be a dual wielder.. Early on in the game you have a knife and gun which you can equip in either hand. The code works fine UNLESS the player puts the gun in the second weapon slot and the knife in the first weapon slot. In which case the knife gets unequipped and the gun remains functional.. Thus enabling the player to keep shooting without ammo. This could be solved if there was a way to specify which weapon to unequip when the ammo variable is equal to zero.

Argh my head hurts thinking about this.

I could abolish the dual-wielding aspect, which would leave the player without any weapon when they run out of ammo in the middle of a fight. But I was really attatched to that idea and I can't think of anything in terms of a defensive item that would make sense in this game (like a shield.. It's a "modern" game so shields would be silly)

Another issue I've managed to make for myself is that I proposed for some weapons to multiple-attack per turn.. That's all good and fine if it's simply using the "attack twice" tick-box from the item database.. Because that WILL subtract 2 of the ammunition per turn EDIT: No, it won't.. However when using the "attack twice" or "three times" option from the "weapon animations settings" panel and combining that with the attack twice to get varied effects (I was testing an idea with an auto-pistol that attacked 4 times per turn for example).. The ammo calculations begin to get a little messy because the additional attacks are not counted by the engine as seperate attacks.. ALTHOUGH that could be figured out quite easily.. It just poses a needlessly complicated additional issue.

The IDEA behind all this is the player will have to balance between lethality and ammo consumption.. Automatic weapons will drink precious ammo up but wipe out enemies pretty swiftly.. Which is important when you're alone against hordes of enemies.

When I first got started on this game. This was the whole idea that got me excited about making a new rpg so I'll be gutted if i have to scrap the entire deal. I think I'm coming up against the limits of rm2k3 unless I'm prepared to do a LOT more battle event programming. I'm almost certain I'll have to make a battle event page for EVERY gun I intend to implement into the game but that's not too much of a big deal.

I'd be really grateful to any suggestions as to the best way to make my idea work. The game's still in it's early stages so I'm open to most ideas so long as I can keep the majority of the original features that I wanted to implement to make this game something a little different.

Sorry for long post. Had to get all the caveats in there.

That's a really good idea and an awesome tutorial.. But it'd require a total overhaul of my current half-baked system.. I might actually end up implementing this though though be honest. I was JUST two seconds ago trying to create a set of skills for "alchemizing" ammunition out of thin air at the cost of lots of MP.. But rm2k3 doesn't want that to work at all for some reason.

Also there's the issue of complication. I'm NOT that good at this kind of "programming" yet and I'm still learning a lot.. If i make it overly complicated I'm gonna end up getting frustrated with the project and probably sack it.. Looks like I might have to scale back a little bit on this one until I'm more experienced.

Yeah you're probably right about that. What I think I'll do, at least for this game... Is scale it back to a single-weapon system. I read somewhere that RM2K3 doesn't recognise 2-handed weapons as 2-handed when it comes to shield-using characters.. If that's true then that kind-of helps considering "hands" were a big feature of my old proposed system. Even if it's not true.. I don't have to take that into consideration if my second-slot items are going to be something other than a shield.

Considering the theme of the game I think I'll use the shield slot for equip-able items called "seals" that don't really affect stats that much but rather apply varying "resist" attributes to the character (elemental/status resistance for instance). It might sound a shabby idea right now but it should fit in with the theme of my game.

SOO anyway, to Fallen-Griever.. I don't know how many kinds of ammunition I'll be utilising just yet but if I go as extensive as I expect to then I will go as far as to give different types of ammunition different attributes (armour-piercing for instance). So when it comes to certain types of enemy, correct weapon choice will be essential rather than the player simply equipping the weapon with the highest stats.

For the time-being I'll make about 5-10 copies of the ammo/gun event stuff, probably 5 different kinds of ammunition and some weapons that share ammunition but have different ammo consumption and other factors (for instance an M1911 pistol and a UMP will share ammuntion but the UMP will decrease agility, use more ammunition and attack multiple times per turn).

The problem I have with this system is the fact I'd want to be able to change weapon in battle which is feasible but it's going to be really complicated in itself. OR RATHER just make it the player's responsibility to keep an eye on their ammo consumption in order to avoid being done in. I've made it so that in the event of running out of ammo the "default weapon" is equipped (a survival knife that you will always have) instead of being unarmed. The event will actually equip a "new" knife every time and remove the old one from the inventory, but it's all the same to the player

SO ANYWAY, after all that rambling. I guess I need to make those 5-10 identical-but-different ammunition pages and get them all working and that's that. So far everything's all nice. Does each weapon/ammo combination deal have to be on a seperate page? :/

EDIT: I guess I'm coming to terms with the fact that it's not ENTIRELY necessary to have a super-complex system in place to make an enjoyable game. I recently played One Night and that seems to lack a true battle system for the most part but it's still enjoyable in it's puzzle-based-ness... So all this "extra" stuff probably isn't entirely necessary. I'm getting too hung up on details I think.

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Changing a weapon in combat shouldn't be a problem, especially if you already know how to get the weapon to change. As for the skills, you can make a copy of the event that tracks weapon-based skills and, instead of it being a parallel process, make it an event that needs to be called. When you change the weapon in-battle just call that event and it will sort the skills out for you.

I think.

This is going to be very large task due to the complexity of the weapon-system you want to have. For a small number of weapons it isn't too difficult, but with a lot of weapon it will become so. You should really work out which weapons are vital and which weapons are merely slightly different versions of weapons that are already available and hence don't add that much to the gameplay.

Agh, now you've tempted me to revise things even further now.

Okay, Here's where I'm at right now, and it's all working fine.

*No more dual-wielding.

*I'm using the basic ammo as common item /unequip weapon when relevant ammo <1 "code".

*After the player runs out of ammo with an equipped weapon, I've told the event to equip "Knife" automatically AND to remove the knife from the inventory (because the "change equipment" command will automatically "generate" a "new" knife to equip, right? and I don't want the inventory being full of knives because the player keeps running out of ammo)

That all kinda makes sense to me so far. I'm open to advice on this... Things to consider:

*I don't want to use a skill system to replace the weapons.

* I MAY not even have skills related to the weapons (but rather to other equipped items, so that won't interfere with the whole ammo thing). So that shouldn't be a worry.. If it's not too difficult I MAY include them, but it's not a necessity.

*I have NO idea how I'd go about making the player able to change weapons [b[by choice during battle. I just assume it'd involve the "change equipment" command and therefore I'd have to make sure that whatever the equipment is changed to gets deleted from the inventory to avoid equipment cloning.. Which would get pretty hectic if there were a lot of choices.

*Additional melee weapons will also be in the game (a couple) which obviously don't need ammo, don't know if they'd need to be considered in the event programming?

I think that's about it, there'll probably be something like 5-7 (tops) weapons that use ammunition in the game.. 10 was a liberal estimate. Other than all that.. I'm open to being educated :P

EDIT: I finished the demo for SL: Riot Grrrl today, really enjoyed it :) liked the style/graphics too. Don't know if it's been pointed out but somewhere (I forget now) in the text the character is referred to as "Alexis" instead of Cheska.. I think anyway, it was a late night. :/