• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Combat plugin starting to bear fruit

It's been another decent month of progress in Forgotten Gates. I've managed to work out several bugs in the combat plugin and get successful results with a few different types of skills: a single-enemy damage-and-stun, an all-enemy defense-reducer, and a single-ally heal. Right now I'm working on getting the basic Fight skill implemented. I say "basic" because that's how it is for the player, but systematically it's actually a little more complex than most skills because the animation involved depends on what battler is doing it and what weapon they have equipped, and some battlers have two weapons on top of that.

A funny (though costly in dev-time) anecdote which happened while I was testing the single-ally heal: I found that the DynBattleChoices plugin was not triggering event pages like it should be when I tried to use the heal on the actor casting it. For a while there I thought I had uncovered some onerous edge case in how RT2K3 handles things, and I was updating the DynBattleChoices readme file to warn other developers of this limitation. But when I tried doing a similar skill in the DynBattleChoices example project, it worked just fine. After quite a bit of headscratching at the code, I finally tried copying the status condition I used in my skill-that-does-nothing trick from the DynBattleChoices example project to the FG project, and lo and behold, that fixed the problem. By changing the attributes of that status condition one-by-one to match what I'd been using before in FG, I finally noticed what had been wrong: the condition (as I'd been using it in FG when I had problems) disallowed actions for the battler they were inflicted on. It wasn't easy to notice when the game is running because it was also set to abate immediately, but apparently if it was inflicted on the currently acting battler, it would mess with the action. Oh well, at least it wasn't really an unsolvable problem.