JOSEPHSERAPH'S PROFILE

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is a mood

great tip. I wonder if there's a similarily easy way to reposition the battle commands? I figure that's probably way more complicated and buried deep within piles of compiled code...

Hmm... Yeah, there's just so many functions, not even I, who have been using the hell out of it for over a year, know nearly 10% of what it can do??? like, I keep finding new uses for all the stuff it provides every week. Though a lot of it is providing access to baseline DBS stuff which is irrelevant in this project. And a lot else of it is stuff you probably have figured some other way to do. But, for example, it has a very powerful Show String Picture function which you can use to render text as a picture, and it lets you control how the windowskin behaves. So I use that to make the Windows of every menu I design rather than relying on pictures, for example. I don't know what solution you came up with for this game's dialogue boxes but I personally can't imagine how I'd do custom dialogue/text on vanilla 2k3 D:

Then there's stuff like advanced variable pointers and operations, controlling variable arrays, the Get Picture Info command which retrieves information of positioning and size of a given picture ID, the change picture ID command which lets you change, swap or otherwise modify a picture (or an array of pictures)'s ID... Global saves, access to Save, Load and Get Save Info, there's even a crazy Call Command command which, for anything that the patch failed to turn into pointers (and there isn't that much) you can use to call a command with pointer refeences kind of like a script call in a newer maker.

That's not to mention the extended functionality added in 1.12 itself, most notably the powerful new Picture functionality which allows innate use of spritesheets, which can be auto-animated and either loop infinitely or be erased at the end of a loop, or can display an individual cell based on a variable pointer, and it also allows you to point at the last X digits of a picture based on another variable (say, for example, Idle_03 if you want to show the animated Idle pose of the hero you set up as ID 3, and i mean specifically animated because if it was static you could really just use a spritesheet and figure which cell through a variable)

IDK it's a lot and I'm in love with all its extended functionality. But it reaaaaaaaaally shows how difficult it was to make some things happen in previous iterations of 2k/2k3. I see a lot of games that would have their code reduced into something quite small, that have pages upon pages of laborious code to overcome some limitations that EVERY rpg maker still has up to this day (barring RGSS/JS extensions)

anyway IDK. Maybe if you play around with Maniacs it'll interest you. Maybe not. I don't mean to disrespect your work, though. This is amazing. Once again, it just makes me think. I want to see what more stuff people make in this day and age with 2k3 :)

i wonder how lighter and easier to achieve would this project be now that Maniacs Patch is out... it'd probably decrease the amount of lines by, at least, idk 200x. yeah 199 out of 200 lines being magically erased. but i don't know

anyway this is one of the absolute beasts of vanilla 2k3 coding and i adore it. it's just weird, how different the paths we take to achieve the same results are now than they were pre 1.12/Maniacs

Does anyone here have any idea of how to patch out the battle UI? Like, literally just move the Actor Status window('s rm2k3 equivalent) 100 pixels or so offscreen

With the Maniacs patch now giving access to BATTLE common events that occur EVERY FRAME, it's very easy for anyone to make their own custom RM2k3 battle UI and override the default one.




This is very useful for lots of reasons: You can very accurately display status effects now, for example. You can even display the characters' statuses in real time. You can easily make an Enemy Status Window just like the actor one. Etc.

But... Right now, if you do that, you're forced to use the Battle UI Mode 3, so you can completely occlude the previous UI and not have any trouble with overlapping with the command / skill windows. If it was possible to hide the UI, though, you could display the new, picture-based UI on a layer BELOW the actual battle UI, and when a character's turn comes on their window would properly occlude the (fake, picture-based) Actor Status window.


oop

author=Seraphic
Now I have a fresh copy of RPG 2003, how would I go about installing this? As I notice each release is either larger or smaller in size. Many thanks if anyone can give a quick guide? :)

https://bingshan1024.github.io/steam2003_maniacs/

Second link from here, the patch version is sorted from newest to oldest. After downloading, it's real easy to install as the installer is in English, and it creates a backup. Still backup your stuff yourself though, especially your projects (As the editor is easy to redownload from steam or degishop)


I have two questions and I don't want to bother BingShan, so I'd love if someone here could help me:

In the Get Battle Info command, I can't seem to be able to retrieve enemy States. It returns only the max number of states in the project, instead of a variable for each state. Is this normal behaviour? Is there any way in which to check for enemy states?
Edit: W0t.... now it worked as intended, somehow. So, the next fields get subbed for the enemy's individual state information (each variable, starting from V+1, will be 0 if the enemy isn't afflicted, and 1 if the enemy is) and that's the only way to check for an enemy's status. Kinda cumbersome, but it's really cool that we can do that now!


Also, what exactly does the Call Command function do? It... sounds suspiciously like a Script Call... Especially since it's a string field in there. If that were the case it would be absolutely MINDBLOWING.