MECHANICALPEN'S PROFILE

A Heal After Battle system could be used in a dungeon crawler if, say, the game tracked total health lost and applied some sort of injury/stamina penalties for characters that took too much.

So, while the player still had full use of the characters for any one battle, they'd have to decide whether to press on and risk Strongarm McSwordguy being out of commission during the next dungeon or if turning back and resting is worth another crawl.

Such a system would have to have something to do between dungeons, so as not to hold up the game if a player really messed up. Or have enough characters to cover the occasional mistake.

If you are not a scripter, a common event is the easiest way to do this, you just have to get creative with your tile passibilies. I'll do my best to explain;


Here is our example map, notice I used a dark grey for air 'for show' you can easily use an invisible tile for this. These tiles block the player from walking, so they cannot walk up into the air.



The player can walk through both the ladder, and the platform tile because we want movement to occur on those surfaces.



We use special terrain tags, so we can tell what we are walking on in common events.



Every frame we check if the player is NOT on a platform (terrain tag 0 is the default). If they aren't on a platform, we set the 'fall code' to run every frame instead.


Every frame, we fall down one tile, wait for the movement to finish (an important step!), and then increment a 'tiles fallen' counter. Since we waited for movement to finish, the player is now one tile lower than previous. So we check if they are on a platform again. If they are, they take damage if it was a large fall and then things return to normal.

Hoped this helped. Feel free to ask questions.

Don't you love Windows 8 hiding all the options you care about?

Okay when that comes up click on "More Info" on the left there, and choose "Run Anyway." No I have no idea what running something has to do with information.

This is why Windows 8 is losing market share to 7 and even XP.

Did you know that VXACE has the same number of layers as XP? It's just the editor DOESN'T LET YOU USE THEM because it thinks it is smarter than you. But in code it's the same, a 3 dimensional array of tile IDs.

Maybe someday I'll get around to writing an external map editor.

Back on topic; So what exactly can RPG Maker 2k3 do that cannot be done in VXACE or XP? People obviously like it, and I'd like to know why exactly which is something this article doesn't do.

Personally, I recommend XP. If you don't mind the battle system being a bit pants, it gives you complete control over mapping. VXACE sort of misbehaves if you use characters bigger than one tile.