TRUJIN'S PROFILE

Hey guys =). It has been a long long time ago since I did anything with rpgmaker, but in the last week of the Christmas holidays I opened the program once again and started working on some stuff.

First of I tried to "improve" two old games I made for some contest. First one was "Secroma" (2002), it could only use RTP graphics and the second one was "Perfection" (2005), this could only be made in 24 hours. I fixed up some major gameplay issues and tried to improve some dialogue (it makes more sense, clears up some storyline issues or just some minor language issues (English isn't my first language). Anyways since Secroma was a stealth game which made you die on detection I tried to improve this by showing you a line of sight of the guards and upon detection you simply will be teleported to the start of the map, no game over. Perfection was fixed by placing some items on more logical places (sand under a desk and a spoon in a pot of plants... wtf). Next to that I improved the menu with some new coding (will be getting back on that) and fixed dialogue and storyline.

My back-ups dated from 2010, so that makes a 3 year time leap for me starting on something "big" yet again. I tried to learn some XP scripting and I'm familiar with editing systems to my visual liking (menu's etc), I can't script whole new modules (or tried it =p).

I did however pick up an old Rm2k3 project of mine and looked in the folder. It seemed that through using Cherry's Picpointerpatch I managed to make a decent item menu without to much coding and used this to improve Perfection. After that I went so much deeper this week. The menu I had was like this:

- Shows 7 items at once.
- Shows arrows at the top or bottom if you can go further in the list.

I was looking at the code and starting to fix up some stuff I didn't like about it (better said: the eventing/coding/scripting could be improved) and starting to mess with variables that stored variable ID's (in a way they work like indexes or arrays). This ended up with less code and even better: the option to load other data in the menu (for example: weapons or skills). I took this a bit further so I could show "items" with or without an icon in front. After some serious messing, which really didn't take that much time I came up with a really nifty menu. I could load data in it (weapons, skills, logbooks, items or even simple options like quit/don't quit) and it would use the same base to form a menu (kind of the class Window_selectable in RMXP).

What can I do with this:

- I can set the amount of "items" to show at the screen.
- I can set the position at the screen (handy if you want to change it for battle systems or just the menu).
- I can edit the spacing between "items" (this can be handy if you want to use icons in front of the itemnames or not).
- I can load multiple sets of data in it (at the moment to a maximum of 40 entries (could be easily edited, but I don't expect to need more)).
- It shows the amount of items hold.
- Uses a single common event to form the menu, it loads in an other common event with a maximum of 47 variables to set (if you really want to have 40 entries/items in the menu).

What I want to add:
- Also be able to change the x width of the menu (isn't too hard, but at the moment the menu takes half of the width).
- Give the option to hide the numbers (handy for log menu's, isn't too hard).

What I'm thinking about to do:
- Menu background changes size automaticly (isn't too hard with the pic patch, but will take some work on images).
- Thinking about two options: set the menu kind (weapons, items, etc) with switches or 1 variable (switches will be clearer, 1 variable takes less of the 5000 switches I have, both would be easy to use (the variable thing is allready implanted).
- At the moment there are two things I have to change in the base menu every time I add a menu: the background and the "item" graphics (orange and green in the screenshot). If I actually want this base common event to be totally stand alone it wouldn't be to much work, but it would need some pondering about the common event structure I'm using.

All by all I'm really happy with this and it makes me able to build menu's very fast (especially those dynamic selectable menu's were a bitch to event/script/code before I stumbled upon Cherry's picpointerpatch). I have to think about how I want to organise certain stuff, but in the end making a menu would cost very little time. Therefor, thanks Cherry major much for this patch and in a lesser extent the Rpgmaker 2009 patch he made (I use this to organise picture resources in separate folders.

Attachments:

- Shot of one of the dataload common events.


- 4 shots of menu's the base menu event made using diffrent variable values.


- Also, Craze, remember this =p?