WCOUILLARD'S PROFILE

@alterego: That game looks sweet. Translate to english please! :D

Annnnd here's my latest addition... just working on altering the battle interface. Still got a long way to go on it.

@WIP: That is always our first course of action. I said up there in the original post that we're looking into a scripted fix for it. :D

Very generous of you to share, neok. Thanks.

author=Liberty
See, the problem with the item menu in any of the RM engines is that it's hard to code gaining over 100 items - which was one of the main draws of the original BoF II menu system.

You could have 300 herbs to spam healing whenever you wanted but with the lack of that I'm kinda worried that with only having 99 at a time there will be some problems with balancing as item spamming was a very useful thing to have considering some parts of the game. I think having only 99 will make it feel like you have to conserve your base items and lead to 'my pwecious items' syndrome - which is something this game managed to break. (That's what FF games are for >.<)

That said, the idea of other weapon types doesn't really bother me too much, but it will probably affect a few things, like having to think about what characters to equip with what. So, say you have Nina and Bleu in your party and you got a new ring you had to think, "Which of these lovely ladies needs the spell boost? Which should have the attack boost?" I mean, they're both the same in that their attacks don't really account for much but sometimes even that one damage extra counts - especially on Nina because she's the faster of the two and more likely to hit the monster before it and Bleu get a turn.

Same goes for other weapons. Find a dagger and get annoyed that Sten's not in the party at the moment, so equip it on Ryu for the meantime, then pass it off to Sten when I get a better weapon for Ryu. I kinda like having an overlap with weapons so that it is possible to pass stronger weapons down to the less used characters.

Still, if you can't find a way for it to work, I guess there's nothing else to do. But NewBlacks idea would work... it'd just take a bit of time to implement.

OK, a lot of points to go over here...

1. We are implementing the same item grouping as Breath of Fire II had, in that some items can be grouped in bunches (up to 9) in one item slot, and other items (namely, equipment) will take up a single item slot for each item. We will likely increase the total slots available to account for the increase in the amount of available items.

2. With each character having their own set of specific weapons, deciding who should equip an item no longer becomes a concern. For example, the Amber Ring has an attack power of 74 and a cost of 11,000 zenny. Since Bleu and Nimufu will no longer use rings, we've added the Amber Rod and the Amber Wand, which both have the same attack power of 74 and the same cost of 11,000 zenny. While they are "new" items, they are simply mimicking an existing weapon so that when the character is equipped with them, their animation timing and sound effects will remain accurate.

3. Not too important, but Nina is definitely NOT faster than Bleu. In fact, Bleu is the fastest character in the game, with a maximum agility rating of 511.

The battle script uses it's own arrays for handling animations for battlers, so I'd have to alter it there. If you're familiar with Charlie Fleed's scripts, they are notoriously hard to edit outside of their included configuration modules.

There are no changes being made to any skill animations, only the addition of weapons that mimic the parameters of existing weapons to the database. As it stands now, inventory space is unlimited (we haven't jumped into scripting the original BoF2 inventory system yet), so there is no foreseeable downside. In the event that we do replicate BoF2's original inventory settings, we will increase the capacity of total items the party can hold to account for these changes.

IIRC, you could carry something like 48 item slots in your inventory. If we need to, we will probably increase this by 24 for a total of 72 item slots.

I'm currently testing some alternate methods for calling animations. There are weapon-specific arrays included in the script, and a few more hash arrays that can handle actors as well as weapons simultaneously. If all goes well, no huge changes will have to be made to the existing database, which is exact to Breath of Fire 2's item database, not counting our new additions.