This week I spent some time improving the old code I writen. Mainly the character window and job window.
I downloaded a new program called GEMINI. This is basicaly improved script editor for most RPG maker engines. It has plenty of nice features but for me the most important one are the colapsable tree structures.
So I decided to rewrite / improve the old code I did long time ago and make it more efficient and easier to work with (Some of that stuff was a mess). I started with the character window.
Not much has changed. I just changed each layer into seperate def to make this thing easier to work with. And I found out that this thing already has shitload of them.
And there is going to be more of them. This also reminded me of the “transparency” problem. Some pieces of clothing just don’t work with each other well. This results in some ugly graphical errors like lower clothing layers going through upper layers. And as far as I know, there is no easy way to fix this.
Look at this. It’s a mess. But I know of some solutions to this. Sadly, none of them are feasible.
1.) The is a function that would allow me to create some kind of transparency mask so that upper clothing layers will block the lower ones. The problem is, this thing is useful only for small images (say 32*64) because it redraws the entire image pixel by pixel or something like that. Doing this would slow the game to crawl.
2.) Edit EVERY clothing image to be compatible with every clothing image. This is obviously out of question. I want to have something aroun 100 clothing pieces in the game. Your character will change every year. Game will last 8 years. This makes 800 images. Now your character has different poses depending on the weapon she carries. So lets say, each image has 5 pose variations. My calculator says this is 4000 images total. Redrawing manualy most of those pictures will most like kill me and I dont want to die just yet.
3.) Ditch the RPG maker and start using some 3D engine that would allow me to do this stuff automaticaly (not gonna happen. This would mean scraping all of my work)
4.) Simplify things
This is probably the thing I am going to do in the end. I will limit the equipment slots to 5. Weapon, head, face, body, other. This would make a lot of things much easier for me. I would put weapons on the character back / hip so there would be no need for 5 different poses for each weapon. Instead of having leather jacket, peasant tunic, peasant trousers and peasant hat, you will only get peasant outfit and peasant hat. On one hand, this will make it much easier for me to make new clothing compatible with other pictures and I will finaly be able to make different poses for different emotions. On the other hand, this will greatly lower the customisation options for your character looks. I will have to think about this more but as I see it, these are the only two options. Have cliping clothes and armor or make things more simple and more polished.
And the last thing I worked on was the job window. I changed the way it was called and the way the values were edited. Now it will take me much less time to edit this thing and it also shows much more information. It is still a work in progress, but it works flawlessly.
Thats it for this week. I will try and finish the job window and I might also try and change the character screen for the “simplification”.
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