RPG Maker

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I picked up RPG Maker, and it's fairly straight forward! I can totally see how people get involved in making these kind of games.

Oryx Labs is doing a "Star Trek pack" and it makes me really want to put together a tiny game using those sprites.

[lethargic]

I tried it a while back. But after a few hours I decided other people had already made great games for me to play, why am I wasting my time making a bad one.

[pinback]

I picked up RPG Maker, and it's fairly straight forward!

I watched MaximusBlack struggle with it for like a month, for very little result. I am interested in your experience, because it looked painful as a peanut in your eye to me.

[Flack]

Is this what they used to make that Kanye West time travelling game?

http://kanyequest3030.tumblr.com/

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

I got really into tinkering with RPG Maker XP (or rmxp as it's users refer to it on their forums) for a few years. If your a programmer who can get a handle on the Ruby scripting language it's programmed in you can pretty much make your game do whatever you want. So it's extremely powerful even for experts. And of course it's about as simple as you can get for a full featured RPG development package. Well not nearly as simple as Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set or Chris Hopkin's Adventure Creation Kit, but I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that it was originally designed for Japanese users and was translated from Japanese to English only as an after thought.

[RealNC]

I assume you bought it from the humble bundle weekly thingy? I considered buying that, but not for RPG Maker. I'm only interested in one game that comes with the bundle ("To the Moon"). But it's in the $6 tier and the game will be way cheaper than that when it's on sale. So not worth it for me.

But if anyone else is interested in RPG Maker, the bundle is extremely cheap compared to the normal price of the software. Though the deal ends in 9 hours from now.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I picked up RPG Maker, and it's fairly straight forward!

I watched MaximusBlack struggle with it for like a month, for very little result. I am interested in your experience, because it looked painful as a peanut in your eye to me.

The painful parts come into play with the fact that no program on earth is going to stop you from having to create attributes for your enemies. At some point, you gotta code up dozens of monsters and give them sprites and say "werewolf.strength = 5." If that's with a GUI or not, it still has to be done.

I paused my RPG Maker exploration because I had been doing the exact same things in Cyberganked and need to finish that first.

[Tdarcos]

At some point, you gotta code up dozens of monsters and give them sprites and say "werewolf.strength = 5." If that's with a GUI or not, it still has to be done.

This is similar to a problem that shows up in Delphi (and Free Pascal), and it's one that the original Visual Basic solved very elegantly, the problem of forms with lots of controls, such as the bottom of this page when entering the options that has 4 checkboxes (disable HTML; disable BBCode; attach signature; notify on replies) for them.

Now if the items are a small number, identifiable single names may be appropriate, but when you just have a collection of items (like checking which of several of the 50 states something applies to, or which of the more than 175 identified countries or independent regions) having to identify each one as a unique named control could be a pain), so Visual Basic implemented form controls as a collection, and you could simply identify them all as individual numbered elements in an array, so you could have a checkbox or radio button numbered 0 to 50 or 1 to 51 (50 states plus DC). You could then reference the checked property for 51 array elements instead of coding to handle 50 (or 175+) named controls.

Even PHP supports this, so if you design a web page you can declare controls as unique names or as an array as well.

[pinback]

At some point, you gotta code up dozens of monsters and give them sprites and say "werewolf.strength = 5." If that's with a GUI or not, it still has to be done.

This is similar to a problem--

Without even reading it, I'm going to guess that what follows is in no way similar to what ICJ was describing. Heck, I'll guess that it has absolutely nothing to do with anything anyone is talking about.

Let's see how I did.

--that shows up in Delphi (and Free Pascal), and it's one that the original Visual Basic solved very elegantly, the problem of forms with lots of controls, such as the bottom of this page when entering the options that has 4 checkboxes (disable HTML; disable BBCode; attach signature; notify on replies) for them.

Now if the items are a small number, identifiable single names may be appropriate, but when you just have a collection of items (like checking which of several of the 50 states something applies to, or which of the more than 175 identified countries or independent regions) having to identify each one as a unique named control could be a pain), so Visual Basic implemented form controls as a collection, and you could simply identify them all as individual numbered elements in an array, so you could have a checkbox or radio button numbered 0 to 50 or 1 to 51 (50 states plus DC). You could then reference the checked property for 51 array elements instead of coding to handle 50 (or 175+) named controls.

Even PHP supports this, so if you design a web page you can declare controls as unique names or as an array as well.

NAILED IT.

[Tdarcos]

Without even reading it, I'm going to guess that what follows is in no way similar to what ICJ was describing. Heck, I'll guess that it has absolutely nothing to do with anything anyone is talking about.

Let's see how I did.

NAILED IT.

Wrong, asswipe (you haven't even risen to the level of asshole here), because since you didn't even read it in either case, you know nothing about what you're talking about.

Jonsey discussed the problem of having to access the properties of several dozen objects and having to reference each one individually. I noted that on forms in applications, it's the same thing for Delphi and Free Pascal, each on-screen control is a separate named object.

Visual Basic. however, implemented control arrays, which means you can treat all the objects collectively the way you treat array indexes.

Perhaps what I could have asked was if this capacity was available.

Pinhead, next time you want to make a comment, at least have the minimum level of intelligence to know what the fuck you're talking about, as I do.

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

Welcome back to the RPGMaker show folks. Hope you enjoyed the short comedy sketch during intermission. That skit never gets old. :D

I'm more familiar with RMXP which is why I mentioned Ruby scripting. But I should probably clarify to those unfamiliar with the RPG Maker series that RMXP (RPG Maker XP) was the first in the series to be programmed in Ruby and the first to give the designer direct access to all scripts or game code sections and thus full customizability.

Before that there was RPG Maker 95, the first PC version in the series. Then RPG Maker 2000 (RM2K) followed by RPG Maker 2003 which was a backwards compatible update from RM2K which introduced the Final Fantasy style battlers.

So which version are/were you guys using?

Oh and all versions of RPG Maker allow you to script event actions which can be similar to programming in short bursts but not at all like writing a complete program from start to finish. Basically you start with a tabbed GUI which includes a map editor, and various database tabs for tilesheets, sprite sheets, items, monsters, the usual stuff.

In the map editor you have various layers you can work on. Mostly the layers serve to represent a background, then obstacles, and then an overlay layer for things the character can walk under. But there is a special layer for events. On the events layer you can add all your specially coded events.

The GUI has an event form you can use to create new events and tons of preprogrammed but customizable events are provided. In that dialog is where you would add your special event code in the appropriate field of whichever type of event you choose to create. So it really isn't programming in the way writing a whole Ruby script for RMXP would be. It's much simpler than that. Though still tedious sometime as ICJ pointed out.

I may have assumed too much about how the older RPG Makers work but I'm pretty sure that aside from a few differences in resolution and asset limits the general layout and GUI are pretty familiar from one to the next. The biggest departure from them to RMXP being as I said the Ruby scripting option.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Wrong, asswipe (you haven't even risen to the level of asshole here), because since you didn't even read it in either case, you know nothing about what you're talking about.

True.

Jonsey discussed the problem of having to access the properties of several dozen objects and having to reference each one individually. I noted that on forms in applications, it's the same thing for Delphi and Free Pascal, each on-screen control is a separate named object.

Paul is correct. Why don't the rest of you lay off him a bit?

COMMANDER. In a semi-related question, I have a proposal for you.

Remember the work you did on the Genesis Device? How would you feel about contracting for another, similar project?

This is what we would need. (And if you built it in Pascal like with the Genesis Device then awesome!)

I need something that will generate stats (but not names) for a bunch of monsters. So if I gave it inputs like:

Level of Monster
Hit Point Range
Special Attributes
Number of Monsters

... it would then stub out or generate that many monsters. In Hugo code.

I could then add their names and shit.

Is that a project you would like to tackle? And get paid for?

[Flack]

So would these be created just like a normal object in Hugo? From the Wikipedia page:

object table "Kitchen Table"
{
is hard
is not female
color brown
size 10
}