The new Pokeditor

[Bryan]

@Bryan, that will be great! I was planning to implement the sprites at the end of next week, if they are ready. I just need a few of them though, only for test purposes yet. Now I'm busy to redesign the layout of the NPC editor, to meet Mr_dark's plan he had in mind.

And yes, the development is going great team, carry on!

New character sprites have been given to Mr_Dark, I am now making separate image files for eyes, and kind of like a template to follow. I'll have these by Sunday. I am still touching up the tiles, they may take a little bit. But will be releasing them here soon, and I'll just touch them up as we develop.

[Zatir]

Another update to announce, the main layout of the NPC editor is done. I've uploaded a screenshot. Please note, I'm working on a test environment, so the sprites, npc's and maps are only made for test purposes.



This is just the main screen.  In the middle you see the "working" area. All npc's and maps are shown in there, ordered by tabpages. On the right you can see all the npc's which are currently made and on the left some of the map editor are shown. The whole editor is easily adjustable by just dragging and dropping the windows. The working area will always fill out the remaining space. So every editor can adjust the tool for his/her needs!

Now further on with the NPC editor, it's possible to create a NPC and creating an outfit. Now I'm busy finetuning this system, and after that the other NPC tools can be made (I've already made a start with that) When selecting the radio-buttons, you can get acces to extra menu's like making pokemon for a battle-npc, or make a shop for a trade-NPC!



Any tips, feedback and stuff is always welcome!

[genbor]

 Looks very similar to the Neverwinter Nights toolset which was always one of my favorites to use, since it's simple but efficient. I like where this is going. *You live to be criticized another day*

[Jerry]

Speaking about NPCs, I wonder if we might implement NPCs who dress up (or another better word). Like in FR/LG, in Koga's gym, you have those dummy trainers who spin and appear with their true form only after speaking to them/getting in their line of sight.

I don't know on what level (mapping or the client itself) this would be implemented, but felt like mentioning this since we were here.

[genbor]

 Ahh Jerry that sounds like a great idea. Also NPCs that might hide for example trees etc, would be pretty fun. In the games you could often avoid fighting Trainers if you wished to for some reason, since you could see them from further away and avoid getting into his line of sight, but if he hides behind a boulder you just searched (used the action button on it, or whatever you did) he would pop out and there would be no where left to run. It would be quite funny to have a very rare encounter in tall grass: You shuffle in the tall grass like always but when the battle commences, instead of a wild Pokémon appearing, an NPC would appear saying "Oh, I fell asleep." or the like. Just a little food for thought.

[Jerry]

Uh huh! There's so many characters using camouflage in RSE x3

Not to mention we might have some people from factions doing spying, some inspectors undercover and so on.

[Zatir]

Speaking about NPCs, I wonder if we might implement NPCs who dress up (or another better word). Like in FR/LG, in Koga's gym, you have those dummy trainers who spin and appear with their true form only after speaking to them/getting in their line of sight.

I don't know on what level (mapping or the client itself) this would be implemented, but felt like mentioning this since we were here.

That's a great idea. But it's not on top of the list yet, the main system must work first. 

BUT, you're actually talking about adding some extra events to NPCs. That makes me think of how NPCs are set up, and that I have to figure out how to handle different kind of events, like dialogs. But we've also have a battle event. My plan was to create specific NPCs, as you can see in the screenshot (battle npc, nurse npc, dialog Npc etc) Then I was thinking: When does a battle start? Directly when starting to talk to the NPC? Or after one dialog-event has finished. Maybe the NPC is asking a question: do you want to battle me? If yes, start a battle, if no, leave and say goodbye. So you actually can't choose one of the npc-types, because the events have to be combined.

This is now done by scripts. After I've finetuned the NPC appearance stuff I will have a look at those scripts, how the game is already handling NPCs and what hasn't been implemented yet. This will be a great challenge!

[Jerry]

Sure

I'm just sort of throwing it here so that things are easier to implement later on when they're ready. I mean, I've been writing simple scripts myself and I know the pain when I find that I could have done something I did earlier another way so that when I'm implementing something now, it's easier to do so.

And in my mind, I see only one type of NPCs. Now, each NPC has some kind of 'switch' which triggers a battle, only dialogue, or some miscellaneous activity.

Maybe something like this:
NPC Mode : Description
0 : Dialogue only
1 : Battle
2 : Selling items
3 : Asking for trade
4 : Healing
5 : Quest
6 : Other (Run away immediately, or something of the like)

So, Nurse Joy is defaulted to 0, so she speaks first and when healing is asked for, it's switched to 4. Because there are some NPCs which outright heal your pokemon and then speak, those would be directly set to 4, then 0.

Same for battling NPCs, they are first set to 0, then set to 1 when battle is triggered (Not sure if such NPCs will be implemented).

And so one and so forth. And if need be, more modes can be added.

That's just a suggestion of how it might work. Maybe it makes things simpler, or harder, I'm not quite sure, but as I said, it's just what it appears like in my mind and it's a mere suggestion

[Zatir]

Hi there,

A few updates yet. First of all I've created a public accessible TODO-list, which is posted on the first post in this topic. On the second hand the NPC pokemon are already loaded into the editor. This will be used for creating battle-npc's! It just needs a couple of finetuning and adding a few features, but probably next week the npc-pokemon-editor is done.

And last but not least: after the pokemons I will start with the script-system, to make events! I'm planning to create a drag-and-drop system, like the scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) system. That won't be that hard for the editors!

Cheers for today,

Zatir

[Zatir]

This weekend (Monday was my weekend too) I spent a couple of hours on the event system. I thought I would finish the pokemon-team creator, but this one's more important.

The first attempt was creating a NSD (Nassi–Shneiderman diagram), an easy drag and drop tool. This looks very helpful for small NPCs, but for bigger ones it gets annoying. Secondly the use of "jumps" isn't possible, like when handling quests.


After discussing with Mr_Dark we found out another system would work better, even for smaller NPC's. Take a look at the next screenshot. Different event boxes can be drag-dropped into the panel, and you can assign actions towards each event. This is just an example of just two event-boxes, but I can create unlimited different boxes is I want. Like some boxes which should read player data first before the NPC is going to talk to you.


This is just an impression to see where I'm busy with at the moment. Ideas and comments are always welcome!

Cheers!

[Zatir]

I'm bumping myself again for another update about the event system. I didn't have that much time because of school stuff, so it won't be a really big update.

The following picture shows how the event system looks like right now:

(Click to enlarge, because I think you all don't have that great eyes)

Events can be drag dropped to the field as before. Only one adjustable event block is possible right now. That block-list will expand soon for quest related stuff. The part what took the most time was making this whole area of information getting stored in the database, so everything is stored at one place. No more need for sending npc-scripts by yourself one by one, this will go automatically from now on!

The current event block is also very easy to use, it can be enlarged when needed (up to 5 answers right now) and you can delete answers till just one answer when they are not needed anymore. Also the static actions on the left can be used, like opening a shop or end the conversation.

That was the update from the last few weeks. The NPC-editor can't be used yet, I need to create a few more blocks first.

Cheers,

Zatir

[Tickles]

Pretty awesome. I can see many possibilities now.

[Zatir]

Yeah Cortex. Looking back to the first page of this topic:

I see, instead of having to write out full scripts for the NPC's, we can just edit them and integrate them with this tool you're designing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You'd still need to write the code for the NPCs, but the tool allows you to make the actual NPC which will be shown in-game.

You actually don't need to write the code right now, because you only have to create the NPC in a more graphical environment.

[Tickles]

Yeah. But for some of the NPC's, there are special actions that may need to be coded by hand. I think I'll have to show you which ones when I get a new laptop, and can use the IRC a little better.

[Zatir]

You probably mean when writing quests. Then there are If/else statements. I can just make a panel where you can choose different if-statements with their parameter(s). That will be my next panel I'm going to create. Correct me if im wrong, tips are always welcome.