Messages

That was amazingly fast! Can't wait to put it to use!
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

There's no way to interrupt a sound once it's been started.  If you're using it for voiceovers, and the player just *clickclickclickclickclick*s through your dialog, it'll sound like a total trainwreck of audio.

That's kind of what I meant by "limitations". I happen to clickstorm as well whenever I have already seen the dialogue for a certain map or just restarted because one of my characters died. The StopSounds action you're suggesting would probably the most direct solution to that issue. If I do end up using PlaySound for my sound effects I might find some way to skip the dialogue so you wouldn't have to hear/read everything again, but that's more of a workaround that a fix.

This is pretty cool! Some nice nostalgia from the old Fire Emblems.

I did a little looking around and was a little surprised no one has asked about this yet. As briefly mentioned in the post about the stretch goals, voice acting was a possibility for the main game, though not pursued. While I don't mind not having voices in the main campaign, if there's some way to do it in custom campaigns then I would like to find out what it is.

From what I know(which is iffy at best), there's two main uses of sound in the game, sound effects and music. A possibility that comes to mind is creating "sound effects" that contain voice acting dialogue and use custom campaign magic to play those sound effects at the correct moment. What are the limitations of this? Will the sound quality be good enough for this purpose? I'll eventually answer these questions myself, but I am currently busy with other aspects of custom campaign's so I was hoping to get some inside advice  ;), plus then it will be here for everyone to learn from.

Update 6/24/15:
New image added, these images are likely to be similar to what in-game characters may look like. Art style doesn't really match with the rest of Telepath Tactics, which is why I'm trying to make whatever I can custom art(which takes freaking forever).

Storyline is being worked on, still no spoilers to give out but maybe expect some backstory campaigns for you to play/test the custom mechanics/attacks/characters/etc.

Let me guess - the darkness element belongs to the bad guys?

I'd like to see Light Is Not Good and Dark Is Not Evil make an appearance at least once. But that's just my feedback.

In short, no one element is the "bad guys". I'm not giving anything big away, but don't expect cliche "darkness is bad and light is good" themes. If there's one thing I hate it's unoriginal ideas. Etheria is split up into seven kingdoms, and they have small fights or political power struggles every once in a while. There is a greater power that keeps the balance, which I also won't reveal, but pretty much anybody can be the "good guys" and anybody can be the "bad guys".

What would be amazing if Craig just implemented the ability to rename character attributes, such as "Psy Power" to "Magic Affinity" or something, so that the lore of my story works a little better with the engine. Of course, I have no idea how complicated that may be or if it's a hardcoded value, so I'm not demanding it, it would just be a nice feature. Maybe someone in the community can make a mod that does something like that; there's endless solutions because the game is open to modding.

I'm very excited to see the prospects of custom abilities/classes.  I also love the elemental kingdoms trope and am curious to see how yours plays out.  Curious, how would you manage elemental magic that isn't "damage typed" in the engine- TT supports fire, light, dark, cold, mental and 3 physicals.  Would you repurpose blunt and piecing into new magic types?

Excellent question Kletian999. Currently the modding engine will let me give any element name to a skill, but if it doesn't exist, like "Lightning", then it won't have any effect on a character's resistances, damage, etc. If Craig does have in mind implementing the ability to add custom elements that actually work, or he already has and I haven't noticed, then that is the route I will take.
However, if not, then I probably will not end up using/repurposing TT damage types, but instead implementing some sort of generic element cycle that will apply to every character. Think of Pokemon, and how Fire type attacks are always super effective against Grass type Pokemon. This system will still give the player the ability to plan their strategy around who can resist certain enemy attacks better and who can damage the enemy more, which I like a lot about the TT play style.

I'm afraid I don't have much to offer in terms of artistic ability, but if you're looking for beta testers/coding support I'd be more than willing to help! As for the idea, I'm definately interested to see where this goes. It's nice to see custom campaigns sprouting up. I've got one I'm working on as well, but I'm not ready to announce it until I have all of the basic mechanics written and screenshots and such done. I'm subbing to this thread for future notifications! :D

I'll edit my post to put a little more in my progress section, but first I'm putting together a small testers campaign with unique skills, classes, characters, maps, etc. which I would be glad to let people have and test with. That should be done in the next week or so if things go according to plan. Though like you, I don't want to reveal much until I have the mechanics in place and some more design done, which is why I only wrote a little on the subject.

[Summary]

Legends of Etheria
Aster: Darkest Star from Brightest Light

Summary
[spoiler]
    In another dimension, the magical lands of Etheria, a young girl by the name of Aster will begin her quest that will change the nation forever. Etheria is a large continent, split into seven kingdoms to represent the seven elements, which are currently at peace with each other. Lady Asteraceae Calmette lives in Radiant Castle, located in the Light Kingdom of Solus, with her father, Luca Calmette, a retired, but honorable, knight from the legendary Amber Guard. Aster much prefers adventuring and training than her duties as the Lady of Radiant Castle, and she is skilled in both magic and sword.
    Our story begins on the dawn of Aster's sixteenth birthday, when a person celebrates their "Coming of Age" ceremony and officially becomes responsible for themselves. Aster's mother lives in Kol, the Dark Kingdom, and Luca has never let Aster leave Solus for her own safety. Now in charge of her own life, Aster and her friends Cynthia, Vadden, and Uriel will travel to Kol in search of her mother, and will encounter plenty of resistance along the way.
[/spoiler]
Telepath Tactics
[spoiler]
    Now that I've given a brief introduction to the story, I'll explain what it is I am doing and why I've chosen Telepath Tactics as the engine for my story. Legends of Etheria is an original concept created by myself, a magical world of seven kingdoms and seven elements, filled with forces of evil and good, set in a medieval type era. "Darkest Star from Brightest Light" is the story of Asteraceae Calmette, as she travels with her friends from Solus on a seemingly small adventure to the neighboring kingdom of Kol, but encounter much greater troubles along the way, changing the history of Etheria. I am only a few weeks into the writing of Aster's quest, and as such not all of the story is ready for public viewing, not that I want to spoil anything anyway.
    I am using Telepath Tactics as a way to tell this story because I like the strategy and storytelling potential of the game. As this game mostly focuses on storytelling aspects, don't expect too much of a challenge through the main storyline, though I plan to include many special levels that are for the players looking for a difficult challenge. I think the modding environment of Telepath Tactics is easy enough to learn, yet flexible enough to do what I want, and once Craig works through all the suggestions and bugs of the system(easy install for custom textures with mods?) then it will be a great delivery system to anyone who wants to enjoy my story.
[/spoiler]
Progress
[spoiler]
    I may come back and periodically update this section with the status of this project. Like I said above, this project has only existed for a few weeks and I haven't yet created much publicly viewable content that won't spoil the storyline. Currently the greatest support anyone could give me is a comment on what they think of the project and if they are in favor of it, I need to know my time isn't wasted. If anyone is artistically talented and would like to help, please leave me a PM or send me an email with your offer.

Update as of 6/24/15:
Backstories almost done, storyline almost written, I'm extremely excited for this and I want to get something simple out soon so that you can test the mechanics I'm adding and things I'm trying to do with the campaigns. I'm really trying to make the story the best part of the campaign, and that takes time to make good.

[/spoiler]
Gallery
[spoiler]
I'll post my very few existing pictures of the characters here. Note that these are only very early concept ideas and don't reflect the final version of the characters. Concept art characters drawn by Kat, a good friend of mine and good artist as well.


[/spoiler]
    Helpful critiques are welcome! Questions about campaign design and mechanics are also encouraged, as I may draw ideas from what you ask about.

[fantastic]

I'm working on a campaign that will most likely have a bunch of custom art, so this is definitely a need within the custom campaign system. What would be fantastic is if the entire custom campaign could be contained in a single zipped file/folder so there is no need to have an extensive and confusing installation process. Thanks Craig for all your hard work on this game!

Soon, you'll be able to have multiple campaigns in progress at a time!

Will this allow multiple instances of the same campaign, i.e. will I be able to have several saves of the same runthrough at different points?

Thank you Craig! That's literally been the only thing I keep worrying about. I like switching between my serious hardcore campaign where I don't ever let anybody die and my casual campaign where I don't care because they'll be revived next scene, so this change makes a huge difference for me!

I don't have the map editor yet, but when the full game comes out and I get my hands on it I will be making my own campaigns. In the meantime I'll be writing the story and working on custom attacks, items, and images for characters.

This really is a great game in terms of modding capability, so I'm going to be doing a lot with it in the future.

I tinkered around with the script some more, playing with the variables that will "change" upon transformation, like disMaxHealth(named formMaxHealth in my script). You can implement a form of multiplication by using multiple Action blocks, since in-line arithmetic doesn't seem to like working(Ex. <Action>SetVal/formMaxHealth,=,5*-STAT:-FNAME-,Level-</Action>)

Example of working version:

Code Select Expand


<Action>SetVal/formMaxHealth,=,5</Action>
<Action>SetVal/formMaxHealth,*,-STAT:-FNAME-,Level-</Action>


However, one issue I found with doing this is that if you equip the item(and transform), then level up, then revert back, it will cause you to lose some total max health because when the script calculated the max health to revert you it used a different level.

Ex. Tidus is lvl 1 and equips the transform item. His MaxHealth raises by lvl*5 from 10 to 15. He then levels up, and then removes the item, causing his MaxHealth to lower by lvl*5 from 15 to 5.

To counter this problem I set up my Scripts to only calculate the values to change when entering the form, not when reverting, so the already stored values of formMaxHealth will be used.

Here's the new script(adapted from your "Swordsman Disguise" script):
http://pastebin.com/E9wC16ne

This ensures that the exact values used to transform the unit are used to undo those changes.

Thanks, I can always look at the XMLs to find out how you did certain things.

I decided to try it out as well, and basically extended the capability of the Azure Orb item. The only problem I found is that if I changed the class of the character then the item would not be equipped, but changing the class is an unnecessary detail. I may adapt the script you wrote for your "spy" character to fit the purposes of my "dreamer", if that's alright. I'm pretty much satisfied with this way to transform a character, some things I might want to implement in the future will be stat changes based on current character level, and other graphical effects while changing.

One question about your script, how does this line work?

Code Select Expand


<Script>
Add Disguise
<Action>SetString/CurrChar,-FNAME-</Action>
...
</Script>


I understand that you need to save the current character's name as a variable, to reference it later when changing stats and sprites and such, but how does -FNAME- know to get the specific name of the character that is changing disguise?