Crazy Li

I don't want this thread to rot forever, but not much I can do when the maker is probably a good ways off :p I guess I'll post a planned list of skills. Perhaps not the final cut, but what I've got at the moment... it's mostly just me going through the entire series and picking out ones I thought worked well Iron Wall - Chance to nullify damage (Skill%) Wrath - Always Critical when HP is below half Adept - Activates a second attack (Speed%) Mug - Chance to steal gold on hit (Skill%) Steal - Steals enemy's unequipped weapon or item Awareness - Negates enemy criticals Vantage - User attacks first even on enemy's turn (Speed%) Charisma - Hit rate and Avoid +5 to all allies within a 3 tile radius Renewal - Recover 30% HP at the start of user's turn Dance - Allows adjacent target to move again (not sure if this is being considered a skill or not) Luna - Negates enemy's defense (Skill%) Sol - Recover HP equal to damage done to enemy (Skill%) Astra - Attacks 5 times consecutively (Skill/2%) Cancel - Negates enemy's counter attack (Speed%) Nihil - Negates enemy's battle skills Resolve - Skill & Speed x 1.5 when HP is below half Pass - User can move through enemy occupied tiles (if I can figure out how to make that one work xP) Gamble - Hit rate -5, Critical +10 Disarm - Unequips enemy weapon (Skill/2%) Miracle - Character survives with 1 HP after receiving a fatal blow (Luck%) Lethality - Instantly KOs enemy (Skill/2%) Outdoor Fighter - Hit rate and Avoid +10 when fighting outdoors Indoor Fighter - Hit rate and Avoid +10 when fighting indoors Armsthrift - Attack does not reduce weapon usage (Luck*2%) Locktouch - Opens doors and chests without the need of keys Acrobat - All traversable terrain costs 1 movement point to cross Vengeance - Deals (user's Max HP - Current HP/2) extra damage (Skill*2)% Some of the command skills are only going to be relevant if re-classing is a thing... which I'm not sure if I'll go that route or not yet. Re-classing isn't easy to do right. Awakening showed me just how broken the system can be.

Yeah knife/ice will be pretty easy. I added new weapon types in FEXP and that was a mess considering what it had to do. I expect FEXNA will be easier to work with and more organized. For the same reason, making the ranks show right should also be easier. Just look at existing ones and replicate that and make sure everything references the correct portion of the code. For mounting, I won't need stat or weapon changes. Mounting a horse/pegasus/wyvern literally just changes move type and move amount so it'll be fairly simple. I can probably learn how to make things mountable/dismountable by studying how ballistae work. And yes, a re-classing system is going to be the most involved... but also the one I don't actually need for anything so that would be more of a test of my skills if I went for it. I may be a bit ambitious with what I want to do... but honestly coding is the one of the few aspects I don't suck at xP I'm not so great when it comes to music and graphics for games... just writing and coding.

And someone WILL do it to be sure. There's too much clamor for that to never be a thing. If no one else figures this out by the time I get my hands on a copy of the engine, I'll do it since it's one of the many things I need to implement for my game idea. I actually have a fairly long list of modifications I'd need to make to FEXNA for my game... I have my work cut out for me xp -Knife usage -Ice magic -Various battle formula recalculations (most notably magic damage as it relates to chosen element vs. affinities of caster and target) -Mountable/dis-mountable units I'm sure there are also going to be skills I need to program beyond what's used in 7x... and I may decide to build a re-class system... but I'm not totally sure about that one. I won't make it for my own game if I feel it breaks the balance of it. I certainly don't want Awakening style re-classing where you can just loop characters over and over so they easily become OP with max stats. If I used anything, it'd be more like Shadow Dragon where you retain your current level and just shift classes.

I would argue that having the same base stats for MAG and STR while also having the same growths would make the tomes thing pointless. Aside from RGN luck, you're not going to see any practical reason to do this over making weapons that hit RES. At the same time, differing the stats could make thing dicey. In my current idea, there are two factors that come into play. The reason the character acquires magic use is plot-related so the result is more story first and practical second. Added to that, since they get magic later, the character is planned to start out with better STR intially but with a slightly greater MAG growth so it can potentially catch up and balance out. But yeah... there's no wrong way in theory... it's up to how you put it into practice.

No, I shouldn't do that because that doesn't make any sense. You're basically telling me I should give a thief more magic or staves instead of the knives they're supposed to have to begin with. I don't really believe your method is more balanced than mine. You're basically saying you have a garbage character that can hit two different stats in their attack for their one redeeming quality. The end result of my character will be similar (though not garbage all around since this character has good speed, being a thief-type). Really balance is about making a conscious effort to balance stuff... play-testing everything. I plan to test every map to make sure things make sense and characters aren't becoming too strong... adjusting and tweaking as I need. I know C#, so as long as that's the core behind FEXNA, I should be fine on making it myself. My only concern was whether or not new stats would show up in the management area for character/class initial stats/growths. Since it sounds like stuff actually adds easily, it doesn't sound like it'll be problematic from the GUI management end so I should be perfectly fine to make this change. There's a lot of other system changes I need to make anyway since I have a lot of ideas that deviate from GBA style of doing things (some from other FE games, and some my own original methods). I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty in the code at all.

I really don't agree with this point of view. Again, not trying to tell Yeti what to do. He's free to make the editor however he wants of course... and as long as it's flexible enough that adding it myself in a way that's reasonable to manage is possible, I have no problems. But still I don't get the arguments against this so much. It's up to the game maker to make the game good. If you don't need the mechanic, you wouldn't have to use it anyway. If it existed, it would be an option, thus being optional. It only becomes bad design if the person using it implements it poorly... but if the person using it isn't good at game design in general, they'll likely use other features poorly anyway. Excluding this isn't saving anything... it's just making it harder on people who may have good ideas. To say having a character that can do both magic and melee devalues all characters that can only do one is silly. What are the chances that a single unit that's average at both things can take out everything by themselves? No, they still need other units. Yeah, if I made a unit that could get 20 STR and 20 MAG, that would be obviously OP... but the same could be said about any unit that has too many high stats. A paladin in GBA games can use Swords, Spears, and Axes, right? Why does this not devalue other units by your logic? I don't need Swordsmasters, Heroes, Bersekers, Generals, ect... because I have one unit that can do all 3 melee weapons. No, that's not how Fire Emblem works. Units are more complex than what weapon they use. A Mercenary and a Myrmidon both use swords... but they are fundamentally different units. One tends to be more powerful and the other tends to be swifter and better at crits. Units can be unique and have their own values beyond what weapon type(s) they use. And really a unit that say uses Magic and Swords can attack DEF or RES, sure... but attacking DEF doesn't give them an edge over every piece of the triangle like my Paladin example. They might slash a mage good, but then a Halberdier comes in skewers them on the enemy turn. My implementation of the idea involves a character that uses Knives and Tomes. They have tactical options, but don't excel at damage in either capacity. The knives are outside the triangle, so they don't beat anything and are fairly weak weapons to begin with. The character doesn't have exceptional STR either. MAG can be a little more promising if I keep a triangle around, since the Anima will at least have a strength... but I haven't decided how I'll handle magic yet. Still, the MAG isn't on the level of an actual Mage, so they won't have comparable damage output. On top of this, attacking a Mage with a knife to hit DEF can still be risky since this character doesn't have super high RES or anything (also doesn't have high DEF). The character avoids being too OP by having very balanced/average stats despite two types of attacks that target different defenses. The end goal is to make the character situationally useful while not universally outshining other units. Also I find it weird that people argue both ways against STR/MAG splits... I've seen posts where someone will say it makes the character too OP while also noting that magic attacks are pointless on chars without good MAG in the same post xP Which way is it? Useless or OP? It seems some are so against it that every possible scenario makes it bad. If it's strong, it's bad. If it's weak, it's bad. If it's average, it's bad. I don't understand that.

I understand that it's not gonna happen since Yeti doesn't want it, but I hafta disagree highly with the points. It's not "bad design" at all. Combining the two in one was just a cheap shortcutting that the GBA games took. Now while I agree it's not important to have in a game that doesn't utilize it, what about those that do? Awakening is a good example where your Avatar uses Swords and Magic, so this is essential to that game. My issue with refusing to make it built-in is that it's WAY easier to combine STR/MAG if you don't want them separate than to code the game to separate it yourself. Why? Because of the database. This is my one issue with the idea that it can easily just be coded after the fact. How do you manage it? If a character's database entry literally only has one field for STR or MAG, how do you enter stats? That makes the whole process entirely more complicated. If every character had fields for both STR and MAG, you could use both if your game required such or just use the one that's applicable and make a simple code that ignored the one not used for that class. See how this is much easier? This is assuming the engine is designed in a way where the character sheet GUI only has 1 field for both without any stat field flexibility. If stat fields can actually be customized to show up in the GUI itself to be easily managed, I have no problem.

I took a break for a long while because sometimes you need to step away from stuff when you hit roadblocks in order to take a fresh attempt at them. I went and revisited an older attempt at a character (look back previously to find this one) and below is my progress. All I really did was play with the outfit itself more. It definitely looks off to me though... like if it were distorted... I'm guessing I have alignment and/or proportion issues here... probably even bad shading contributing to the funky look of the shoulders/arms. Hoping someone who knows this stuff better could give me some ideas on how to fix it. Also if anyone is curious about the character's original design for what I'm trying to represent here, you can see it here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v342/crazyli825/my%20chars/Natalie_zpsjqui45tf.png

The engine was developed primarily for the creator to make his own FE fangame, FE7x: Immortal Sword. I believe his primary focus is development of the game itself and he expands the engine as needed to facilitate that process. That said, a public beta is planned to be released eventually, but don't expect things to move super fast when the game itself has a higher priority than the maker. There's a good chance there will be something out sometime this year... but that could be closer to the end for all we know (or not this year at all, nothing is for sure). This also isn't a professional product, so it's not exactly yeti's job to develop it. That's another reason the project naturally moves slower than one might expect. For those who are less patient, do some looking into yeti's old FEXP project that was a set of scripts for RPG Maker XP to try and make a FE game out of it. This project was dropped upon finding XNA to be easier to work with than trying to turn RMXP into something it was never meant to do but still has some of the core foundations in place. It's a good testing ground for balancing units, placement, stats, and map design. You can also practice eventing and making conversation scenes. A lot of these skills will be transferable to FEXNA as stuff like the text format for dialog will be the same.

Python would probably be more useful if you wanted to program professionally... though if you're just making the programs entirely yourself (as opposed to working for a company), you can make it in whatever you want as long as it works.

Here's a little tidbit that I was planning on that I'm not sure is a good idea or not... I was gonna change how the Attack Speed formula worked. For the most part, I plan on sticking to the GBA formulas, but this one I was considering playing with. The GBA games compare the weapon's weight with your characters CON. Basically, if it's too large for your body, it weighs you down and you suffer a speed penalty. In games were Strength is universally prevalent, they tend to compare to STR instead. If you're too weak to wield it efficiently, you get slowed down. What this means is that in the GBA games, a small character will never be able to do anything about suffering a penalty from heavy weapons. They can't improve (except maybe by 1 on promotion). In other games, as their STR increases with level, they might overcome the penalty. I wasn't sure which of these made more sense, or which I preferred, so I thought I should combine them. If WWt > (STR+CON)/2, AS = Spd - (WWt - (STR+CON)/2)). This means being small still makes it difficult to hold heavy stuff, but isn't eternally dooming. Characters can be strong for their sizes. This plays most heavily into one character in particular who's a little girl using axes. She has practically no CON, but with enough STR gain won't be a sitting duck any longer.

Late to this conversation, but I just wanted to note that I too had Visual Basic as my first programming language and then I went to Visual C# (then Visual C++, but that's off track) before trying some Python most recently and I didn't find Python to be that troubling. Then again, I'm not actually doing straight Python, but rather through an editor that's based on Python (Ren'py) so that might be why :p it'd kinda be like saying I was doing Ruby because I was coding in RPG Maker when that's not quite the case. I also learned GML somewhere in there, but not sure what that even counts as xp

I could manage with the no staves or healing items... but not sure I could do with the no between chapter healing bit as well. I don't often need to heal in battles, so making it to the end still alive is feasible for me... but when I say alive, that sometimes means I have characters with 4 HP left XD that would be a terrible way to begin the next map.

That was an awesome reply

I'm not particularly worried about animation problems for the real project since FEXNA won't have those issues.