Something I'm Working On

[manikus]

I just got home from work, anxious to see what trouble CocoaSpud had gotten himself into now...

-manikus

[TwilightKing]

'Spud got overzealous and hacked his way into the very last encounter. Consequently, his corpse will now fester on the dungeons lower level, while the tree creatures "feast" upon his nutrient-rich flesh.

[Dinonykos]

Is this giant tree a 144*144 pixel icon? I've never tried that, my biggest monster was 144*96 and I excluded it from the adventure because it had problems to move around when too many monsters were on the combat field.
A really good but complicated feature would be if the hitpoints of several monsters could be connected. So your monster tree for example could have roots coming out of the battlefield everywhere and when those roots were hit, the tree could lose hitpoints...
Is that a dumb idea? Is it possible to suggest that to CocoaSpud? I'm not sure if he visits this forum frequently...

[manikus]

The largest combat icon that I've used was 960x480 in a Mecha design I was working on.

I think the tree root thing can already be done, you just have to think about it as each root having x percent of the total hitpoints of the whole tree. For example, the whole tree is worth 200 hitpoints, with 50 of those points being in the roots, maybe 5 points each in 10 roots...

-manikus

[Steve McDonald]

The problem would be that you cannot ensure that the icons for each separate part of a tree etc appear in the right place - that is, roots at the bottom, branches at the top. And of course, even if you could, the monster's movement would need to be set to zero so that the parts did not run away from each other.

One of the best battles (I thought) in the gold box series was a fight against the avatar of Takhisis (a five-headed dragon) in Dark Queen of Krynn. The dragon's body was actually immobile and just part of the scenery. Each of the five heads was treated as a monster with a certain number of HP (eg Blue Head 56 HP). None of the heads moved in combat: they just fired off dragon breath and attacked. Once customisable combat setup becomes possible this sort of custom battle, including stationary trees made up of separate roots and branches that have to be hacked off before the trunk can be attacked, should be easier to achieve.

Steve

[Steve McDonald]

By the way, these screenshots look great.

[manikus]

I was thinking much the same idea- use the current tree icon and add some additional "rootling" icons that had zero movement, or a movement of 1 to simulate the tree's ability to effect it's surroundings. These seperate icons could appear anywhere without effecting how th etree looked. Actually, if the ready pose was blank, they could appear to be popping out of the ground...

-manikus

[SilentThief]

Yeah! Great screenshots!! the artwork is awesome!

SilentTheif

[TwilightKing]

Thanks! And good ideas on the tree roots..I may have to add them in!!

The tree actually has 0 movement, and only 1 frame for its animation, so it just sits there.

[Dinonykos]

Okay, with manikus hints I learned how to post images, so here are two ingame graphics from the adventure I'm working on.




Hope you like them. The frameworkhous was difficult...