Thoughts about older RPGs

Combat project has sorta been on hiatus with all the job junk but I've been thinking about turn based games. Asking a question akin to "how would you make turn based RPGs competitive" to some people got a few answers. Some not so worthwhile to me as they were subjective such "awesome graphics" and "Epic plot" but a few managed to get my attention.

Pre-battle Tactics
This one got my attention, though not much of an explanation, as I may have never seen this explored. In most traditional RPGs the most you did before a battle was buy then equip the best items, maybe use some monster repel to keep random encounters down, and recover. That's it, quite little you do that does have an impact in battle but not much of a choice until you're low on supplies. While I didn't get a proper explanation there was a few thoughts on this. The most overwhelming thought was of "buff" spells.

In most old games, I say most as I haven't seen them all, enhancement spells only last until the end of battle. After that the only thing that sticks with you is a number of negative status effects like poison. While this could have been due to memory issues it may have been a hold over from earlier games. The thought upon hearing Pre-battle tactics was a very simple idea of "everyone gets to cast a free enhancement spell". Using some menu you could set up your battle strategy and get all your buff spells or possibly abilities cast. Personally in every RPG I never used buff spells besides bosses for the simple reason that the turn you spent casting them could used defeating the enemies, it only served to make the battle one turn longer for the random encounters to me. How true this is I'm not sure but given a system of setting up some insurance on battles would tempt me into using them, a good strategy for making MP more valuable as it could be expended a lot more.

Beyond that I'm not sure. I'm not the most creative thinker in this sort of thing but for a more traditional Turn based RPG this seems like very unexplored territory so it's gotten me interested in it. Maybe something to look more into for later musings.


Menu System Reduction
I had mixed feelings on this but it's true. There are a lot of menus in RPGs. Often you'll go through a few sunscreens to do something other than the basic attack, even then you'll have to select the enemy which might as well count as a menu. It's a hard thing to solve for me though there may be a few ways to go about it.

While I have not played Mass effect I have seen it in action. The ability to pull up your non standard attack actions with one button then use a mouse/direction to select which one and target at the same time hides a lot of the menu systems without taking away from the number of it. Excuse me if I'm misremember a bit here though, it's been a bit over a year since a viewing of a Mass Effect game in action was seen here. While it may just be hiding the steps it's a lot better to look at.

This is sorta something that I was beginning to realize in combat project, 4 to 5 options every attack was seeming to be a lot. May be ways to reduce this as skipping some of them but at minimum you need to do 2 selections unless some sort of macro system was in place to automate a few decisions. More work needed on that thought though if that gets done soon you guys may not benefit from it.


Either way some lite thinking going on. I will try to get back to putting something up here but it may be hectic till I get an understanding of the situation. Though with how it goes I tend to do more little things like my own projects or drawing the more work I need to do. Either way if you have seen games which do some of these things I'd like to hear about them to look into it.

Still alive and looking at things

Haven't been posting for the past few days with mandatory drug tests, pre job paper work, and getting transportation set up. Between that just been trying to keep it cool as I'm going to probalby have a tough first few weeks.

To prepair for that I've looked into some "advanced python programing" on a whim not sure what It'd spit out. And got this video on youtube. "Advanced Python or Understanding Python"is presentation hosted by google for "advanced" topics on python. The quotes are there as I'm not sure where advanced starts and guts of the system begins. It's one of those things that even with the amount of time I've spent with python haven't really gotten into. I can get the gist of most of it especially the objects, some of which I've used such as generators, but some of it went over my head. Some things blow my mind such as the ability and execution of functions inside functions and the possible ability to contain more functions within.

Though there is a positive note to this. While I know that I am not the best python programer out there if this is labeled "advanced" and seemingly things that may never be used by me I might do alright. Beyond that a friend of mine is tentivly looking to try and make a game and I've been trying force him into python using tkinter to help him out with it. Playing with snakes post I made are me trying to refine what the points I was trying to get to him when I tried to "teach" him for giggles at one point.

Other than that been sleeping in as much as possible because the days I can do that are soon to come to an end. Though I'll finally have a job programing which is what I've been after for a long time. But for tonight it's Wings night, wonderful yet horrible for you buffalo wings from Pizza hut. Their "WingStreet" wings have a deal every Wednesday which means I can grab a box of them for nearly 4 bucks. For that price I'm up for getting take out.

All rights for this image owned by pizza hut, please don't sue me.

 While not the best wings I've gotten there isn't much choice around here. Not that many restaurants in the area though there are quite a few bars but doubt they are known for their chicken wings. I've had a quite a few failed attempts at cooking good chicken. Either way it's a nice spicy thing that I do enjoy even it's bad for my health. So with this a question for you guys. Anything you get regularly that's horrible for you but eat/drink it anyways?

Random musings

Yesterday went well thought this week is seemingly wash for Combat project so I'll extend the projected date a week and take it easy this weekend. So just a bit of random musings.

Though I have found out a few things about python. I managed to get multithreading working though it seems the python language is not the most thread friendly language. I managed to use that with a bit of socket work for a simple echo server test. It was interesting to do something that had some non game programing.

I have done work in other languages in a higher end capacity but python has mostly been my personal amusement code. Simple little programs or games of no real value to anyone else. It's easy to transport, quick to set up, and isn't too much of a pain to work in beyond self and whitespace issues so it works well for that. On the professional end I have no code in it, and that was what the people were looking for the other day.


It was a little rough but at least it was something to show the people who were interviewing me along with some older code. It could use a lot more polish and I did cope out with some timeout functions instaed of perfectly avoiding deadlock which would only appearing in 4+ thread cases where something would get stuck on listening for a reply. I considered it a win though getting it all done in one night.


While on that subject, have you guys done anything quicker and more proficiently than you expected when you needed it?

further delay on anything interesting

It seems I won't have anything interesting today to offer either. After some poking around I got a quick interview to show up to. While this all well and good I have little current programing examples. To remedy this all day I have been producing some newer examples of my competence in coding.

Namely some multithreading and server client code. Then combining the two. It's going along decently well as this is territory I have covered quite a bit in my schooling days but I have never done it in python so there is a few language hurdles to overcoming though hopefully it'll help out in the end. I may attempt to get some SQL examples done but I don't think that will happen if I want sleep.