Screenshots and demo is possible? Is very confusing to imagine its potential. Also, something for animations in map? For action or SRPG battle engines (animation in normal map, outside battle map, no battler)? Thanks
Viewing post in Battler Flipbooks Core MV + MZ comments
It’s tricky because this is the kind of generic/subdued system that looks and behaves entirely differently depending on how it’s used. I have a very unpolished recording from about a month ago here with some features and fixes still missing at that point, as I had to make rough versions of some extensions to figure out and test the core, but this may not reflect well how someone else would use it in practice.
I’ll still try to make a better showcase once I have more of my code polished and published… but it will still feature those programmer art cubes or similar because I really can’t draw well enough for more than that.
Regarding map animations: The main reason this plugin is able to work efficiently and seamlessly at the same time is that it can predict which animations may be used based on the battlers that are present. Keeping all animations for all battlers in your game always in memory would likely cause issues due to memory use, especially on mobile/web, but they need to be in memory to play instantly when needed.
Map events also don’t (easily) have the meta data I use for flipbook rule conditions, and I can’t set up a nice object selector for them in the plugin parameters afaik, so animating them directly this way isn’t that feasible from a game content creation point of view.
The good news is that at least some map battle engines do in fact use battlers and Window_BattleLog internally, which makes them somewhat nearly compatible with this system already!
What’s needed to make it work is another plugin loaded after Battler Flipbooks Core that bridges it to the map battle system loaded earlier, and adjusts Sprite_Character to show bitmaps from a hidden Sprite_Battler-like instance animated this way during battles.
I’m close to certain that this is possible without changes to Battler Flipbooks Core, since all engine hooks are published as before/after properties and can be adjusted and called as needed without unintended side-effects due to that.
However, I currently don’t have plans to implement this myself. I am available for questions and code review towards this purpose though (and related to Battler Flipbooks in general, really).
Thank you for the follow :)
Note that there will be a bit of overlap between the layers I make, since there’s a trade-off between how different the battle events that can trigger animations in a layer can be and how well the rules can react to specific context of an event.
For example, Battler Reaction Flipbooks will let you filter conveniently by how much damage an action did as percentage of the target’s max HP or its elemental effectivity, among many other action-related conditions, and can be used to make that damage-scaled fake knockback you saw in the video.
However, if you need only a simple general damage reaction per battler, then Occasional Battler Flipbooks will be enough, since it can be used to play an animation whenever the Game_Battler.prototype.performDamage engine function is called.
That one will come with a handy drop-down with suggestions for about 160 battler-related engine functions it can dynamically hook into, but without the additional filter conditions available in more specific layers.