editing magic in ExultStudio

[Quentin]

First of all, thank you guys for the incredible work! Once again I'm having fun with U7 because of Exult.

Maybe you already answered this question elsewhere... Are you planning to implement magical abilities to characters in the party? I know that it wouldn't make sense to have members of the party in U7 to use magic. But if we're making other games, such a feature would be essential. Would this be a really difficult feature to implement? Of course, it'd be great if exultstudio has a magic system editor.

Since I'm asking away already, let me ask something else. Would it be possible to add a feature where you can point and drag to select your party members to do tasks, much like Planescape or even C&C? Such a feature, even if not used in U7, would be helpful in another game someone else might make with Exultstudio.

Thanks again.

[wjp]

Magic:

interesting question. Currently the spellbook works only on the avatar. It probably wouldn't be too hard to change this to any party member.
However, the tough part is going to be figuring out how to specify this behaviour. The whole magic system is currently pretty much hardcoded in exult. We should probably change this to a more flexible system, but I'm not sure how.

Tasks:

Kind of the same answer. U7 was focused on the avatar. You could only really control the avatar. I think it will take quite a change in architecture to allow you to specify actions for party members. Anything's possible, though

[drcode]

For 'tasks', do you mean you want to take control of one of the other characters? As wjp said, that would involve lots of changes. Might be a fun thing to do, but it won't happen for quite a while.

[Quentin ak]

Well, I guess I mean you can select one or more characters and command them to move to the location you clicked on to. Also, you can command the character(s) to attack the monster you select. This is what you can do with your troops in C&C and other war strategy games. I didn't mean you can totally take over the character like you can do with your party members in Planescape or even in U6. You think that might be feasible?

Quentin

[Valliant Dragon]

Magic:
This is all in the usecode functions, as far as I've seen. With UsecodeStudio you should be able to code that in

(I keep updates at
http://www.ultimadragon.0catch.com/UsecodeStudio.zip)

Character Control:
At the least, you could switch bodies like the Avatar-Petra switch. It's certainly feasible.

Thanks,
Valliant Dragon

[Valliant Dragon]

Character Control revisited:

Im looking into character control for my addon Giridion. From what I've observed, it's certainly feasible. You'd probably need a flag for each character with the current framework, however, and ExultStudio doesn't yet support custom flags.

Thanks,
Valliant Dragon

[Soul Harvester]

If you wanted to do that, you would most likely have to totally abandon the current structure for flags and avatar control.. as it stands, there are global flags that are attached to the avatar per se, but are not affected by the avatar itself, so no matter what form you had you would get a certain response or a certain flag would behave in whatever way.

Since NPC's dont have global flags attached to them (do they?) you would have to have a new structure that allowed each npc its own individual profile and information.

But then perhaps you could have it simpler, that the current supported tasks and whatever future tasks/AI are implemented you simply assign to a character, and then they act accordingly.