Unmei Densetsu, or "Legends of Destiny", is a paradox futuristic RPG  based upon characters and situations from "Federation Crystal".  It centers around the experiences of 8 distinct characters: a young gender-changing fighter, an amazonian warrior and her mother, a mysterious soldier and her ditzy twin sister, a suave mechanic, a vicious experiment, and an elegant, age-old prophetess. These characters are more than they appear to be, and in this installment of the Federation Crystal series, they are each legendary characters brought together by the chaotic will of a KI being known as Crystal. Intertwined sharply into this Crystal's counterpart and direct opposite, Sapphire, along with a mix of other characters, who each play an important role in Destiny.

Re: Unmei Densetsu::DevLog
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:58 pm EST

Tonight brings yet another installment of the DevLog. I will be somewhat concise with this.

Recently I began shifting away from the tile-based turn-based system I was using to a more fluid version of the system that was not bound by turns or by tiles; currently Unmei Densetsu uses a Pixel-based positioning system for all of its objects (a player, a tree, whatever is considered non-tile-based art that the player will be able to weave in and around). Each of these objects has a footprint, and also a height. This allows for flying objects to be portrayed better and also makes collision detection work a little better and provides a pseudo-3D environment (a fly can fly over a player if the fly is high enough off of the ground, and likewise a player can run underneath or jump over objects of certain height).

The jump still needs to be polished. For instance I shall more than likely make it so the player cannot control the direction of their character after a jump is initiated. Right now it's probably a boo-boo in my calculations. . . so we'll see.

So on to what I did today.

I ripped out some code from the dead Battle Engine. Because everything occurs on the map now, looking at combat as a separate entity from normal map conduct no longer works. It can, but for one the battle engine assumed a separate coordinate system, and once a lot of that code was moved over to the actual map engine and I began to work with all objects as an extension of a Map object the Battle System's positioning and objects no longer worked. Instead of bothering to convert it I'm just copying and converting what I can use and removing the rest.

For example, the Map Cursor was ripped from the Battle class and made into a stand-alone object that now wraps an instance of the MapInterface, which is the manager of all map based objects. This works out nicely because it then can be drawn properly on the map despite the fact that the map camera can be hundreds of pixels away from 0 (pretty much all drawing has to take the camera into account to work well on a scrolling map, unless it is supposed to be drawn over the map in a "2d" sense).

This took some time and I had to kill some other Battle engine code ... but oh well, it needs to be ripped out anyway.

Also, I am now working on incorporating highlighting of the space for an attack back in, now through the map system. Before highlighting was based on a grid because it was tilebased. Now an AoE is literally the pixel size... though I might get a little kinky and make AoEs be listed in meters just for giggles (in fact I like that idea). Done.

The other significant accomplishment was with actually getting some circle-drawing and circle-filling code actually put in place I can now put shadows beneath characters and objects (again using the MapInterface). It's actually an ellipse drawing routine. Now of course I need to go back and remove the shadows from Rei's sprite there, but that's OKay.

Here's the "fruit" of today's labor. It also shows a placeholder for skill selection. This will need more work.