Blah
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- Unknown Island
- Seen Feb 19, 2025
Was anyone here into RPG Maker 2000/2003 before ROM hacking?
Myself and a couple of friends had a fairly ambitious game planned, set on a world consisting of a few islands bordered by impassable waterfalls. Part of the conclusion would have been that the waterfalls actually went down to an even larger ocean, and that other waterfall-bound islands probably existed far away, like discovering that the Earth is only one terrestrial planet among many. Basically setup for a potential sequel.
Like so many RM2K projects, we never got beyond a half-hour demo release, although it was fun designing the world map, sprites, weapons, etc. And at one point I was tired of RPG Maker's bad algorithm for "make an NPC walk towards the player" and tried implementing A* search, which in retrospect was a terrible idea given the lack of actual data structures. (RPG Maker XP, with its scriptable Ruby support, would have been a better choice, if it had existed at the time.)
Personally, I have not used RPG maker before. When making the initial decision of RPG maker and ROM hacking, I decided to pick RH because the barrier to entry was so low (we've got a tool for everything). But if you're hoping that ROM hacking offers an easy solution for "npc to player", you will not find it :P
People normally hard code the pathing and movements an NPC takes, rather than having the game generate the movements. Though this is a neat idea, and would definitely be a nice exercise/QOL addition to the basic scripting library. Luckily, it wouldn't be too difficult to code because the array of NPC structs contain X/Y positions so simple subtraction does the trick (ignoring collision and NPCs too far off screen not being rendered).