What I planned for data format is something like classes. Here's what I mean :

• First there's the character. It has HPs, MPs, stats, a pointer to an animation and a set of pointers to attacks/skills/capacities (dunno how it's called in English).
• Then, there's the attack/skill/capacity. It has a name, a cost in MPs (0 if not required), a byte to tell the effect (hurt, heal, change stats ...), one or two bytes to tell how much damage it does/how much HPs or MPs it restores/by how much a stat increases or decrease, a byte for the precision of the attack, a byte to tell if the target gets a special state (paralized, burnt, frozen etc), and finally a pointer to a bunch of code which will be the animation you see when you use this attack.
• At last, there's the animation. It has a number of frames, and as many sprites as the number of frames.

That's how I see the thing. What do you think of it ?

It's almoqt like every rpgs I olayed and dissecated the engine! It should rock!

The only problem I have is the last bullet. I feel like the attack animation should not be restricted to sprites. Instead, I think attacks should be subroutines so that we can make attacks that are customised for graphics and whatnot. For example, a thunderbolt animation might strike several places on the field before attacking a character. Using sprites for this would take a lot of memory, whereas using existing routines for lines and stuff would be a lot smaller.

EDIT: Otherwise, it looks good Maybe the last two bullets could get merged, then...

The only problem I have is the last bullet. I feel like the attack animation should not be restricted to sprites. Instead, I think attacks should be subroutines so that we can make attacks that are customised for graphics and whatnot. For example, a thunderbolt animation might strike several places on the field before attacking a character. Using sprites for this would take a lot of memory, whereas using existing routines for lines and stuff would be a lot smaller.

It's exactly what I meant for example, an attack data would look like this :
Data(Str1^r,5,0,300^r,255,0,_LAttack^r)

And you would write :

:"Thunderbolt"->Str1
:
:etc
:
:Lbl Attack
:animation code for Thunderbolt here

Here we're talking about attack animation, not regular animation. The double use of "animation" confused everybody I guess

Personally i don't think grayscale is worth dropping 83+ support. Sometimes it looks nice, but in general i think B/W looks much better.

Maybe it could be made optional.