Here's what I originally planned, in that respect:

 - Enemy would blink when attacked, or when it executes an attack

 - Either the entire window would blink when a character (or the entire party) was attacked, or the screen would shake

 - Spell animations would consist of screen-flashing and shaking effects

I'm not sure what Iambian is going to do, though. I guess it depends on how taxing the effects are, and what's really most feasible.

I'm not sure if we touched-down on this, but are you going to add any sort of animation to the enemy sprites? If an enemy executed an attack, for instance, then would the enemy sprite flash to indicate that the enemy is taking an action?

I remember we did masking for all of these sprites a while back. I figured this is probably the reason why.

Ah. PoD has a much smaller world. The maximum map size is only 16x16 tiles. (both battle maps, and exploration maps) The overworld is just a ubiquitous map that lists the various regions and locations you can select. Although that limits the potential for ships and other transportation, there might be battle maps that place you on a ship during events where you're traveling across a sea to reach a distant region.

Wow, Zera. I was planning to do the exact same battle as you for TLM -_-;; I got inspired from some of the games that I played long time ago, but don't remember their names.

Feel free to borrow any ideas from PoD. I have some of the statistical information listed a page or so back.

I'm curious about some possibilities with the data structure. I was working on ways to handle enemy data, and I created a proposal using fractions for attack probabilities, and flags to handle various other properties:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name (bitmap)

{Spell / special ability}

HP 255  |- Physical attack toggle  [ ]  Undead type        [ ]
AT 255  |- Counterattack           [ ]  Dragon type        [ ]
DF 255  |- Cause poison            [ ]  Explode upon kill  [ ]
Mov 16  |- Hold target             [ ]  Weak to fire       [ ]
Act 16  |- Cause death             [ ]  Weak to lightning  [ ]
        |- Drain HP                [ ]  Resist fire        [ ]
Crit.   |- Destroy equipment       [ ]  Resist lightning   [ ]
01/08   |- 25% chance of 2x hit    [ ]  Resist poison      [ ]
        |- 50% chance of 2x hit    [ ]  Resist hold        [ ]
Evade                                   Resist death       [ ]
01/08                                   Flying             [ ]
                                        Can see invisible  [ ]
 GP: 255 / Spoils: -------- [01/01]     Celibrax defence   [ ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each enemy has a single spell or special ability it can use. The A.I. would simply choose (in some random fashion) whether the enemy unleashes a standard attack, (if the attack toggle is active) or it unleashes its spell / ability.

To the left are the basic statistics of the enemy. Critical hit and evasion probabilities are simple fractions. There is no hit probability that has to be compared to evasion in order to determine the total accuracy of an attack - there's merely evasion by itself.

The first column of flags (starting with "Physical attack toggle") describes flags that are directly linked to physical attacks. Anything checked in this column will occur when the enemy unleashes a standard attack. The second column describes all other (attack-independent) properties.

At the bottom, we have the amount of GP awarded for defeating the enemy, and the item (if any) with its probability of being dropped.

Something like neh-puh-topple

I suppose you can substitute the P sounds for V sounds, as well. P, V and F are all rather ambiguously sounded in some languages.

Good work, indeed. I didn't expect you to put this much detail into it.

Iambian can confirm the veracity of this method, since I sent the e-mail to him.

It seems GMail avoids displaying links for certain red-flag terms to avoid displaying offensive content. I think you could possibly achieve the same effect by writing something downright pornographic.