I'm plannin first to manage turns and acitons, then I'll work into porting at least one earthbound-esque bg animation

NECROBUMP!!

I finally stopped to messa round and gone into the deep and complet part of turn actions. I implemented a text box routine and I'm  trying to deal with it and turn reactions,, like death of a character. But it's way complex and delicate than I thought and I need to redesign more or less all the mechanism

Got some neeews. I adopted a similar yet more functional methodology to program and it seems to run quietly fine. Yet text routines have to implemented again, but this weekend I'll show you the text box routine in a separated demo. It's quite modulable.

You have three routines:

• SText links the text and prepares the needed variables
• UText updates the two text buffers (one per line), it takes one character per run, changes the buffer if needed, and even scroll text (copies the second buffer on the first and rewrites after on the second).
• DText draws the buffers. If the text don't reach the second, the second won't be drawer, nor the eventually trailing remaining characters in both buffers.

You can run Utext in a loop until it reached the end of the text or if the buffers are filled, or you can run and draws them for each character. I'll take the second because i'll maybe implement custom character codes for reactions or effects (slowing the text flow, shake, whatever you want it'll implement the functions you want with some function pointers).

I have yet to make sure my code is cleaner than before and more understandable than ever. Textboxes litteralt breaks the battle flow and can be quite hard to manage, specially when characters dies/KOes (the rolling meters still roll when in a textbox, that's the hardest thing to manage in this engine)

Feel free to use some of my old Noah sprites.

Any screenshots coming up soon?

Three months later, I got a game engine revelation : I'll drop real-time death detection for a "final blow". I'm not sure how I'll use it, certainly something like a multiplier based on Guts at damage/recovery calculation and then the characther will fall. Now I need to balance, so much abuse is possible with such last stand chance (like recoverying each time at 0 hp...)

To sum up : the counter will flow naturally to 0, and once it reachs 0 and with some event, the charatcer will be given a last chance final blow. Else it'll collapse at its turn. And now I just obliterated an difficult obstacle by not overcoming it! \o/
I'll maybe go into the source later. DOn't expect something but I'm interessed again in the game engine.

What I decided during this time:
- Managing the death in real time is quite hard and I do'nt really know how I will manage this. I'm gonna take this slightly different from the original games.
- I need to plan more things
- Gonna make some real documentation.
- I need a better way to code on computer. At least dig into the last zStart version.


What I expect :
- The engine taking too much space. Having an engine totally apart of a hypothetical RPG engine is quite bizarre, right? Having to arhcive things before running something else and getting the data back can be quite problematic (and prone to Garbage Collect).
- Need more power. I need to keep the source code as clear as I want to keep it. Thus optimization is quite unneeded as long I want to expand the code.

Thanks! For extra information, it started at a "proof' of concept for dynamic background in modal menus.

Having to check death made a big conditionnal and as i didn't finished the structure itself it gave me some big problems. i almost lost track of what's done in the code...