It was a slow day at work so I grabbed some scratch paper and began to work out formulas for my 3d RPG project. I've put the editor on hold for a moment to work out the combat and item system.

I'll be making a seperate gm6 for it for testing so I won't be cluttering up the editor with 'temporary' code.

As far as the editor is concerned, I've made some good progress with the map making and map showing( as in a 3d test that displays walls/floors) but it still needs some fine tunning to bring up the speed. So far it pushes a good 40fps average without frame skipping.

I started making a few items as well, tacked a little showcase of them below.

They are a little gritty, but I'll clean them up later. I'm not sure how I feel about the bricks though. Originally I made each item as a 256x256 image using simple shading(around 5 colors or so) and then crop/rotate/shrink them down to 64x64 and used a burn tool to give them a more 3d look. The outline obiviously needs to be touched up on them.

Back to the topic mentioned above…

Formulas for rpgs, I feel, are the life and blood of the game, and there for the hardest part. Now some may think it shouldn't be to hard to just throw some randomize functions in and juggle stats about, but I'd like to take a more detailed approach.

For example, I spent my down time trying to figure out what is the best of two formulas to use when calculating the success rate of hitting an opponent.

I came up with two and began doing a series of test by changing the values of the variables to get the outcomes of different factors.

Formula 1 :

WeaponHitRate * (Agility * Skill)

VS.

Formula 2 :

Agility + (WeaponHitRate * Skill)

It seems simple enough, Agility ranges from 1 to 10, Skill is a percentage so its value ranges between 0.00 to 1.00 and I used a WeaponHitRate of 10.

A maxed out Skill and Agility resulted in a solid 100 for the first formula and the second was 20.

The lowest were .1 for the first and 2 for the second. I decided to go with the second formula since I didn't want to make it impossible to ever hit someone and not have a insanely high value if you were to say have a weapon with a 100 hit rate.

Now comparing this formula with a dodge formula for the oppoent, each one stuck into a random() function and which ever is greater wins. Hit > dodge = hit else miss.

I'm throwing out the realtime idea of combat that I had with the COW rpg I have in my WIPs, but I'm not sure if a true turnbased would be best or perhaps an active-time ala FF3 and up would work better. I personally feel that realtime combat in a RPG ultimately kills the strategic part of the game. I like playing Oblivion and all, but it just isn't as challanging as some of those old turn based RPGs I used to play like Chrono Trigger.

Yep, I'm done ranting now. Happy 13th.