I'm going to be re-jiggering the custom enemy system...

Sweet! We can make moles now!
Enemy scripts would be useful for just movement patterns, but any more complicated would be too much for now.

beefster09 wrote:Sweet! We can make moles now!
Enemy scripts would be useful for just movement patterns, but any more complicated would be too much for now.

Seriously.

Also, I've added homing movement for floaters (Homing Rate now does something) and an option for diagonal movement for walkers.

I suppose I could implement an approximation of the Z3 Guards' movement by making their homing rate and speed double if Link is in their line of sight...

This sounds so, so awesome!
When making a big quest you encounter the problem of too few kind of enemies, but with this all maybe even some LttP bosses will be very possible!

Will there ever be "enemy carry overs"? Enemies whiches follow you through screens unless you get 2 screens distance away? Not like it couldn't be faked right now, just curious...

Now I miss only one thing: can a "bounce" be added? Like in LttP, where the Tower of Hera boss (Big Moldorm) bounced Link away when Link touched it's head or when Link attacked with a sword/hammer.

Yeah, I'm amazed there's no knockback customization feature yet. Enemies don't really push Link when they harm him. Bullets don't make people fly backwards when they strike, and swords tend to slash skin and draw blood when they slash.

Of course, how often is it that a Darknut just walks around the room randomly in real life? 😛

I still think that custom bosses are going to be really difficult without cusotm enemy sizes. As for bouncing, well, that should be a pretty simple/moderate change to the tekite system. Actually, wait, what if you could modify the wait time between jumps for tekite behavior, thus if you wanted, you could set it to 0, and have it bounce. Throw in some kind of "Follows Link" flag, and voila.

Amaster42 wrote:I still think that custom bosses are going to be really difficult without cusotm enemy sizes. As for bouncing, well, that should be a pretty simple/moderate change to the tekite system. Actually, wait, what if you could modify the wait time between jumps for tekite behavior, thus if you wanted, you could set it to 0, and have it bounce. Throw in some kind of "Follows Link" flag, and voila.

I didn't mean that the enemy bounces around the screen, I meant that when Link hits the enemy, Link gets bounced back and the enemy shivers for half a second. Like the Big Moldorm and those "living switch"-like things in LttP.

Ohhh...ok. Yeah, that's a recoil/knock back thing.

Hrmmm... the problem with the Bat 'robe is that I need a misc slot in which to put the ID of the enemy it summons, and the quantity of enemies it summons. I'll do this by overloading misc3 and misc4. So, Bat 'robes with the splitting attribute will have to split into their summonlings when hit.

That doesn't make any game sense, as in "Hey, that summoner just split into his minions. WTF", but I can see a lot of creative ways to use it. BTW L, how's those string editor things comin along. Haven't heard on thsoe in a while.

Well, I'm thinking of making a Quest Rule that adds an extra fourth row of text to the dialog boxes (and resizes the box appropriately)...

Oh, yeah, and I have to fix the Ending Text bug.

_L_ wrote:Well, I'm thinking of making a Quest Rule that adds an extra fourth row of text to the dialog boxes (and resizes the box appropriately)...

Oh, yeah, and I have to fix the Ending Text bug.

How many bugs would this new feature introduce?

Ideally, zero!

(I can't imagine very many places in the code that assume three rows of message text...)

The idea for this came about because, in implementing the control code system, I doubled the capacity of strings (to make room for the codes.) Then I thought, well, if you aren't using too many multi-argument codes, you might as well make use of that capacity for display purposes...

Also, the Mirror 'robe's invulnerability is now captured in an enemy flag called "Not Invincible to Reflected Magic/Beams."

Okay! After days of deliberation, I've had to conclude that the Pols Voice's movement algorithm is completely irreconcilable with standard Walker movement, so it'll have to be a separate enemy type.

Hmm, you've been willing to divulge what's going to be customizable on regular enemies so I was wondering about bosses. What will we be able to change on them? Will they get as much flexibility as regular enemies(I.E. making boss type enemies into splitters and letting former non-projectile enemies like Moldorm fire them), or are they complex to the point of needing to be fairly restricted? On especial note, are spawn locations something a player might be able to mess around with? I know you're probably not onto bosses yet, but I was rather curious about your intent with them.

Also, how much of Ganon is stuck as just being a part of Ganon? There's the special scene when you enter the room, the way he becomes weak to a weapon he used to be invulnurable to after taking so much damage, and the way he has a special death animation and leaves behind an item after dying. It would be pretty neat if those became general possibilities. Being able to remove the first one makes the Ganon type enemy a lot more flexible(like being able to use it to be something other than the final boss), and being able to play with the last one would just be incredibly cool(it would make bosses dropping heart containers be a lot more exciting). Of course, there's still the concern that the only way to get a Ganon type enemy to appear currently is to use the Ganon room which means that only one Ganon type enemy can exist per quest, and you can't have the player fight multiple Ganons at once(on that note, how much of the stuff that happens during the Ganon boss fight is a part of Ganon and how much is a part of his room?).

I must say that all status reports indicate that this new editor is going to be pretty awesome when it's completed. Being able to edit enemies to this extent should allow for some very interesting quests to say the least.

Well, I'm trying to give projectiles to as many creatures as possible. There's a bit of a difficulty, though: if a Moldorm has sword beams as a weapon, does it shoot the sword in the direction its head is facing, or "toward" Link?
Also, in what direction should a Tektite breathe fire?

(A slightly bigger difficulty is boomerangs - the current boomerang code assumes that the enemy using the boomerang remains still while the boomerang is flying. My current plan is just outright preventing non-Walker enemies from using them...)

As for Ganon: If Ganon is editable (which he is), then he can also be selected in a room's Enemies list. So, you don't need the Ganon room to create him. Thus, the Ganon entry cutscene will only be present for the Ganon room type.

Giving Ganon's disintegration animation to bosses? Now that's an idea I can get behind. Thanks!
(But couldn't the Heart Container be attached to bosses using "Enemy carries item"?)

I like the idea of other bosses having a Ganon-style death, with the flashy lights and the item resting in the ash.

Overall, I do realize that Bosses are rather unique- the LoZ developers didn't exactly have us in mind when they designed them. Some degree of manipulability would be nice, but isn't an immediate necessity. It's better to take it slowly, one step at a time, and get things down right.

Even If the loz bosses can't be flexable, New enemy types that are intended as bosses could be a viable solution. I don't think that itwill be a big problem so much as _L_ hasn't gotten around to doing them yet.

Hmm, Moldorm could be really evil and fire a sword beam toward Link out of every segment... When I mentioned Moldorm, I was honestly more thinking of fireballs, but that is a bit of a conundrum. I'd think Moldorm would be toward Link which would leave Lanmolas firing out of the head, establishing another big difference between them, but that's just how I'd do it. Moldorm would certainly be improved either way; he's not a very imposing enemy currently no matter how you look at it.

I thought of the possibility of having a boss carry the item with enemies carry item, but that has a few problems. The biggest one is that bumping into the boss would grant you the heart container, and the only way to prevent that is to use a quest rule which removes neat possibilities like having Bubbles carry keys and such and generally makes generic enemies carrying items a whole lot less notable. There's also the problem that Digdogger will drop the item if you just kill the right kid without finishing him completely, though I suppose the problem of Digdogger doesn't really go away no matter how you do it(unless it were possible to just have the last kid explode like that or if you just used a 1 kid Digdogger and gave the kid that property).

I'm contemplating taking the "Tribble-up" effect (where, after some frames an enemy becomes another, often stronger enemy) and tying it to a misc2 effect, for extra versatility. For example, you could specify how many frames would elapse before it would transform, and maybe also allow it to transform into more than one enemy.

This comes at a price, though: as a misc2 effect, it would be mutually exclusive with the "splitting" effect. But, I think it makes more sense this way.

It wouldn't have to be mutually exclusive. Imagine an enemy that, every 5 seconds, changes into a harder enemy. So, you have a time limit to kill it before it gets too strong to fight.

Or, an enemy that keeps regenerating its hit points every so often (keeps changing into a new version of itself).

and my question is, how far back would this set a stable ZC?

Dark Nation wrote:It wouldn't have to be mutually exclusive.

Also, such a change is really just a few lines of code here and there. Nothing major.

Doublealso: to unite Armos with Walker, I'm making it so that the "Spawned by Armos combo" flag also makes the enemy "flicker in" like an Armos or phantom Ghini does.

Me likey, me likey. And hey, heres a question. If the flickering thing is an actual trait, is there a possibility of an enemy flag "Flickers"? How about "Transparent"?

But of course!

_L_ wrote:Also, the "Ghini 2 Flickers" and "Ghini 2 is Translucent" rules are departing as well - and in their wake comes two enemy flags which allow any enemy to be flickering and/or translucent.

More Armos news: I was originally planning on splitting up the Armos into two enemies: Armos (slow) and Armos (fast). By altering the Armos combo type's enemy spawn code, I'm able to make it generate either of those enemies, chosen at random. However, what I didn't count on was the possibility of older quests generating Armos from a room's Enemy List, where the random selection of slow and fast Armos should also be present.

So, I think I'll make another enemy flag. I think I'll call it something like "Randomly replaced with other Armos enemies". An offshoot of this flag's addition is that it allows the neophyte quest-builder a small degree of randomnity in enemy generation, outside of scripts.

_L_ wrote:An offshoot of this flag's addition is that it allows the neophyte quest-builder a small degree of randomnity in enemy generation, outside of scripts.

It's got RANDOMNITY.

From the same Internet that brought you "vodcast" and "polymascotfoamalate" comes... "randomnity".

Okay, here's how it's finally implemented: it's now called "Randomly Substituted At Screen Init" and when a screen's enemies are created, those with this flag are randomly replaced with another type of enemy that also has this flag. If only one enemy out of all enemies has this flag, nothing happens.

EDIT: Hmm, here's a quick and harmless idea: two flags called "Damage increases speed" and "Damage increases homing." I'll add them now.

I've been wondering when the Pols Voice should use its weapon, considering that the enemy can appear in both Sideview and Topdown. I've just realised the most obvious solution: a Pols Voice will shoot whenever its Z (sideview: Y) is about the same as Link's.

Also: Traps that shoot projectiles = the cannons from Zelda 3?

Genial idea with those Z3 cannons!
I was fearing that I need to ask it in a script format.

Also, remember the gargoyles in Z3? Those little chipmunks whiches would turn into stone upon hitting them and then turn back into their original form? Could that "gargoyle ability" be also an option?

Also, will it be possible to bounce enemies into holes and deep water?

I'm crazy about new enemy additions.

If I'm implementing drowning, I'd better be implementing drowning enemies to boot.

Also: enemy flag "Shields are Mirrored" is coded. With this, you can make those Mirror Shield Darknuts that everyone's been asking for.