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Cast Animations are a hot mess right now

For as much time as I've spent with RPG Maker, I've learned very little useful advice. If there IS one piece of advice I've learned, it's that you shouldn't try to port Final Fantasy into the maker. Of course I'd have to learn that the hard way.

Creating a battle system that capture the look and feel of the NES Final Fantasy games has been a particularly difficult task, and as pleased I am with what I've accomplished it's still a constant trial of learning what I have to be happy with. To illustrate that struggle, I thought I'd share a recent disappointment, the sorry state of my cast animations at the moment.



You'll see a few problems here. The first casting animation is intended for black magic, and sits over the battler when it should be under it. The second problem is the white magic animation, which, painstakingly ripped frame by frame, is muuuuuch too slow. The third problem, neither looks as good ripped as it did in FF3. I canconsider my options here, but ultimately my best solution is to opt for a much simpler, generic cast animation I don't think are great. I guess there's a joy in settling for something and moving on, certainly part of what's driving me is the desire to not be obsessive and get the game made, but I thought I'd share this failed concept before scrapping it.

Posts

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Is it possible to share damage file with us? I would happily use it as well :)
Hmmm...for your first problem is the casting animation for black magic set as "feet" in the Animation editor? It sounds like for both issues that yeah, you may have to settle for a much simpler animation. If I can help at all, let me know. =)
-Swish- Damage file? I'll share anything gladly, but not quite sure what you mean.

-Sphere- Setting the animation to feet doesn't do much, fine giving up on it for the moment. I'm not particularly concerned with cast animations, but would gladly take you up on the offer if you could lend me any quality assurance. The battle system is a little wonky right now, and I suspect there are ways of improving it I'm not seeing.
author=nemojbatkastle
-Swish- Damage file? I'll share anything gladly, but not quite sure what you mean.

-Sphere- Setting the animation to feet doesn't do much, fine giving up on it for the moment. I'm not particularly concerned with cast animations, but would gladly take you up on the offer if you could lend me any quality assurance. The battle system is a little wonky right now, and I suspect there are ways of improving it I'm not seeing.


I'd love to take a look at it. Battle systems can be real tricky, especially for FF fangames. PM me with a download link and I'll see what I can do to help. I'm not the greatest scripter or anything, but I did learn quite a lot from FFIVAD.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
When you say "over the battler instead of under it," based on the gif, I assume you mean "instead of behind it" - that is, the problem is the z-axis rather than the y-axis.

If you were using RPG Maker XP or VX Ace I would be able to offer useful advice on how to fix this, but for MV I'm pretty much lost. This person seems to have been dealing with a similar problem. You might message them and ask them if they ever figured anything out, since that post was almost a year ago.

The solution for the white magic animation running too slowly is much simpler, of course. Just delete every other frame. (Make a backup copy of the longer animation before doing so in case you come up with a better solution later. You might decide to increase your entire game's framerate instead, for example.)
Damage font file graphic used in your battle system and general font as well if you could:)
@Swish- Aha, yes. I'll put together a font pack, it's all done using Victor's plugins, so use at your own risk.

@Locke- Z-axis! For the second problem, yeah, it was that simple. A forest for the tress moment indeed. Appreciate your help on the subject, Doctor.
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