[VXA] [REQUEST] Dynamic Face Changing in Battle

[AddleBoy]

Dynamic Face Changing in Battle
April, 7 2012

Summary
This script will allow the party's faces to change in the middle of battle depending on the actions they are making and what the enemy does to them. Since the only thing indicating the party actually on the battlefield are their faces at the bottom of the screen, I thought that being able to change the expression on their faces during battle would add more of a connection between the player and the characters in the party. I'll provide all of the instances in which the character's face would change along with examples in the mockup section. Please, and thank you for reading.



Features Desired

• For the faces of the player characters in battle to change depending on their condition and their actions.
• The ability for the game maker to chose which faces are used and in what situation for each player character.
• For the battle command window's height to be extended a little so that the whole face portrait fits.

Mockups
Okay, imagine that you're playing an VX Ace game with the default battle system, and you're attacked by monsters all of a sudden. The battle screen comes up. (As you can see, the HP and MP bars block the bottom part of their faces.)



We will use the character, Kaguya, for this example. I will show each instance in which the character's face would change and show a picture of her face as an example.

Neutral - no action has be selected for this character.

Neutral with status effect - no action has been selected for this character, but they have a negative status effect such as poison or their HP is low.

Getting ready - an action has been selected for this character but, it has not been executed.

Attack - the character attacks one of the enemies with an offensive move.

Charging an attack - The character is charging an attack that takes a turn or two to get ready.

Damage - The character is hit with an attack by the enemy. The character loses HP, but returns to Neutral or Getting Ready if no status effect occurs after the act is finished.

Positive status effect - a positive act such as healing or protect or haste is done to the character.

Death - when the character runs out of HP.


Games its been in

• I'm not sure exactly which games this is feature in.

Did you search?
Yes. I found a script very similar to what I'm looking for here: http://jetruby.blogspot.com/2011/07/dynamic-face-changing.html, but it's written for VX and it only applies to states and HP percentage and MP percentage.

Where did you search?

• RMRK.net's VX Ace script database
• Google
• RPG Revolution

What did you search for?

• Dynamic face changing
• Face changing in battle

[AddleBoy]

Bumper cars.

[AddleBoy]

Rubber baby buggy bumper

[Twilight27]

I shall help you out. Bump :3

[modern algebra]

Just out of curiosity, what is the script you are using to show faces in battle?

[Lethrface]

That looks like yanfly's battle engine.

[pacdiggity]

Yeah, but it's not. Unless the resolution has been changed (the window is wider than usual) and Yanfly's script works with it, it's not Yanfly's.

[AddleBoy]

I'm using Yanfly's Ace Battle Engine.

[pacdiggity]

Oh, done shot me down.

[AddleBoy]

So, is this a no-go?

[modern algebra]

It actually isn't a difficult task, though what has stopped me from taking it is thinking about how to set up the configuration for it. Doing it in noteboxes would probably be imprudent, since it would take up so much of the notebox's real estate and conflict with other scripts which require use of the actor's notebox.

Additionally, I'm not convinced that a lot of people would use it, and lack of general application usually prevents me from taking a script request.

However, when I find the time, I will think more seriously about the script and if I think I can finish it in an hour or so then I will take it.

[Lethrface]

you could do a naming convention to where in the config file you would have the user set suffixes for the faces and it will take the name of the original face file and add the suffix to it depending on the status.

I think a lot of people who aren't too lazy to create multiple faces for one person would use this simply because it can add some detail to the battles that will help give information to the player.

[modern algebra]

Well, with indexes, it seems to me more logical to use one file holding all eight faces than it would be to have eight files, each holding one pose of the same character in the same index. Plus, I find naming conventions and the like can become confusing for the average user and it can cause problems with other scripts which use similar naming conventions or which change the way faces are drawn.

So one way would be to set it so that each face file must hold all eight poses and then have each pose be a different index, but then it can be weird since some people might not want to use all the poses. Additionally, some people might want more than eight poses - for instance, the requester only wants one face for negative status effects and one face for positive status effects (which one should take priority if the actor has both negative and positive status effects at the same time?) but more importantly, what if someone wants to have different poses for various status effects? I think it would be reasonably prudent to expect such a desire and so build something into the script, but you quickly extend beyond eight poses then and so you're into a place where you have to use naming conventions for more than one faceset, or else permit the creation of larger facesets.

Additionally, it's not particularly clear how priorities should work either, so I would have to create some kind of way for users to indicate which faces should take priority when conditions are met for two poses, as in the above example with positive and negative effects applied to the same actor. That would probably be the easiest part though.

[Lethrface]

It all sounds pretty complicated to me of course I'm also no scripting genius either lol

[modern algebra]

Well, I think I have a few good ideas on how I would do it.

[AddleBoy]

Thanks for your consideration, guys! =D

[JoeCool]

Is this what you're looking for?

http://ateliercross.webege.com/codes/rgss3/animated-faces/

[AddleBoy]

Is this what you're looking for?

http://ateliercross.webege.com/codes/rgss3/animated-faces/

Actually, that does look like what I'm looking for. This'll do just fine.

Thanks for finding this!