IB (pc only, testbed) Development updates

[youngneil1]

IB v186 released - no liabilities, no warranties, use at your own risk:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xtase85q193bf ... 6.zip?dl=0

- a much more stable iteration of vanish/appear/change walkable state properties than v185
- this (and the recent versions before it) allows for treasures, doors, traps, battlefield manipulating trait usage, timers for vanish and appear, hidden triggers, positional triggers (granting cover or an attack bonus only while standing on them), etc. all during an encounter - all polished with fitting mouse over info
- as the system is a large toolbox of combinations I still think the one or other bug will lurk somewhere in there, but I hammered the systems quite a bit with debugging/playtesting recently
- I fear I will have to write a guide about all of this before I forget again how it is supposed to be setup, sigh

[slowdive]

Sounds great (minus the fun documenting part ). I'll update IBx once v186 is on GitHub. I'm also working on adjust some of the UI for IBx to work better on smaller screens.

[youngneil1]

Github is updated now (v186) . I imagine getting the UI work right on the smaller screens is very challenging indeed.Let's hope for mobile phone sizes still increasing in the future .

[slowdive]

Here is what I came up with for a test... shown on my iPhoneX (the button to show/hide the toggles is in the bottom left, works like the arrows show/hide):

C9ED4BB1-0508-4F17-A710-02F9E3523EF8.png (2.59 MiB) Viewed 4447 times

92846A5B-7DE9-4135-BE1A-6933E26B30DC.png (2.28 MiB) Viewed 4447 times

36868579-A971-42E6-86E6-CEEBAF651021.png (1.99 MiB) Viewed 4447 times

C0AED1DE-3770-44A4-8D0B-D325A1A46C7E.png (2.31 MiB) Viewed 4447 times

[youngneil1]

Great Ui design there - the former toggles where much too hard to hit on smaller screens. You have bascially implemented our missing options menu !

[youngneil1]

I am looking into lingering effects now (think Poison Cloud). One thing I am gonna add is a persistenceBonus for each effect. When two or more lingering effects are applied to the same squre, only one will prevail (otherwise our graphics will look really messy quickly). To decide which lingering effect overrides the other, a comparison d20+persistenceBonus roll is made. This way authors can design lingering effetcs that are really hard (or impossible) to override. I will also include loginfo for the lingering effects on mouse over (as for pc/creatures and triggers already).

Speaking of effects, it is time to improve the way we handle the icons on pc/creatures for effects. We will need some "scale smaller and sort on token" function (taking into account creature size, too). Same goes for portaits that should display the effect icons on top, too.

The more detail I add, the more detail I find we still miss. It's a curse (or maybe a blessing ).

[slowdive]

The more detail I add, the more detail I find we still miss. It's a curse (or maybe a blessing ).

Definitely a blessing. Details may be slow going, but they are definitely worth it and we have time on our side

[zach_holbrook]

Just playing around with the new trigger functions now. Very much looking forward to designing encounters that take advantage of these!

[youngneil1]

Great to hear, Zach . I still have to do some proper explanations of how it all works, but it 's reassuring that it's intuitive enough to allow experimenting with it.

Distracted here big time by RL, but it looks like we found our new appartment (still waiting for the final version of the rent contract). Still, I did push foward work on effects a bit:

IB beta v187 released - no warranties, no liabilites, use at your own risk:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/juzj1ogm8jnko ... 7.zip?dl=0

- gave lingering effects on battlefield the mouse over/info treatment
- added a persistence porperty to effects that determines whether a new lingering effect on a sqaure succeeds in replacing the old lingering effect on the very same square (only one lingering effect on a square in combat is allowed for clarity of graphics)
- generally worked a bit on the the effect logic (saves, duration, messaging, application timing, etc)

[youngneil1]

I am trying to figure out to how display the sprites of multiple effects on the same actor (pc/creature) in the best way.

Maybe the effect that was applied the last is dispalyed full size while all other (older) effects are shrunk down to 1/9 (1/3x, 1/3y) of their size (mini-icons). This would allow for up to 10 effect sprites on the very same actor (one large one and then up to nine mini sprites, drawn on top of that one). The mini-sprites would be auto-sorted next to each other in a three row, three column pattern.

This gets potentially more complicated for tall, wide and large creatures. Especially the non-square shaped wide and tall creatures would cause the effect sprites to look stretched if adjusted to the size of such creatures. Easiest solution would be to display all effects only on top left square of large, wide and tall creatures.

For pc I would like the mini-effect sprites to additionally appear on the portraits of the pc.