Messages posted by: BattleMode

*** HOTFIX: BattleRPG V7.1 ***

Get it while it is HOT: http://bigbattleservers.com/battlerpg.php

I made 2 mistakes with V7 which should be corrected now with V7.1:
- I put the wrong version of BattleRPG in the root of the zip (the invasion one instead of the regular one).
- The BattleRPG menu did not get updated after the player gained a level (resulting in false information).

Please let me know if everything works ok now.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

If you order them class first and than all abilites for that class, you'll have a very long list since some abilities should appear twice or more in that case.

Yes that would be the smartest.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

Perhaps you could just change case, or use B, I...? I dunno, I really have no idea how this is done...

Changing case might be an idea, changing formatting is probably very complicated.

Dracos wrote:

Couldnt you shade the text on abilitys you cannot by, This way the order doenst need to be changed and you can still read the text if you want to but Instead of being like White Text, make it a darker grey text on the ability list. Is it possible. I'ma try to get some testing done with my lan friends and see what its like so far.

AFAIK I cannot do that with a UTUIComboBox. I will do some research on this.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

Wow! Looks awesome, I want to play! ... But I have to say again, WOW! It looks clean, smart and tidy.

Thank you.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

The mind reading combo box , can it be configured in such a way that the skills that are completely unavailable to you (=the class you choose can't have them) don't show up at all or perhaps show in the bottom of the menu? Because the list of abilities we use now is rather large and confusing...

I have been thinking about that. I think it should also list the abilities you cannot buy, because you might still want to select them and read their description (e.g. to find out WHY you cannot buy them). Putting them on the bottom would mean their order would change all the time which is confusing. I think the best way is to order them smart (e.g. first the class and then all abilities related to that class) to make it as clear as possible. UTBattleRPG.INI allows you to define the order in which they are shown, so you can select the order that is the clearest.

Szlat wrote:

Excellent job

I think most of the things you asked for are there.

It has dynamic abilities so you can define 3 versions of the same ability all with a different max level and different pricing like you suggested.

Is has (optional) custom player classes including the option to make the nested player classes you suggested. Nesting can be nearly unlimited. The only limit is that you can have a total of 100 abilities and a player can have approximately 20 different abilities.

It now shows which abilities are maxed out (max) or not available (n/a) for other reasons as you suggested.

BTW I am very curious what you are going to to with this here. I made a simple example with 2 classes: Warrior and Magician.

I also wanted to make Medic, but I already spent a lot of time on the new menu, the dynamic ability system, the requirements system, 7 new artifacts, console commands etc. etc. so I wanted to release a new version. I will probably add the medic stuff to V8.

A completely operational RPG for UT3! Supports ALL game types.

Features levels, experience, Mana, magic weapons, artifacts, player classes (optional) and FULL ability management. Has abilities like Weapon Speed, Vampirism and Quickfoot, artifacts like God Mode, Spiderpig and Mana Gambling and magic like Rage, Ultra GIB and Invisibility. It also has a custom RPG scoreboard, a custom RPG HUD, etc. Includes UT3 Invasion and Galtanor's Invasion and custom versions of BattleRPG made to work together with them.

Go to http://www.onsrpg.com/battlerpg.php for download (including full GPL V3 source code), a player manual, an administrator manual and a developer manual.

New in V7:
* Implemented a new more advance and more user friendly BattleRPG menu.
* New abilities: Loaded Artifacts, Loaded Weapons, Loaded Magic, Weapon Resurrection, Ammo Bonus, Mana Bonus and Mana Regeneration.
* New weapon magic: Infinity.
* New artifact: Max Magic +2
* Implemented console commands "brpg use artifact", "brpg first artifact", "brpg next artifact" and "brpg prev artifact" so people can bind this to keys.
* Created 3 example configurations: Standard Edition, Class Edition and Extreme Edition.
* Implemented a new (optional) flexible requirement system allowing player classes etc.
* Implemented support for Galtanor 007 now including BattleRPG levels in the Invasion scoreboard.

The new enhanced, dynamic, future predicting and mind reading BattleRPG menu:

BattleRPG V7 with Galtanor's Invasion 007:

Szlat wrote:

Any chance it could say "max" rather than "n/a" when you have it maxed?

I will put it on my to do list.

Szlat wrote:

I presume you are just checking the value of the Cost return, and if 0 saying "n/a" - but it would be really useful if people knew when they had a skill maxed (or should that be on the right window next to the current level purchased?)

Hm, thats also a good idea.

Szlat wrote:

Presumably the classes (if any) will just appear in the combo list with the other abilities?

Yes. As soon as I make them they will, everything needed to make them and use them is now finished.

The new (optional) player classes in BattleRPG V7 made me improve the ability menu. The new ability menu is more flexible, can handle much larger amounts of abilities and is more user friendly. Took me some time to get UTUIComboBox to do everything I wanted it to do, but it now works the way I want it to work.

The new menu now only shows what you actually have on the right side. If you didn't buy anything yet it shows a small manual. "Next" is still there but you can now also use the combo to select the ability you want to buy by clicking on it:

The combo is completely dynamic, it also shows the cost of the next level or n/a if you cannot buy it (e.g. you do not have enough RPG$, you already have the maximum level or you do not meet a requirement):

I wanted to replace my ugly "how do I leave the UI Scene crap ASAP" NEXT and PREV solution with a much nicer and user friendlier Combo Box.

After a very long night (I think I spend a total of over 16 hours on this one) I finally got it working.

The first challenge was to get the combo box on my menu. That was a few hours of UT3 Editor fun, I want to forget about ASAP. As usual I copied things to the clipboard, did the real work in notepad, and pasted them back. There seem to be all kinds of things in the editor for this as well, but I am not even close to figuring out how that works.

The second challenge was to learn everything I didn't want to know about UT3 DataStores. I learned a lot about this from the "DataStore Problems (aka, I want to kill something)" thread another happy UT3 UI developer posted on the Epic forums: http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=593380. I based my solution on the UTUIDataStore_StringList, which once you learn how they work, are quite usable actually. It's code, I like code, I hate the UT3 Editor.

The third challenge was to capture the event a combo box fires if the value is changed. To make a very long story a bit shorter: I gave up on that. Whatever I tried, it didn't work.

The fourth challenge was to get some timer working with polled the value of my nice combobox. Of course UTUIScene don't do timers or tick, so I tried calling a pseudo timer from the PlayerController instead. After wasting a zilion debug log's on this I finally figured out that if you locate the UTUIScene from the PlayerController you somehow get the wrong object. Even though I never create the UTUIScene (UT3 does that for you) I somehow got two of them and of course the nice function in UT3 to locate them returned the wrong one.

Finally I figured it out. In the DrawPanel event of the panels on the UTUIScene I can access both the right PlayerController and the right UTUIScene at the same time. This allows me to give them both a reference to each other. Using these references a timer in the PlayerController can now poll the value of my nice combobox.

Yeah I know, there must be a better solution for this. But I am very happy I got it working at all.

Besides my own enhancements I am also working together with Galtanor on connecting BattleRPG V7 with the new Galtanor 007. This new version will show RPG Levels in the scoreboard (once we fixed some small issues we are now working on).

Galtanor 007 has some awesome new monsters.

Example of the dynamic abilities settings:

Code:

DynamicAbilities=(Id="HealthBonus",AbilityClass=Class'BattleRPG.BattleAbility_HealthBonus',AbilityName="Healthbonus",AbilityDescription="Gives you 10 extra health per level every time you spawn.",AbilityMaxLevel=10,AbilityLevel1Cost=5,AbilityCostIncreasePerLevel=0)
 
 DynamicAbilities=(Id="QuickFoot",AbilityClass=Class'BattleRPG.BattleAbility_QuickFoot',AbilityName="Quickfoot",AbilityDescription="Gives you 5% extra walking speed per level.",AbilityMaxLevel=10,AbilityLevel1Cost=5,AbilityCostIncreasePerLevel=5)
 
 DynamicAbilities=(Id="SuperJump",AbilityClass=Class'BattleRPG.BattleAbility_SuperJump',AbilityName="Superjump",AbilityDescription="Gives you 5% extra jump height per level.",AbilityMaxLevel=10,AbilityLevel1Cost=5,AbilityCostIncreasePerLevel=0)
 
 DynamicAbilities=(Id="WeaponSpeed",AbilityClass=Class'BattleRPG.BattleAbility_WeaponSpeed',AbilityName="Weaponspeed",AbilityDescription="Givesyou 5% exra weapon speed per level.",AbilityMaxLevel=10,AbilityLevel1Cost=5,AbilityCostIncreasePerLevel=0)

Example of a requirement (you are required to have SuperJump level 2 AND WeaponSpeed level 2 before you can buy QuickFoot level 2):
Code:

DynamicAbilityRequirements=(This=(Id="QuickFoot",Level=2),Required=((Id="SuperJump",Level=2),(Id="WeaponSpeed",Level=2)),NotAllowedWith=)

Example of a requirement (you can have either QuickFoot level 4 or HealthBonus level 2 but not both of these:
Code:

DynamicAbilityRequirements=(This=(Id="QuickFoot",Level=4),Required=,NotAllowedWith=((Id="HealthBonus",Level=2)))
 
 DynamicAbilityRequirements=(This=(Id="HealthBonus",Level=2),Required=,NotAllowedWith=((Id="QuickFoot",Level=4)))

(Please note this needs to be defined 2 ways).

Szlat wrote:

BattleMode wrote:

.... Replacing sell with "sell all" will probably be the easiest solution. This will also allow for some penalty in a future version for this (to prevent people from rebuilding too often).
Sounds fine. Could you have a configuable "number of levels you lose by selling"? I suspect it would be little effort at this stage, and would allow server admins to let it be free, charge 1 level per "sell all", or set an even higher penalty.

With my own flavor of UT2004 RPG you do not lose levels but experience for a rebuild (in part because high levels are extremely hard to achieve on my servers). This can of course result in losing a level.

Just ran into an interesting aspect I didn't realize before. My amazing sell button makes keeping up with all the dynamic settings quite complicated. Replacing sell with "sell all" will probably be the easiest solution. This will also allow for some penalty in a future version for this (to prevent people from rebuilding too often).

I have implemented dynamic abilities now (as suggested in PM by Szlat, thanxs again) which for example allows multiple flavors of the same ability (e.g. a cheap and an expensive one which could be available to different classes, dynamic abilities can also have different max levels, custom names and custom descriptions, so almost anything is dynamic).

I am now working on the configuration options for defining dependencies (and thereby also classes).

So far what I am creating allows things like:

"Before you can buy ABC level 3 you need (DEF level 2 AND GHI level 5) OR (GHI level 2 AND JKL level 4)"

and

"You can not buy ABC level 7 if you have (MNO level 2 AND PQR level 4) OR (MNO level 8 AND STU level 3)"

I think this will allow for some pretty complicated setups for server admins who want to have them. No programming required.

Szlat wrote:

BattleMode wrote:

TheDruidXpawX wrote:

The engineer was an idea we kicked around for a while before Szlat took on the adventure to hook it up.
I never looked into that one. Is there a description somewhere?
Here

Thank you.