Strange itemspell system I made

Well I'm back from Revolutions...I won't spoil it don't worry...but I've been thinking about the map as well...and there's a problem which I have found and also found an answer to but I'm not sure if others would be ok with the answer...basically for those who don't know, I'm using order triggers, so when a unit orders the ability silence it checks for the items in the player's slots and casts the spells based on the info it finds. The problem with this is that as you know an archmage casting blizzard will run over to the place where he must cast it from and start casting, this triggers a 'ability begins casting' but when an order is given it's given when the unit was told to cast blizzard, technically it's possible for the unit to be outside the range and thus be able to cast the spell but move again and stop the ability ever being cast and miss A) the mana cost and B) the cooldown...there are three ways to solve this, the first two both sacrifice something...I can remove cooldowns and simply make it about mana cost, but even then people will be able to bombard enemies from the other side of the map...or I can lock the camera to the unit and force the unit to only be able to cast within the screen size and improve the spell range to the edges of the screen so no matter where they cast it, it still triggers the ability itself. (this is the current method I have adopted) OR and I swear I've seen it before, people have got triggers that activate for the order and then follow through with the ability process...but this could be a fair amount of work as you can imagine...I was hoping to be able to find out if people wouldn't mind the camera simply being locked...since one this would make things easier and two personally I prefer locked cameras even if others don't...

That was actuilly quite fun.

Something that you should do is use a mock inventory unit, this will allow you to give weapons and such to the heros. Use something like, unit picks up item, if item is materia, then move it to materia inventory, if inventory is full them drop from hero.

Something else, when a person has 2 of the same type materia for the same spell make that spell better (not 2x but maybe 1.5x).

Ahh now I'm glad someone mentioned the two materia problem, firstly the trigger analyzes the items one at a time, so two fire materia(still working on a new name, suggestions would be helpful! :D) will deal 100 damage to the target, but two ice materia won't double the effect or increase the duration of the effect. So I'm not sure if that should be like, a drawback of using effect materia as opposed to straight damage materia or not...I figure that way damage materia can be overall more powerful but I'm still not sure exactly if that's a good thing...it's a fairly complicated system to balance...

By the way, AllPainful I like your ideas but I think I'd prefer to keep it all around the concepts of simply, who is affected by the spells...I'm thinking of adding one that no matter what, all your allies and yourself are effected, of course no one would ever put damage materia into this category and it's extremely useful, it's mana cost and cooldown would be fairly high. I'd expect it to be a priest ability, or perhaps an ultimate like FerretDruid suggested...

And finally, ObsidianTitan, I am still weighing up the idea of having swords and such but then it occured to me...anyone who has played Wild Arms will know about the mystic ability, essentially a powerful ultimate like ability that allowed one character to use an item in combination with a spell to create an effect based on the item...and this got me thinking, instead of saying you have 6 item slots, put in materia or if you want fill it with weapons or armour as a tradeoff if you want a more warrior rather than mage type hero...instead of something like that, perhaps instead I should make it the items you can carry are imbued with the magics themselves...a firesword produces the same effects as the fire spell while at the same time it holds a +5 damage ability as an item. So choosing good weapons that also fit as good spells adds to the difficulty in designing a good hero. This would produce an insanely complicated and challenging system to master and in my opinion would be a hell of a lotta fun to try mastering. I think I'd also try to either just colour(australian spelling, deal with it:D) the text of the items (their string descriptions) to the colour of their element or edit every .blp for the items I use and add a coloured tinting to their boarders...although that might be too much...Anyway I'll leave this for you people to discuss in the forum as I go to sleep 10:51pm australian time *yawn* sleep good....

Bed already at 10:50. Im in Australia too, with havin to go to school(TAFE) tomorow, an theres no chance of me going to bed for a while.

That was rather off topic, I really like the idea of having the weapons\armor and the materia mixed into one item. It should add alot of complexity to the map, but leave it simple enough for the smarter than average person on battle.net to pick the point up quickly.

Well,
I haven't really taken a close look at your source (only a little bit when it was UMSWE only).

its a very interesting set up, but your right about spells that imbue statuses are generally not worth pairing together. My idea for you is to do something like FF7 did.
That is you can only have one materia in each slot, and if its a support materia you can bind it to an attack materia.

I'm thinking about redoing your spell system and adding it to the massive RPG engine which will be dialog test 4 whenever 1.13 comes out.

I didn't check out the map yet, but do you have just one level of each Materia? Like "Fire" but not enhanced Fire?

I think it would perhaps behoove you to have a multi tiered system for each effect. If you had 3 Forms of 'fire', that were all the same or better then the last, you could have even MORE fun with Materia/Item combo's.

For instance: The normal wizard would get a level 2 'fire' to start with, or he could get a level 1 'fire' sword that gives him +5 damage.

As a stretch, you may even be able to make it thus that a 'two element' item is possible! I know that'd be a little trickier than you have right now, but not SOO much so.

The aforementioned system would allow for an interesting combo of classes. Do you just go for the straight up more potent Materia and let your magic guide you? Or do you also go in for some amount of combat.

Another thought: I have no idea if this works, but it's something I wanted to try out. Make all units start as 'melee'. If they want to be an 'archer' then have them require a 'bow' item. This item gives them a ranged attack via the Orb item skills. If that doesn't work just have a 'gains item - allow second attack, but not first' trigger.

One last thought: The mana reduction is all done with triggers, yes? So I would also consider a "Mana" Materia. Having it in a slot wouldn't enhance the power of the spell at all, it would simply make casting that spell cheaper (Say half, or 3/4's cost).

Edit: Just checked, you can easily get a reference to the Level of an Item in the Trigger editor, which means the 'tiered' types are very useable, since their 'effect' can be a function of their level. This won't allow multi-materia however.

Let me say you have the building blocks, but I think things need some serious expanding. First of all: I think the Materia need to have different effects depending on what slot they are in. With only 1 player, there's pretty much no reason to have anything but 'healing' in the target slot, and the AoE spell type is not generally that useful. However, if the effects varied, You could have some SERIOUS fun :). For some they wouldn't need much work. Fire would make sense in any slot. But poison? Earth? Hmm, not sure I dig that.

This will obviously require more coding than you can shake a stick at, but none of it is too terribly hard.

Example: Fire. When 'targetted' would just do its damage, straight up, 50 per materia. When used to 'enchant' would cause the caster to gain Immolation for X seconds. When AoE would cast something akin to flame strike.

Second thought: Mana deduction shouldn't be a set thing. Set the mana costs to '0' and just deduct the appropriate amount when a materia is used.

Example: Fire is meant to be an AoE effect, but it's indiscriminate. Allow it's AoE ability to do 30 Damage for each of 3 waves via Flame Strike. Deduct only 75 Mana for this, since it's Fire's 'forte'.
Water, however, is better used to enchant people, so when you use it's 'chaos' ability, that has a 50% chance to put all units around you to sleep for 5 seconds, it only costs 50.

See what I'm saying?

Lastly: Your issue with the spell firing and no mana is spent is easily fixed: Simply put an 'if' check in the ability use, to see if the unit is within the 'casting range' of the targetted point.

Well my opinion on the mater is that
The AOE should do the least damage but since its spread out between so many targets its still worth leaving it in that slot.
The Enchant as you call it should do more damage as you have to put yourself in dangers way to use it.
And finally The direct target should have the greatest damage multiplier as is only one target.

(Example: Flame Strike does less per level then Tunder clap which also does less then StormBolt).

Balthamos, that's really spiffy. Keep in mind that you're not limited to just damage effects on these "materia" - some can be stat boosters, cost reducers, etc. Having two of the same type of "materia" should have some additive effect, but you might also consider materia that simply lower the cost of using them - perhaps by giving back a small amount of mana whenever that ability is used, or resetting the cooldown immediately, that sorta thing.

Putting these things on the character is somewhat limiting, however. You might want to consider either a "backpack" character where the materia can be arranged, or a player specific region where they can align materia into sockets - make immobile, circle of power models with 1 inventory slot, and a "wrench" hero be able to move them from socket to socket. Every time you acquire a materia, it gets sent to that region, and the "wrench" can pick 'em up and move them as you see fit. That way, you're no longer limited to just two slots, and it allows you to customize a lot -- a healer might have multiple slots in Enchant and Target, but few in Area, whereas a mage would have most of their slots in Area, but few if any in Target.

Either way, this is real clever - kudos!

I'd use 'backpack' units in some corner of the map. Set the default cool downs of the spells to being some ungodly long time, and then have the 'reset ability cool down' called by the spell effect that you cast. This will allow different abilities in the same spell type to have different cool downs, as well as allowing components that decrease the cool down of a spell.

Woah! The idea of a combined equipment/item/materia system... I like it. It could make for all kinds of crazy effects like a Fire Wand that had no attack bonus but a stronger magic effect vs. a Fire Sword with a stronger attack but lesser magic. That could get REALLY hard to code and balance unless you got clever about it, but it could be really cool.

I'm torn on the subject of having varying effects for different spots. I think it would be a cool system, (poison causes poison as an attack but casts Dispel on you as a self-spell) but at the same time it could kill the attractive simplicity of this system. Part of what's so neat here is that it's so simple yet so fun. (Or maybe so fun because it's so simple.) Still a more complex system could also be fun... like I said, I'm torn. I think the system would be cool, but I'm also afraid it could make things too complicated. (Though it would give a reason to, say, put a fire materia in a self slot... sounds like an Immolation-like ability to me.)

Thankyou for all the feedback people. Firstly, multi leveled materia will be in the rpg for sure. Fire and Firaga type stuff. Secondly I'm unsure about the fire doing something different depending on it's slot and the same for all spells...I feel like Lost Loch said, torn between the two systems...I liked Biflspud's idea of a seperate room for materia slotting, for two reasons, one that could allow me to have spells with 10 materia slotted in and so forth, simply by picking every item in region type coding, but on the other hand that doesn't allow for weapons imbued with magic...which I must admit I was beginning to like that idea...I think i need more time to think on this problem...I'll reply back in a few hours..

Y'know, this is why I'm an addict on this forum - I love the good exchange of ideas like this, every one of them a "Hey, that's so cool! Why didn't I think of that?" and getting to blue sky about a cool idea like this one is a good idea sparker.

any of you rember that kirby for n64. wher you could take fire and stone to get valcano or something like that. this could be used for a materal craft instead of having fire and earth to do 25-75 dmg plus 50. also i wounder whut would happen if you took reg items like claws of attack and mana potion, got rid of there abillitys and did the same thing with the materals. could add a lot more fun to a melee:gsmile: