[RM2k3] Arbitrary limits...

[Myuu]

While the official version of RPG Maker 2003 make me happy in many ways, I ran into some oddities that I really didn't appreciate as I worked on a new project of mine.

In particular, regarding HP and animation frames limits.

With HP, I find 99 999 to be incredibly limited. Simply put, when you reach the endgame and have characters using combo attacks, those 99 999 HPs won't last long.

So I need to have the boss auto-heal by events... which would be fine if it wasn't from the game displaying the damage healed, breaking the illusion of a boss with far more than 99 999 HPs.

This is also a problem when I want enemies and bosses with custom defeat animations ; I need to give them a lot more HP than it is possible to inflict as to make sure they're not overkilled and then have them be destroyed via events when their HP dip below their intended maximum. Doing this become problematic when the absolute maximum is merely 99 999 in an engine where multiple 9999s with a single command is a thing.

Given I saw unnofficial versions of the maker have much higher limits, it made me question the limit.


The other point is animation limits.

500 frames... is only about 15 seconds of animation. Given animations can be used for character animations during battle, elaborate special moves, and minor on-field animations, 15 seconds... is just plain not enough.

For example, in many of my projects, I actually give my characters idle animations with over 1000 frames, namely making the characters loop normal combat stances but growing impatient and tapping their foot if the player idle during battle for over 2 minutes without anything happening. This can't be emulated with the official maker's strict limits.


Why am I making a thread about this?

Simply put, there's some limits that I accept are part of the engine. But the HP and animation limit? Arbitrary. Is there any patch, mod, or what not compatible with the official RM 2003 maker that remove those silly limits?

 

[Tai_MT]

The short answer is, "no, there's no way to lift these limits". There's no way to add scripts or plugins or anything. What you got is what you got. That being said... I'm going to go through your list a bit here. There might be a way to edit the files beyond that. That'd be the long answer, to which I'm not sure how to do.

While the official version of RPG Maker 2003 make me happy in many ways, I ran into some oddities that I really didn't appreciate as I worked on a new project of mine.

In particular, regarding HP and animation frames limits.

With HP, I find 99 999 to be incredibly limited. Simply put, when you reach the endgame and have characters using combo attacks, those 99 999 HPs won't last long.

Why do you need more than 99,999 HP? Do you just like big numbers? Most players become "desensitized" to large numbers. Mostly, because they become meaningless. What do I mean by that? Players typically gauge their power by "amount of hits it takes to kill the enemy". They don't think, "wow, I did 80,000 damage!". Not unless that 80,000 is incredibly out of place or different than damage you've been normally doing. Anybody who's played more than three or four RPGs doesn't really care about the damage done except at the beginning of the game or if they can "min/max" their characters. They care in the beginning because they need to know the "baseline" damage. What's normal damage? Normal amount of hits to kill? They care at the end with the min/max build because they're looking to maximize damage. If they can squeeze 20 extra points of damage out of an attack, then they care.

So I need to have the boss auto-heal by events... which would be fine if it wasn't from the game displaying the damage healed, breaking the illusion of a boss with far more than 99 999 HPs.

I don't really understand this. This is a limitation that you're imposing on yourself and your own game. Why does the boss need more than 99,999 HP? What if your stats and skills were much lower and the basic damage you ended up doing each round was 200 damage each turn? You could then give your boss 10,000 HP and have just as difficult a fight. It sounds like to me that you're using large numbers just for the sake of using them. You want to max out all the stats possible, all the damage possible, all the HP possible. What's the design philosophy behind doing that? You can balance a game around small stats so that the 99,999 limit is actually far more than you'll ever need.

This is also a problem when I want enemies and bosses with custom defeat animations ; I need to give them a lot more HP than it is possible to inflict as to make sure they're not overkilled and then have them be destroyed via events when their HP dip below their intended maximum. Doing this become problematic when the absolute maximum is merely 99 999 in an engine where multiple 9999s with a single command is a thing.

You could just have the characters do less damage than 9999 so it's not required to have more than 99,999 HP on a boss. Easy enough to do. Sounds like you've got some "power creep" going on.

Given I saw unnofficial versions of the maker have much higher limits, it made me question the limit.

Unofficial versions are basically hacked/cracked copies of the engine. Basically illegal. Especially with official rereleases of the program out there.

The other point is animation limits.

500 frames... is only about 15 seconds of animation. Given animations can be used for character animations during battle, elaborate special moves, and minor on-field animations, 15 seconds... is just plain not enough.

While RPG Maker 2003 really isn't my forte and I am not an expert on it, I'll throw my two cents into the ring. Feel free to correct anything I'm getting wrong. It's my understanding that Battle animations are 1/10th of a second each frame. So, 500 frames is 50 seconds. That's nearly a minute. That's a lot of time for an animation. Most players will only tolerate animations that last 7 seconds or under. Because, around hour 4 or 5, they get tired of wasting a lot of time watching an animation that they've seen a bunch of times. Think Final Fantasy VIII Summons. The thing that people stop doing in the game unless it's absolutely necessary because it's roughly a 35-70 second animation every time.

For example, in many of my projects, I actually give my characters idle animations with over 1000 frames, namely making the characters loop normal combat stances but growing impatient and tapping their foot if the player idle during battle for over 2 minutes without anything happening. This can't be emulated with the official maker's strict limits.

Not sure how you did this. Is that a common thing that you see? People idling in combat for 2 minutes or more? I thought you only got 4 frames of animation for character sprites. I mean, you can choose 3 speeds on them, but I was pretty sure you only get 4 frames of animation on your characters. I don't think I've ever seen a player idle in combat more than 10-15 seconds. Because, if they're going to step away from the keyboard, they usually do so on the map, where they can pull up a menu or "pause". Especially since most RPG combat lasts seconds as it is. Usually it doesn't even last through 3 turns (that's everyone gets 3 hits in). So, I'm not sure why you'd need more frames and time for an idle animation 2 minutes down the line.

Why am I making a thread about this?

Simply put, there's some limits that I accept are part of the engine. But the HP and animation limit? Arbitrary. Is there any patch, mod, or what not compatible with the official RM 2003 maker that remove those silly limits?

Far as I know, there's no patch or mod to do what you're asking. Might be able to edit one of the files, but no clue how you'd go about doing that, or even if it falls under the End User License Agreement. Hope that helps.

 

[Myuu]

Your reply as a whole was really not helpful. And to say the least, did not like your tone. Still, I will assume that I worded my reply poorly and will try to explain myself a bit better. Hopefully, I will come off as less stupid with this new reply.


For battle animations, there are two very good reasons to use longer animations. As I said, it is not for combat animations proper, but rather character animations.

Sometimes, due to speed and order of play or simply the player thinking on strategy while in Wait mode, combat can stop for a good while. In such cases, I thought it a very nice detail to have the characters actually grow bored and have their idle stance change for a while to reflect this. Note that this being a character animation, it does NOT actually pause combat ; it happen automatically if the player stay in combat like this, which can happen.

But the other, and most important point, is death animations. Simply put, I like to make it so characters are not instantly on the ground when hit lethally but are shown actually collapsing. However, due to how animations for such things work, this result in the collapsing animation looping, which look silly to say the least.

To get around this, I give the animation a lot more frames than it actually use, so it linger on the player character having collapsed. This way, even if the fight take a while without the player able to revive the character, you won't see the character constantly getting back up and re-collapsing.



On HP, I admit the example I used was shaky. But it still holds regarding the custom death animations. Generally, I have numbers remain in the low triple digits for most of the main game. But for players who want to push it, I actually tend to include significant post-game options and custom systems that allow the player to power-up their characters far, far beyond the main game stats caps.

Notably, I will usually include one or more super broken joke weapons as a reward for beating the game's hardest challenge (usually either a super boss or a boss rush of sorts), with the intend of giving the player the opportunity to mess around and use said joke weapon to take revenge on all the foes they once struggled against (a point that was received positively by many players, especially since my games usually offer an option to redo finished encounters, including boss fights, whenever the player wants).

I like to include large HP limits to ensure that no matter what crazy exploit the player finds and use, it won't break the game's events.


On HP, this is also an issue of scale ; I like to use different scales to denote different protagonist levels. For example, in one game I worked on, you begin with regular JRPG adventurers, with a lower HP and damage cap scale. Later on, you get the opportunity to switch to characters who fight higher scale conflicts on a cosmic scale, and it's reflected by having the usual numbers involved be much higher to reflect this.

For example, what may be an epic boss fight for the initial party cannot even touch those new characters. And bosses those new characters face will sport stats far beyond the original party's stats caps, reflecting the higher scale conflict.

With most stats, this isn't a problem ; since I usually use 200-300 as the absolute cap for the initial party and use quad-digit numbers as the cap for the higher scale characters.

But this create problem with HP ; I tend to use combo mechanics a lot, so party damage increase very fast, even when the damage they do per attack is low. And well, I tend to try to design my harder encounters so they demand a bit more strategy than "unleash your best attack once or twice, heal when needed".


Simply put, in normal gameplay, I indeed never use more than 99 999 HPs for bosses. And even with my super bosses, I tend not to break that limit. But I still break it because I like to use special death animations for bosses and thus, must set the total HP to be "actual boss max HP + total maximum damage possibly inflicted in one turn with the most powerful combo attack possible".

This is especially true when I use two sets of scales for my games, which sometimes happen. And can happen for multiple reasons (say you have a cast who either fight on foot or fight larger scale enemies using humongous mecha. In the former, I use lower numbers. In the second case, I use a bigger number scale to reflect the higher firepower involved).


... but then, I guess it all make me sound silly.

Apologies...

 

[CleanWater]

For battle animations, maybe you can do a workaround using different set of animations triggered by events. For max numbers, well, I know no solution for this unfortunately. I usually stick with low numbers (like in BoF series) to balance my game. So a boss like Myria from BoF III with 30k HP is still a great challenge.

Anyway, if I recall well, the Terms of Use allows the use of custom .dlls and other things on your projects. Maybe you can change these min/max values with this method.

 

[Myuu]

That... makes me deeply unhappy. As in, so deeply unhappy.

I got the official version of RPG Maker 2003 because I wanted to access its new features... but because of frankly very silly arbitrary reasons, I must now choose between having non-3 frames super stiff animations or using the new features.

"You can always make your own battle system!"

... if I'm reduced to that, may as well pick up RPG Maker MV and just make up my own battle system using Javascript.



Oh well...

 

[LordBlueRouge]

Hi Myuu,

I wanted to take a chance to respond to this, because you asked some really good questions that a lot people aren’t aware of with rpgmaker2003. I don’t know much about the HP limits, but I do know a bit about how rpgmaker2003 treats battle animations:

500 frames... is only about 15 seconds of animation. Given animations can be used for character animations during battle, elaborate special moves, and minor on-field animations, 15 seconds... is just plain not enough.

For example, in many of my projects, I actually give my characters idle animations with over 1000 frames, namely making the characters loop normal combat stances but growing impatient and tapping their foot if the player idle during battle for over 2 minutes without anything happening. This can't be emulated with the official maker's strict limits.

So the way rpgmaker2003 treats battle animations is this:

-rpgmaker2003 runs 500 frames of animation at 24-30fps
-with sprites of 96x96 or 128x128 in size.
-with a hard limit of 8 sprites on screen at any given time.
-with a spritesheet containing 25 unique sprites. (this can be extended)


For “Field” Battle Animations:
-You can only have 1 “Show Battle Animation” play on the field, at any given time.
But, you can extend Battle Animations beyond their 500 frame limit, if you use it in conjunction with a 16.0 wait command.

For Battle Animations that play inside “Battles”.
-You can have a maximum of 5 “Show Battle Animations” play in battle:

(1) Any “Show Battle Animations” triggered through Battle Events.
-You can extend these beyond 500 frames, but similar to “field” animations they cannot play in parallel to other animations.
i.e. you’ll have to wait for the current battle animation to finish playing, before continuing,)

(1-4) Current Party Members, “Idle” Battle Animation
-These are your Party Member's Idle/Condition Animations.
-You cannot extend these beyond 500 frames - but you can play them at the same time and use them in conjunction with the “Show Battle Animation” Command.

So yeah, those are the hard limitations of Battle Animation rpgmaker2003. it’s like what you said Myuu, it’s very limiting:

(EDIT:Examples from previous projects YS3 SNES in RPGMAKER2003 and FF5 in RPGMAKER2003)

Field Battle Animation (within 500 frames)

Frames:402


Field Battle Animation (Extended over 500 frames)
Frames:482 , Wait 16.0
Frames:481, Wait 16.0
Frames:481, Wait 16.0
Frames:481, Wait 16.0
Frames:337, Wait 11.2
Frames:150, Wait 3.5

(I'll upload an example of rpgmaker2003 Battle Animations and how to extend them once I finish working on a particular project)

Even though rpgmaker2003, utilizes a side-battle-view system which was popularized by games such as Final Fantasy, you can really only make games like Final Fantasy 1 – 3 with it, anything beyond what those games did within their means, on their original platforms, is just too much work for rpgmaker2003's default battle system.

i.e. A very simple attack animation or a very simple Fire Spell is "O.K."

But anything more elaborate, like:

Final Fantasy 4 - 6 "Jump" Command,
Final Fantasy 4- 6"Summon" Animations,
or Final Fantasy 4-6 "Throw" Command.etc.

requires a bit more effort, and is often too much work for something that should be really simple to achieve in rpgmaker2003.

When rpgmaker2003 was originally released, a lot of Japanese rpgmaker2003 games, would make their own custom battle systems utilizing pictures within rpgmaker2003 in order to negate these limitations, Such as "Dragon Fantasy" "Silfade Gensou" and the action rpg "RelicWalker". Having said that, you’re probably better off using one of the more modern rpgmakers like VXAce in order to create the game you want to make, etc.

HOWEVER, with Cherry’s most recent update to rpgmaker2003 1.12.

Cherry has added a whole lot of new features that extend the possibility of using Pictures in rpgmaker2003. So you may not be able to achieve what you want through rpgmaker2003's battle animation system - but you may be able to do it through pictures.

Ideally, you can now have a 1000 idle animation; but depending on its size and amount of frames it’ll probably be something like 22MB for 320x240 sprite animation of 300 frames. Honestly, right now, it’s too early to see what this new feature can do, because we’re still trying to figure that out, Honest answer.

But yes, those are the limitations of rpgmaker2003's battle animation.

EDIT: ...Years ago, Aten had made two rpgmaker patches, called "David and Goliath" that would extend stats like HP beyond rpgmaker2003 limitations as you mention - unfortunately I don't think you can use these with official rpgmaker2003.

 

[Kamillo]

If you have RMweb official RM2k3 version, you can increase listed limits, this same method as the other day in unofficial RM2k3 - edit values in reshacker or another this type program. Path EULA permits these actions.

Unfortunatelly if you use a sream RM2k3 version this not work, because sream DRM block edit exe.

If you have a RMweb version and you can not change this in reshacker - write for me - I will do this for you.