Animated Odometer for Window_BattleStatus

I've been working on an odometer animation which I intend to substitute by the original Window_BattleStatus in order to track information about HP and MP during battles.


The odometer is working fine, but until now I've been debugging it on an html page. I am also using Pixi for the animations.


I provided a sneak peak of this odometer which is attatched to this topic.


I intend to use the same odometer features that are found on the game Earthbound. For those who never played it, if the character gains/loses HP or PP, the number tiles in the odometer should move on a certain frequency until it reaches the new values. However, if the new HP value is zero (a.k.a. mortal damage), the character should only faint when the number tiles reach zero. While the odometer numbers do not reach zero, the player may have a chance to recover its HP or to defeat the enemies, thus having a chance to survive (if the battle ends before it reaches zero, the new HP value should be equivalent to the value that is being shown by the number tiles).


I've done some research on the RMMV scripts and I figured out that I should work on the Window_BattleStatus class in order to substitute the previous images for the odometer.


My problem is that I am pretty fresh on plugin development and I have no idea about the other classes and objects that I should care about in order to program the odometer controls correctly.


Anyway, how hard should it be to implement this feature?

Here are my thoughts. when someone gets hurt then apply a battle status to that character. In the background have a script running every 1/3 or 1/2 second that checks if a character has that state then change the odometer by one number. Also you would need to change the battle status 1 count too.
For example:


Player gets hit with fireball and it does 10 damage (5 seconds) so the battle state is applied.


1/2 second later they take one damage tick on the odometer and the total time left is 4.5 seconds.


The battle state is reduced from 10 to 9.


Once the total damage is done (10 damage, or after 5 seconds) the state counter is reduced to 0 and they will no longer take damage.


I haven't played earthbound but is it something like that?

Well, I sincerely did not understand what you were trying to say... but anyway, for the odometer movement, I do not use time. Instead, I calculate the difference between the actual value and new value and all the displacements are performed based on this difference value.


If you never played it, perhaps you could have a better understanding by watching this video:

If you have the odometer scroll at varying speeds then another way might have to be used. However, I do think battle states are your best bet.

As I said, all the tiles move using a certain frequency, so the speed should be the same.


Sorry if that's a stupid question, but should I find enough info regarding the battle states on the Window_BattleStatus class?

I would probably look in the rpg_objects script. In Game_BattlerBase

can't wait to see the full plugin come out