Changing Event Graphic Positions for LARGE Graphics?

Dymdez here with another brainbuster. For epic bosses of epic proportions (remember, my game is an ABS) I am having an issue with the whole "an event takes up one square no matter how large the graphic" thing. Before asking my question, I'll show you the problem first...



The image above shows the problem.. the "square" that serves as the base of the event, is too far from the graphic itself.. Is there a simple way of changing the graphic position? I can't "lower" the graphic in gimp because it ruins all of the other movement positions (just take my word on it).

Edit #1: The reason why the square being here is an issue is because it serves as the basis for hit detection meaning that the monster can get hit 1 tile lower than he actually exists.

I don't expect a solution for this, but I really wish there is one :(

for default, there is a large event script from Shaz - however, that is only for immobile cases.


And I really doubt that it could be combined with an ABS.


So either you find someone to add something to your ABS (and for that to have even a small chance, you would have to give us a link to that script), or you make your enemies smaller...

Before I posted this, Andar, my games enemies were like my dreams - EPIC.

Now, after reading your post my enemies look like this:

Is he just standing still, or is he moving around? If he's standing still, you could use my 'large collision' script. If he's moving around, I imagine some kind of proximity script might be better suited.

Moving, attacking, etc. What do you mean by proximity script?

I think I will just use a super choreographed boss battle with 100 events and use switches to control what is "blocked" and what's not blocked. ABSs already take the engine in a direction they aren't intended to go, so I'm not the least bit upset when I can't get what I want in this regard.

What ABS are you using? I have seen ABS videos that have huge enemies (I think it was Falcao's) so surely there's already something made for it

I'm developing my own ABS, and got around the problem of large enemies by giving the Game_CharacterBase class attributes called "high_x", "low_x", "high_y", and "low_y" based on the graphic file the event is using.  Then, for anything that requires hit detection, it would check to see if the hit area is higher than the low x AND lower than the high x, AND higher than the low y AND lower than the high y.  If so, it's a hit.  You can solve the "the hitbox for this enemy seems too low" with this approach too, since you could set the "high_y" and "low_y" to both be higher than the event's true y-coordinate.

Yes, it is Falcao's, but the large enemies you saw were very constrained. 1) they were battler graphics that did not move OR 2) they were 2x2 or 2x3 graphics (tiles that is). Falcao's engine supports a limited large enemy size, far smaller than what I was hoping with that giant Pit Fiend. Furthermore, Falcao's "enemy body increase" notetags are a bit buggy and could have been done a bit better (something like what Wavelength has commented above, where it considers all the enemies dimensions)

@Wavelength, that's really really interesting, maybe you could help?

I'd have to see how Falco's Hit Detection system works.  It's possible that it will be flexible enough to simply adjust hitboxes to consider our new "low_x", etc. properties, or it's possible it would require reworking the entire hit detection system (which I seriously don't have the time to do for anyone).  That can be one of the drawbacks to using someone else's premade system.

Do you think you could find the parts of his script that deal with hit detection, since I've never worked with his system before, and I'll look into them to see how flexible they might be?

(One other option, if you think Falco would be open to improving his ABS, is that I could open up my code to him if he wants to directly incorporate this kind of thing into his system.  That's on you to ask, though. :) )

Falcao rarely responds to messages (you can't blame him, he's busy, like you and I).

As for locating the part of his script that deals with hit detection, I'm afraid that would be outside of my knowledge base. I know that you can slightly increase the hit detection with the notetag "enemy body increase = x" where x = 1 or 2. However, I don't have the depth of knowledge required to recognize "hit detection" scripting. When I Control + F on "enemy body increase" to see where it would lead me, it tags me to "@body_sized" but that leaves me with 1 line of data and I hardly think that's it. I understand that you don't have time - if you're willing to look at his code and see if an adaptation would be possible, I would definitely compensate for it -- time is finite, and I can't (and don't) expect anything. Let me know.

Fair enough.  If I have a good window of time where I don't feel like working on commissions or my own game, I'll take a look into this for you.  If I haven't given you any indication within a few weeks, feel free to shoot me a PM to remind me.