Could use some help with energy beam attack.

Okay, so this is my first time posting and usually I'm able to find the answer to my questions just by doing a little detective work, so I apologize if this has been asked before, but I tried searching with every term I could think of and came up with nothing that really helped me in this particular case.

I have a character in my project that I want to have a sort of DBZ-esque energy beam attack (its going to fall under magic), similar to the good ol' Kamehameha blast. Animating the attack isn't going to be a big issue for me, given some time.

My question is, if I'm using a side-view battler script (Yanfly) can I track the attack animation to that specific character's battler? And if so, how might I achieve this?

For example, if Char. A has the energy beam attack, but the player were to switch their party position with Char. C, how would I get the attack to not look as though Char. C were casting it?

For visual aid, what I'm trying to avoid is having this:

  |   <---------- A   

  |                  B   

  |                  C    

  |                  D    

Turn into this:

  |   <---------- C  

  |                  B   

  |                  A   

  |                  D

As opposed to the desired effect:

  |                  C

  |                  B   

  |   <---------- A   

  |                  D

The easiest solution that I can seem to come up with is to do different versions of the attack with variants of the animation that switch out based on the character's order in the party, and I'm familiar with using switches for events such as quests and such, but I'm not sure how I'd go about setting a switch or variable for this purpose, if it's even possible.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

To target specific skills and animations, you need a battlescript that has action sequences - for example Battle Engine Symphony, that should be compatible with Yanfly's Battle Engine ACE.


Search for Symphony on the forum, I don't have the link ready as there was some trouble with several script pages in the last few weeks.

I found it, but it seems to be giving me some issues any time I initiate a test battle now. I get the following error message:

"Script 'yami battle symphony' line 1785: NoMethodError occurred.

Undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass".

Sorry, I haven't got scripting quite figured out yet, so I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

EDIT: Okay, so I figured out my issue with the error message, basically it was because I had five members in the party. That issue is resolved, but I'm still not sure what to do about the cast animation for this spell.

Did you start a new game after you added symphony?


You cannot use a saved game after adding most of the scripts as they need a new game to initialize themselves.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy.

To answer your question, yes, but it doesn't seem to do much, at least not what I want it to.

For a while it would make a second energy beam come from behind and hit the character. I'm learning the tag system, but the animation is still stuck in the same spot.

Here's what I've got:

<target action>
move user: forward, 10, wait
animation 114: target, wait
skill effect: dmg, calc
move user: origin
stance: user, idle
<target action/>

I just can't figure out how I can get the animation to come straight from the character circled in red. I'm not super picky about whether it hits the enemy dead-on because the attack is going to cause multiple explosions all over the battlefield, but I'd really like to have him appear to cast the attack.

.

You seem to have found a direction to go in, but I thought I might post this in case you get stuck (or for those of us already knee-deep in another battle system but still wanting a beam attack) - you can cheat by using a battle animation that fires the beam skyward (and there's a script to let you choose which animation your character uses for each skill), then having it fall down and hit the enemy. This is how I handled mine (originally I wanted my main character to use this kind of attack too, but I got entrenched in a battle system (twice!) and really don't want to rebuilt my in-progress game a third time...)

Good luck though! (and if anyone happens to know of an answer that doesn't include installing a different battle system....)

Good news! After a bit of monkeying around, I finally figured out my animation issue.

Turns out it was actually a deceptively easy fix-

After changing the target battler to the character I want to execute the attack, all I needed to do was reposition the attack animation like so:



Combined with these tags in the notes on the skill...

<target action>
move user: forward, 6, wait
animation 114: user, wait
skill effect: dmg, calc
move user: origin
stance: user, idle
<target action/>

...The animation now looks the way I want it to. The problem I have now is that the skill causes damage before AND after the attack animation.

I've tried deleting the damage formula and just letting the skill effect: dmg calc tag do it's thing, but then instead of doing any damage it just says 'Null'.

Then I tried just deleting the tag and letting the damage formula do what it does, but then the damage would occur before the attack animation, which is obviously going to look a bit odd.

Here's what I'm working with at the moment:



Does anyone see anything I might be missing here?

Also, thank you to both Andar and Ashton, your input has been invaluable thus far.

What if you removed the skill effect of dmg, calc at the bottom-right of that screenshot?

Its close to the desired effect, Hotfirelegend, but like I said it makes the damage indicator show up before the attack animation. It isn't a huge deal, but it just looks weird to see the effect of the attack before the attack actually happens.

I've illustrated the flow of events with everything that makes sense to me to try below, highlighting the issues in red if that helps you see what exactly I'm running into.

How it should look:

@ = Battler

• @                        @ (Player executes attack)
• @ <-----------------@ (Attack animation)
• @ 'X' DMG           @ (Damage indicator appears)

If I use both the damage formula and dmg, calc tags:

• @                        @ (Player executes attack)
• @ 'X' DMG           @ (Damage indicator appears before animation)
• @ <-----------------@ (Attack animation)
• @ 'X' DMG           @ (Damage indicator appears)

How it looks after removing the dmg, calc tags:

• @                        @ (Player executes attack)
• @ 'X' DMG           @ (Damage indicator appears before attack animation)
• @ <-----------------@ (Attack animation)

 And if I leave the dmg, calc tags but get rid of the damage formula for the skill:

• @                        @ (Player executes attack)
• @ <-----------------@ (Attack animation)
• @ Null                  @ (No damage caused)

Hopefully this makes sense.

That said, any other ideas? I'm just drawing blanks right now.

I've got the same problem, it seems like the damage calculation in Symphony is based upon the damage in the skill. What's weird is that at one point for me it just started working, and then reverted back to doing damage twice again later on....

WAIT! I think I figured it out. Try putting the other tags into the comment section.

<setup action></setup action>

<whole action></whole action>, etc

I think what happens is that using each of these codes over-rights a specific section of code. So if the first attack is still there, you just need to over-right it.

Let me know if that worked.

Thank you!

Adding the <whole action><whole action/> tag did the trick.

So to clarify, the notes section now looks like this:

<whole action>

<target action>
move user: forward, 6, wait
animation 114: user, wait
skill effect: dmg, calc
move user: origin
stance: user, idle
<target action/>

<whole action/>

Thanks for your input, everyone. I would have gone mad trying to figure this out myself.

Moderators, you can close this thread now if you wish, my issue is resolved.

So the code works but when my actor fires the move he flips, Like as in fires it the opposite way. Oh well this post is two yeas old, maybe the code is invalid now.