[MZ] JABS - J's Action Battle System

I might just wait for now until you do your thing, I'm finding work arounds by just naming them how I want them in the game.

I did notice that when you disable JABS that when you press the +START button the game freezes!

I was kind of hoping to start my game with it disabled, then adding it in when say I pick up an 'item' which would be my first weapon. (the slashy thing you start with.

Any idea why this is happening?

EDIT: also do you know why X doesn't work at all (I think your game has it configured to Y. But you know, the top button of the 4? You can't assign it to anything.

I've also noticed it doesn't like in text boxes or question boxes when you use \n[1] or \n[2] for the actor names. it makes the game crash:(



super sad because I have the ability to change all my Ninjas names when you meet them, now you can't interact with them at all without it crashing if they have \n[1] or \n[2] in their name.

I'm getting pretty far with setting this up tho.
Thanks so much again for making these plugins.

Also is there a way to set it so if the projectile hits a region it explodes. Eg a wall or some thing. So it doesn't just pass straight thru? GALVs Map Projectiles is pretty good for that but it's also very limited & doesn't work with MZ3D.

This was called out by @kouta555 just yesterday, actually. I have since updated it so that it should work, you'll just need to grab the latest J-ABS.js file. (there were a slew of small adjustments I had to make to properly handle those who wanted to totally turn off JABS that I didn't account for because I don't turn off JABS in my personal project lol)

This is one of the dangers I was worried about, as your experience can vary between controllers. Unfortunately, the code can only support the basics, and if your controller doesn't map the buttons the way that RPG Maker needs you to, then its no dice. :(

I haven't experienced this in my own project and use \N[number] and other shorthands all the time. Can you give a bit more detail about that? (and show the console as well if possible so I can see the culprit plugin and line)

I'm just about to run off to bed but I'll get that info for you in the morning for sure!


it's probably in the documentation & since I'm about to bail to bed I thought I'd quickly just ask here. what is 'Tool & Dodge'.

working with MZ3d I have set the trigger buttons to rotate 90 degrees & the L & R buttons are assigned to the shooting functions. I think this is a cool set-up.

But yeah what are those other 2, keen to know what else I could map :p

Goodnight & thank you once again.

No worries. Also, my documentation is fairly lacking to be quite honest. Of all the things I love doing (like development), I don't really enjoy writing documentation, so... yeah.

Tool:
Basically what I call "items". The tool can be simple stuff like a potion that heals you, or they can be an aggressive item that links to a skill and performs an action, such as a scroll of fireball or a pickaxe that performs the "pickaxe" skill or whatever your creativity can come up with.

Dodge:
A reference to "mobility" type skills. The closest thing I can think of that is similar to this in an AAA game would be like... (from Zelda) Link's ability to tumble in a direction. You, the RM dev, can decide a variety of details including how far, forced or non-forced direction, whether or not they are invincible for the duration, etc.


I actually looked into this a bit. I didn't realize that this was even a thing! Makes stuff look a bit like minecraft or PS1 era, but thats kinda nostalgic. I like it a lot! However, the code appears to be obfuscated (common when the developer sells their plugins) meaning it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to troubleshoot if incompatibilities arise. It is the reason I have almost no visustella plugins in my demo project (aside from the core engine, QoL newgame is nifty and im too lazy to write it myself)- because they are obfuscated and if I run into problems I can't troubleshoot why its not working with their code. I spent a whole weekend trying to debug around it and gave up and just ripped all of them out. Quite frustrating as a developer (and has led me to write what I'm sure is a ton of overlapping/overwriting code to replace their functionalities).

[dpost]@cabanas_ds [/dpost]

EDIT: is there also a way to set either a switch or a common event when you kill an NPC? I need this for my 5 star police chase system.

Any enemy that is defeated will execute all commands in its current event command list. This means if you put a command inside of the event that you made an enemy (above/below the comments that you use to define the enemy) then it should execute that kind of stuff as well.

Regarding party cycling between followers:
This was initially designed for myself as a means to swap between exactly 2 party members. I realized later afterwards that maybe others won't only have 2 members, and have yet to update it XD. Basically its not checking the whole party properly, my bad. I'll see if I can get a fix in for that.

this seemed to do it. yeah I basically only want one follower at a time. I have it so you can turn around and talk to the follower using a common event. thru that common event I'd like to be able to have JABS enabled ect & a few other options. only trouble is when JABS is enabled you Slash at your follower.. haha, it doesn't do anything but it'd be cool if it was like when you talk to the other NPCs.

Unfortunately, the functionality of being able to interact with your followers is outside the scope of an ABS engine like JABS. However, on the bright side, I updated the code so cycling between members should be OK now. Again, it wasn't extensively tested, but I added a few extra members and killed them off to make sure cycling would be polite and not try to make the dead members do something (which I'm guessing was the cause of your error). Now it'll cycle through however many members you have and pull out whomever is the next living one.

Is there a way to make an enemy use different skills? I dont understand how to make em use not just only one skill, and i dont understand what mean this?

<ai:11100000> this a model a what enemy must do, or what? when i write in enemy tag

<skillId:1> then he use only a physical attck, but i write there any other number, he use skill from box, that i added.

Well what i try to do: i need an eney those not move, he just stand and shoot to player, but there is no skill to shoot in player position only straight shot, so this is unusable i think. Okay there is a skil what got player at any position like magic, but u cant dodge it, not good ether. So i realise there is no d way to shot in 8 directions. This make this sistem really boring, you can move in 8 directions, but can't shoot? Whaa?:ysad: I cant make an interesting enemybecause of that. i understan that sistem not ready on 100%, but i reaaly think, that its need 8way shooting, or pixel moving projectiles like this https://galvs-scripts.com/2020/10/16/mz-map-projectiles/

The "<skillId:1>" from the database represents the skill id that JABS identifies as that particular enemy's basic attack. Any skills that are listed in it's skill box (the same one you add skills to with weight and condiitonals etc for regular battles) will also be considered when gauging what to use.

Regarding your usage of "<ai:11100000>", the third bit, (11100000), is the "executor" trait, which will test all skills available that a battler has (excluding it's basic attack) and pick only the most elementally-effective one. If all skills are the same effectiveness, then I cannot say which precisely that'll be off the cuff.

Regarding "can't shoot in 8-directions", if you have a skill that has "<projectile:8>", it'll fire off skills in all eight directions. Though you are correct, the "8-directional movement" is not true 8-directional movement, because technically the player will never actually be facing in a non-dir4 direction.

As an individual with a life outside of coding this engine, everything comes down to a matter of setting up priorities. Shooting and facing 8 directions was not directly implemented into JABS, the only reason it works is because there is another plugin that is enabling it within the demo project (the Yami one). I have only so much time in the day, but if you want to tackle integration of a pixel movement engine, 8-directional movement and projectiles, and all that, then feel free to open up a pull request with the code changes required. I'd be happy to code review your branch, and merge it in! However, if you are not willing or unable to do such, then you'll have to wait till I get around to that. It hasn't been high on my priority list because I personally (and others) can create interesting enemies despite that missing functionality.

Try to use these AI modes.
<ai:00001000>
<ai:10001000>

The enemies will always use skill in the skill box (Multiple skill is applicable).
00001000 will attack recklessly without dodging.
10001000 will attack while trying to dodge at the same time.

Mostly, just 00001000 mode will do the job. If a unique enemy behavior is needed, Move Event command can be integrated together to build a unique behavior.

I realize that I don't really have the best documentation describing this.
The next major update for JABS will include a pretty significant update to AI under the hood, so I'll be sure to add a bunch of documentation to the project wiki for it.

Thank you though, for explaining that.
<ai:00001000>, the fifth bit, is the "reckless" ai trait.
"Reckless" will NEVER perform it's basic attack skill (unless it is also within it's skill box or out of resources to cast any other skills).

Some ai traits also influence their movement patterns for the different phases of combat for JABS, but I'll go over that more in the documentation.

Hello, I've been using your ABS for my little fun project that I'm doing for my wife and our anniversary.
She dosent really know english really well because we are German so I want to translate the menus (like when you press triangle / ESC to bring up the menu), do you know where I can manage to do that?

That would help me alot!

Thanks!

If you search for-
-within the J-ABS.js file using any text editor, there should be only one match. There, the command names are defined. If you start to scroll down, you should see other this.addCommand("Clear Slot..." commands and - unassigned -` commands that contain text that can be adjusted as well. Feel free to play with the code as needed till you get the text to your desired state.

I apologize this isn't easily accessible, I have it on my list of future enhancements to parameterize this into the plugin settings so that the users can more easily adjust the text and the quick menu.

It is important to note that this would only affect the JABS menu.
I'm not very familiar with localization of the rest of the menus (like the proper main menu).

This is a nice system, good JAB job :smile: The only problem I have with this is the frequent fps drops. It usually goes from 50 to about 40 and even 20 (which, from what I guess, is because of the concurrent AIs on map? And all the particle spawning?) This happens on both VS Fast Mode enabled/disabled.

My specs aren't the issue. I've ran before about 100+ custom pathfinding agents in rpgmz with no problem. Even more than that with the vanilla movement.


Btw, I could not defeat that dragon in the demo.

The biggest offender in the fps department is the animations. Though the MZ 1.2.x update helped some, the engine clearly was not optimized to play more than maybe 2 or 3 animations at the same time. In the default battle system, where animations typically only play one at a time (or two if you counter or something) it runs fine. Playing a half dozen animations at once will absolutely bog the engine down.
Unfortunately, I believe the culprit is largely the transition from frame-based animations to their choice of particle animations. Reducing the animation sizes (like literal downscale from 100% >> 33%) makes it more bearable, as does using simpler animations (like the basic hit), but at the end of the day, you'll never be able to make a 16-bit dynasty warriors clone using any ABS engine with effekseer being the library of choice for animations.

The actual engine itself handles the concurrent AI fine up until about 80 battlers all at the same time, and then you'll experience a different kind of lag (fps is still 60, but you'll feel input lag). I don't think I've included it in here yet, but I've got a working branch that skips processing battlers that are outside of X range from the player which basically renders that moot, but it'll come with the ally AI I'm building next and the AI improvements for enemies and such.

This was probably an oversight when I converted enemy tags from notes to comments, my bad.

I'd like to formally mention here that I have released version 3.0.0 of JABS.

The major feature functionality includes Ally AI and an Aggro System, along with a suite of bugfixes and optimizations. I've also opened up a huge number things that were initially hardcoded into the engine to now be user-defined if you wanted. Take a peek at my changelog post to see more (I wrote a bunch there).

Also, I do believe this concludes a majority of the functionality that I set out to include with JABS. With that in mind, I'm thinking this'll be about it as far as general features are concerned for the base engine of JABS. That doesn't mean I won't support it still and fix bugs for it (I like perfectly-working things as much as the next guy), but it does mean I don't think I'll be putting out any additional major features meriting the need to bump the version from 3 >> 4.

Despite no longer actively working on JABS directly, I do have plans to add additional optional functionality to it down the road via extra plugins! As an example of how that might work, if you download the latest demo, you'll notice that the Ally AI functionality is actually separated into it's own plugin instead of being baked into JABS.

Hello Jragyn, first of, my compliments for the amazing and complex plugin.
I want to ask if and how i can make it, instead to use the animations for attacks and skills, use change sprite, for custom attacking sprites and such.