Plugin 3D ReBirth Battle System

[Xilefian]

This is something I've been planning for a bit and I'm finally going to start on it (and hopefully one day finish it).

This will be a 3D battle system in the style of HyperDimension Neptunia Re;Birth (See the video below from 0:30 onwards)

The plan is to eventually have something working just like that video.

The battle system works by controlling the position of each actor on the field and then attacking with a given area of effect for a weapon/skill/item. Everything within that area is hit.

The base Plugin (version 1.0) will be a simple 3D battle field (graphics similar to Mode 7) with a 3rd person camera on the actor sprites with battle actions dependant on the radius of the actor (configurable at first). This will be a very basic 3D turn-based battle system with movement. It should be able to be dropped into MV with no changes and instantly work with the default MV battle setup.

From there, I'll be adding additional features to make it more complex and closer to the Neptunia Re;Birth system; these will depend on the main plugin so they will be features that can be toggled as part of the Plugin's parameters.

The first task is to create a 3D battle field with a camera. I'm going to be using the battle background layers for this definition (layer 1 would be the floor texture, layer 2 would be the sky texture). I'll need to think about indoor scenes (I may use the layer 2 file-name as a way to define if it should be used as a sky or a wall).

For this, I'll be using the JS Canvas to keep support for non-WebGL, but I plan on having a WebGL system primarily for performance reasons and so fancy 3D models, lighting, etc can be used. For this, my secondary goal is a basic 3D API for MV scripts, which I will most likely release as a separate developer Plugin.

I'll be documenting progress here.

 

[MinisterJay]

I watched the first few minutes of the video, too much bandwidth usage to watch entire video, and I liked the concept. What I like about what you are doing is that you are showing that there are more applications available with RPG Maker MV than many may realize. I look forward to seeing more updates from you. Thanks.

 

[Barchetta]

I may not use this because I can't imagine the amount of lag that might come from running the scripts needed for it but I will definitely pay attention to this. This here would be a truly professional level script. I look forward to seeing your progress.

 

[LTN Games]

Hey, sounds like a great idea, and a ton of work. I will be keeping an eye on this and I hope to see some awesome videos of this system in action.

 

[Xilefian]

I may not use this because I can't imagine the amount of lag that might come from running the scripts needed for it but I will definitely pay attention to this. This here would be a truly professional level script. I look forward to seeing your progress.

The base system will offload a lot to the GPU, so there won't be any "lag" (I presume you mean low-FPS), even with an integrated GPU it will be using simple quads, so you can expect 60 FPS everywhere.

Mobile browsers without hardware acceleration forced will most likely have some issues (going through canvas) but the goal is as heavily optimised as possible for rendering.

 

[LTN Games]

The base system will offload a lot to the GPU, so there won't be any "lag" (I presume you mean low-FPS), even with an integrated GPU it will be using simple quads, so you can expect 60 FPS everywhere.

Yea, with JS as the new language of RM, and MV being a better engine, in general, I believe you will accomplish a good 60fps no problem. I'm really excited to see even a little bit of progress, so please don't forget about updating us.

 

[Xilefian]

Yea, with JS as the new language of RM, and MV being a better engine, in general, I believe you will accomplish a good 60fps no problem

Don't get me wrong, MV is not a "better" engine and JS is a lot slower than RGSS, but the use of HTML5 canvas means we get access to WebGL where available and the use of PIXI.js has made things a lot easier to do.

This kind of system can be done in RGSS, I think I mentioned before that I've done GPU acceleration with VX/VXA. It would be a lot faster and a lot more feature-rich in RPG Maker XP/VX/VXA but it would take about 20x longer to implement (as a real example, my first MV Plugin for GLSL shaders took a few hours to get working, the same system in VX/VXA took about a week to get working and was not nearly as well optimised).

 

[LTN Games]

Don't get me wrong, MV is not a "better" engine and JS is a lot slower than RGSS, but the use of HTML5 canvas means we get access to WebGL where available and the use of PIXI.js has made things a lot easier to do.

See now this is interesting to hear, that JS is slower than RGSS, I always thought the opposite, maybe it's because some of the plugins I used in MV are much faster than ones of the same functionality in RGSS. This lead me to believe that MV is just a better engine in terms of programming. Good to hear your side of it. Anyways not trying to go off topic, so I'll stop here, and just keep an eye on this thread for the progress you make.

 

[Xilefian]

First update is that I'm dropping support for the fall-back canvas 2D. It's way too slow and the only devices that would use it are low-end mobiles and incorrectly configured mobile browsers, so I'm going to make this fully WebGL to save time and effort.

Got a 3D API designed. The idea is to make a 2D sprite that accepts basic 3D sprites (I'm going for something akin to the Sega Saturn if anyone here has experience with programming for that).

 

[Barchetta]

Well forgive my mistake then, haha. I don't even know why I worry about fps, honestly. My laptop can handle overkill ENB Skyrim so I suppose this would run just fine. I've been without my big laptop for months so I've gotten use to the Surface Pro 3 and its lack of processing power.

 

[lmd0013]

I think you can use threejs as 3D API

 

[Xilefian]

I think you can use threejs as 3D API

ThreeJS is a hefty webgl library, no reason to use it. My job involves graphics engine programming so I have no problem doing that here.

Speaking of which, my job has taken up all my time recently which is why I've been quiet here (haven't even launched MV for a while).

I have no other MV projects, so this is the only thing I am working on when it comes to MV.

 

[Companion Wulf]

I'd be interested in the final product. It certainly has a lot of scope.

 

[Nightfox]

I know its been little over 3 years but were you able to finish the rebirth plugin?