The Mana World Forums

Well... Two questions. In many RPG's there are NPC's (duh!) But what I always see is that those NPC's always stand in their place. As if they were statues.

Isn't it nicer for them to at least move in their own house/bar/shop etc. Maybe even walk in their own town. And what wouldn't be greater than a traveling merchant who realy travels the whole world.

I think it should be possible right? Just threat the NPC's as PC's.

As for my other question. Will there be support for animating tiles? For example a waterfall or maybe a torch in a cave.

Well, just two questions I wanted to ask

I think that the biggest problem is that artist would have do more work.

Given that the NPC's are to be made from the standard character sprites, meaning we can clothe them in the same manner, mobile NPC's would actually not constitute much extra work at all.

And I'd be down with the marginal extra amount of work it would take to animate those sprites that need animation.

Yes, but you have to do the clothes from at least four points of view...

I say to only have some move and others stationary. That is how WoW is. Some are roaming about and others are always same spot.

Pajarico wrote:Yes, but you have to do the clothes from at least four points of view...

Which is no different from how we're doing any other clothes. There's going to be a fairly huge equipment list, adding a few more on for NPC's shouldn't be a big deal.

Which is no different from how we're doing any other clothes.

I didn't say it was different, actually that was my point. But it you feel you could do it...

We are planning on it. The only problem at present is that we have yet to get a complete character sprite sheet, and therefore can't make clothes for any of the NPCs yet, so it's naked walking NPCs or clothed stationary NPCs at the moment.

Let's not concentrate on the minor glamorous details at this point, ok?

Just wanted to point out that if you ever visited http://www.xrpg.net and look at the animation you can export you might find many animation that are pretty good. They have waterfall, fountain, fire, smoke, water, rain, thunder, and other animations. I am working on my own RPG and you can do quite a bit of things with animations and layers. As for the battle system. Its a crappy turn based game. (meaning the graphics sux hardcore)

well what you could do, is modle alot of npcs after players, and when players get a name or something under them, it would be a differnet color so you could tell it was a npc...though for this to work good, you'd need alot of variety of hair styles, and body proportions (or classes, or sprite changing armor blah blah)

if you did that, you could make a traveling merchent, you could have a low chance of him appearing on a map slowly roaming around for X ammount of time...he could have good deals on randomly generated items and maybe have some items that you can't purchase at npcs, which would be extreamly expensive of course.

but yeah having npcs just walk around in little areas is just eye candy, it's nice, but definatly shouldn't be top priority...should be one of the last things that happens.

Well, we really have to get our character sprite finished first. AFter that, walking NPCs are only as far away as clothed characters are (which isn't super-far).