1/23: Maybe someday I will get the chance to breathe during the midweek. Until then though, I felt the urge to take a screen draft and finish most of the detail on it already. For some reason I really like how this turned out and I like the idea I had put down for what lies beyond that curious gate.
Hopefully over the weekend I'll find the urge to finish this area of the overworld and then another and see about getting the quest off its feet and actually put in a little bit of gameplay. Until then, I've been thinking about ways to allow greater control over Blue Ring/Red Ring damage reduction.
I had a script figured out and prepared for Shadow of the First. I think it was BigJoe who helped me figure out how to do it, but basically, how I did it back then was a global script kept a "damage multiplier" variable that was modified when you picked up a ring. This was applied to all enemies' damage and weapon damage, and there you would have a nice working damage reduction without a lot of complications.
Well, there was one, and I chose not to work around it: it involved the Mirror Shield. Normally when you reflect a projectile back at an enemy, it'll just do that enemy's weapon damage to the monster unfortunate enough to catch the projectile. This meant that the more scripted defense you had, the LESS damage ANY reflected shot will do. This can be a rather, unpleasant experience to the player when he tries walling Wizzrobe shots and realizing they do nothing. Thankfully, Mirror Wizzrobes went unused in SotF, but it does mean the script's not perfect. Unless there's a way to remove the damage reduction off neutral projectiles, if projectiles could even be in a neutral condition, you pretty much get precise control over damage reduction at the expense of breaking a functionality of the Mirror Shield. Tradeoffs are never a pleasant thing to have in scripting; the goal is to add in a feature with no strings attached.
So right now, I am going to try a rather brute force option and just multiply every variable in item damage/enemy health/ enemy damage/and damage divisor by 8. First off, I would have to give the player a ring at the start to bring the bloated damage back down. After that, I can take advantage of the greater damage divisor and simply tick the divisor up 2 to go from 1/8th damage to 1/10th, which given the starting numbers, would equate to a 20% damage reduction when you receive the Blue Ring. Unless some hardcoded elements in this game ignore the damage divisor, I should have at the end an evenly increased damage table that can then be divided by the first divisor to return you to what you started with. After that, all I need to do to make this work is give the player a "Green" Ring in the init data, and go on an arduous process of multiplying every relevant variable by 8. Unless Zelda Classic really emulates an NES and it overflows easily, I have solved a past dilemma using nothing but maths.
Now I wish I was actually good at LEARNING maths instead of just understanding how to maths.
Oh and not to mention you finally have a use for that Gold Ring.
Edited by Darkmatt, 23 January 2015 - 01:13 PM.