I've used what is almost the exact same manual system for almost 6 years now on IRE games and it has always worked well for me and a couple friends. Basically, it would color part of an affliction message, with the part of the message colored corresponding to a certain key to hit. Lots of people however couldn't envision that well so for the public version I'm going for something different.

What it's going to do now is actually dispaly ansi art of your keyboard, and color the key that you should push to cure a certain affliction. That said, I'm not sure jost how big the ansi art should be, so here is a sample for you guys, tell me which you think is better. Big keys are good, but could move past the scroll area if you're being spammed by multiple attacks or other such things. I triggered it to wag and bark emotes for now since that's easier than actually afflicting myself.





Now, the boxes are normally hollow, but I filled them with ---- because the forum doesn't allow blank white space

That said, the boxes correspond to the Insert, Home, Del, End and Pagedown keys on your keyboard, hence that shape. Not all of the cures work like such, but the most common ones are set there and use that specific piece of ansi art.

Also, the boxes actually look like boxes in the courier font of default zmud . They look more like rectangles here. But the point is, which size would be better?

Well that sucks. All mine look exactly the same. That would also be ungodly spammy.

-laugh- I need that. Though I'd have to use Zmud and I don't have a copy of it. -.- someone should make something good like this for java, so I dun suck so bad. That explains why you bark so much. -tickle-

The point is you don't try to read the text, but absorb and react to the shapes and colors That said, it might be spammy, but it could also work.

Yeah, every time I bark I see a bunch of boxes, and then I tweak their size/colour etc.

Also, the final goal is to fill the boxes with numbers corresponding to how many of that type of cure you have to eat so that having one scrolling off the screen won't matter. But that'll take a lot of work and probably wouldn't go in until the later versions.

Another possiblity is to just have the boxes and numbers therein exist inside of a separate window, hmmm... perhaps I will just do that.

Oh, and I'll add more colored bars for when you've applied your cure and when you can use another cure. Hoorah.

Put it in a side win... beat me to it. Interesting idea though, for those that like to manually cure.

Everyone loves an auto-cure.

Other than that, why not use a graphic, versus spamming the screen? Shrug.

Why not make a keyboard image in a different window using buttons that change state. This could be configured to show what you need to press to cure.

So for example if alt+f cured Anorexia then the button relating to F on the keyboard image will change colour or something to show that it needs to be pressed.

Still, the serious problem becomes illusions/spam. There's no such thing as solo-combat in Lusternia, and it's pretty difficult for you to see these big arse blocks swathed in a wad of colored text moving at about 500 mpm.

Ugh, that's true. Why are you making a manual system anyway? What benefit does it have over automatic, if that auto is done well?

Manual systems are more fun to use. There was a time when combat was actually fun for the act of combat, not just bragging rights... as for using actual buttons instead of ansi art, I've never used buttons before so it just didn't occur to me. The current version is almost done, maybe later versions will use actual buttons.

If you're using a manual combat system for the sake of not being a robot and for the sake of the old times when combat was fun, why would you want to poste the actual buttons to the screen?

For one, I think that's a horribly OOC way of doing it, and, what's the difference between any automatic system and this kind of manual? I mean, the only difference is that it's you who pushes the button instead of your system, there's no real skill involved. If you have to know your colors and how to react, that's an entire different thing I think....

But hey, it's an interesting idea never the less *grin* any chance I can get a look at that system? Sounds neat and I'd definitely love to see how you do the outputs and all.

No wait... you're still using colors and all aren't you? Just using boxes roughly resembling your keys rather than lines and partial color syntaxes.. bah. That much for reading posts while half asleep. Still, I'd love to have a look at that system.

That would be really spammy as most people have said. Personally if I was to make a manual system, I'd just highlight affliction messages and corresponds the F1-F12 keys as cures with echos, and perhaps the insert, home, delete, end keys.

Like I said earlier, I've moved the buttons to windows, so it won't be spammy.

I don't know Jello's reasons for making a manual system, but I have a manual half-system because I prefer not to put tons of time into a system, I don't have the knowledge yet, and because I don't want the risk of my half-baked system messing me up if something happens that I didn't plan for.

HEY a lot of us manual still! I deffinitely manual a lot... well semi-manual with a lot of checks :\\ I think a fullauto system is boring.

Gods I miss those times.

Then Tranq came along?