Making the party members follow you around with these new mechanics is quite an interesting problem.
Normally, in grid-based 2D RPGs the party members just follow the same path as the main character, so they're essentially replaying the main character's path, and only the last few steps need to be recorded.
Now that we have non-grid-based AND elevation around, things get trickier, as the space becomes continuous rather than discrete, and they have to not stop in the middle of jumping.
I wonder if we can do this by recording the player's movement keystrokes, along with when they are pressed instead?
Then the party members can just move according to this keystroke, minus some of the last entries so they don't end up overlapping with the player.
With the caveat that, when the keystroke entry is jumping, they won't execute that until the landing entry isn't also within range for execution (that is, all entries minus a few last ones to prevent overlap)
Which means that we also need to record as an entry whenever the main character lands. This way the party members won't jump but ended up falling where the player didn't because they didn't make the whole jump because the player decided to stop moving right away after landing.
I've never implemented this so I don't know whether this would work flawlessly, but I don't see any obvious flaw with this method. Other than that it's annoyingly effort-costly to implement.
Registering the entries may be a bit tricky too, I said the party members will just cut off the last few entries for simplicity but if an entry is simply a keystroke then we wouldn't want to ignore the WHOLE keystroke even if it's the last one, otherwise party members won't follow when you only press one key to walk straight.
What we really want to ignore is a certain amount of distance traveled, so maybe each keystroke entry could also contain the current character coordinates.
If the main character can only move to cardinal directions with the arrow keys, this means the direction won't change without there being a new keystroke, so we can rest assured that until the next keystroke entry, the character walks straight a certain direction depending on what key that is. And since we're also recording the coordinates of where the character is located during each keystroke, the party members' objects can calculate how for down this last keystroke that is within range they should execute.
It's not necessarily an exhaustive algorithm on how to implement this, but may just be somewhere to start.
So, it seems like a lot of annoying work, but also somewhat interesting and seems quite possible to implement, though not worth much in the list of priorities.
2
Tobias 1104~4Y
I'm tempted to try to implement something like that just for the challenge of it, but I've decided to do away with jumping now, because it's just more trouble than it's worth! Thanks for thinking so deeply about this though!
Normally, in grid-based 2D RPGs the party members just follow the same path as the main character, so they're essentially replaying the main character's path, and only the last few steps need to be recorded.
Now that we have non-grid-based AND elevation around, things get trickier, as the space becomes continuous rather than discrete, and they have to not stop in the middle of jumping.
I wonder if we can do this by recording the player's movement keystrokes, along with when they are pressed instead?
Then the party members can just move according to this keystroke, minus some of the last entries so they don't end up overlapping with the player.
With the caveat that, when the keystroke entry is jumping, they won't execute that until the landing entry isn't also within range for execution (that is, all entries minus a few last ones to prevent overlap)
Which means that we also need to record as an entry whenever the main character lands. This way the party members won't jump but ended up falling where the player didn't because they didn't make the whole jump because the player decided to stop moving right away after landing.
I've never implemented this so I don't know whether this would work flawlessly, but I don't see any obvious flaw with this method. Other than that it's annoyingly effort-costly to implement.
Registering the entries may be a bit tricky too, I said the party members will just cut off the last few entries for simplicity but if an entry is simply a keystroke then we wouldn't want to ignore the WHOLE keystroke even if it's the last one, otherwise party members won't follow when you only press one key to walk straight.
What we really want to ignore is a certain amount of distance traveled, so maybe each keystroke entry could also contain the current character coordinates.
If the main character can only move to cardinal directions with the arrow keys, this means the direction won't change without there being a new keystroke, so we can rest assured that until the next keystroke entry, the character walks straight a certain direction depending on what key that is. And since we're also recording the coordinates of where the character is located during each keystroke, the party members' objects can calculate how for down this last keystroke that is within range they should execute.
It's not necessarily an exhaustive algorithm on how to implement this, but may just be somewhere to start.
So, it seems like a lot of annoying work, but also somewhat interesting and seems quite possible to implement, though not worth much in the list of priorities.