You know how in Final Fantasy 7 magic grows by gaining AP? The materia splits in half so you get one, let''s say Bolt and one Bolt 2? Then it splits again so you get Bolt 1, Bolt 2, and Bolt 3? Well, I was wondering how you could technically grow magic without objects to split in half or clone or something.

Ggggh ?! I kind of feel something interesting here, I jsut don''t understand our question. Could you expand a little bit more ? please ?

That'd not how the Materia system works, it goes like this.
Every new piece of Materia starts with one star, which is the lowest strength of magic for any materia {and for certain ones, the mighest as well.} As an example, here's how the development for a typical elemental magic materia goes:

*--- = Fire {new materia}
**-- = Fire 2
***- = Fire 3
**** = Fire 3 + new Fire Materia {at one star{*}}

For the Fire that you've been working on all this time, the last growth doesn't make it any stronger. Instead, this 'Mastering' creates a new lowest level piece.

So what's this new piece good for? You can:
-give it to another team member so there's another member who can cast that spell.
-give it to same member on the same weapon/armor. When you cast a spell that both materia have that level as, it doubles the strength for the same amount of MP.
-sell it. The stronger it and rarer it is, the more you'll fetch. Useful if you ever reach the limit of materia you can carry, 500 {I think, I'd have to play one of the in game tutorials to check.}

----Sonic Silicon----

Edited by - SonicSilcion on August 7, 2000 10:43:16 PM

Thanks Sonic. I was a little confused there. What I was wondering, ahw, is how I could have somthing besides books be used for magic in an RPG? Any ideas?

Skill based advancement? The more they use it, the better they get at it. They then reach a peak (for that level) when practice does no more good, then they seek out a master to train to the next level? It is all in the DOC

-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

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I''m afraid I still don''t quite grasp the question. Are you asking:

1) What can be used as a source of magic besides books?

2) How can magic be grown/reproduced and harvested?

3) How can characters learn spells besides reading books/scrolls?

4) What other ways are there of restoring a character''s magical powers beside using items?

If you would like the character to experiment every game, you could try to have a symbol based magic system. If the character casts Circle, Star, Square, he might cast Fireball. If you don''t want spoiler sites to show all of the magic combinations, randomize this for each character. For example, if you have the above combination cast fireball for one character, it might cast heal for another and do nothing for another.

I was thinking about implementing a system for the more arcane majiks (ie, not the usual quick-spells for klik''n''kast... which I am trying to renounce) where the player is required to actually draw a symbol (very simplified) on the screen. This would add to the cast time reality (c''mon, as if you can destroy the world in the time it takes the signal to travel from your mouse to your game!) and would add more reason for people to LEARN spells. No dirty-quick-klick''n''kast spells for those spells.

But that is a different story


-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

Check our site:
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Check out our NPC AI Mailing List :
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made due to popular demand here at GDNet :)

YES ! YES ! YES !
You are not alone on that track. But how the heck do you implement it correctly. I have been reading about Hidden Markov Model to interpret natural language, natural patterns, etc, but I am a bit wondering if that ain''t too much for a simple pattern recognition. Do you have any pointers on this subject ?

youpla :-P

If you are going to use the drawing symbols method, I think that it would be cool if the amount of damage was based on how accurately you could draw the symbols. I got the original symbol idea from the classic game Dungeon Master. Whenever you draw a symbol, your MP should go down. I wonder how scrolls and wands would work... Would they just cast a spell or have a perfect drawing of a symbol to use in a spell?

Here''s my idea of implementing the drawing magic system. The player gets like a 64 x 64 square for each symbol and uses something similar to Windows paint with only one color. Then the game checks to see how accurate the player was. This could be accomplished by just checking whether square 1,1 was the correct value of 1 or 0, etc. or it could be something more complicated.