Ageman20XX | Mega Man RPG World Leaderboard

A few more random previews to show you guys. What I'm working on right now might seem uninteresting or simple or "easy" to program, but what I'm really doing is building a solid foundation for all these new features I've been talking about. Doing it this way ensures better testing and planning, and honestly it's how I've been programming this game from the very start. Anyway, on to the screenshots!

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The first thing you'll notice is that the height of banner area in the prototype has been reduced by about... 70 pixels? This leaves a lot more room for buttons and text and other content, which was necessary to fit some of the new features into the available screen-space. I know that you can technically scroll areas that are too big for the window, but I like to avoid scrolling as much as possible (it feels clunky in most game-contexts) and code for the lowest-possible screen resolution. It's just more accessible that way, in my opinion. Note that navigating to/from the "home" menu causes the banner to expand/shrink to its previous dimensions - they worked quite well for that tab. Anyway...



The in-game leaderboard has been fleshed out a little bit more and now shows the appropriate colours and avatars. Other changes may or may not be coming to this section depending on if I have time.

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The robot database now shows the robot's home-field. This is mostly just an aesthetic update to the page, but maybe cross-referencing will come in handy at some point.


The robot editor's functionality remains largely unchanged except for two small details - the robot selection area has been expanded and shows larger mugshots (so it's easier to review your teams) and now has a more fleshed-out sort option, allowing you to sort by either number or level, ascending or descending.


And finally, the player editor has been expanded a bit to include Player Items. As you may or may not have noticed, all players pull from the same "pool" or "inventory" of items. If a target robot drops an Extra Life in Dr. Light's game, both Wily and Cossack also have access to that same item and its quantity. This feature will remain unchanged, but the exact items that each player has access to in battle can now be customized. This would have been pointless before as there were exactly 8 items to collect in the game, but now that there's more... :)

Oh, and the "one item before you attack" limit has also been extended to switching. Now you can only switch and/or use an item once before your attack and no more. This should make the larger items a lot more useful and smaller ones... less so. With this in mind, I don't think over-grinding on the first stage will be too much of a problem as the only "useful" item you could get that late in the game are small screws and I think that's a perfectly acceptable strategy.

So... that's all for now. I think. ;)

Lots of changes are coming in this update regarding items and how they are collected. Details are still being finalized, but this is what we have coming up in the new update:

- A player may now use ONE item per turn before they attack (instead of an infinite amount)
- All robot mechas have a 25% change of dropping an item
- All robot masters have a 50% chance of dropping an item
- Disabling any robot with a OHKO will double the chance of it dropping an item
- All robot mechas drop small screws, energy pellets, or weapon pellets
- All robot masters drop large screws, energy capsules, or weapon capsules
- Robots found in fortress and event stages may drop other items like Energy Tanks, Weapon Tanks, and Extra Lives
- Robot masters disabled using super effective attacks have a 66% chance of dropping an Elemental Core

More details incoming later...

@MegaBossMan : To be honest, this is on purpose. You see, it would be too server intensive to actually watch everyone to see if they're still active or not so I (kind of) cheat and guess if people are still online by their "last accessed" variable. This date variable is updated every time you view a website page or return to the prototype's main menu. If you're in battle for a long time though, it would look like you left the MMRPG for 10 mins but you actually have been there the whole time. If your session cookie lasted long enough you might even go 30 mins without "checking in" to the server. It is because of this that I have the online indicator set to display people who checked in within the last 30 minutes. I could easily have it set lower, but then online player encounters would happen less often and it would not be as fun. Once we have more members and more people online at once, I'll update the variable and decrease the value accordingly. Sorry it's not "real" online! :P

The community forum itself has been updated with a few new features as well. Threads and posts will now show the users's battle points as well as the thread and post count underneath (shown as TP and PP respectively). Right now TP and PP are just a representation of how active you are in the community, but maybe one day they'll unlock something of have some other benefit. Not sure... Anyway, the @Reply buttons actually do something now, automatically scrolling to the text area and putting preformatted reply text for you. So if I clicked on my name it would add @ [ Ageman20XX ] { flame } : to the form for you (but without the spaces of course). It's pretty awesome, actually. Also, special users will now have icons by their avatar. Developers (me) will have a Yashichi, and all Contributors (MMX100, MetalMan, Brorman, etc.) will have an Energy Capsule. This will let new users know who they can trust and ask questions in the future.

I haven't finished programming it yet, but I'm also planning on making all contributor accounts also able to act as moderators on the community. This will allow you guys to create stickies, delete comments, lock threads, and all the other fun stuff that I currently have to do on my own. >_> This should make the entire moderation process of the game and website easier as I'm clearly not able to be around all the time and you all have proven yourself to be great players and incredibly helpful, reasonable people. :)

The leaderboard is also getting a slight makeover, and I do mean slight. The data has been rearranged and now each tab loads on a separate page to prevent memory overloads. But you'll also notice extra stats on the main page and a new "likes" feature I'm in the process of programming. The Star Force tab has also been updated so that the stars don't get crammed together and instead separate into pages. They'll also be sorted by the current "top elements" according to your star force chart on the left, so it looks pretty cool going from page to page and seeing all the colours. :P

@MegaBossMan : Thank you for trying to post it. I fixed up your formatting the first post and uploaded the rest of the preview screenshots to the website's preview folder. :P

Now, I'm going to copy/paste some of the stuff I told MegaBossMan about in our email conversation. First off the credits section will now be synced with profile backgrounds and you'll be able to edit your own link and bio!

@TheDoc : At the moment, field multipliers in player battles are completely randomized. This will likely change in the future as there are far more interesting ways it could be decided - I just didn't have time to fully flesh it out during the last updates. Expect something more interesting and maybe even something you can control in some way... ;)

Hello everyone, I'm sorry for being so silent the last few weeks. For those who don't know, this is actually Adrian but I use this alt-account for testing and debugging purposes sometimes. Initially the silence was due to me working on a (fairly large) update to the code, but then I got really sick and that lasted forever so I took some forced time off from the game. Apologies for the inconvenience. >_>

Anyway, I'm really happy you guys tracked this down. One of the reasons I imagine I never encountered it is because I do not have anywhere close to 99 of any item in my primary save file. It's still possible that there are other things that cause the endless loading glitch, but if you're are reporting normal gameplay otherwise I have hope. ^_^

There are a lot of fixes coming in the next update that is unfortunately not done yet, but this particular issue has plagued the prototype for so long I thought it deserved special attention and a faster response. I found the line that was causing the problem (leftover code from an earlier version) and after rewriting it I believe I've fixed the bug. The changes have already been uploaded and if this was truly the cause of the infamous glitch then you should have relatively smooth sailing from here on out. :)

Let me know if I'm wrong or you have any other leads, and I'll try to catch up on all the threads I missed in the near future. Thank you for your patience everyone!

Hmmm. There must be some specific combination of factors happening the cause the glitch, or maybe there's some outside influence that no one is thinking of yet. And there's also the possibility that it's related to another bug! So hard to track down. >_> At the very least, I don't think it's the Wily Buster specifically as it's worked fine for me plenty of times, but you may be on to something either way.

About Disco, it think it's based on your "Failed Missions" count rather than your "Total Defeats" count. If you fail 100 times on one stage, the "Total Defeats" count would keep going up but your "Failed Missions" count would still be only 1 because it represents how many different missions you've failed rather than failing over and over on the same one. Rhythm is likely unlocked in the same way - fail X number of different missions to unlock her -

Looking at your leaderboard page I can see that you finally did unlock Disco and your "Failed Missions" count for Wily is exactly two, so I believe my theory might be right. Let us know when you unlock Rhythm so we can take a look at Cossack's records.

Yeah, not really a glitch - just how things worked out for some people. When the game was still in the (very) early stages of development, gaining levels and experience was significantly easier than it is now. It might seem unfair for some people to have higher battle points and levels than everyone else if they technically had an easier time doing it, but I like to think of it as more of a perk/benefit for being an early adopter. It's still technically possible for even the newest member to get a full team of 9999 robots, it'll just take them a little more effort. :P