Ragnar's Brain Crunches
I am currently in a RACE AGAINST TIME to code the impossible in Ika. (Ika being a hardcore RPG making engine you can find here. http://ika.sourceforge.net/ )
What I'm trying to do, in a nutshell, is implement HEIGHT SIMULATION into my game, to start. Kind of like Super Mario RPG where you could jump on stuff, but not everything will be square-shaped. I might implement this for some kind of puzzle (I also want to implement a push-pull system and a system for lifting stuff), but I'd like it just for the sake of USELESS INTERACTIVITY.
Ika is mad cool because even though it is for fairly experienced programmers, there is always a way to do what I want that doesn't involve lots of pictures and other insane measures, unlike the ASCII RPG making engines. It involves a lot of thought and planning, but it's probably less of a mental strain than "emulating" a feature in RM2k. And some features are just impossible in Rm2k.
Ika is like the Turing Machine they teach you about in Computer Science - it can do anything a computer can feasibly do, it just might require a lot of thought. I'm not just talking about limits on map size, or color depth or anything like that - since Python has a time module for getting time from the system clock, you can use it in Ika just like that. There would literally be NO way to get the current time and use it in an RPG Maker game. You'd have to like, ask the player for the current time when they started or loaded a game, and then increment it every second. However, this value would become absolutely wrong if the window were to ever go out of focus, or if the game slowed down, or if you entered the default menu, or a battle, or had a message box, probably. This time module thingy will always have the correct time. All the time. Always. And there are many uses for it besides letting the player know the last time they saved... I used it to make a completely accurate FPS limiter, for people whose computers play games too fast.
Yeah, so Ika is really really good if you're willing to make a game, as in the entire thing. Not just the story or the art - you have to be willing to make all the systems from scratch too (or borrow someone else's code, but that's a matter of learning how their own stuff works.) Fortunately, I've got the nerve to make all that too.
And here's that sprite I was talking about.
I'm really proud of how it turns so seamlessly. I should add some shading, but I'm too lazy for now.