[Starlight] ?>A DRAGON APPROACHES (Patreon)

OKAY hi it is definitely 6am right now and i should definitely be going to sleep but that's definitely not going to happen because i am H Y P E

the future is here

and this is what it looks like:

worried? you should be. but i'll explain. probably.

hokay so i mentioned this on stream the other day verrrRRRrrrRRRrryyy glancingly buuuuuut. bassicarry i chanced onto a plugin for RMMV, which is that thing i'm making starlight in, and it's a lot like that thing i'm making reborn in except instead of sucking it's awesome, caught up? good, anyway this plug in was integration support for a different program i'd never heard of before. that program is called dragonbones. 

hokay let's back up some more first, so we have this battle system right, i've been working on it, well i've moved on to working on the combat system, i was going to post that but forgot, great, next, i also have a combat UI mock up to post which i was going to do today but didn't because reasons great nextnext anyway as you would have seen if i had posted the UI i was gonna be usin' those lil spritey battlers kinda like the GBA Fire Emblems had to animate the battles like these types of dudes:

'cept bigger and with more colors because we're not barbarians in the year fucking 2002
but not too much bigger because spriting things takes a while and especially animating sprites takes a verrryyy long while and honestly i was a little bit nervous about that because i realized that doing it that way the thing that would pad out starlight's overall development time the most was sprite animations
so let's keep the sprites small and manageable to make even if it looks a little dinky and still takes forevery
cuz you know like what else are you gonna do right? 

okay you're caught up so ANYWAY,
i'll tell you what else you're gonna do

you're gonna fuck a dragon.

until it's dead.
and only the bones are left.
or something.
(i should go to sleep.)

so dragonbones is a 2d skeletal animation software and wow it's cool, i opened it up the night i found the plug-in to fiddle around with it a little bit and see how hellishly obtrusive it was to work with but it's actually????? really intuitive???????? like wowiezowie and i'm sure i've really only skimmed the surface but my feeling is that it will be significantly less time consuming than animating each sprite frame by frame would be
but dont take our word for it, just ask our satisfied customers
of which there are none and i don't know why i said that
anyway, so dragonbones is neat cuz it makes itself very easy to fux with by providing libraries for various integration into game engines (!!!!!!)
and of course, one of those is... not RPG Maker.
it never is, really.
BUT THAT'S WHERE THE PLUG IN COMES IN
so these dudes who are like super cool and make badass plugins made it compatible with RPG Maker and i happened onto that plug in and was like woah and the plug in was like woah and the dragon was like woah and then we all made out
good story
(lay me to rest.)
okay but that plug-in was for RPG Maker's default battle system, which we are definitely not using because it's almost as garbage as the american 'president', a budew, and the feeling you have when that fucking james blunt gets stuck on loop in your goddamn head again all combined
so the real question is if i could make the plugin that makes dragonbones compatible with RPG maker compatible with my system
which is a little bit nervewracking because wow that's a lot of code to sift through to figure out how to do the thing especially when we're going to throw out like 80% of it and start over for the other battle system
so actually i didnt really even expect to be able to get it to work immediately

but then there's this.

yes. helo.
they are Watch you
they ccanSee you when your sleep ing

this is a performance test included natively with the plugin that i hijacked just to see if i could get it to work.
it worked.
that is 100 dragonbois staring at you from the void
surprisingly, even 100 at once animate very smoothly. on my computer at least. i really only need 2 at once though.
it looks very silly like that, but i'm not going to show you what the graphic looks like normally. it's just some preset that comes with dragonbones but it looks incredibly ugly, like the lovechild of barney and puff the magic dragon grew up to be a cocaine addict. we won't talk about it.

but simplifying that performance test a bit immediately gave me what i was looking for. so...

wow the gif murdered those gradients
well whatever we're not here for those
check that shit out though
look how fluid that is
that gets me hot tbh
(whether or not that's just because it's a fire demon is up to you)
by the way that is absolutely just another preset dragonbones graphic so that's not like an actual thing we'll be using
and idek what the green thing is, but i can probably kill it.
but it wooooooooooooooooooooorks
so we get to use this instead of sprites and it's easier to make and looks better and scales and animates and we can do cool things with it and look how smooth it is and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa