Odometer Gauge ~ Version 1.1.0 - Hello MZ!

Hello everyone, we have a major update for Odometer Gauge plugin to share with you today. Version 1.1.0 is now LIVE!

New in Version 1.1.0

Bug fixes

• Fixed Save Screen crash issue and extended compatibility to YEP_SaveCore (thanks to user thebest714 for reporting this)

• Fixed Menu Skills bug where if an Actor used a Skill in the Menu, it was applying it as Rolling HP (it applies it instantly now)

New Features

• You can use the Odometer Gauge plugin in RPG Maker MZ!

Probably one of our most requested features. This was more than just a compatibility fix, it basically required rewriting a lot of the functions which took some time. The bonus was that because of how MZ handles its UI, we get a preview of what Odometer looks like inside Menus. Here are a few screenshots of how they appear:

Currently, Odometers in Menu do not roll and are rather set to target value. We could add rolling HP in Menus in a later update, but perhaps adding more options for UI customization takes priority for the future. Speaking of which ...

What's Next

There are a number of features that I would like to implement so Odometer Gauge plugin can be

• Being able to specify a Guts Formula to determine Roll Speed

Right now Roll Speed has a default setting. This is a feature we see in Earthbound where characters will higher Guts (e.g. Ness) can take a huge chunk of damage but have a slow roll speed allowing more time to recover while characters with lower Guts (e.g. Paula) will have their HP roll a lot faster when damaged. There are other details like how Defending can slow down the roll until the start of your next turn and how Guts would give you a %chance to drop your HP to 1 rather than 0. These are lower priority to implement but could still be neat to see in action.

• Special Skill Notetags: Slow, Fast, NoRoll
  

While we can use Roll Speed and the Guts Formulas to determine what is default behaviour for Roll Speed, to have more interesting gameplay around them different Skills need to interact with Odometer in different ways. We see some of this with the enemy skills in Mother 3 where some will deal heavy damage at a slow rate (e.g. like the Trees or Terriotrial Oak enemies) so you have a countdown or light damage at a fast rate so you don't have enough time to recover from it. Other times we may want damage to be instantly applied rather than always rolling (for example, a Skill that sets HP to a value rather than heals or damages). These can be achieved with custom Skill Notetags.

• Enemy Visual Odometer Gauges

We want to give an option that lets you display Enemy Odometers as well. Rolling HP does work for enemies now, however, if there is no visual way to see where the Enemy's Health is then when they die becomes all the more confusing. By adding a UI component that shows the Enemy's current HP and how it is rising or falling can help alleviate this issue. This would be a break from the Mother series use of Odometers but may be a welcome one if you want to make some more enemy archetypes (e.g. low Health, high Guts or high Health, low Guts).

• Being able to work with any dimension of Reel Image

This one is tricky but we feel is necessary for the plugin to be complete. We are using a set dimension for Reel Image now but for other game projects that may not always work with their UI, so we want to make it flexible so that the user can determine the Image and then we dynamically change the UI for a best fit. Along with this, we could add plugin parameters so you can change the relative coordinates of where an Odometer is placed within a window.

• ... and many other bug fixes ...

Thank you all for your support of the plugin so far! We hope to develop this further and give you all more options to make some unique games with it. If you run into any bugs or issues, please let us know in the Comments and we can work towards resolving them :)

Thanks,

MythAtelier Team