Odometer Gauge - Version 1.4.0 - Bug Fixes & Enemy Gauges!

Hey all, hope you have been doing well. It has been some time since our last update but the good news is that Version 1.4.0 is the biggest update yet to the Odometer Gauge plugin. Let's get into the new fixes and features and see if it was all worth the wait :)

New in Version 1.4.0

Bug Fixes

• Mortal Damage Crash Bug

As many of you have run into, there is a crash bug when your party members die but they were in the middle of executing an action. For example, if they die while trying to select an enemy for an Attack the game still tries to make the dead Actor perform that action but finds that the value in BattleManager._actor is undefined. The solution in place now will shift to the next Actor in order if the current Actor falls in the middle of choosing their action. It also closes any input windows that are open and transfers that state over to the next Actor. If everyone in the party falls, then the Battle Manager goes on to processing Defeat.

Even though this bug has been resolved, my gut feeling is that this is part of a larger issue so let's keep an eye out for more bugs like it. My guess is that we will need to a systems level change of BattleManager to prevent these issues from happening altogether.

• Healing Damage Formula Bug

This was a bug that was happening where when a healing Skill or Item with a Damage Formula was used upon an Actor in the Menu it healed 1 HP and then stopped completely. In Battles, it would heal the full amount but there would be this strange stutter motion the Odometer would go through as it rolled up. It turns out that the way rolling HP was working was not properly accounting for HP Recover and HP Drain cases. As a result some changes have been made so that healing works the same way across the board and the Odometer rolls up in a less stutter-y manner. The fix is pretty simple, however, so if you want to do more fancy HP operations such as healing from negative Damage (i.e Zombie status) then I think you'll need to wait for a future update where we can write the code to support that.

Again, let's keep an eye on this. My feeling is that this will crop up again when we do rolling MP and rolling TP in the future.

Compatibility

• YEP Battle Status Window

While the plugin has always been compatible with YEP Core Engine and YEP Battle Engine, we have had requests to extend this to YEP Battle Status Window. You can see the result above where we vertically stack the gauges in a similar manner as the MZ layout. While currently it is overlapping with the mugshot, it is possible to move around the X and Y offset and also with Battle Status Window you can resize the window for a better fit using its own parameters. If you want to change the layout of the Gauges in this specific case, I would recommend editing the layoutOdoNumber function in the plugin as there is a section that accounts for if your have Imported Battle Status Window.

• SRD Battle Status Customizer
  

Another major UI plugin that has been brought up has been SRD Battle Status Customizer. Odometer Gauge plugin has always had compatibility with SRD Super Tools Engine and SRD HUD Maker, however, there was a major conflict with Battle Status Customizer. And we found out why. It turns out SRD Battle Status Customizer just blanks out the functions used to make the Battle Status Window and instead replaces it with a whole new Window called Battle Status Upgraded. Though it was a frustrating process, we did manage to get it so that the Odometer Gauges show up for each Actor.  Keep in mind the Gauge plugin parameters in the Battle Status Customizer plugin have been overridden to achieve this so any shifting of the Odometer Gauge will need to be done using the X and Y Offset instead.

Note: Place Odometer Gauge plugin below all of these plugins in the Plugin Manager.

New Features

• Enemy Rolling HP & Enemy Visual Gauges

• TP Gauge Display in Menus (for MV)

While this has been available for MZ, for MV it was difficult to fit the TP Gauge into the Menu UI with the previous way we were doing gauge anchors. Now that has been changed so you can now draw TP Gauges in Menus and Battle by checking off a plugin parameter. If the corresponding settings in the Database or plugins like YEP Core say otherwise, they will override the plugin parameter in Odometer Gauge.

What's Next

Here are some features that we might tackle next going forward into future Odometer Updates:

• Skill Notetags to set Target Roll Rate on a per Skill basis
• Progressive Damage or Healing speeding up Roll Rate
• States Notetags to have States which impact Roll Rate (i.e. Freezing it or making Damage Instant)
• Actor/Class Notetags that specify whether they use Odometers and what Odometers they have
• Animating Odometer Rolling while in Menus
• More UI Configuration options

There have been many requests for us to extend the Odometer plugin to a full Mother 3-style UI overhaul. While we don't want to rule this out completely, we do want to state that it is currently out of the scope of what the Odometer plugin is supposed to do which is to simulate how rolling HP works in the RPG Maker battle system. There are many great plugins out there that can help you modify the Battle UI to get closer to the style you would want. What we can certainly do is extend compatibility to those plugins so that you can build this on your own, so let us know if there is a UI plugin that would help you achieve your game's final look and we can make a patch to extend compatibility to it.

Final Thoughts

Thank you as always for your patience and generous support of this plugin. In particular, I would like to thank our Patrons who have been supporting MythAtelier as we continue to do work in the RPG Maker plugin space

Stefan Sigl

iF4DED

Lee Occleshaw

Reiko Lupus

Austin Moehnke

Ecilla

Kakeru

Cymaiden

Anonymous Lynn Profile Picture

Winston Lewis III

kkk

Marcus Hjerpe Östlind

John Smith

DDreams Games

Vibrant Fervor

Also this will be the last update on this plugin from me (Neel). I am no longer working at MythAtelier in the capacity of a plugin developer so future updates on Odometer plugin will be handled by our lead developer Isiah (whose work you can see on all of the other plugins on the Store including Card Game Combat). I'm pretty proud of the work I have done so far on the plugin, it's come a long way since we released it back in October 2022, but I will also concede that we are rapidly entering coding territory that is beyond my self-taught capabilities. Isiah is a far better programmer than me so future updates will clean up a lot of the smaller issues with the plugin right now which could make it hard to work with for folks like yourself. Please give him a warm welcome and be sure to communicate any issue  you run into with the plugin to him in the comments or over on the MythAtelier Discord(where the plugin has its own channel).

Cheers,

Neel