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iv been lurking here for a while and here soon im gonna be getting DarkBASIC pro, something me and a friend have been wanting to do (for years now) is turn our countless notes, drawings, ideas and etc around a fictional world into a Tactical RPG similar to the Disgaea series and of course Final Fantasy Tactics among others.

I have looked through some tutorials and other threads and they gave me some great advice and help although one thing yet avails me
The battle system....
I may have skimmed over it but to my knowledge I didn't see anything relating to the soubject

So my question's are

Can any map I make be turned into a grid based map for battles?

How would I go about making the characters that are selected move along a set course square by square?

and if its different for these kind of maps, how would I implement a height factor so certain points on the map are out of reach, unless climbing to a lower altitude that when added to something like a climb or jump stat would allow you to move to the higher altitude?
(sorry if the last question was confusing)

sorry if this was already answered, im just a tad frustrated T_T
well ill continue looking while awaiting your help! Thanks a bunch in advance!
(Keep in mind im a bit new to coding, but more then willing to learn so any reference that would be helpful to this is welcomed!)

yep, absolutely


do a quick search for astar pathfinding, there are a couple of good libraries (ianm's and darktib's spring to mind)


you are right, it was a little confusing. With a bit of playing around you can turn off the pathfinding routines and jump directly from one place to another, bypassing any of the obstacles in between

This type of game is a bit complicated. I am currently making one myself, it's currently open sourced and downloadable in the Work in Progress or click on my sig.

From my experience a few things you really need to learn or know:
- Very VERY good understanding of arrays.
- Astar Pathfinding, You can modify it from 8 ways to 4 ways. This is how you generate the path that the character will move along.

If you're using 2D:
- Quicksort or Radix Sort, I use these for priority of drawing sprites. The built-in priority of sprites are confusing.

- Experience!!!, if this is your first project it'll never happen. Create many smaller and simple projects first to learn the basics. What I mean is how to structure your codes, the use of subroutines and functions, and how just to make something WORK. There are no right or wrong way to make something work, there are just more efficient ways or lesser ones.

Thank you I will keep this in mind! in fact ill do a bit of research on it right now!


I will defiantly once I have some time, balancing between work and free time and such.



I was really stressing about our sprites so thank you

and thank you for this bit of info! like you said if its my first it probably wont happen, but I find that learning something new is fun so im looking at this project with some enthusiasm. In fact I was looking forward to making some small projects to spread my wings a bit of sorts

Natural sprite priority is by the image number used in the sprite. In the following code it creates 17 random sprite numbers using image numbers 1 to 17. It shows all the sprites partially over each other in a line. The mouse is sprite number 1000 using image number 17 at the start. At image number 17 it is above all the other sprites. Press the mouse button to randomly pick another image number. If the image number picked is 10 it'll be above sprites with image numbers 1 to 10 but under sprites with image numbers 11 to 17.

it doesn't matter if 'it' doesn't happen (and if it did I would start searching the skies for aerial pigs!) just as long as you have fun! (and learning something is an optional bonus )