New Abilites Suggestions

[Fran]

Ah, I forgot that you could use it to unlock items and put them into the locker, good point.
But then I'd rather disable that for the class too instead of locking the class to selfmade dungeons.

[The Avatar]

I suppose, and no boss trophies too.

[gjaustin]

[The Avatar]

Actually, I am out of cash, and I've won the dungeon. 9999 isn't that much.

[Darvin]

[The Avatar]

[Darvin]

Ideally, everything will be defined in external text files and loaded at launch time. For instance, using XML a fighter might look like this:

<Class>
<name>Fighter</name>
<flavortext> [insert class description here ] </flavortext>
<Ability>
<action>DeathProtection</action>
<activates>GameStart</activates>
</Ability>
<Ability>
<action>RevealMonsters</action>
<activates>Always</activates>
<condition>TargetIsEqualOrLowerLevel</condition>
</Ability>
<Ability>
<action>GainXP</action>
<argument>1</argument>
<activates>OnExpKill</activates>
</ability>
</class>

So, under this hypothetical model, you could change the fighter's death protection to also apply on level-up just by adding the line "<activates>OnLevelUp</activates>"

If the devs are doing their job right and not taking shortcuts, there should be some sort of system like this on the back-end that will mean that modders shouldn't need to touch the code unless they're doing something really complicated.

[Fran]

But in this case, it would be fairly easy for the developers to implement a custom class in the game as well.
All they'd have to do is create a menu where you compose abilities from a drop-down-menü, give in some text for class name and class description and be done with it. The game would just change the custom XML file and you'd have your custom class.
This may be unnecessary in the way that you could easily do it yourself just as you described (and i guess tempering with the xml files would have a lot more options), but it would feel official, it would attract customers as customization is a big selling point and i bet most people wouldn't mod it via xml files just because they're scared that they might break something.

[The Avatar]

Being the non-programmer I am, how do you access the XML files?

[Fran]

I'm not sure but i guess you could simply open it up with your standard editor and rewrite the passages that you want to change.
Even if this is not the case, you'd only need to download a special editor for xml files and open them that way, the interface would be similar to that of the standard editor.

As long as the format would be similar to the way Darvin described them, all you had to do was to change a set of expressions which you could look up at the wiki. As long as you have the heart to do it, this should be no problem for you as it's really easy, even for someone that never programmed