So, you’ve got your damage hitboxes for flinging people about, you’ve got your chain hitboxes for racking up hits, you’ve got your funnel hitboxes for drawing people in for a big hit, but what if you want to do something really, really cool?

Well, the new Event system has you covered! A new addition to hitboxes will allow a lot more customization without needing to resort to using code. In overview, you can now execute a list of subactions on yourself or your opponent when a hitbox makes contact. This means you could switch out your action, teleport an opponent, or, if you’re okay with an incompatibility error here and there, change the opponent’s action or sprites for them!
How it works is similar to how conditional actions work. You define an Event in an action, and give it a name. When creating a hitbox, you’ve got two new fields you can add, onHitOwner and onHitOther. Pass them the name of the Event you have defined and it will execute those subactions on the owner of the hitbox, or the foe who gets hit. Inside of the event, you can add any subactions you could do on a Fighter and they’ll be executed as if that fighter’s action had called them.

A warning when using these, though. If you’re executing actions on your opponent, be aware that they might not be built the same way as yours. Telling a fighter to switch to a prone action will work fine if the fighter is built using the BaseActions, but what if this character doesn’t have a prone action? For the most part, if a subaction is impossible, it is quietly ignored, but sometimes it can lead to crashes and other errors. Best to stick with the basic subactions like movement and sprite shifting unless you really need it. Despite the risks, this is a powerful tool for fighter packs, where different fighters are meant to play with each other, allowing for things like custom status effects and other unique abilities that couldn’t be done otherwise.

Announcements

This week, there’s a few announcements to make beyond the usual stream reminder. For one, we’re trying out a new time slot for the stream! Tomorrow’s stream will start at 2PM MST (1PM PST). Two hours before the previous streams have started. This means that the streams will end when they previously used to begin. This schedule should make things easier for everyone on my end to get ready, and we might be using this new schedule for every week moving forward. In case you’ve missed it, you can find the stream at https://www.twitch.tv/digiholic or catch the archive at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC416SW5rkbsc6zuJclwMNvQ (by the way, still hoping to hit that 100 subscriber mark where we can get a real URL and not that auto-generated one, so please help out by subscribing!)

Additionally, there will probably be no update next week. A friend is moving in before the start of next month so a lot of my free time is going to involve moving furniture and I don’t expect there to be a major new feature to show off next week. I’m still going to try to get some coding done, so if there’s a breakthrough, I might wind up making a blog post anyway (I just can’t leave you guys!) but I don’t expect much. There will likely also be no stream next week, but if I don’t get through what I have scheduled this week, it might be just a continuation. Hopefully Zero will be finished soon and we can start working on some stages.
And that about wraps it up for this week, Tusslers! I’ll see you all in two weeks time with another update!