Moonpearl’s Animated Custom Menu System

One day a guy came to me asking for a full custom menu system on a now defunct community. Since I still had to make a name for myself I agreed and worked hard tu fulfil his request. He never gave any news.

But I liked what I had made and, since I could only find CMS that were either ugly or difficult to customize or clumsily animated – sometimes all of that – I decided to push my work further. I learned about Lagrange polynomial interpolation and Ruby metaprogramming, and well, here is the result.

Fully animated

• Compose your own background with any number of layers, each of which can exhibit one or several special effects
• Show Animations (as defined in the project’s database) upons various events (selecting item, making decision, cancelling…)
• Windows and buttons are moved in/out when switching scenes, and scenes overlap (elements from the next scene are brought in while elements from the previous scene are being swept away)

Special menus

• Title screen
• Party selection menu
• Biography menu
• Modified save/load menu

Highly & easily customizable

• Change pictures at will
• Each window type can have its own particular windowskin
• Customize party max size, main menu options, transition speed between scenes, and much more
• Minimal to no script edits required – only adjust a few constants, everything else is managed automatically
• 4 themes to choose from already available

Easily expandable

• ACMS only feature code that modifies scenes’ appearance, they still work using the base code
• Thus, external custom scenes should be fairly compatible with ACMS – if you’re in luck, they’ll fit perfectly as is, if not, just minimal tweaking should do the trick
• Scripters will find ACMS’s architecture extremely powerful and reliable to write their own scenes

This work requires the scripts flagged as MP Scene_Base and MP Common bundled along with it in the demo. You should get them as well to have it work properly.

Note: all scenes are independant. If you don’t want a specific scene to be ACMS-style, simply delete the appropriate entry (for example Scene_Title to keep your own custom title scene).

I put a great deal of efforts into the making of this script. Please comment if you like what you see!

Also please visit my blog to find future updates for this work, and other works of mine.

Theoretically compatible with any custom menu scripts that do not modify the menus’ behavior too much, although no guarantee is given since it mainly depends on the other scripter’s approach. If this script clashes with someone else’s then you can safely tell them their work sucks.

Script & graphics by Moonpearl

Free to use, distribute and modify for non-commercial use, as long as the original author is credited.