Heretic86

You'll have to be much more specific than that. I dont know what youre trying to do, what the circumstances are when youre trying to do what. @Paper, I'll take a look and see if I can work a way around this Empty Party bug.

Try it now. Had to resave it in notepad to pull out funky formatting. I didnt update the notes or version number on there, but it is slightly newer code that should fix all the issues you had with saving.

After Nicole mentioned it and I started digging a little deeper, I tried doing a couple of things with saves. One of the things that the script isnt supposed to do is limit anyone. So I had to rethink how to allow the "save anywhere" feature of the engine. One of the other bugs I came across was hitting F12 then reloading caused the caterpillar to stop following the player. Still working on that. But she was right. Exiting, then reloading from a non event called save would mess things up. A bunch of things were uninitialized so it was causing crashes. I'll continue working and see if I can figure out whats wrong with the cat not following the player on an F12 reset / reload.

Thank you for posting this bug. It was MAJOR. It appeared to affect ALL save games. Im working hard on 1.97 which is taking a while, but will include even more new features, such as Ladder stuff (mostly evented) and a bunch of transparency bug fixes. None of the way that people such as yourself has changed, although I did do some minor core rewriting. This should be compatible with what you presently have. The notes arent updated, but try out this version and let me know if this helps. Revised - Demo updated to include Bugfix

I'll take a look.

There was one issue with the SDK but I revised that already and elmininated its dependancy in an earlier version. As well as I can tell. I didnt touch anything in MMW but I do believe there is a NON SDK version of it out there, but I havent checked it for compatability with this revised Cat Script. Thinking more on your issue. Are any of the characters off screen when $walk_off_map = false is called? The way that $walk_off_map works is in a method called "passable?". And the first thing it checks is to see if the coordinates that the event or player are trying to move to are in the size of the map, and if they arent, it kicks back false. Thats even before Through is checked. So $walk_off_map runs even before any of those other checks, which allows events to move outside of the map area. So if you have an event that is trying to move from off the map to on the map, the "passable?" method will kick back that it isnt a valid move and that event or Cat Actor will get stuck. I could try to rewrite something to allow all the Cat Actors to go off the map at any time, which shouldnt affect the player from being restricted to map space. Would that be a viable solution to your dilema? edit: I'll add this in for the "smart" people, and those that dont know how to script. Non scripters can also fix fairly minor things in scripts, even if they have never edited a script before in their lives. In the scripts window, try hitting CTRL+F to search for a line. F3 will search for the next instance of the last thing you searched for. What you can do to test to see if the script is somehow resetting $walk_off_map is to do a "Print". Explaining "Print" a bit. Print will Print out a Message in a Pop Up Box in your game. for example print "hello world" Notice that Hello World is quoted. Any "strings" should be quoted. If you want to display a variable, then dont use quotes. $walk_off_map is a Variable. So if you wanted the value of that to be displayed somewhere in a script, type in print $walk_off_map and it will show you the current value held in that variable. Anywho, if you search for $walk_off_map = false, you'll find two instances of it. Try using that new nifty Print ability to display a message to you each and every time that $walk_off_map gets changed. Where you see $walk_off_map ==, that is something in the code to check whether or not the value of the variable is equal to. The single equals sign is the one that sets the value of the variable. In short == checks and compares, = assigns a value. It is like saying "is Var_A equal to 2" when using ==. And a single = sign is "Set Var_A to be 2". if (Var_A == 2) do something. And Var_a = 2 sets its value. So with $walk_off_map, the one you're looking for is "$walk_off_map = false" This wont fix anything, but will help you to observe what is going on. Once you find $walk_off_map = false, try replacing it with this code. # This is a Comment and doesnt matter whats here print "Changing the Value of Walk Off Map to False Here" $walk_off_map = false Once you're done observing, you can pull out the "print" line. Personal Note: You can shorten your code to use "p" instead of "print", but I like typing out the full word "print" because it is easy to search for, and searching for just "p", not "p " (with a space) will show you every time the letter P is in your script. Thats just me though. This message was sponsored in part by the Letter P. We now return you to Sesame Street. So, my question for you now is: Does that $walk_off_map value reset when you change maps?

@Nicole - What are you trying to do when that error pops up? @Paper - I think that may just be some overly complex eventing that I did. You could try to make sure $walk_off_map = true until after Wait for Move's Completion is run, or reset to true it as soon as you transfer and see if that helps...

I know about that bug and havent come up with an Elegant Solution to work around it yet. For the time being, the only way I've found to work around this is to either clear_moves and "fake the caterpillar" with ordinary move routes, or to Pause and Unpause the Cat from the same player's position. Not very elegant, but Im also not finished with trying to take care of all of the nuances of this thing. Big script = Lots of work. :(

Quite welcome, and Im following your advice and putting together a 'Quick Start' guide. Hopefully if anyone else has the same questions, our discussions will help them out too!

Oh, a lot of that stuff is explained in Zeriab's Demo. It has a lot of useful data in regards to the Chat Bubbles. Let me find a link to download, I'll edit once I got a link. Edit: Got it. http://www.sendspace.com/file/s5hkl7 The file contains Zeriab's original Caterpillar that this caterpillar is based on. Not too much of the original core code remains, but this should help with any questions you have about the Multiple Message Windows script.

Script: "clear_moves" That will empty the entire move list.

Cat_Actor[1] is used if Actor #1 is not in Position #1. So if Aluxes is in Position #3 and Gloria is leading the party, the Player technically becomes Gloria. For your scene there, what I'd suggest is to make the Player INVISIBLE, then use any other ordinary event in place of Player, just for the Cutscene, then get rid of the fake Player Event and make the Player Uninvisible.

That option is kind of tricky to work with. But I agree, I like having actors walk and talk at the same time. I think what may be setting it off is ANY event that has a "Wait X" property. That was the example with the Fading Grass when you read the sign. So if your Random Moving Event had any sort of a Long Wait, the Engine would see that Event was Waiting, and wait till that event was done waiting before continuing on with the Cutscene.

There is a feature to handle those pesky other moving events. Change its name to include "\move_route_wait_exclude" and "wait for Move's Completion" wont consider that event any more. Very useful during cutscenes. But since you probably had "repeat" enabled, that was automagically excluded from the "Wait for Move's Completion". There are some script commands to temporarily enable or disable that @exclude property as well. In "Set Move Route" you can use "move_route_wait_exclude" and "move_route_wait_include" to change that property on the fly instead of being permanent. In the demo, that first map has a ton of cutscenes with tons of stuff all going on at the same time. The reason I did that was to both test and show off what the @exclude property (actually called @move_route_wait_excluded) allows you to do with complex cutscenes. Sounds to me like the move route may not be able to complete, IE, something blocking its path? Oh, are any of those events trying to walk over another Event? Like the one that triggers that cutscene? Events get stuck when trying to walk over each other, even if they have no graphics. Player can move over other events, but events cant cross other events, even if they have no graphics! Could that be it? Edit: Events moving over other Events: In the demo, notice the wise ass Frog. It is boxed in by Events and moves at Random. But it stays on the grass because it is boxed in. When the Caterpillar Pause switch is on, the Cat Actors behave as any normal event, with no special passability properties. Normally, if you try to give an Event a move route that goes over another Event, unless one of those has "through" turned on, they wont be able to move over that other event. Those invisible touch events should probably have "through" turned on if any event, not just Cat Actors, need to occupy that tile. Its one of those lesser known quirks that can mess with you, but it was definitely built in as a Feature, not a Bug. Finding some of these caveats can sometimes be a challenge. Edit #2: Just saw your edit. Glad it works, but I think we could figure out a better solution. Revised above post to provide more specifics about the quirks of the engine.

Does it "freeze up" and not do anything else, or does it just skip over the text? IE, can you still move the Player? Are there any other moving events on that map?

Is that actor still on the screen when the text for that actor is triggered?

Ok, that makes sense. The Parallel would cause that same event to teleport. If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to say so!

Dont worry about feeling dense. I think it is my responsibility to try to make sure that non scripters can use the stuff I write with as little difficulty as possible. So I'll do my best to work with you so anyone else that isnt quite sure how to get things up and running benefit from what we work out. Ok, you've found switch 23. You've also found that you have to name your "Cat Actors" something like "Bob\cat_actor[2]" and dont worry about giving the event a Graphic. Doing good so far. #1 Any other scripts installed? #2 Is the way you Add Party Member or enabling Switch (not a Variable) 23 running as a Parallel or Autorun Process?

I saw that, I was thinking you were asking for how to get a specific bit of data into a script, then wanted to take it from there. My bad. Yeah, your line that said "Print $data_classes" is what made it constantly print. But if you grab the data the same way and instead of printing, put it in a variable, then you could manipulate it as you needed to. As you saw, it would continually loop through that "print" scenario. You'd probably want to use that in an Initialize method so it doesnt run all the time. Not looking at the code specifically, but just in general...

Plug this in with main somewhere, or anywhere you need to plug it in. I just set it to print the name of the Actors Class. Im sure you'll need it to be different for your purposes. if $game_party for actor in $game_party.actors print $data_classes[actor.class_id].name end end Modify it as you need to. If you need to use a different data type, change the .name to .inspect to get those properties. Quick and dirty. Looks to me like the first time main is run, the $game_party isnt intialized yet. So if the array exists, then you can do what you need to do with it. So copy and paste that into the "while $scene != nil" loop. Does that help? Edit: to avoid confusion, ".name" here is the Name of the Class. Like Fighter or Lancer, not the Actors name.

I think it would benefit! The one I used made the image with the larger light radius static, then faded in and out the one with the smaller radius to fake the effect.

@QuesTMajoR Would you mind downloading my Lightgeist Mountain Demo? I need to put a script into it for a Lantern / Flashlight Effect, but if you take a look at Lightgeist Mountain from the Scenario List, and go into any cave, you can see the event version of it (which sucks), but what I did like was the "Flicker" effect. Light seems to Grow and Shrink. Is it possible to do something similar to that "Flicker" effect in your script?

Hmmm, great, now you got me thinking... Did you ever play games where the spotlight moves around using a pattern, then follows the player if they set off an alarm or something?

Hmm, I think Flashlights and Lantern Effects could be done a bit better as a Script. Something like flashlight_on(20) where 20 is the number of frames to fade out and flashlight_off(20). The technique I use is just to display a picture. http://www.775.net/~...es/darkness.png http://www.775.net/~...ith_lantern.png http://www.775.net/~...lantern_big.png Edit: Right Click, Save Target As... And make sure it stays as a PNG FILE!!! Import these pictures, then use an Event to Display Picture at Max Opacity to test it out. I put 3 pictures up. The first one is a picture with an Alpha Channel (an Alpha Channel has its own transparency, so set its opacity to max, and the visible parts will still display all the way through), for when the Player does NOT have a Lantern or some Logical Light Source. The other two I use to display when the player DOES have a Logical Light Source, then I use a Parallel Event to display two pictures, constantly fading one in and out to give the impression of a Flickering Light. There are some drawbacks, however. If you get close to the edge of the screen and the player is no longer Centered, the Picture remains Dead Center so the effect of a Flashlight or Lantern is totally blown. Ive been a bit busy and dont have the time to try to write out a script for displaying an image that centers over the player, but I think there are already scripts available that do that. My pics probably wont work with a Script that makes a Picture center over the player, just because the size isnt big enough which would cause the edges to show through. Just need to pad the Black out around the edges... Bonus! Just showing off Alpha Channels and how they can affect your game, try out this Alpha Channel Fog / Cloud to add a bit of atmosphere to your game! http://www.775.net/~...s/alpha_fog.png Hint for anyone trying to figure out how to use Alpha Channel Transparency: look for PNG files. JPG's by default dont support an Alpha Channel, GIF's only supported a 1 Bit alpha channel (meaning either totally opaque or totally invis), but PNG files support 8 bit (meaning 255 total) levels of transparency in the Graphic Itself. So if you take a PNG that has an Alpha Channel, you can control the In Game Opacity with the Alpha Channel set into the Picture. That means if you import a picture with an Alpha Channel, like that alpha_fog.png (above), when you import it, set the Opacity to 255 so it is NOT transparent, and the Alpha Channel in the Image will allow PARTS of that picture to be completely invisible, while other parts completely obscure your view. Hopefully those that dont undestand what I am talking about can be helped by this picture... Parts of the Cloud Layer completely obscure what is beneath it, while other parts let you see totally through. That is an Alpha Channel. I linked to the fog / cloud graphic above in case anyone wanted to use it. I hope this helps!

By best, I mean most efficient non laggy way to do it. So I have this script I am trying to modify, and thinking to myself it needs a total rewrite because of the lag it generates. The script appears to be updating the graphics it generates every frame, which I know is totally unnecessary and is exactly what is causing the extreme lag. If you wanna take a look at the source, its the ATB Script in my Caterpillar Demo. You'll have to get rid of the following Window Bars script as well cuz some of those things are redefined in that window (need to clean up some of the code, workin on it...). The LAG occurs while the Interpreter is running, which, in plain english means that if you go to your Database, Troops, and set up some battle events, like the enemy casts a spell, there is some horrible lag. Script Source: http://www.775.net/~...ds/rmxp/cat.php Script says ATB What it looks like it is doing is creating one custom window that has all 4 actors HP bars displayed in it. Is it better to keep it this way, or should each actor get their own HP Bar Window so that each only updates as necessary? What I am thinking is that I can assign non displayed properties so I can update when it needs to update (@hp_displayed != actor.hp) and save from trying to redraw each and every frame. I am also not sure of the difference between Update and Refresh as far as the methods that are normally called, or when or how I should define those methods. So, my question is, would it be better to have One window displayed, then update each HP bar in that window, or give each actor their own unique window specific to them. Any suggestions? edit: Forgot to tell you the line number. Go to Line 1412 in the ATB script...