A Few Requests for Help and Guidance

Kitten2021 · 2014-05-01T09:36:00+0900

Greetings everyone, I'm finally crawling out of the pits of the shadows and posting a comment on forums once again. Thank you kindly, in advance, to anyone that is kind enough to answer my cry's of help. : (Oh, and please excuse this being a long post... Some things are harder to explain unless you are slightly detailed.) :/ Since I've been in the shadows a long time, I figured I'd start out with a little about me so you understand where I am creator-wise before asking my question: Spoiler I only use RPG Maker VX: ACE, and yes.... I have the legal license for it (as well as the licenses for VX, XP - because it's the LEGAL thing to do people). 3/5 stars in mapping, I love maps made by Parallaxer's but hate Parallaxing myself and would never have the patience for it.... So KUDOS to you that do. I instead devote myself to detailing as much as I can with standard mapping... Let me know what you think of the image I've included for reference purposes below. 4/5 stars for writing, I write my own books - and I only say that encase any of you needed help on a project then I'm willing to try my hardest for you! (But I write nothing that a young kid couldn't read.) 2/5 stars in scripting, I am trying very hard to study up on Ruby to try and understand this better....... Please have patience with me there. 0/5 stars in Audio editing, I have no audio editing software and have a Brown Thumb for music instead of plants I'm afraid. Now that you understand where I am as far as a Creator goes, here is what's going on: I am a GIANT fan of games that has your character/hero stranded on an island or plopped down in a town/village that is deserted and then makes you rebuild the entire town or village yourself once again, or in the case of the island, build things and craft things just for your own survival until you have the entire island completely built up to looking like your own village with other people in it or just you alone surviving on it. And so, I knew I had the imagination well enough to create the maps and the writing skills for this type of game and the medium sized knowledge with scripts, mapping, etc that I could more than create my own version of one of these games. But, then here comes my requests for help and/or guidance... 1: Timers I know there needs to be farming for this game, that's no problem, plenty of scripts and tile sets (specifically Celianna's Rural Farm set) out there for this... But, what I DID run across is there are items that you find on the ground (logs of wood and big leaves, for example) that need to be set on a timer to re-spawn after, lets say, for examples sake, 5 minutes. If I set a timer for each individual Log of Wood and then I set a timer for each individual set of Big Leaves found on the tree's, then the timers are going to cancel each other out... Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? Such as a Timer script or some kind of event that you know of that runs by itself individually? 2: Audio Spoiler I'm really in need of a good song that can be played as a part of the Tutorial on how to farm and build things in the game... I've searched now through SoundCloud and a few other sites' resource pages, including this sites resource page, for music and downloaded a total of about 2 gigs worth of OGG's, MP3's, MIDI's and WAV's and found nothing that would be a good tutorial song. Any suggestions on where one might look for something that would make a good tutorial song? Something kind of lively, since it is a farming kind of game. 3: Buildings And I leave the hardest problem as the last inquiry... In my game, the "stranded" individual has to collect 3 different types of items to build a hut right at the start of the game for shelter at night. But, I then realized... How in the world was I going to get the hut to appear on the map? I had a few ideas, but they did not seem proper or sufficient. -I thought about putting down events and then have Page 2 of the events set to a specific trigger and once the character had all the items and selected to build the house then that trigger would turn on, the screen would turn black and the pages would turn on the other-wise invisible events and the screen would fade back in and there would be the hut/house for the character made completely out of events. Of course, that sounded like a lot of triggers being made if you think about the amount of buildings I'm going to have... -Then I thought about creating a duplication of the map itself with the "Home" hut on the duplicated map and then additional copies for all the other types of buildings you will need to create. If I duplicate the main map, then the game is going to get massively large quickly, as it's currently sitting at 70w x 68h it might get smaller or it might need to get larger, so duplicating this multiple times is going to hurt - a lot. -I also thought about creating the buildings into Characters, but I wasn't sure how to get that size of a Character to actually work in game... But if…

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Started by Kitten2021 May 1, 2014, 12:36 AM 9 posts View original ↗

Kitten2021

#1 May 1, 2014, 12:36 AM Source

Greetings everyone, I'm finally crawling out of the pits of the shadows and posting a comment on forums once again. Thank you kindly, in advance, to anyone that is kind enough to answer my cry's of help. :wub:

(Oh, and please excuse this being a long post... Some things are harder to explain unless you are slightly detailed.) :/

Since I've been in the shadows a long time, I figured I'd start out with a little about me so you understand where I am creator-wise before asking my question:

Spoiler
I only use RPG Maker VX: ACE, and yes.... I have the legal license for it (as well as the licenses for VX, XP - because it's the LEGAL thing to do people).

3/5 stars in mapping, I love maps made by Parallaxer's but hate Parallaxing myself and would never have the patience for it.... So KUDOS to you that do. I instead devote myself to detailing as much as I can with standard mapping... Let me know what you think of the image I've included for reference purposes below.

4/5 stars for writing, I write my own books - and I only say that encase any of you needed help on a project then I'm willing to try my hardest for you! (But I write nothing that a young kid couldn't read.)

2/5 stars in scripting, I am trying very hard to study up on Ruby to try and understand this better....... Please have patience with me there. :blush:

0/5 stars in Audio editing, I have no audio editing software and have a Brown Thumb for music instead of plants I'm afraid. :headshake:

Now that you understand where I am as far as a Creator goes, here is what's going on:

I am a GIANT fan of games that has your character/hero stranded on an island or plopped down in a town/village that is deserted and then makes you rebuild the entire town or village yourself once again, or in the case of the island, build things and craft things just for your own survival until you have the entire island completely built up to looking like your own village with other people in it or just you alone surviving on it. And so, I knew I had the imagination well enough to create the maps and the writing skills for this type of game and the medium sized knowledge with scripts, mapping, etc that I could more than create my own version of one of these games. But, then here comes my requests for help and/or guidance...

1: Timers

I know there needs to be farming for this game, that's no problem, plenty of scripts and tile sets (specifically Celianna's Rural Farm set) out there for this... But, what I DID run across is there are items that you find on the ground (logs of wood and big leaves, for example) that need to be set on a timer to re-spawn after, lets say, for examples sake, 5 minutes. If I set a timer for each individual Log of Wood and then I set a timer for each individual set of Big Leaves found on the tree's, then the timers are going to cancel each other out... Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? Such as a Timer script or some kind of event that you know of that runs by itself individually?
2: Audio

Spoiler
I'm really in need of a good song that can be played as a part of the Tutorial on how to farm and build things in the game... I've searched now through SoundCloud and a few other sites' resource pages, including this sites resource page, for music and downloaded a total of about 2 gigs worth of OGG's, MP3's, MIDI's and WAV's and found nothing that would be a good tutorial song. Any suggestions on where one might look for something that would make a good tutorial song? Something kind of lively, since it is a farming kind of game.

3: Buildings

And I leave the hardest problem as the last inquiry... In my game, the "stranded" individual has to collect 3 different types of items to build a hut right at the start of the game for shelter at night. But, I then realized... How in the world was I going to get the hut to appear on the map? I had a few ideas, but they did not seem proper or sufficient.

-I thought about putting down events and then have Page 2 of the events set to a specific trigger and once the character had all the items and selected to build the house then that trigger would turn on, the screen would turn black and the pages would turn on the other-wise invisible events and the screen would fade back in and there would be the hut/house for the character made completely out of events. Of course, that sounded like a lot of triggers being made if you think about the amount of buildings I'm going to have...

-Then I thought about creating a duplication of the map itself with the "Home" hut on the duplicated map and then additional copies for all the other types of buildings you will need to create. If I duplicate the main map, then the game is going to get massively large quickly, as it's currently sitting at 70w x 68h it might get smaller or it might need to get larger, so duplicating this multiple times is going to hurt - a lot.

-I also thought about creating the buildings into Characters, but I wasn't sure how to get that size of a Character to actually work in game... But if I could get a Chara Set put together of buildings I could create then plop into Gimp, then I would like to fit as many buildings onto one Chara Set as possible so there wouldn't be multiple single buildings sitting in my system bogging it all down. I am so far planning around 30 different buildings or Chara's that I would need like this, and more will probably be coming as things progress further and more things come to light that I'll be needing in the game. Any guidance on how to do this is greatly appreciated everyone! :kiss:

And that's all... For now, anyway. I hid everything inside of spoilers because the post was just getting stupidly long and I didn't want it to get huge. :) Thanks again everyone for any advice or guidance you can provide to me! And also for being patient with me... Haven't RM'ed in a loooooooong while. (Oh! Silly me, please see the attached image's so you can see my 'test' map of what it is I'm talking about.)
whitesphere

#2 May 1, 2014, 12:54 AM Source

Welcome, Kitten2021. The easiest approach for multiple Timers is to use a parallel event. The event should merely set a variable to 0, Wait 60 frames (1 second), then increment the variable. Repeat this endlessly.

If you only want events that spawn every 5 minutes, you can have the parallel event reset the variable to 0 when it reaches 300. Then, you can create your wood/etc when the variable is set to 0, or 299.

So, the Condition would say something like:

if Timer > 298, then respawn wood/leaves/etc.

As for a tutorial song, have you tried taking the songs and changing their pitch? This has the effect of speeding up or slowing down the song and can radically change the character of a song. Try speeding some of the songs up to make them more lively.

As for the building? I'd do something with events, myself, especially since you'll be building a lot of, well, buildings.
dinobeat

#3 May 1, 2014, 01:11 AM Source

RE: buildings, I won't provide a full coding lesson, but you can do this with a single event or multiple ones, depending on your time.

A first example would be to create the entire building as a New Event, making sure to select the appropriate graphic. Once it's placed, copy and paste the Event Page. Then, go back to the first page and delete the graphic, choosing "none" from the list. If the building is to be fully built once all components are stored, then it's a case of a simple switch: the second Event Page should then have the "Switch is On" option toggled, with a Switch name of your choosing (ie., "AllItemsForHut").

Let's now say the player has all items and touches that board again. Except now, instead of the previous text, it will tell players something (ie., "I can now make the hut"), then proceed with a Yes/No prompt. A Yes could result in, say, a fade out, then a fade in - but between the fades, make sure to activate the "AllItemsForHut" switch. When it fades in, the hut will be there.

Alternatively, should you want to have every building show an ongoing construction process, the idea and methodology is the same, but will require more switches for each step of the process. Visually, this also means you'll have to create buildings in various degrees of construction (and their corresponding event pages, too) so that every time the player returns with more items, there are graphics showcasing their investment.
Kes

#4 May 1, 2014, 06:20 AM Source

I'm not sure that I'd go along with using parallel processes for all these items - the chances of introducing significant lag seem a bit high.

As an alternative Vlue has several game time scripts. Here is the link to the basic one http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/1079-basic-game-time-nightday/ If you look in the spoiler in his signature you will find some others which may fit your needs more exactly.
Kitten2021

#5 May 1, 2014, 10:25 PM Source

I apologize for taking so long to respond, work hours are odd hours. >.>

@whitesphere: I actually tried this and it worked very well! I created a new page on my Leaves event and set it to being a Parallel Process and then added 1 Wait set to 60 frames (1 sec) and then added the Variable command to Add 1 Variable to my Variable command for the Leaves Variable event. Then allowed it to just repeat itself until it reached the desired Variables and created a 3rd page and had it set to Conditions>Variables>xx and then had it basically repeat what page 1 did with the item you could pick up. Thanks for that nice little idea.... Hadn't even thought about using Variables for that, just kept thinking of switches. :)

@dinobeat: I thought about doing the buildings this way, but then something dawned at me today... Tile set A is not accessible from Event's. So, I would not be able to use my Wall tile sets to build a house; I would still need to create the buildings and turn them into some kind of Tile set. Do you or anyone else happen to know of an exampled tile set I could look at that would give me some kind of idea on how large I could make the buildings? I you look in my posted images you'll see the storage hut, I'm wanting the "Home" hut to be just a little bit bigger than that...

@ksjp17: Thank you greatly for linking me to Vlue's scripts! I grabbed a couple over there, but he didn't have a script for timing events, mostly for weather or for day/night time tracking. But that's ok... I know the Parallel thing might start lagging things down and if that becomes the case then I will just have to figure something out at that point.

I appreciate everyone answering as quickly as they did! And thanks for the "Welcome", too! :)
Kes

#6 May 2, 2014, 05:00 AM Source

Tile set A is not accessible from Event's. So, I would not be able to use my Wall tile sets to build a house; I would still need to create the buildings and turn them into some kind of Tile set.
Actually you don't need to do that. What you can do is put just your wall tile on to a B-E tile sheet, set it to X passability and use it to create the house at whatever size you want.

You can't just do a copy/paste of A tab tiles, as they are set up as auto-tiles. If you are unsure how to do this, you might find it easier to make a wall in the editor, do a screenshot, paste that into your image program and take a tile from there. If it is a wall with a shadowed top, or a slightly different base, which many of them have, then you would need to make a 3x3 tile image so that you have all possible combinations. Okay, that means you've used 9 tile spaces, but that's a lot less than making a whole house, and gives you the freedom to use the wall to make multiple, different houses.
Lunarea

#7 May 2, 2014, 05:13 AM Source

You should also make use of the "Change Tileset" command on event page 3 (in the Map section on the top right).

You can have multiple tile B-E sheets for different levels of house-building progress, and you don't need to set up multiple events. Just one event that checks the conditions and switches the tileset at the appropriate times. :)
Kitten2021

#8 May 3, 2014, 12:17 PM Source

Sorry again for the late posting...

I will try the eventing thing, see how that works out. Seems a little odd sounding, but I'm always willing to try something new. Thanks guys!
Tyler Clark

#9 May 19, 2014, 02:14 AM Source

I'm extremely interested in buying some of the music packs for RPG Maker VX Ace on steam, but I want to know where I can here some samples. Any ideas?