Event Not Moving?

Hi guys,

I'm having trouble with this event, and it's driving me crazy! I'm pretty new to RPG Maker, so there are a lot of things I still don't know about it. In any case, here's what I'm trying to do:

I want the player to walk through this city. Partway through, a homeless person calls out to them, walks up, a conversation ensues, and then the homeless person walks away. I guess it's basically a short cutscene.

I've set the event to trigger by "player touch", when the player touches a particular sidewalk tile. The homeless man is an event characterization already on the screen, just down a ways from the trigger. The player can click on him before the reach the trigger tile, and he just mumbles to himself. I've set a move route on the trigger tile for the homeless man event characterization to move towards the player, and then the conversation ensues, and then the homeless man moves away. I set up a self-switch system so that when the player touches that sidewalk tile again, nothing happens, so the event does not repeat.

Everything works perfectly, except the homeless man event characterization doesn't move! It's weird to me, because he'll turn towards the character, or whatever direction I tell him to turn towards, and the player will turn to look at him, but he won't actually move anywhere. Originally, after the player and homeless man characterization looked at each other, the gameplay would get stuck. I set the option to skip the movement if it couldn't be completed, and now the conversation part works perfectly and the player can move after the event finishes, so I really think the issue is that the homeless man is stuck somehow, and can't complete his move route.

Currently, the homeless man is on "Walking Animation" and "Fixed", but I've also played with many different combinations of options and autonomous movement types, and he still won't move during the triggered event.

I've decided it's either something terribly simple that I'm missing, or something terribly complex that I don't know about. Either way, any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Could you post screenshots of your event, please? It can help pinpoint the issue. :)

This should not really hard and not too complex too, but yeah Lunarea said that it's better for you to give screenshot at your event page, so we know what's the problem exactly, so I suggest you to do that =).

Sorry, here's the screenshots. This first one is the trigger event.



I put in the variable for the conditional branch, because there are two sidewalk trigger tiles side by side, and once one is active, I didn't want the event to go off on the other one. This screenshot is a little cut off, but there's just one line missing and its a control self switch A at the bottom. The control variable for the "Else" path is just some random filler, so that nothing actually happens on the "Else" path. The second page is the self switch A control. Right now, I have the homeless man's movement to just go towards the player, but initially, I actually counted out the spaces he would need to move down and right to get to the character, and although he would look in the direction, he still wouldn't move.

This second shot is how the homeless man event characterization is currently set up.

Are there any events that are blocking the NPC? Even completely blank ones can make the event not move.

Also, have you checked the passabilities in your tileset?

Do you have any events between the homeless man and the player? You may need to turn "through" on (you could try it just to see). Also, you seem to only have him move one tile towards/away from the player. Is he that close?

How far the range between the player and the events? I almost sure that it more than 1 tile away. I can see that your move route will only make the homeless man move to the player only by one tile.

Move Towards Player, means it will move to the player, but just ONE TILE. You need to manually calculate the tile needed by the event to reach the character and add more move command. 

Wow, so many quick replies! This is fantastic. Tommy Gun's suggestion solved it! I checked the passibility of the tiles, and they were fine, and no other events were blocking the way. Before, I had him moving the exact number of spaces to get to the player, but when troubleshooting, I wasn't too concerned with how far he had to move, and had just changed it to "move towards player" to see what would happen and if he would move at all. I took Tommy Gun's advice and selected "through" on the homeless man event characterization, and now it runs through smoothly with no hiccups!

Thank you guys so much! You were a huge help!

Glad you solved your problem, but take good care in using the command "through ON", by using that you tell the system so the event or whatever it is to be freely move to anywhere regardless the passabilty or anything, it's best to put "through OFF" at the end of move route. This might not really a problem right now, but if you use this on your character and you forgot to put "through OFF", you'll see your character started to walk on a wall even on water. So keep in mind about this, this will saves you a lot of headaches later, trust me =). 

It's awesome that "through ON" worked, but I would strongly suggest to continue trying to make the event work without that. Since "Through ON" fixed the issue, it means that there was some invisible obstacle that your event couldn't go through, and you definitely want to figure out what that was in case it starts to cause other issues with the map. :)

Yep - if there was something blocking him, it's likely that it'd block your player too, and that's annoying when it's not something you can see. Especially since you say there are no other events between the NPC and the player. If it's a passability issue, there could be other places on the same map, or other maps using that tileset, that will have the same problem. You don't want to go putting THROUGH on every move route when it may not be a complete solution.


Better to find the cause and implement a real solution than to make do with a workaround.

Oh, I see, I understand now. Thanks for the explanation about the "through on", I'll be sure to keep it in mind, and turn it off after the event. Hm...I wonder what the obstacle could be, given there's nothing that would get in the event's way that I can see. The player can freely move to and interact with the homeless man and everything around him without a problem, so I'm still not sure what could be causing the "obstacle". I'll keep fiddling with it, but at least I have an option that works too, so I won't get too hung up on it. :)

That's why I asked about your tile passabilities. They're usually one of the big factors when movement issues crop up. Things like first tile in TileB needs to be a star, for example, are super easy to overlook, but they end up messing up maps and events. :)

Can the player move to the exact tile the event is standing on? If you move the event a tile to the left, can the player walk to where the event used to be?


If the player can't walk there, then it's likely to be something about the tileset - you've possibly placed the event ON a tile that's impassable (or impassable in the direction you're trying to make them walk).


If the player CAN walk there, then it's likely to be an event in the way. One with a Below Characters priority would allow the player to go over it, but other events would not.


If you can provide a screenshot of your map, zoomed to the closest level, showing where the event is, where the player would be, and just drawing a line to show the path the event follows, and also a screenshot of the tileset with the particular tile highlighted that you've used to draw below the event, that might give us a clue.

It's as I feared, it was something so terribly simple, and I just completely overlooked it, haha. You were right, I had placed the homeless man event on an impassable tile. When I checked the passability of the tiles before, I had only checked the ones around the homeless man, I completely missed checking the ones he was actually standing on to see if they were passable. I changed them to be passable, turned "through" off, and tested the trigger event, and it works perfectly.

Thank you all for all of your help and advice! I'm glad I got to learn about the "through" option too, as I was never sure what it meant before.