One time text on event - think tutorial in game.

Hello everyone,

Firstly let me just say a huge thank you to you all. I just got RPG VX Ace (trial version - gonna be buying the full version on payday whoop!) I have had it for three days and have spent those three days looking at this forum, youtube and googling every question I had and I have learnt alot from this community. Your help so far as been amazing. Sadly I have had to come in here and ask a direct, and possibly stupid, question.

I am currently making save crystals for my games and in the starting town, where I have a save crystal, I would like a a mini tutorial for the player: i.e first time using something you get a "tutorial" text appear.

So, I have the crystal set up as an event, it works fine. I just need a text box to appear once, only once, when the player activates the event for the first time displaying this message:

"This is a save crystal. Use these to save your game."

I know something like this is possible as I have seen it in the DEMO game crysilis. But I cannot figure out how to do this.

My second question is: Can I also get the game to save at an INN?

In my game I want to only be able to save via a crystal or sleeping at an INN.

Many thanks in advance and sorry if this is something obvious that I have overlooked.

-N-

Set the event to turn on a switch like 'Crystal Tutorial'


Just below, that, put a Conditional branch:


'if Crystal Tutorial is on', 'bring up save menu'


else:


'if crystal tutorial is not on', 'show text', then 'bring up save menu'.


That is probably the simplest way.


For disabling save access unless it is prompted, go to the start of your game and in the first event at the start, put 'disable save access'. It's on one of the event pages. This just disables it from the menu.

When you want to activate something in RM from something else you use what is called switches.  These are universal variables that are set true or false.

In this situation the easiest thing to do is use a self switch.  This is a switch that applies only to the event itself, and other events have no access to it.

Now to use switches you need to know how RM looks at events.  You have pages in an event that start at 1.  However RM checks the ones on the rightmost side to see which ones go first.  I.E.  if you have pages 1,2,3,4, and 5, then RM will run page 5 first.

This is where switches come in.  If an event you have conditions on the top left.  The page will not run if the condition is not met.  So if on page 5 we set the condition of self switch A is on, then when the even runs, if self switch A is off, the event will run page 4.

With all this in mind your event will look something like this

Page 1

On action button:

Show text: "You can save here!"

Set self switch A: on

Page 2

condition self switch A is on

Save

As for the second question:

You can do all this in an event, it'll just take a little fiddling.

Walk up to a guy and set him as an action button activated event.

Show text do you want to sleep here?

Show choices:

    Yes:

           Screen fade out

           Recover Health

           Open Save Screen

           Screen fad in

     No:

Try this junk out and let me know if you have any questions.

To your first question:


The solution is switches, the most basic element in almost anything you can do with the makers.


You need to control an switch ON at the first crystal after the message display and have all crystals check if the switch is ON or OFF before displaying the message again.


I suggest you follow the link in my signature and read through the basic tutorials linked there to get these basics, as you'll need switches for everything in the game - and Crysalis as a basic sample game should be easier to understand if you open it in the editor, if you can't learn this from how it was made in Crysalis then you really need to work through those basic tutorials.


To your second question:


just add the open save menu command at the inns, similiar to its use on the save crystals.

Thanks for all the help everyone :D

I now have a basic grasp of switches, not going to beat around the bush I am sure I will have many more questions to come!

Anyway, I got the text to come up on the crystal. Its brilliant!  Works like a charm.

Time set up the inn. Will report back later :)

If you're SURE the player will activate the first save crystal (you can force them to do it with a switch--for instance if you have a transfer point out of that map, have that check to see if they've activated the crystal. If not, pop up text telling them to save first), then you only need to add the "check if used crystal" code to that first one. If you don't want to force players to do things, then you'll need to add that "check" code to basically every crystal in the game because you won't know which they'll hit first.

Check my signature for some long video tutorials I made. They have chapter markers, so you can skip to any part. Part 3 deals with switches.

Hi Nanaki_Fan.

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