RMVXAce - Tip for Newbs determining fault in their events

I apologize as this isn't a problem, but I wasn't sure where to post this?  (First time poster)  I've read through other posts and haven't found this information available, so I thought I would share it.

I'm a newb myself, and was having issues using switches.  I was creating an event that caused an invisible barrier to appear around an area during a mini-game, so the player couldn't push any of the event items out of the mini-game area.  I was trying to have the barrier appear when the game was active, but disappear if the player wanted to quit the mini-game and return later.  The barrier should have returned once the mini-game was restarted.

The barrier would initially appear at the beginning of the mini-game, then disappear if the player wanted to leave.  For the life of me, I couldn't get the barrier to reappear once the game was reactivated.

I had a hard time visuallizing what event steps the barrier was going through and when, to understand where I was going wrong.  So, I visually "labelled" each of my conditional statements with different balloon icons.  Thus, as my event carried through, I could note what condition was occuring when, and see exactly what conditions were not being accessed by the game.

This is what my event ended up looking like:



Once I visually labelled my conditional statements, I noticed the last balloon icon that would appear when the player would chose the Restart option (which turned the Flower Barrier = off) was the exclamation (3rd page).  This told me that my Self Switch control on the 3rd page was incorrect.

I fiddled around and realized that I needed to turn Self Switch: B =OFF, instead of turning Self Switch: A =ON to have my event return to the 2nd page.

I realize this problem may have been somewhat basic to some, but this post is to focus on using balloon icons as visual aids when facing an event issue.  I've seen from other posts that the Moderators encourage solving problems on our own, so I wanted to share this tool's usefulness.  It was also extremely satisfying to see the final lightbulb icon once my event condition worked!

I then of course, when through and deleted all of my balloon icons once the event was working :p

I don't really understand what you're trying to say, but if those images are meant to be a tutorial for new users to learn how to do events, I'm really sorry, but they're bad examples. If this is what you're trying to do in your own game, I suggest you post a thread asking people to help you learn how to improve your approach and design.

Being a newbie myself, I think this was a great way of looking for problems when creating event sequences.  Sort of like running a debugger when programming in C++, etc.  Sometimes is it hard to figure out where exactly your problem is in the sequence of events.  Having a visual cue to indicate where it is in the sequence tells you exactly where you need to look for the problem to fix.  But yeah, this should probably be in the tutorials section instead.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough and for posting in the wrong section.  I wasn't looking for help, as my event seems to work well (I'm sure there could be improvements to it, but at the moment, I'm content if it works.  Learning in baby steps  ;)   )

I was more so just sharing a technique that I found worked well for my own troubleshooting.  It also helped me visualize how the conditions and switches worked, as it showed me visually what was occuring at what step during my event when I played through it.  I was just trying to help others who may have problems visualizing what happens behind the scenes while their event plays out in game.  I'm not sure if that's any clearer, but I guess this can be closed if it's in the wrong area?  Should I delete it?

A good way of trouble shooting is using the following script call:

puts "put text here"

this will put the "put text here" text into the console (the black window you see when you test play your game).

You can also do something like

puts $game_variables[10]

That will print the value of variable 10 onto the console.

If it's about timing however, using something like balloons like you mentioned is a good indicator in-game albeit a bit limited since it has to wait until the last balloon finishes.

That's really great, thanks so much.  I had no idea it had a console to use for debugging!