Trouble with approaching NPC, adding him to party, and then moving around

How the scenario plays out is that the map fades in, transfer student is introduced, and then class is dimissed with the TS NPC free to move around.  The main character talks to him, gets him to join party and follow, and the two walk to a designated spot on the map.

What happens is that I have the NPC stand still and set move route  to "move at random" while the player's not talking to him.  I thought he would stop like how the player's mom would stop after walking randomly, but while he has a conversation with the player he keeps walking around the classroom.  After I set to the NPC joining the party, a clone of him is right behind the player and then I can't move the player anymore.

Do you allow the player to walk up and talk to him, or is it part of a cutscene? If talking to him is triggered by an Action Button event on his page, then he SHOULD stop walking around while you're talking. If you're doing the whole thing in a cutscene, you could try one of these:


- turn on a switch when you're talking to him, and have an extra page on his event conditioned by the switch, with the sprite, but no movement.


- when you talk to him, do a Set Move Route with the NPC event as a target. Add 'Turn toward player' as the movement, and set it to repeat. This SHOULD stop him moving around until you do another Set Move Route with no movement and no repeat.


After he joins the party, you should turn on a switch that controls another page on the NPC event. That page should have NO changes except the switch as a condition - everything else should be the default settings. The "clone" of him that appears behind the player is the follower. If you don't want followers, just go to the Settings menu and uncheck the visible followers flag. However, if he IS a follower - unless you've done some script changes - you should be able to walk through him anyway. If you are not able to walk at all, and there is somewhere that you SHOULD be able to go, and you're using the default scripts (so follower can be walked through), I'm guessing that might have been the last command in your cutscene and you've somehow got an autorun event running without any commands. That prevents you moving.

The player can decide whether or not to talk to the new student.  I cleaned up the TS' event page so that after the TS joins in the party and becomes the follower, there's no clone but I still can't move and neither can the other NPCS.  I had another error where I made a conditional switch where everyone moves randomly after "Class Day 1 ends" is switched on, but that causes the TS NPC to not move for some reason.  In the end, I settled for having the TS stand in one place and let the player approach him, but again nothing moves after the TS joins the player's party.

If neither you nor the other NPCs can move, it suggests an autorun event. Maybe one that has no commands.


Look for autorun events on the map with no commands, and look for autorun common events that might share the same switch. Especially ones that have no commands.

Ok, so I went back and made sure there were no autorun events.  I did that by letting one autorun cutscene occur, and then set a switch "Class day 1 end" on so then all NPCs under parallel process will start randomly moving under the condition that "Class Day 1 end" is turned on.  There's probably a better way than relying on parallel process, but if I didn't use the conditional branch to get the NPCs moving after a cutscene then they would all be invisible until the switch was activated (or maybe I should have placed the switch at the very top of the command list...).  

Anyways, I got the transfer student to follow me and I used a bunch of event tiles to outline the boundary indicating an appropriate spot to trigger the next cutscene.  As far as getting NPCs and the player to move after transitioning to another custcene goes, this issue is fixed.  Thank you for the help, I learned something today. 

Random movement does NOT require the event to be set as Parallel Process. Setting the Autonomous Movement to Random will make them move randomly. Change them back to Action Button.


If they don't show up until you set the switch, it's because you've got the switch as a condition.


Put 2 pages per event. The first will have NO conditions, Autonomous Movement will be Fixed, and the sprite will be the NPC just standing.


The second will have the switch as a condition, Autonomous Movement will be Random.


NONE of them should have Parallel Process as a trigger. They should ALL be Action Button.