[RM2K3] ROW MOVEMENT WHEN CHARACTERS JOIN MID-COMBAT

author=Prinnyhero
So as the title suggests I'm having a major issue with a couple of battles where other party members arrive mid-combat and join you in the battle.

What happens is after the characters are added to the party during battle the whole party is moved to the back row. Is there any way to stop this from happening as it really screws with the flow and makes no sense.

Yeah, uh, I ran into this problem with Final Fantasy vs. Dog. Whenever a new character was added during battle in rpgmaker2003 DBS the party align got rearranged.

I could not fix this problem, however, what I did to hide it was:

-On Turn Zero, Add every party member that's going to be in this battle, including those that show up in the middle of battle. Then, Remove everyone, than re-add the party members that are suppose to currently be in this battle - If done right, when the battle begins in rpgmaker2003, it should look like a normal party line up.

So now, whenever a new party member shows up, the party alignment won't change (because it already happened on turn 0) - but this will only work depending on if you have it set to "automatic" or "manual" lineups in rpgmaker2003.

(But this is how I got Kain to Jump into Battle, and Rydia to walk into Battle in the tech demo - because they were already added on turn zero)

This is not really a fix, this is more of workaround I used. But yeah, hopefully someone in the comments will have a proper solution for this problem. I apologize I couldn't offer more help here :(.

Can you show a reproducible example? I tried it and the party reorders accordingly and it looks the same as it does when I add the actor before starting the battle.

(Also, which RM2k3 version are you talking about?)

Ah I see, it's only on manual placement, and it's because Shinji Hamada seems to have done a mistake when copying the code for battler placement from the battle initialization to the party change and later updating it, apparently forgetting the second copy (and that, my dear children, is why you avoid duplicate code in the first place). There is normally an offset of 24 pixels if the character is in the front row, but due to this mistake this was only applied to part of the calculation and didn't affect actual placement, so characters would be positioned as if they all were in the back row.

There you go, I created a patch to fix it: https://cherryshare.at/f/OU31HP/RPG_RT_112a_fixbadactorpositiononpartychange.ips

Apply to RPG_RT.exe using Lunar IPS. Don't forget to make a backup before doing any patching.