WALKING IN TALL GRASS WITHOUT MULTIPLE EVENTS?

!!! SOLVED !!! ~~~ Thanks to Narcodis for helping me. Here's what you do... (for rpg maker 2003)



ADDITIONAL ADVICE: This is a parallel process event, however, if you set it to call, and have another common event on parallel process which manages all other parallel process common events by calling them within it. It makes things cleaner, and makes it easier on the game's engine. :)

You can also use this to do other things that change your charset. It could turn on switches that causes noise, which would alert monsters to come after you, etc. :) Anything you want! ^O^

-Below is what my problem was, before it was solved-

(i'm using RPG Maker 2003)

Have you noticed in games like Zelda: A Link To The Past, when Link walks in tall grass, it would show grass around the feet of his sprite, and when he stepped off the grass, the grass around his feet would disappear?

I want to be able to have ground tiles set to where you step on them, it automatically triggers your charset to change with grass around your feet, or with water ripples if you're walking in water, etc, and automatically switch back when you step off.

The only other way I have done this was with having a bunch of events all over the grass to turn on the switch which activates the charset change, and then more events around the grass that turns off the switch. It's a lot of events, and I don't like like copying and pasting so many events.

Is there any other way to do this without using so many events?

author=narcodis
what engine are you using?

Oops, forgot to mention that. I'm using RM2k3.

author=narcodis
A single parallel common event that checks the terrain ID of the hero's coordinates and changes the character set to WalkingInGrass.png when in grass, and NotWalkingInGrass.png when not would be the best and most practical method of doing things.

:O! I'll give that a try. Do you know how I would go about setting that event up?

author=narcodis

author=FelixFlywheel

author=narcodis
A single parallel common event that checks the terrain ID of the hero's coordinates and changes the character set to WalkingInGrass.png when in grass, and NotWalkingInGrass.png when not would be the best and most practical method of doing things.

:O! I'll give that a try. Do you know how I would go about setting that event up?

First off, you'll need to make sure you've got a specific terrain ID set aside for the "Grass" (lets say Terrain ID 2).

You'd need three variables. Two to store the X and Y coordinates of the hero, and one to store the Terrain ID of the tile the hero is standing on. (HeroX, HeroY, and TerrainID).

In Common Events, set up a Parallel Process event. In that event, start with setting the HeroX and HeroY variable to the Sprite "Hero"'s respective X and Y coordinates.
Then get the Terrain ID of the tile at (HeroX,HeroY).

Then set up a conditional branch following that.
If TerrainID = 2 {
Change Hero Graphic to Walking in Grass
}
Else {
Change Hero Graphic to Not Walking in Grass
}

At this point it should work in theory. There might be some tweaking needed, and this will definitely interfere with events that try to change your hero graphic in the future. For that, you might want to set the entire common event here to only be active when a switch is on.

Hope that helped.

For the most part, it works on activating the 'not in grass' charset, but it doesn't seem to work when you step in the grass... Yeah, it has to be tweaked.. >.<; but thanks, this did help me at learning about storing coordinates in variables, because I didn't know how to do that before. ^o^

Here's a snapshot of the comment event. I set it on call because I have a main parallel process that manages the common events. So it worked at keeping the charset in 'not in grass' form.

It worked!!! Thank you soo much!!! ^O^!!! I've been wanting to do this for years. I can't believe it was actually this simple. xD!!!