OMEGAHUNTER'S PROFILE

Towns. One of the most dreaded words for a mapper to hear. They're not so hard to make in theory, in fact I believe I'm pretty good at making a good village or two. The problem is when you realize that you're going to need to end up mapping another 10-20 or so cities, then mapping the interiors of all the buildings, then making a ton of NPCs to wander the town, then coming up with meaningful dialogue for each of them, and so on.

I'm pretty sure we've all been there at some point. I'm at the early stage of development in an RPG, and it just hit me that sooner or later I'm gonna have to add some villages to the fairly big game world I'm working on. So I was wondering, what are some alternatives people use to avoid having to map a ton of cities out? I was thinking of having an "area select" in each village that lets you travel to the important buildings in the area, mainly the inn and shops with the occasional quest specific special area (temples, castles, someone's house, etc). The other idea is to work with a central hub and develop a single city with a lot of detail and build the game around this one central location.

So RMN, what's your take on things? How do you deal with mapping out a ton of towns for your games? Do you just man up and add all of them the old fashioned way, or do you have a less time consuming method?

You should remove the third event tab. On the second one, instead of turning on "Self Switch B", have it disable "Self Switch A." This way the event will alternate between adding and removing the party member.

Hopefully that helps some. I don't really understand what the problem is. Might help if you explain it with some more detail about whats wrong.

You learn something new every day here... I never thought of using conditional branches like that. Anyway, I'll elaborate on how to do that.

Start by making a common event called "Character Switch" or something like that. Make the Trigger a parallel process. For the switch, use one that will only be on when character switching is available. If at any time you want to disable the char switching, simply turn off that switch.

Now, add a conditional branch. Select button on page 4 and then choose whatever key you want to use as the char switch button. Just for this example, I'll use "C" but you can choose whichever one you want. I don't think there's any way to use spacebar though, sorry. =(

What conditional branch does is it looks at whatever data you enter as its condition, and if that data is true then it does one thing. If it isn't true, it does another. So basically what we've done is made a common event where if C is being held down, it does one thing, and if C is NOT being held down then it will do another thing. Since we don't want anything to happen when C is not being held down, we're not going to edit the "Else" section of the conditional branch, only the first section which occurs when the data is true (in this case the C button being pressed).

Now we need to identify which character we're switching out. Add another conditional branch inside the one we just made. Go to page 4 in the conditional branch box and select "Script," then enter this and hit okay:

$game_party.leader.id == 1

The line of code we entered means that "actor 1 is the party leader." So, under the true section of the conditional branch, remove actor 1 and then add actor 2. This is optional, but if you still want to be able to see actor 1 in your party after switching them, simply add another line adding actor 1 again.

Now, the "Else" section here implies that actor 1 is NOT the party leader, meaning actor 2 is. Simply do the same thing as above, except reversed so that actor 1 ends up being the lead again.

Hope that helps. If you need any more help, just let us know. Here's an image of what your common event should look like when its finished:

http://gyazo.com/82c51fcd9c92632cd8394cf79ae8a6e6

Once you learn conditional branches, RPG Maker gets a lot easier to use.

Here's a simple method that should work in theory.

1. Record all your voice files. For the sake of this explanation, I'll just be calling them voice1, voice2, etc. Import them as sound effects.

2. In your event where someone is talking, choose the voice file for whatever they'll be saying and put that in first. For example, add voice1. Next, add a line of text immediately after the voice file, with the text itself being whatever is said in that file. This causes the sound effect (voice acting) to play as the text box appears.

3. Add a command immediately after the text box that stops the last voice file from playing. If you don't do this, then you'll have overlapping dialogue playing if the player button mashes through conversations without letting each file fully play.

4. Repeat step 2 and 3 until you're done with that dialogue sequence.

Should be simple enough to do, just time consuming.

If you're talking about the damage formulas for skills, then its really simple and you can do a lot of cool things with it. First ask yourself, how do you want damage to be calculated? For an example we'll just use a simple formula and say that in your game, damage is your ATK minus the enemy's DEF. The formula you input really won't look too much different from my sentence. It would be:

a.atk - b.def

The a and b represent who we're talking about in the equation. A = attacker, b = defender. So all we're saying there is attackers ATK minus the defenders DEF is going to be how much damage this skill does. You can also put modifiers in though. Say you want the skill to deal 2x the attacker's ATK. Again, the formula won't look much different than how it sounds:

a.atk * 2 - b.def

What this does is it multiplies the attackers ATK stat by 2, then it subtracts the defenders DEF stat for the total damage. You can also add static numbers to the equation that don't rely on any other variables. For example:

50 - b.def

That'll just subtract the defenders DEF from the number 50, and that'll be your total damage output for that skill. If you want to get advanced with things, you don't even need to use ATK or DEF (or MAG or MDF), you could do something like this:

a.agi - b.def

This would come out the same as our first example up top, but would use agility in place of attack to calculate damage.

Its really easy to do, you just have to mess with the system for a while and practice with it to see all the stuff you can do. I figured this all out on my own without looking to the internet. Its really one of the easier parts of Ace in my opinion.