Castle Paradox

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

How do I make NPCs to display a value (say, the amount of red in the 192nd color on the palette) at a certain X,Y spot on a map (like in a custom battle system)?

Or would I be able to do this with strings?

Also, would it be possible to write the values to global variables?

[Gizmog1]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean. You can use global variables to allow the user to customize his palette, and have those changes save to the game, but as for displaying the amount of Red in a color in the palette, I always just used a variable, and show value. Just have the script set the actual value in the palette to be the same as the variable, and it should work okay, but it might not be exactly what you were thinking of.

[TwinHamster]

If you want to position the variable, I'd suggest using textboxes.

As seen in Moogle's darkmoor dungeon, the selection of heroes is pretty much what you're trying to accomlish, except you're going to use the same text box over and over again.

Ex)

textbox (1)=
______________________
Color: ${V#}
______________________

while this textbox is shown, you want to suspend box advance.

Then stick the text box into a keypress script.

So, if you press up, the value is increased by one and textbox (1) is shown again, this time with the new, increased value.

[Moogle1]

You can do this with strings -or- store them in globals and use textboxes instead. If you need more than one set onscreen at a time, use strings.

Someone who has messed around with strings can probably tell you the exact syntax better than I can.
_________________

Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

[Gizmog1]

Well, having it in hex complicates things. But, I think you could do it mathematically. It being hex, you could divide it by 16 to get the number for the "tens" place. If the number doesn't divide evenly into 16, you could subtract one until it DID divide into 16, and by keeping track of how many times you subtracted, you'd know what number to put into the "ones" column.

For example, you might have 128 Red, 56 green, and 0 blue.

128 divided by 16 is 8, so you'd have in hex 8 0, and your script could show that.

56 divided by 16 is 3.5, which isn't evenly divided. But the OHR automatically rounds down, so your script is going to think it's 3, which is 48. To fix that, have the script divide by 16, and then multiply that value by 16. If you don't get the same number you started with, you've got a problem. I'm not very good at Math, so I can't say for certain if either of these is always going to give you the correct figure, but you've got two possible solutions here. Solution A would be

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

[Bob the Hamster]

[TwinHamster]

Oh...My...goodness...
There are things as convenient as strings?

I'm still a little dazzled over it, but I think I got some parts of it down.

If I include:

[Bob the Hamster]

Close. The show string command shows the string at the bottom left of the screen, just like the show value command does with numbers.

The show string at and center string at commands are IMHO much more valuable. After you have used one of them to position your string on the screen, it will continue to display the live value of the string. You can make changes to the string, and they will be displayed at that spot automatically without further need for string showing commands. (see also hide string to make the string go away when you are done with it)

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

Okay, I figured out how to do it. 'Cept now it's saying that my global variables aren't being used. O_o

Edit: okay, fixed that — now it's just freezing up GAME. >_<
Edit2: OKAY, finally fixed it all — now I just need to figure one thing out: when I use the below code, why does the number always increment one if I press any key other than 'up' (after pressing up to change a color value), or decrement one if I press any key other than 'down' (after pressing it to change a color value)? For instance, I press up and set the red to 54, then I decide I want to add some blue, so I press left to get to the Blue selector — instead of jogging over to the Blue selector, it increases/decreases the red by 1. If I press it again, however, it does go to the Blue. But how do I keep it from doing this?

[msw188]

I'm a little bit confused by this script. How is this script run? Is it a keypress script?

In any case, I think that the root of the problem lies in the fact that the string is written only at the beginning of each color section, not at the end. Say you are on RED, and you press up. In your code, the first thing to happen is that the screen displays the amount of RED (before changing it). Then it goes through your if checks and finds that you pressed up, so it increases the RED and updates the palette. But it does not update the string! This updated value only gets shown the next time a key is pressed. The immediate solution is to place string updating code AFTER all of the if checks. Then you would also want an 'initialization' script as well (that is to say, you want the strings to show the current values in the beginning before this keypress script here is ever run; maybe a map autorun script?).

There are other problems with this script. Let's say you are on RED and you press right. During the if checks for RED the tag 15 checks out, so the code is run turning tag 15 off and tag 16 on. But then the if checks for BLUE are run, and tag 16 is on so they are all run (and they may still be picking up the keypress right as well). I believe that this code could be cleaned up to be more efficient with the use of some local variables. Something like this:

[Kizul Emeraldfire]

[msw188]

If hide string doesn't work, I can only think of two possible solutions, that are really just cheats. First is to clear the string. Then the string will still be on the screen, but since it has no characters nothing ought to be shown...?

Another possibility may be to reload the map. Do strings outlast map loads? I have not used strings outside of textboxes before. Or maybe you could position the string in some ungodly place where the player has no chance of ever seeing it. Not sure if your map even has such a place.

Is hide string broken? The string commands seem overly complicated. I think show no value is used to eliminate strings sometimes too, depending...

Oh yeah, the problem I was considering with left and right was basically this. You are on RED and you press right. Tag 15 is turned off and Tag 16 is turned on. However, then in the part of the code (GREEN) Tag 16 is checked and it is on, so I was afraid there was a chance that

if(checktag(16)==on), then, (if(key is pressed(key:right)), then...

would run, so tag 16 would be switched back off, and tag 17 would be switched on, and then the same thing would happen again in BLUE, until the computer decided that the key was no longer pressed. But it was only a guess; if you are not having any problems scrolling through, then I must have been mistaken.