Castle Paradox

[Leonhart]

There was once a game called "Fox and the Eight-Six". I think it was an entry on the 48hr contest. One of the game's features was having a separate inventory screen for all your items, names of people, abilities, etc...

Does anyone know how to do this via plotscript? I tried contacting the game's creator, but it seems he wasn't replying...

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about:
When you talk to an NPC, you could choose to use an item/ability on the NPC or leave. When you select use, you go into this entirely different screen, where you can select your gathered items and use it on the NPC, triggering another plotscript if the item you selected is correct...

Thanks, guys.
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The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
- Robert Bloch

[msw188]

I can think of a couple ways to do this, but they are both pretty difficult. If you have less than 128 different kinds of items in your game, you can have two copies of every item, one for actual usage, and one for calling a script that would depend on the NPC in front of the hero. Basically the idea would be to call a script that goes through the inventory and replaces every item with its corresponding script calling item, then calls the item menu, then waits until everything is done, and THEN goes through the inventory and puts the regular items back. None of this is very fun, I can assure you, but if you'd like to go this route we can try to help you (note this will not work for non-item skills unless you have a LOT less than 128 items).

OR if this is not a valid option, we could try to use the new custom menu system to build a menu with to represent the player's inventory and NPC usable skills. This would probably be even less fun (I'm not sure that there would be an easy looping method for assigning captions to all of the choices in the menu), although it may be much nicer if we only want CERTAIN items and skills among our choices of what to smack the NPC with. If you want to try this, then we can try to help you, although it will be difficult since very few people are familiar with the new custom menu system (WIP only).

The only other thing I can think of (which is probably what that other game did) is to script your own menu system, text, cursor and all. This is probably the most difficult, although also the most flexible. If you want to go for this, I'm sure someone here can help you, and I will do what I can, but I never felt very familiar with complicated string handling and keyboard input (maintaining cursors) in plotscripting land.
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[Gizmog1]

Could you use the items outside of battle before? Maybe they made judicious use of tags and had a script for every item. Talking to a NPC set a few tags on like "Talking to NPC: YES" "NPC needs a dog: YES" "NPC hates corn: YES". Then talking to the NPC would turn on a tag, allowing items to be used, and using a dog or corn would produce the proper reaction.

If using an item outside of battle (An unusual one, leastwise) produced something like "You can't use this now" that might imply that's what they did. I asked one of the designers how they did it, and he didn't really say anything. I'll try again to get him to help out.

[djfenix]

It's not that difficult to do, actually.

In FatES, every item, name, and ability was an actual item that went into your inventory. And every item had an individual tag that would make npcs visible as items in separate maps.

For the menu, there were 4 separate maps. One map for selecting item, name, or ability, and then one map for each. For the latter 3 maps, it would store NPCs of each item in it's respective category.

For the script, all you really need to do is make a script that checks the position of the cursor on key press. It'll also check to see if the item is in your inventory (which is the individual "have item" tag), then check if it was the right item for the right person (if you're making something like Fox86).

[Leonhart]

That makes sense, djfenix. However,

[djfenix]

I dont know all the plotscript commands, so it'll be hard for me to write an entire script, but anyways...

What Fox86 did was have a textbox activate the menu script. It should start off by remembering what position you are, and if you want, current direction.