Thex Character Creation

[+ Titanhex 284]

Part of:          Thex Tutorial & Demo Systems

 

DEMO: Thex Character-Selector & Creation

 

What is this?

 

Excerpt from the Intro Event comments:

 

 

 

" Welcome to the Char-Select Tutorial: Extra!
by Titanhex

This is the tutorial that's a little bit tougher and a lot more tedious
to use, but it looks much better!

 

First you'll need to grab one resource out of the pictures folder.
'Selector'

You can access it through F10.

 

Once you're done, you'll want to import it into your project.

From there, lets make a blank map.
Set a parallax for your map if desired, and any loop settings for the
parallax.

 

The next part is IMPORTANT! Set the Scrolling to either Both or
Vertical/Horizontal depending on which way you'll be rotating the
characters. The demo here is Vertical.

 

Next you need to make a brand new event. Set it to Autorun. If you
want to give it a graphic do so and set it anywhere.
If not, leave it blank and shove it into a corner out of the way.

This event will handle all the movement and commands in this
"menu."

 

Next we need to make another event and set it somewhere in the
center.  Leave it blank. Check all the boxes in "Options."  Name it
something like Char 0.

 

Now copy it and paste it until it wraps all the way from top, to
bottom, then from top back to the event again. Or if doing
horizontal, right to left.

Rename them in the order you pasted them. 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.

 

This concludes the map setup. The only setup left is for the Autorun
event. I'll go through the idea of what we're doing here,
but for more detail check out the Autorun itself.

 

First we set up the variables that tell the selector where it'll be.

We move our center character one more to the right so it overlaps
our start position.
This helps with aesthetics. If you don't care too much then just put
the start position anywhere and the char back in line.

 

Next we ask for Gender. We make the switch represent Male for ON
and Female for OFF. Switches can be used to represent True or
False. Like are you Male (True) if you're not then you're Female
(False).

 

Now we ask the player to select a name.
Some people do Name Input but then you don't get well-themed
names and people name their character Poop or BUTT or
something.  For "Make your Hero" games I like asking them to
choose from a list. But I suggest making a much bigger list if you
do it this way.

 

Now we get to the tedious part. We ask them to choose their
character.

First we check if they're female or male, which you'll notice we did
for name picking.

If they're female, we load female graphics onto the list.

There's a way to shrink or expand the list. Just increase the map
size and make the events move the appropriate amount to
accomodate. If it's 13 or more it only has to be move 1 tile.
If you're good at eventing, setting it shouldnt be hard.

After loading the appropriate graphics, we check for keys presses
Up, Down, Enter, Esc.

Key press checks are easy.

To do them, we just make a Loop with Wait 1 inside. Then we check
if a button is being pressed. This can be the typical conditional
branch way or the script check Input.trigger?(:n) where N is the
button. The difference is one checks repeatedly and the other only
once.

Depending on the button we do different actions. Make sure we
break the loop inside any condition that ends button press
checking.

 

In this case up causes all the events to move up, down does the
same but down. They also decrease or increase a variable that
tracks our character selected.
Esc sets the events to blank, erases the picture, and returns us to
setup via labels.

 

Enter selects the character and changes the player graphics to it
based on what the Character variable is. It then ends the
processing and takes us to a new map.

When testing this map put your start event to the right of the
misplaced one."

 

 

 

This is a character creation run through. The options are basic, but those are not the emphasis of this tutorial.

 

The emphasis is on how you select the graphic for your character.

 

This is a beginner to intermediate level tutorial. You'll need to understand loops, conditional branches, variables, and switches. You should also learn basic system design concepts like index.

 

There's 4 examples. The one where you start is a very nice scrolling menu that goes up/down with the characters.  The first one at the top is very basic and simple, but doesn't show the next character in the list til you hit left/right.

 

The other are variations of the starting map, which show how to do horizontal scrolling and use fewer characters than the map size.

 

The way it works is you are asked what gender you are, what your name is, and then what you look like.

Inputting extra options such as race & class should be easy if you look at the system.

 

It's mainly to show off how to make a pleasing character design system using events.  Give it a try!

 

 

[Bunni89 85]

I love the selector idea! I've been working on a complex character creator using Visual Equip and ran into the problem that with lots of options it starts to look really awkward just showing text choices over and over again. This is a great help and I'm excited to check it out and see if it's compatible with my ideas! (The only issue might be getting the visual equip to work on the selectable characters so they look identical to the player aside from the one part that's being changed at the moment)

You're such a superstar, all these new event systems are awesomely creative!

[Realdeal 1]

Great I think It Is Amazing

[linkusblue 0]

Would you be willing to make a video tutorial or something where I can see you do the steps? I'm still pretty new to this stuff, however I saw this and instantly got excited to do this. 

[+ Titanhex 284]

I was planning on making video tutorials of my current tutorials. Unfortunately I've been very busy so it may be a while before I go back to tutorial work.

[linkusblue 0]

I was planning on making video tutorials of my current tutorials. Unfortunately I've been very busy so it may be a while before I go back to tutorial work.

I am a bit confused on the areas that I will copy and paste in here. If you can help me, that would be great. 

1)Now copy it and paste it until it wraps all the way from top, to

bottom, then from top back to the event again.

2)First we set up the variables that tell the selector where it'll be.

3)We move our center character one more to the right so it overlaps

our start position.

This helps with aesthetics. If you don't care too much then just put

the start position anywhere and the char back in line.

4)We make the switch represent Male for ON

and Female for OFF.

5)If they're female, we load female graphics onto the list.

6)If it's 13 or more it only has to be move 1 tile.

7)To do them, we just make a Loop with Wait 1 inside. Then we check

if a button is being pressed.

I understand some of what you wrote down, HOWEVER since I am new when it comes to this stuff I don't quite understand. If you could explain to me what you did (With the green copy and pasted parts I put) that would be awesome; as simple as possible would be nice. Sorry for the lack of understanding and questions I just saw this and thought 'WOW! That looks awesome'

[Deej 19]

I love the selector idea! I've been working on a complex character creator using Visual Equip and ran into the problem that with lots of options it starts to look really awkward just showing text choices over and over again. <- +1

 

Awesome idea, I hadn't thought of adding something like that to my events for a bit of eye candy. Nice job

[+ Titanhex 284]

Alright I got my mic working. I'll make a tutorial video for this in the next day or so.

[+ Titanhex 284]

Turns out my microphone is crap and makes horrible noises. I need to get another one before I can do this.

 

So in the meantime I'll just clarify the listed questions:

 

1)I think what I meant to say was:

 

"Now copy it and paste it until it wraps all the way from the middle, to

bottom, then from top back to the middle event again."

 

So put the first event in the middle, then copy that and paste it from middle down to the bottom of the screen. From there go back up to the top and continue pasting the event from top to the first event that you copied

 

2) This is referring to the autorun event. There are an X and Y variable that set the position of the selector in there.

 

3) As you can see in the demo, the Start Position is in the middle of the line, and there is an event to the left of it. The event is moved to the right at the start, and will be sitting on top of our starting character. This is important for keeping everything in line.

 

4) Switches only have two real settings. True and False. 0 and 1. So using that to represent only two genders, we can say OFF is Female and ON is Male. Simple.

 

5) The conditional branch means we check the switch to see if they're Female (OFF) or Male (ON). If the switch is OFF it means they're female, so we change all the event graphics to female in the line.

 

6) The screen size is about 13 tiles high. So logically, we only have to move every event on the line down 1 when we're pressing down to scroll through them. This only applies to 13 or more characters though, because if we have less than 13 we can't fill all the tiles from top to bottom. This will require a change on how we set up the events.

 

7) A loop is simple enough to understand. Until it's broken, we keep doing it. We need a wait inside a loop though or it freezes our game. This is where the wait 1 comes in. This is great for checking for button presses, since every frame it will be checking for the conditional branch, which in this case would be the "Button Press" check of the conditional branch. That means every frame it will be checking if you have pressed any of the buttons in the loop.

[NehpetsYar 0]

Edit: Nevermind! I figured it out, stupid mistake on my part, thank you for this, its pretty great.

Edited July 29, 2013 by NehpetsYar

[+ colll78 2]

I have used so many of your events and all I can say is your eventing skills are insane. This one is pretty sick but your grapple hook system was just unbelievable. So thanks a lot!

[FCU777 0]

Hey, you know that part where you choose what name to put according to gender.

 

What if I replaced it with a name inputting processing thing (which allows users to put their own names), would that still work?

 

 

Oh and, can I also make the faceset to show?

Edited January 17, 2014 by FCU777

[+ Titanhex 284]

@FCU777: That would totally still work. Go for it.

 

Showing face-sets would require using "Show Picture" and cutting out each face individually and putting them in pictures. Then you'd just show picture of whoever you're on when you scroll through.

[FCU777 0]

Ah I see.

 

Oh and before I forgot (I hope I'm not asking for too much), there are some characters I want to replace in the character generator both male and female (not all of them, just the elves, neko characters, witches, magicians, etc). How can I do that?

Edited January 21, 2014 by FCU777

[ninjabrim 0]

ok is there anyway to make it so when they do pick a person that persons graphic is displayed when they talk to somebody? like when you do display text event it has where you can pick a actors graphic, how would one go about making it auto pick the one that the player chooses? and thanks for the script very nice

 

 

 

 

edit .... yea i just reread my post haha yea its not a script i was looking at 2 at the same time but i like it over all anyways

Edited June 14, 2014 by ninjabrim

[Euphoria 147]

It's not a script it's an event and you can't make it automatically show a character's face :/

[ihartrpgs 147]

The closest that you can do with that without involving scripts is what I did in my tutorial here. I'm not sure what scripts are out there for changing the faces, but there might be one that makes it easier.

[+ Titanhex 284]

Sadly, GameCreations is right. In order to make it show a specific face, you will need to use conditional branches. I doubt it would have been hard to add an option in the software to pick an actor face graphic, but the developers of RMVXA had oversighted it.

It is doable with call script, but it's messy. I'm sure there's a few scripts out there that can handle this though, like modern_algebra's ATS.

[+ TheWhisperGame 4]

Excellent Event(s) this makes character selection a lot less clunky than "Unknown Figure walks over to what they want to look like from a line-up".

[Primeless 5]

great eventing! 

 

and thx for the kind answers. 

 

Its so usefull!!!