Oh that sounds cool. I havent tried using Qtile anywhere yet. Sounds like an excellent application of it.

In one of my ACK games, the player can have pets which follow him everywhere. I use QTILE to display which pets are present rather than "follower" creatures / objects. These pets do not fight, but can take damage along with the player, and can die.

- A:A:

Problem with the leaving and reentering room idea is that the way this works is each step the previous instance of the follower is deleted so I'd have to actually break it on purpose to test that. Guess I could do that. Ill report on the results next update.

Thanks for the info on how to use actual people instead of using fake ones [items] like I've been forced to do. I really need to dive into your megapatch and get to know it better. I spent a lot of time with all your changelogs while I was working on the Quick Reference Pages but have yet to try everything. Would be cool if we had a sort of megapatch example adventure designed to use every feature of all the megapatch updates so we could see everything in action as well as how it was done.

Here is a screen cap from Metal Gear with the current step macro in action. You can see two instances of the tile used for a rescued prisoner. The left one was added from within the map editor. It's transparent color is not visible. The right one is one of the stepmacro added instances in game. It's transparent color is visible.

[img]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21267578/ACK/Troubleshooting/ack02_003.png[/img]

Actually, if you know the creature's 'instance number' (which you can see in the editor I think, definitely in one of the text log files that you can dump, and you can also read it directly using one of the patch commands), you can remove it from the map and re-add it as you want. Creatures are object type 255, with the 'custom' field containing the instance #.

Not sure why the transparency wouldn't work on a map-added object. Is this in a room-type or world-type region? Have you tried leaving the room/area and coming back after adding the object with the macro, to see if anything looks different when you return? This may have to do with how the transparency info for the map is calculated and stored temporarily.

I just ran into this problem. I was experimenting with setting up a follower that will follow the player character around. It works great except for one thing.

At first I was using a regular space to represent the follower because I wasn't really thinking much about how it looked while I was busy figuring out how to get it to work. But once I got it working smoothly I decided it would look much better with transparency, especially since the player character has it. Its unfortunate you cannot use mapadd to add a npc to the room.

So I tried a item object with the npc tile I wanted. I was surprised to find it wasn't transparent. I placed it on the map from within the map editor to test it and then played it and saw that the exact same item is transparent when added with map editor but not transparent when added via macro with mapadd! :(