Totoro wrote:Thanks for all of that!
Now I run the thirstiness as a macro you trip near the beginning, and voila - our heroine is dehydrating.
(snip)...
Now that I have started, I'll have to post some stuff as I get it ready...
Thanks again, Garth!
Glad it helped. I had fun trying to figure it out and was able to clear a few cobwebs out of the old ACK section of my memory. ;)
What I would do to ensure my setup variables for this test map fired properly without having to leave the map and reenter it is start the player off in a different place like a start room which is extremely limited and forces the player to take the only exit which is a portal to the map I actually wanted the player to start at.
If I already have this big fancy map made for the player to start at there are a few options I could take. One copy the map and add it to the game as a new map, then surround the player start tile with portals disguised as the grass or whatever terrain is there in your map and have them go to the same tiles in the original map.
Or, heres a few brainstorming ideas to disguise the fact that you are just providing an excuse to force the player to teleport at the very beginning of the game so that the first real playable map of the game gets it's entrance macro triggered so your variables get setup.
Add a little intro scene to the game, perhaps even a nice mosaic cut scene which when finished leaves the player somewhere appropriate to your story which could be anything you can imagine really. A room that is just all black named ASLEEP, or DREAMING, or WAKE-UP!. So basically the player has to run around in the dark till they find the secret door to leave the sleeping or dreaming state and wake up in which ever map you want them to.
The mosaic (if you use one) could be a dream the player just had. If you don't want to put much work into that you can just have them teleport (wake up) as soon as they step on any tile. Or get creative and have a room with many doors which all have different weird dream/nightmare rooms but one of them leads to consciousness.
Or the start room could be the belly of an airplane which the player is jumping out of. To jump out the player just exits through the open door of the plane and then you can just describe the player's act of skydiving and parachuting down or actually show it in a cutscene with images.
Or the player could start off in some room with a wardrobe or magic mirror or anything that could be a portal to another world.
If your game uses a world map there are lots of ways to do it depending on how much actually happens on the worldmap. If the worldmap is basically just to show the player traveling from one place to another and all the real game play happens in other maps accessible from worldmap icons representing towns or other locations then you can just start the player on the worldmap and pretty much any place on the map the player is able to enter can trigger your setup variables.
Or if the worldmap is actually much more a part of the actual game play then you can start the player off in a room represented by a spot on the map where there isn't much of anything going on like an abandoned shack, a cave, or a clearing the player was taking shelter or camping for the night. When the player leaves that location he/she finds him or herself on the worldmap.
Heres what I did for the flask.
My Flask Object:
No on use message because I want the macro to decide what message to show if any. I'd probably add another message saying your not thirsty to the macro for when you try to use the flask when T=0. But I didn't bother for the test.
Message when used is set to my msg #13:
[/img]
