Part 47: Behind The Fangs, Part X - RPG Maker Basics: The Events, Part III

Behind The Fangs, Part X - RPG Maker Basics: The Events, Part III



♪ BGM: Dracula's Theme ♫

Alright, time to dive back in.



What else does the Event Commands window have to offer?



Change Equipped Items is one that's fairly simple and similar to ones we've seen before. You take either the entire party or a particular character and either equip a certain item or unequip the item in a specific slot. Some side notes - if the item you're trying to equip is not in your inventory at the time, it will be automatically added and then equipped. If the item you're trying to equip is not equippable, nothing happens at all.



Change Character HP is another simple one. You can increase or decrease the HP of either the party or of a specific character, and do it with either a specific value or a value stored in a particular variable. You can also set the HP reduction to be able to kill characters or not. So, for instance the traps that I am so incredibly proficient in stepping into would use this event command.

I think we can skip the analogue in Change Character MP. The only difference is that the "reduction can kill target" option isn't there because of course.



Another simple one in Change Character Condition. You pick who you want to target and either add or remove a condition. Easy!



Complete Healing is exactly what it says on the tin - the selected characters are healed of all conditions, including death, and have their HP and MP fully replenished.



OK, so this one requires a bit of an explanation. The Simulated Enemy Attack allows you to deal damage to particular characters, and gives you a way to have that damage be a bit more modular in regards to how much each particular character takes. So, what can you do with this? Well, Attack Power is the base attack power for the simulated attack. Now, here's something from the help file: "Because the value is not halved using this command, like it is during battle, the value entered should be half of the monster's actual attack power."

So... uh... why? Why is the simulated enemy attack subject to different calculations than the actual enemy attack? I don't understand this at all. Actually, that reminds me, I'm pretty sure I haven't actually gone over the battle calculations yet. I think I'll have to throw that in for the next update. If I have already gone over these calculations, please tell me, because I can't remember having done it.

Anyway, next we have Defense Effect and Intelligence Effect. These are on a scale from 0% to 100%, and the effect of 100% is that the damage is reduced by 1/4 of the party member's Defense in the case of Defense Effect, and reduced by 1/8 of the party member's Intelligence in the case of Intelligence Effect. Why?

Finally, we have Variance. Variance goes from 0 to 10, and it adds 5% to the fluctuation of the damage dealt for each step, so we have a maximum variance of 50%. Finally, you can store the damage dealt in the attack in a variable - this can be useful if you want to display the damage in a message or something like that.



There's Change Hero Name and also its equivalent, Change Hero Title. It doesn't get simpler. Next.



Change Sprite Association is similar, though it has a bit more use cases due to the different things you can do with sprites and the utility of the transparency command. Still, it's pretty much the same.



Change Face Association is once again similar. Remember that the face graphics set to a character have nothing to do with dialogue, it's just in the menu and battle.



Change Vehicle Graphic is the same as Change Sprite Association, except for the three vehicles the editor allows you to use from the outset. Basically, from this point on, we've changed from editing things set in the Hero part of the database to things set in the System part of the database.



That motif continues with Change System BGM, which allows us to change the BGM for different parts of the game - the same parts we could set it for in the System part of the database. VD2 uses this to allow us to pick our regular battle music, and any game that wants to have special battle music for certain fights will also have to use this, as there is only one "battle" music set in the system which would need to be manually changed on the fly.

The next three are basically the same, those being Change System Sound Effects, Change System Graphics and Set Screen Transitions. These all allow us to change different things from the System part of the database and give us no more customization than the database did. As such, we'll skip over these and head to the second page of the event commands!



Here, we have some more unique stuff that isn't just "change thing X". Let's dive in.



Enemy Encounter is what is going to be used whenever you want to force a specific fight to happen. You can set the specific battle type to be used (check back under the Terrain part of the database part of Behind The Fangs for more on that), the monster group and the battle background. Furthermore, you can set what happens when the party successfully escapes or gets a game over in the battle. If you set either escape or game over to execute a custom handler, the event command will split up and give you special areas to add the event commands for that case.



That will then look like this. Finally, the part about the first strike without affecting enemy disposition basically is a fancy way of saying "the battle starts with the party having their ATB bars filled".



Open Shop Window does exactly that - it opens a shop window. However, there's some interesting things you can do with the shop window. You can have shops where you can buy and sell, some where you can only buy, and some where you can only sell. And one thing that is particularly interesting - you can set specific handlers based on whether the player makes a transaction or not. I can imagine a few cases where that could be useful - for instance, you could use variables to keep track of how much money the party has spent at that particular shop over time, then give a discount on the purchase based on that (which would be done by refunding a percentage of the money spent).



Show Inn Message is similar. You can give the player the opportunity to stay at an inn for a certain price, and you can even have a custom handler here, which allows you to have certain things happen based on whether or not the party stays at the inn. Interesting stuff!



Enter Hero Name might be a bit confusing at first. Basically, it's the window we saw for the cheat menu in VD2 - you were actually setting the name of an otherwise unused "Cheat" hero, and the event would then check for the name you had given the hero for its handler. With it, you can set the name of any hero. The initial character set really shouldn't be saying "Hiragana" and "Katakana", but rather "Letters" and "Symbols", because that's what it actually is at this point. The help file says that "due to Japanese/English character set issues, Enter Hero Name does not work", but that must have been for an older version - it works just fine for me.



Teleport is exactly what you think it is - you pick a specific spot on a specific map, and the event teleports the party there. You can set the facing for the party if necessary or can just retain it. This is how any sort of normal transfer between maps works.





Memorize Position and Recall to Memorized Position are two commands that go hand in hand together. Basically, they allow you to save the party's position to three variables with one command and then teleport the party back to that position with another command. The refuge spell in VD2 teleporting us back to the position we warped back to Asgar's castle from works like this.

Enter Vehicle basically simulates pressing the action key in regards to vehicle actions, and as such has no options or anything like that. So basically:

- If the party is one tile away from the Skiff or Ship vehicles, the party will enter it.
- If the party is in a Skiff or Ship and one tile away from passable terrain, the party will leave it.
- If the party is on the same tile as the Airship vehicle, the party will enter it.
- If the party is in an Airship and above a passable tile, the party will leave it.

This is primarily useful for "cutscene" events.



Set Vehicle Location allows you to move vehicles across maps (or even place them on a map for the first time), either on a specific location or on a location based on variables.



Change Event Location allows you to move any event across the map. Note that you can't move events between different maps - that is a structural impossibility given the way events are constructed.



Trade Event Location does something similar, letting you swap the positions of two events.



Store Terrain ID is one of those commands that's just inherently weird to me, but I'm sure somebody smarter than me has made good use of it. It just lets you store the terrain ID of a specific spot for further use.



Store Event ID is even more baffling to me. Consider this: Do you have any idea what the ID of the event we're currently editing is? I sure as fuck don't. I have no idea how the hell you learn what ID your event has without reading it out by using this command to begin with. Why couldn't it just have been based on the event name? I guess that would have been impossible because that's a string of characters and not a number. I don't doubt that this is useful... OK, actually, I do doubt that this is useful, but that's beside the point. Anyway, the implementation of this is just weird to me, and it's probably a massive pain in the ass to use.





Finally, we have Hide Screen and Show Screen, which are exactly what you think they are. You set the transition, and they either hide or show the screen.

Well, that was a fair amount of commands, but we still have a lot to get to. Next time on Behind The Fangs, we'll take a break from event commands and instead take a short look at battle calculations.