Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sappho]

Thanks to Humble Bundle, I've suddenly found myself with a copy of RPG Maker VX Ace and a whole slew of DLC. I've got my idea for my first short game and I'm ready to go.

The problem is, RPG Maker is not exactly newbie friendly. There's loads of tutorials online, and I know they have their own forums for discussion, but I'd feel better asking my questions of a group of people who I know (and know to be just an all-around lovely group). I'm guessing I'm not the only one who will be trying to learn how to use this software in a hurry (would be awesome if I can get my small project done by the end of the month and submit it to the competition), so hopefully this thread could be of use to many of us.

My first question has to do with stats. My game is not going to be a fantasy RPG. In fact, it won't even include combat. I do need stats, but not the typical ones. Basically I just need to rename the ones that come with the game and possibly edit which ones are shown on the character screen.

I know this is perfectly possible, but I have no idea how to do it. Google hasn't been helpful with this one. Can any of you help me out?

I only need 4 stats. I am fine with just renaming 4 of the ones that come with the game. They will be increased through dialog options, not combat, so the experience curves and whatnot are totally irrelevant. So I just need to figure out how to rename them and how to control what displays on the character panel in-game.

EDIT: Here's a great starting tutorial for others who are just beginning: http://www.scribd.com/doc/88474618/Beginner-s-Guide-to-RPG-Maker-VX-Ace

[Skyrunner]

... They seriously put RPG Maker in a humble bundle?! Dang, I'm tempted. 60$ is way too much for a thing I could do on my own, but $12 is tempting even though I could theoretically just program eveyrthing myself.

I don't exactly remember VX's UI, but it was pretty user-friendly from what I remember. Mind getting me a screenshot of the configurations window?

(I used XP and 2012 and VX, nearly 4, 3, and 2 years ago )

edit: Figures, they have To The Moon in the bundle XD One of the best games I've ever seen finished, and made in an RPG maker.

[Sappho]

What do you mean by configurations? There are so many windows... I don't see one called "configurations." Can you be more specific about what you want to see?

The $12 is for all the DLC and extra games, by the way. You can get the base program for $1.

[Skyrunner]

Strange, I redeemed RPG Maker VX but it didn't appear in my Steam library.

[Sappho]

Yeah, that happened to me, too, and I panicked for a few minutes before realizing I had to switch to the Software library instead of the Games library. Very counter-intuitive.

EDIT: Okay, I figured out that I can change the display names of the stats on the "terms" tab in the database. Now I need to figure out how to stop the game from displaying 2 of them. And how to set up a character at the start of the game (let the player input their name, etc.).

Basically, I just want to strip most of the RPG stuff out of this and keep just the maps, dialog, and 4 of the stats which will only be modified directly through dialog options. For some silly reason I thought this should be pretty straightforward, but it seems when they say RPG Maker is a good tool, they really mean "it's a good tool for making a standard JRPG and god help you if you want to do anything even slightly different than that."

[Skyrunner]

Good guy Steam, putting stuff in a random tab.

Basically I just need to rename the ones that come with the game and possibly edit which ones are shown on the character screen.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As for deciding which parameters to show (or not), I think you need to edit the programming in the Script Editor. I found which file has the window info (Window_Status, shows parameters); I can show you what to touch if you want to hide certain stats.

edit: Basically, line 95 uses a lambda function/anonymous function thingy (I don't know because I don't use Ruby) to get a list of parameters, then draw them in order. I think.

Also, iirc RPG Maker has a large community for custom UIs and scripts that are useful, so you might want to look into those.

[Sappho]

*cringe*

Thanks very much for the help so far. I should probably mention at this point that I'm not a programmer and, in fact, despite a lifelong desire to learn to code, I seem to have an allergy to it. I've never been able to pin down why, but whenever I see a screen of code, I start to panic. More than once it has turned into a full-on panic attack with tears and screaming.

Spoiler: Small Frustrated Rant (click to show/hide)

It starts with a creeping feeling that there's a language here that everyone else in the universe (or, at least, everyone I ask for help) seems to understand intuitively, yet I can never find anywhere to learn it. What I mean is, I can look at a tutorial or even a textbook that describes in supposedly simple terms how to do something with code, and it just looks like it's written in a foreign language. I feel like I need a dictionary, but everyone just keeps pointing to the blocks of incomprehensible information and tells me that *is* the dictionary. But there's no plain English there anywhere. Then I generally start to get overwhelmed with frustration and start to cry.

I've even taking courses on programming but I could never get anywhere. Anything that's in plain English (ie IF variable = 1 THEN something END IF), I have no problem with whatsoever. But the moment I start to see numbers in brackets and dollar signs and lots of periods/decimal points, it's like my brain just switches to panic mode without asking my permission first.

For example, right now I've opened the script editor and found Window_Status. I'm scrolling through looking for anything that might refer to displaying stats, but I don't see it. I see things like "draw parameters (32, y)" and I have no idea what on earth that is supposed to mean. What does all this stuff actually do? How can I tell? How do I change what I want to change? And most frustragingly, how is it that other people seem to be able to figure it all out without any trouble whatsoever? Where are the secret meetings where all the programmers sit around defining what all the symbols will mean and then never, ever share that information with me?

What I'd like to see somewhere is something like... display: "STR; DEX; HP; MP" or whatever. If I could find something like that, I could figure out what it does and play with it until I could figure out how to change it. But there's never anything like that. Whenever I look at game code I'm astonished that the game can be full of text when the code seems to contain nothing but strange abbreviations and numbers.

So. Please excuse the rant. I'm trying not to panic. I'm sick of feeling handicapped when it comes to this stuff. I have an extremely logical, analytical, systematic way of thinking, and it seems like I should be good at stuff like coding. Somehow I just have to break through the symbols to the actual concepts they represent.

So in this case, I need to figure out what to change in order to stop 2 of the stats from displaying on the screen in-game. Actually, what I'd really like is to understand what parts of the script tell the game what to display, and what all the abbreviations, numbers, and other symbols mean, so I can just customize the screen myself. Because I want to get rid of almost everything that's in there by default.

So... I would be incredibly grateful for any help to push me in that direction.

EDIT: AHA! I'm getting somewhere! I dug around and found some of the stuff I was looking for. I commented out most of the menu commands and they disappeared! Hooray! I managed to hide the HP and MP in the status window, but not in the main ESC menu yet. Still looking. PROGRESS!

[Skyrunner]

Sure, let's start with the Status screen, which you get by going into the in-game Menu (esc), scrolling to Status, then pressing enter on our handsome player named uhhh Sappho..n. Sapphon sounds good.

Here's the entire Window_Status code for reference.

this is our ugly status screen :I



How does that incomprehensible script generate that?! Honestly, I don't know, but we can find out. I also don't know Ruby (the language used to write the script) but I'm pretty good at guessing.

The first lines go like this (remember that the pastebin link has pretty colors, which is easier to read)

#==============================================================================
# ** Window_Status
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  This window displays full status specs on the status screen.
#==============================================================================

Cool, we're in the right place.

class Window_Status < Window_Selectable

Dunno what this is, but I can guess that WindowStatus is a specialized type of Window_Selectable. Not important.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Object Initialization
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cool, let's skip this part and go to the next comments. We don't need to know how to initialize the window.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Set Actor
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know what exactly the code after this does, but I can guess (from the comments) that we're setting the actor. No probs, skip to next block.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Refresh
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This part probably is not important. I guess that it's when the screen has to be redrawn from scratch for some reason... However, since it says draw_block four times and draw_line three times, and if you count the elements in the screenshot at the top, I can guess that it fills in text in 4 areas and draws 3 lines.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Draw Block 1
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looks like I guessed right--it says Draw Block 1 in the comments, and the functions (draw_actor_name, draw_actor_class, draw_actor_nickname) look exactly like what's in the screenshot here.



In fact, if you look in the Database/Actors, the text there is exactly the same as the text here. Name: Sapphon. Nickname: Silver Reaper. Class: Soldier.

Let's look at the code.

  def draw_block1(y)
    draw_actor_name(@actor, 4, y)
    draw_actor_class(@actor, 128, y)
    draw_actor_nickname(@actor, 288, y)
  end

So it does three things. You probably know that a screen has x coordinates and y coordinates, and typically functions that draw things on the screen have an x parameter followed by a y parameter. The programmers who made this probably didn't use "y" to represent the x-coordinate, so let's guess that 4, 128, and 288 are the "x" coordinates of the text. To test, I can try changing the numbers. I swap around the coordinates for class and nickname, then run the game:



Magical

Continue with block 2:

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Draw Block 2
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  def draw_block2(y)
    draw_actor_face(@actor, 8, y)
    draw_basic_info(136, y)
    draw_exp_info(304, y)
  end

Cross-comparing with the screenshot's second area from the top, draw_actor_face probably draws the actor portrait starting at (8,y). Basic Info is probably the LV and HP and MP, and exp_info is probably Current Exp and To Next Level.

And so on for blocks 3 and 4. But there's more lines under that.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Draw Basic Information
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  def draw_basic_info(x, y)
    draw_actor_level(@actor, x, y + line_height * 0)
    draw_actor_icons(@actor, x, y + line_height * 1)
    draw_actor_hp(@actor, x, y + line_height * 2)
    draw_actor_mp(@actor, x, y + line_height * 3)
  end

That seems familiar--"draw_basic_info"... hmm...

So basically, this is a part of the code that specializes in drawing the "basic info". If I want to not draw MP, because magic is silly in my particular world, I can "comment out" line 89, or the one with "draw_actor_mp". To do that, I type a thorpe (#) at the beginning of the line. The line turns green! It also means that whatever is on that line is not counted as code, but just extra text that the game ignores.



sorcery!

I have to admit, this is a pretty nice experience for me, too. I remember using RPG Maker long long ago and back then this was all arcane magicks to me...


There is a slight problem though. You want to hide parameters, but the line has strange code in it:

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Draw Parameters
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  def draw_parameters(x, y)
    6.times {|i| draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * i, i + 2) }
  end

?!

Long things short, it basically does everything in the {}s 6 times. draw_actor_param is called 6 times, except that i changes from 0 to 5 each time it is called. So it's the same thing as

draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 0, 0 + 2)
draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 1, 1 + 2)
draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 2, 2 + 2)
draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 3, 3 + 2)
draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 4, 4 + 2)
draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 5, 5 + 2)

except with less typing. Look at the Status screen again: from top to bottom, ATK, DEF, MAT, MDF, AGI, LUK. That's six stats. So I can make a hypothesis that if I comment out the third line, MAT will disappear.



\o/


Feel free to ask if you have more questions. I'm admittedly not a good explanationator (I don't have much experience in teaching stuff y'know x3) but I'm ready to try.


edit: My code looks like this right now:

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Draw Parameters
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  def draw_parameters(x, y)
    draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 0, 0 + 2)
    draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 1, 1 + 2)
    #draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 2, 2 + 2)
    draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 3, 3 + 2)
    draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 4, 4 + 2)
    draw_actor_param(@actor, x, y + line_height * 5, 5 + 2)
  end

This is from lines 91 to 101. Right after this is "draw experience information".

[Sappho]

Actually, I'd call you quite a talented explanationator. You're a natural! This is MASSIVELY helpful. Thank you so much.

I'm going to play around with these windows a bit more now. It never would have occurred to me that the numbers and random x/y's were coordinates. Since I don't need almost any of the info that's shown by default, I want to see if I can rearrange the status screen a bit. My goal will be to have it show just the portrait in the upper-left, with the name and class to the right of that, and the 4 stats I'm using below it. If I can manage that, I might have to throw a small party in celebration, then I'll move on to trying to make a character creation screen.

I will definitely need to do a lot of coding to create the game I have in mind. It will be short, but involve a few short cutscenes and a lot of events to move the player and change information. So I'm gonna need to learn how to do all that. But if I've got someone to translate the code stuff into plain English for me, it shouldn't be too tough! (You can engrave that on my tombstone when it backfires spectacularly and I have a terminal panic attack.)

[Skyrunner]

Thanks, I feel glad for having helped. Events and cutscenes can be made without any programming, actually, and are the best part of Maker VX. I shall explain that stuff later if you need the help

[Sappho]

Okay, I'm doing well here. I've got a new question now. I want to have the portrait on the left, and the name and class to the right of that. But I want the class to appear below the name. How do I change the y-coordinate? I tried putting in "y+1" but it didn't work, and the name and class were written on top of each other.

Basically I want it to look like this:

Code: [Select]

#####  Name
#####  Class
#####

Where the #s are the picture. Ideas?

[Skyrunner]

Well, remember where the blocks are draw--lines 25 to 37.

  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # * Refresh
  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------
  def refresh
    contents.clear
    draw_block1   (line_height * 0)
    draw_horz_line(line_height * 1)
    draw_block2   (line_height * 2)
    draw_horz_line(line_height * 6)
    draw_block3   (line_height * 7)
    draw_horz_line(line_height * 13)
    draw_block4   (line_height * 14)
  end

So, draw_block1 is "defined" as

def draw_block1(y)

In 'refresh', we are calling the function draw_block1 and passing the parameter   "line_height * 0" as y. This is just a guess, but I'm thinking that the y coordinates in the various draw_something functions is pixels, which means y+1 shifts your image by a whopping 1 pixel. You can't really tell between 100 pixels and 101 pixels.

So basically, everything in the UI is drawn as multiples of "line_height" to make everything look clean. You should probably do "y + 1 * line_height" to put something under another thing.


edit

[Sappho]

Yes! That worked. Thanks! Now to try to get the skills on the screen...

[Skyrunner]

Isn't there a separate skills screen?

[Sappho]

Oh, I meant stats, not skills. And I removed the skills screen; that won't be necessary.