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How can you trigger an event at a regular interval? It is such a basic function of most programming that it seems like it should be in this otherwise fabulous toolkit - I'm probably missing something.
I would also like to be able to use the player taking damage as a trigger to call an event. Is there any way to do that?
Thanks for your help
AG
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Originally posted by Alex Gray: **How can you trigger an event at a regular interval? It is such a basic function of most programming that it seems like it should be in this otherwise fabulous toolkit - I'm probably missing something.
AG**
We haven't found a system clock anywhere yet. The two suggestions for creating a clock are sending an NPC on an errand, and playing an animation.
------------------ everywhere else, it's -- "Nomuse"
Originally posted by Commander Arashi: **We haven't found a system clock anywhere yet. The two suggestions for creating a clock are sending an NPC on an errand, and playing an animation.
**
Here's an idea, although I'm not sure it will work. You have two events, one which is the event you want to call at regular intervals, the other with a "wait" action in it. After the "wait" action runs out, there would be a "call event" action that calls the second event. The second event does whatever you want it to, then issues a "call event" command calling the first event, the one with the "wait" action in it. This way they would ping-pong back and forth. I haven't tried it, so I don't know if it would work or if it would slow down the game too much to have these events constantly running in the background.
Of course, you would call these events when initializing your location. They could be used to increment a global variable, so the timer would continue running after you switched locations.
------------------ -- Mark
Not a bad thought - but it brings me to yet another frustrating problem - layering Conditionals seems to be a tricky business. Because Call Event pauses your current Event long enough to execute the Event you called the kind of ping pong you describe seems dangerous in the "Star Trek logic loop" kind of way. I tried to do a set of ten stacked Conditionals to get around the fact that every decision tree in the game seems to have only two outcomes but it didn't work right once it hit the second layered statement. Ugh!
Commander Arashi noted in his reply to you that a 'system clock' has not yet been found... quit looking for it (in this release).
From the earliest 'beta days' I (and others) have been requesting the implementation of such a timing mechanism and it has not yet happened.
In my opinion this is a major weakness in Coldstone. Not having a way to have 'time pass' at some rate in any Coldstone game blocks/prevents much creativity in design and implementation.
As it now stands there is no such animal as a 'time based and triggered event'... all events must be triggered by player action. There can be no day/night changes governed by a clock, no events that occur at regular intervals independent of player action and no 'onetime' events triggered by the month/day/hour in the games universe. An example of this follows:
If after a fixed time (say 2 months on the game clock) the player has not yet accomplished certain tasks or defeated certain foes or rescued someone or something then other events are modified and/or game locations are modified. Without a game clock and time based events this action is impossible.
We are left only with the 'accomplishment' of goals as a method of modifying the game and not the 'lack of success' as a game modifier.
One-half of the creativity in a game is not present.
------------------ ...it wasn't me...
Originally posted by Alex Gray: **Not a bad thought - but it brings me to yet another frustrating problem - layering Conditionals seems to be a tricky business. Because Call Event pauses your current Event long enough to execute the Event you called the kind of ping pong you describe seems dangerous in the "Star Trek logic loop" kind of way. I tried to do a set of ten stacked Conditionals to get around the fact that every decision tree in the game seems to have only two outcomes but it didn't work right once it hit the second layered statement. Ugh!
I don't want to be mean, but it seems more and more that Coldstone has about the flexbility and expandibility of EVO. Anything past the trite requires more and more drudge work (and doesn't quite work properly). I think it can still be lots of fun, but me, I'm going to continue with my EVO stuff for now.