EZscript, Oh behave yourself!

[qazwsx]

Oh yes, in this scenario and many others, I use flee as a means to make a character "move to" in real time. So in this case, the "fleeyer" is actually "running after" someone who actually is fleeing :lol: I suppose I should abandon this method altogether though, as the characters up and vanish when they reach the marker, which kinda breaks immersion. Another way I see of doing it is just using the "move to" cutscene command with player control enabled, although that limited to one traveler. You'll notice that I tried bypassed this in the transition between "stupidcow" and "moar" by renaming rusty. Here this could be done because the fleeyer's location at the end of the encounter was more or less determined, and he was destroyed anyway. But with the second encounter being a fight, it's anyone's guess where the future fleerer will end up. Thanks again.

[M25]

Ah, so you want to escort the character to a certain spot and then have a new encounter kick in.  It does make sense that a named character shouldn't vanish.  I'll see if I can fix that.

[qazwsx]

Any luck?

[M25]

It should be in your email.

[qazwsx]

Hi garry. Yes, it's that time of the month again :lol:
I've ran into a debilitating problem, it seems that using:

Actions: Allies Fight Villains, Allies Become Controllable, Allies Start Immediately, Villains Hunt Heroes, Villains Start Immediately, Minions Start Immediately, Villains stop when half are defeated

will imediately end the encounter after the cutscene no matter what I tried adding "villains fight heroes" to see if it helped, but it was fruitless :(
By the way, the old "villains stop when allies defeated" you sent me worked brilliantly, except now the ally had to die to end the encounter!(I was using it to give the player the choice of whose side to take) I found an ingenious(if I say so myself) work around though- simply have a villain KO cutscene which kills then immediately revives the ally. Not resquesting anything of course, just putting it out there so people know this can be done. Thanks for all the support so far,

[M25]

Yes, the 'villains stop when half are defeated' had a bug in it.  Hopefully the fix I sent clears that up.

Not sure what you mean in the second part of this message  (need more coffee I think).  What does the encounter look like?

[qazwsx]

Actions: Villains Attack Innocent Allies, Villains Fight Heroes, Allies start at distance, Allies Fight Villains, Fire, Villains start at distance, villains stop when allies are defeated

ok so there's a

Next: If villains gone:
Next: If allies defeated:

So you can choose to side with the "villain", if you know the "ally is a traitor, but for the encounter to end, the ally HAS to be koed. I thought I'd reach a dead end here and forgot about it for a while. Then while working on something else one day, I had a spark- how about adding:

Villain KO cutscene:
Ally is killed
Ally is revived

And to my shock and suprise, it was perfect and hardly noticeable! I love EZscript ^_^
Could you tell me a little about the history behind it? There doesn't seem to be much about it's development anywhere.

[M25]

The 'villains stop when allies are defeated' looks like the issue.  It's not set up to stop when the villains themselves are defeated.  I'll work up a fix.



Erm, history...  EZ script is basically my third attempt at building a mission construction system.  I did the first one way back when the mod tools came out for  :ff:.  I used it in a mod imaginatively named m25_1 (or something like that) and part of the Fantastic Force.  It let you code a mission in a few lines, but didn't work well with the saved game system, and the Irrational developers themselves said they didn't understand how the missions worked. 

The second one relied on placing invisible characters on the map (so you didn't have to write code) and putting special instructions in their names.  I used that for the Fantastic Force mod too, and I think it was included in an early version of FFX, though I didn't advertise it. 

So... by the time I wrote EZ script, I actually knew what I was doing.   :doh:  That, and a lot of functionality written by Dr. Mike, stumpy, kuertee, Epimethee and others made writing EZ script so much easier.  EZ script itself hasn't changed much at all from it's initial version, apart from bug fixes and new features. 

[Epimethee]

Quite interesting. If you ever feel like going through the details of EZ script's history and the design choice involved, it could be pretty instructive.