[Ohrrpgce] A few ideas and things

[Mike Caron]

On 6/4/05, TeeEmCee <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
> A few ideas. If unopposing/unimproved I might start on them soon (for
> many, I need to get to reading through and understanding custom
> first):
> 
> 
> A command to run script by id number, and return the return value. I'm
> actually quite shocked by how many people have requested this,
> including me a few years ago (or maybe it's the same 2 people
> complaining :)

I'm not sure why this is so popular, but I think it's a good idea.

> An option to skip the load screen (go straight to a new game), and
> also a command to show the load game screen (with an option to not
> actually load- like savemenu). The only problem is, if you do this and
> have an option to load in the newgame script, when the player does so,
> the game will be loaded and the newgame script run again! Any ideas on
> getting around this? Maybe something better than this option.

I mentioned this a long time ago, when we first discussed this.
Perhaps when you bypass the loading screen, you end up in save slot
"-1", which really means "no game". That would indicated to show the
menu. Then, when you actually load a game, it's save slot <whatever>,
and you bypass the menu.

> An option to set an automatic proceed on the title screen after a
> delay: Set it to 20 seconds, after which the title passes. You could
> actually use this to create intro movies: have as title "such-and-such
> presents:", set it to show for 5 seconds, skip the load game screen,
> and play a looping demo until the player presses a key, then get into
> the game.

Or, maybe, a title screen plotscript, so that you can cycle through
your movie on the title screen itself. I don't want to think about how
to implement this, though.

> Finally, what about an ability to set the number of saveslots
> available to the player at the save/load game menus, range 1 to 32. It
> would default to 4, incase someone is using higher save slots for
> other purposes through scripts.

I believe that James mentioned that the reason we can't already do
this is because he didn't want to upgrade the menu code to handle more
than 4 slots. :P

> 
> Where would this new data go? In the range 61-92 in gen()? I can't
> find any documentation of gen() that I trust- the one in custom.bas
> includes 60 where one in game doesn't, and I remember MCW pointed out
> that the wrapper scripts in plotscr.hsd alter generals that weren't in
> something James posted on CP a while ago.
> 
> Also, some script calls (as in, npc triggered, autoload map scripts,
> etc) allow you to pass arguments to the scripts. Looking at the
> source, I realise that I was mistaken the whole time that if you don't
> want them, you don't have to declare arguments on the script? It seems
> that if you do this, they will get placed in local variables. I wanted
> to have true or false passed to the newgame script depending on
> whether the player pressed a key at the title (above), this might
> interfer with newgame scripts with locals, would this be a problem?

That's interesting. I had no idea this happened. Perhaps it's because:

A) if you don't care about the argument, you leave it at 0.
B) variables default to 0

Thus, no one would notice. However, I assume this happens in the other
special plotscripts too. Thing is, no one uses a variable without
initializing it, so it's not that big of a problem.

> 
> TMC
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-- 
Mike Caron
Final Fantasy Q
http://finalfantasyq.com