Tahnan
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I've got a problem with NPC move order, and I wonder if anyone has any suggestions. (I fear it's been discussed in some thread where I can't find it.)

Suppose you want, I don't know, a goblin king NPC who takes his crown off and puts it back on--which is to say, what you basically need to do is have the Goblin King NPC disappear and a Goblin NPC appear in his place. Well and good--except that one of them moves before the other. Suppose it's the king who moves before the regular goblin. Then when the GK disappears and the G appears, it happens nicely instantaneously. Unfortunately, when he "puts his crown back on", the G disappears, but because the GK has already moved that turn, he doesn't appear until the next turn.

Of course, you could have another GK NPC standing at the ready to appear. But supposing that you want, say, the king to take his crown off whenever Beethro's within three squares and put it back on when Beethro steps out ("Me? No, nozit kingz here! Heh heh am really kingz...ah! no kingzit here!"), you're going to need infinitely many NPCs. That's a problem.

So: is there any way around this?

Sillyman
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Hmm... Petition for a new script command to be included in the next patch, namely: "Change Graphics"?

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Tahnan
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Man, yeah, that would be nice, wouldn't it.

Pilchard VIII
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I'm not sure this would work from memory, but have it so the Goblin appears before Beethro arrives in the area. Then have the goblin king disappear when Beethro's present, then wait 1 turn, then appear at the same spot again. Then when he's gone, have the goblin disappear, wait 1 turn, then appear. Have this in an infinite loop. Hopefully that will do it. So this means the NPC it will change into has already appeared.

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[Last edited by Pilchard VIII at 05-02-2007 04:07 PM]

Neathro
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You can't have 2 NPC's on 1 space I think?


whoa watch where you're signiture is going Pilchard VIII


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[Last edited by Neathro at 05-02-2007 06:17 PM]

Tahnan
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Pilchard VIII wrote:
I'm not sure this would work from memory, but have it so the Goblin appears before Beethro arrives in the area. Then have the goblin king disappear when Beethro's present, then wait 1 turn, then appear at the same spot again. Then when he's gone, have the goblin disappear, wait 1 turn, then appear. Have this in an infinite loop. Hopefully that will do it. So this means the NPC it will change into has already appeared.

Oh, fascinating idea. Unfortunately, the actual situation I'm in involves more than just two characters--so A needs to disappear and be replaced by B or C, but which one depends on where the player goes. So I don't think this'll work in my case.

Someone Else
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Here.

Tahnan
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OK, next question. Is there any easy way to (a) see and (b) change the move order of NPCs? (I know you can right-click on a visible NPC while playtesting, but if I have, say, a room with a couple hundred non-visible NPCs....)

Rabscuttle
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Order is by placement, so you can fudge it by copy & pasting the one you want to move first, then the one you want to move second. I believe that is what I did when I was coding the reverse mimics.

That's not so helpful if you want to reorder a couple of hundred though.

Neathro
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Feature request:

Imperative Move [not part of feature]say[\not part of feature], 2nd,

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schep
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Yeechh. Allowing that to be a command makes things complicated and confusing fast. For a Feature Request, I'd say:
1. Add a keyboard command to toggle whether little move-order numbers are displayed over every creature.
2. Make it so that when you hover the mouse over a creature and press Q/W or do the mouse scroll wheel, the creature gets moved up/down through the move order, as far as allowed by its type.

But yeah, messing with move order in the editor is currently a big pain. If it were me in the situation Tahnan describes, it would be time to break out my homemade *.hold editing tools....

Tahnan
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schep wrote:
If it were me in the situation Tahnan describes, it would be time to break out my homemade *.hold editing tools....

Since it's me instead, perhaps I'll break out your homemade *.hold editing tools. No, wait, I don't have your homemade tools.

In all seriousness, is there an easy way to edit holds outside of DROD itself?

coppro
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Once you decompress them, monsters can be reordered pretty easily. Some things (like scripts and other tiles) are less trivial.

The files are compressed using zlib, in case you were wondering.

Tahnan
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Oy. It's scripting that I'd most want to fiddle around with by hand. (Side note: oh, thank you, thank you, for including the ability to paste in commands from outside DROD. I've been writing Python scripts to generate series of scripting commands. It's still not fun to have to paste 140 different scripts in, but it's much easier than writing them all, or even writing one, copying the NPC, and making all the fiddling changes necessary.)

The spitemaster
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Um, if you hit wait zero, wouldn't that set the NPC to the back of the movement order?

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