If ... 
        Wait for clean room 
     End 
  If End 
  Appear 
  Imperative 3
Label loop
  Face direction clockwise
  Go to loop

Nuntar wrote:
For a template, look in the "tiles" folder of the TSS Custom Elements Bonus Pack. It's a 176x22 image consisting of eight 22x22 tiles, corresponding to the character's facing in the following order: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW.

For the script, copy the following and ctrl-shift-B to import it. Note that you should not check the "Visible" checkbox.

  If ... 
        Wait for clean room 
     End 
  If End 
  Appear 
  Imperative 3
Label loop
  Face direction clockwise
  Go to loop

Xindaris wrote:
Ok, for help with custom tiles (which I assume is what you mean by sprites), I've attached something I made to this post, have a look. This image should be decently instructive:

-The grayish color that fills most of the image is interpreted by DROD as TRANSPARENT. So use that color for parts that should show what's under your character.
-The "spiky" part of each bit, where it's only 1-2 pixels wide, points in the direction the tile corresponds to, so you see it goes N, NE, E, SE, etc. on to NW.
-Each direction is a 22x22 pixels image all its own, and there are 8 directions, which adds up to 176x22. The tiles occur one after another with no border, so it may be helpful for you to temporarily place a line or pixel of white on the rightmost column of each 22x22 tile to help yourself see where one ends and the next starts while editing. If you want to have a "neutral" tile for some reason you can tack it on as another 22x22 on the far right of this image.
-If you want to animate, you can do it in one of two ways:
--LOOPING FRAMES: You add each successive frame of the animation from top to bottom, again in 22x22 squares. I think it supports up to 6 frames? In DROD you set the "animation speed" to tell it how fast to play those animations. If you have a bunch of the same character facing the same direction in the room they'll all have the same animation frame playing at the same time, and whether or not that's desirable depends on your intended use.
--RANDOM FRAMES: You add just one more frame to the second row of each direction and it will randomly display that one instead of the top one. Then there's a bunch of stuff that really only applies to sworded characters and I've never used it so I direct your attention to the F1 DROD help file for that. Not setting an animation speed (leaving it 0 I think) defaults to this option.

You also have the option of doing just 1 22x22 tile as your image, which it will interpret as applying to all directions.

kieranmillar wrote:
Post your script here (Ctrl+A to select it all, then Ctrl + B to copy to clipboard).

Label Spawn
  Wait 15
  Generate entity Roach queen,7,7,South
  GoSub Spawn

Xindaris wrote:
I don't get the impression that that's your entire script, and it's hard to have any clue what the problem could be without seeing at least a decent chunk of it. Maybe you could just upload a sample hold with one room containing the thing you're trying to script.

My guesses based on your description of the symptoms include the entity not appearing because you didn't put a non-custom monster in the room to make it not yet cleared on turn 0, the script having an "infinite loop within 1 turn" which DROD does not like, or some other kind of misunderstanding of how DRODscript works.

Lucky Luc wrote:
Right now, the only thing you're telling your script to do is to spawn a monster every 15 turns. It won't ever do those other fancy things unless you're telling it to.

Nuntar's script already solves a lot of your problems, though you'll need to make slight adjustments to make it work for your purposes. You can just copy it as it is and paste it into DROD with Ctrl+Shift+B.

Here's a breakdown of how Nuntar's script tackles your questions:

- Make the character a required target:
This is simple. Just add the script command "Imperative Required target" before the main loop of your script. After "exporting" it from DROD, it will only show up as "Imperative 3", but that's basically the same thing.

- Make the character not appear if the room is in a cleared state:
The simple approach here is to check whether the room is in a cleared state to begin with and end the script if that's the case. This can however run into problems with seeding beacons, so if you plan to use them, it might be the better options to just skip to the end of the script with another goto if the room is cleared. Also note that this kind of setup always requires at least one regular monster in your room (which you can kill on turn 0 if you wish to, though). Note that you'll have to uncheck "visible" in the scripting dialogue or add an "Disappear" after the skip label if you want it to work properly.

- Make the character rotate every turn:
That's Nuntar's main loop. An elegant way to combine this with your main loop is to add a counter variable which increments every turn. If it hits 15, generate a roach and reset it to 0. Note that in my script, I named the variable ".Counter", starting with a . to make it private, i. e. only accessible by the character initializing it. Not really necessary in this case, but a good practice if you know that your variable doesn't need to be global.

So here's a reworked version of Nuntar's script which should hopefully do what you want it to do (again, use Ctrl+Shift+B to paste it into DROD):

Click here to view the secret text

×

  If ... 
        Wait for clean room 
     Go to skip
  If End 
  Appear 
  Imperative 3
  Set var ".Counter" = 0
Label loop
  Set var ".Counter" + 1
  If ... 
        Wait until var ".Counter" = 15
     Set var ".Counter" = 0
     Generate entity Roach,30,21,South
  If End 
  Face direction clockwise
  Go to loop
Label skip

Xindaris wrote:
That's now how default script works.

-If you want every character that looks a certain way to have the same script, you set that script as the default script of that character type and put down characters, set their type to that character, and do not put any commands in the individual characters. Any commands in an individual character will make the character only run its individual commands and not any of the default ones.
-If you want each individual to have a totally different script, you put commands into the individual members of the character type.

If you have some simple formula for where the spawning beacon thing should place a roach queen relative to its own location (like "2 tiles east of myself" or whatever) you're looking at a basic myscript problem. If they each have some wildly different location they're supposed to put the queen and you ever want to have more than one in the same room you've got no choice but to set each one up completely individually, but you can at least copy-paste the scripts with ctrl+b, ctrl+shift+b.

  Wait for entity Player 2,28,2,28
  Teleport Player to 17,12
  Speech "",Normal,Self,0,WarpTile_warp.wav

Camwoodstock wrote:
Again, figured I'd re-use this thread for another question.

What about making the character hold a custom weapon? Is that do-able?

  Wait for entity Player 16,22,16,22
  Cut scene 333
  Wait 5
Label rotate
  If ... 
        Wait until var "_O" != 0
     If ... 
           Wait until var "_O" = 5
        Set var "_O" - 2
        Wait 1
        Go to rotate
     Else If 
           Wait until var "_O" = 3
        Set var "_O" - 3
        Wait 1
        Go to rotate
     Else 
        Set var "_O" - 1
        Wait 1
        Go to rotate
     If End 
  Else 
     Wait 1
     Go to scene
Label scene
     Speech "doy",Aggressive,Player,0,.
     Wait 3
     Cut scene 0

Xindaris wrote:
I would probably use Wait 0's instead of Wait 1's, but that choice isn't terribly important. Jittering sounds like the wait commands aren't going through properly, which may be myscript shenanigans outside of the section of script in view here.

I can't see anything in the posted section of script that should cause it to do anything but go straight to "scene" if Beethro is already facing NW.

The if _O = 5 section appears to be attempting to set the orientation to 3, which means it checks if Beethro is facing EAST and then if he is, instantly turns him WEST. Which looks pretty weird.

The if _O = 3 section is checking if Beethro is facing WEST and, if he is, sets his orientation to NW. Seems normal enough.

The Else section following those will make the following orientation changes:
NE --> NORTH --> NW
SE --> SOUTH --> SW --> EAST(!)
The last of those changes seems unintended if your goal is to make Beethro "naturally" turn all the way around as he would if the player needed him to be facing NW for some reason.

My inclination would be to deal with every possible non-NW orientation (that is, 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 = N NE W E SW S SE) as a separate case, and setting _O to exactly the next thing I wanted it to be in each of those 7 cases instead of trying to use subtraction from the earlier value of _O to make it happen. Probably I would do something like
SE --> S --> SW --> W --> NW
and separately,
E --> NE --> N --> NW

averagemoe wrote:
You'd have to make a custom tile set for that. I suggest setting up some image floor that's the exact shade of grey the engine flags for transparency, and getting a screenshot of some real citizens of the desired color facing all 8 directions on said floor. Then it's only a matter of editing the image to get them in the right order.

MelindaAmbient=above ambient.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 1.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 2.ogg
MelindaPuzzle=The Reward.ogg
MelindaExit=city win level.ogg

Camwoodstock wrote:

averagemoe wrote:
You'd have to make a custom tile set for that. I suggest setting up some image floor that's the exact shade of grey the engine flags for transparency, and getting a screenshot of some real citizens of the desired color facing all 8 directions on said floor. Then it's only a matter of editing the image to get them in the right order.

Ah. That'd make sense.

...in more confusing situations, though, I'm working on a custom tileset (for funsies, not 100% if i'll release it) yet I'm having an issue getting it recognized by the DROD engine.

Y'see, I'm not sure if it's an issue with the images, or, what, but it just will not load the style. I added the strings to DROD's data file, yet, nothing.

Attached is a .ZIP file with all of the relevant bitmaps, and the "Tiles" .TIM file. In addition, here's the music strings I attempted to input in drod.ini:

Click here to view the secret text

×

MelindaAmbient=above ambient.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 1.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 2.ogg
MelindaPuzzle=The Reward.ogg
MelindaExit=city win level.ogg

Camwoodstock wrote:

averagemoe wrote:
You'd have to make a custom tile set for that. I suggest setting up some image floor that's the exact shade of grey the engine flags for transparency, and getting a screenshot of some real citizens of the desired color facing all 8 directions on said floor. Then it's only a matter of editing the image to get them in the right order.

Ah. That'd make sense.

...in more confusing situations, though, I'm working on a custom tileset (for funsies, not 100% if i'll release it) yet I'm having an issue getting it recognized by the DROD engine.

Y'see, I'm not sure if it's an issue with the images, or, what, but it just will not load the style. I added the strings to DROD's data file, yet, nothing.

Attached is a .ZIP file with all of the relevant bitmaps, and the "Tiles" .TIM file. In addition, here's the music strings I attempted to input in drod.ini:

Click here to view the secret text

×

MelindaAmbient=above ambient.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 1.ogg
MelindaAttack=above cont 2.ogg
MelindaPuzzle=The Reward.ogg
MelindaExit=city win level.ogg

Melinda=Melinda
Style=Melinda