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In this tutorial you will learn...
• About parallel and background move routes
• How to (hopefully!) get these to work
Welcome to my background move routes tutorial! I've been meaning to do a tutorial on this for quite a long time, and I have finally got round
to it - and only when I was writing it did I realise how tricky this actually is - so, you're going to have to listen well! Okay, let's get
going.
Get yourself a blank map. I'm not going to bother making a fancy cutscene for this - but for you experienced RPG Maker XP users out there,
you'll probably find it really easy
to apply this to a cutscene! (In fact, I've made a cutscene using this technique and the follow-on technique from the previous tutorial, which
you can download at the bottom of this page).
To start showing you this, I am going to have a character walking onto the screen towards another character. There will be two characters in
the background, who are going to spar at each other while the two main characters are talking. It's quite hard to explain in writing, so I'll
get straight on to doing the pictures. Here is a layout of my map. The hero is the default Arshes character at the bottom, the character he
will be talking to is the hooded man, and the background fighters are the two thieves facing each other.
Firstly, I'll make the character walk onto the screen, over to the other main character. This is just simple
move route stuff that should be really familiar by now. I'll add in some text, too. Take a look at my event commands so far (these commands
are in an Autorun event in the corner, as a normal cutscene would have):
Now, this is where I am going to start the parallel movement. To do this, I am going to use a variable called, suitably, parallel movement,
and I'm going to set it to 1. The bottom of my event commands now look like this:
This will trigger the parallel movement of the fighters, and we can also use it to switch to a new page within the autorun event. Handy, eh?
So, now to get the parallel movement going. This is where cutscening gets a little confusing. We need to go into the fighters' events themsevles,
and set up a parallel movement loop. Add a new page, and set the conditions to the variable Parallel Movement being 1 or above, and set the trigger
to parallel. See what we're doing here? Then, add in a move route that you want the event to follow. It is often simpler to use just one event
to control both the parallel counterparts,
and name it so that you know which one is the event with the parallel commands. Here is a picture of the commands that I have in the fighter's
event that I will use for the parallel commands. There are a lot of important things here, so take a good look!
Now, you'll notice that there are a couple of new things here. The Show Animation command is found on the second page of event commands,
about the seventh command down. When you click on it, you will get this box:
From here, you can choose which event will show the animation, and which animation is showing. In this event system, I am having the thieves
sparing against each other, so I am using sword and knife etc. animations to look like they are attacking each other.
The only other new thing here is the Loop command. This is found on the first page of event commands, underneath the Conditional Branch
command. Basically, this just repeats everything inside the bounds of the command unless you use a variable or switch to quit the loop or a
Break Loop command.
Finally, just a few important things to note about this event: firstly, the trigger is set to parallel. This will ensure that the animation
goes on in the background and doesn't disturb our Autorun event, which will be controlling the rest of the cutscene. Also, you will notice that
there are no Wait for Move's Completion commands in the event at all. Now, this is extremely important.
Wait for Move's Completion actually
waits for all the moves routes that are taking place at that moment to stop before continuing the event, which means that if we want to use a
move route in our autorun event, it will clash with the background event and leave huge gaps while we are waiting for all the move routes to
stop. This becomes especially apparent if you have flowing background move routes with characters walking long distances. So, rather than
using Wait for Move's Completion itself, we use a plan old wait command, which is specific to the event that it is called from - meaning that
it won't clash with other events. I find that for each movement (I.e. A jump, a step, etc.) takes eight frames at speed 3, so, adding
this up, you should be able to work out how long you need to wait for. As you can see in the first move route, the character moves right twice, which is two steps,
and twice eight is sixteen, which is the length of the wait. Get it? (Some of the waits I have rounded up a little to add a little extra time
to the pause between actions, which is why some waits are not perfect multiples of eight).
It is a bit confusing, I know, but it is really important. If we now go back to our autorun event and create a new page with the condition
being the Parallel Movement variable being one or more, this page will execute as the parallel movement starts. On this page, I am going to add
some more commands like so:
Now, you can see that after the move routes in this page I have had to use plain waits as well. This is because the parallel movement is happeneing
in the background, and, as with the parallel movement messing up the autorun, the autorun will mess up the parallel movement if we use
Wait for Move's Completion. If you try out this system now, you'll see that it works a treat!
Finally, we need to know how to stop the parallel movement. This is quite simple compared to the starting and using of it! When you get to
the point in your autorun event when you want to stop the parallel movement, change the variable Parallel Movement to the value of 2, like I
did at the bottom of the event command list above. Now you need to go back into your fighting parallel event with the loop in, and add
a new page with the condition variable Parallel Movement is 2 or higher. On that page, leave the command pane blank and set the trigger to
Action button. See the third page here:
Get what we're doing? Yup, we've just stopped the parallel movement. Now you can go back to using the normal Wait for Move's
Completion command in your autorun event. Add some commands to finish off the event, finishing up with an Action Button on a blank page
as we normally do to end cutscenes.
Phew, that was a long tutorial! And there's still one thing that I didn't manage to cover - but don't worry, I've written a
Mini Tutorial on that.
Otherwise, well done for following this long tutorial. Just so you can have a look at the effects in more detail, I've uploaded a little
cutscene demo using both the techniques that we used. It's incredibly cheesy, but it gets the point across! You can download that here:
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