Suggestion Add treasure box quick event text to "Terms" tab

[Soap4]

It would be nice if when using the map editor quick events (e.g. ctrl+3 to place a treasure chest), we could set the text it starts out with.

Description of the Feature:

• New entries in the Messages section of the Terms tab of the database for Quick Treasure text. There should be ones for gold, items, weapons, and armor.
• The string could use `%1` for the item name (or gold quantity). A `%2` with the item's ID would also be nice to have for plugin use, to look up and show other item information.
• Text control codes in messages to call this text. Perhaps \qtg[1], \qti[1], \qtw[1], \qta[1] for quick treasure gold, item, weapon, and armor respectively.
• When creating the quick event, its default message text would contain only the control code for the item selected.

Mockups:


Why is this feature good?
This feature is great because of the following:

• Prevents the need to go back and edit existing treasures when revising or localizing this text (ones made after this feature is implemented, of course)
• Allows plugins to affect this text by modifying the control code output to, for example, add item icons

Possible issues with this feature?
Issues that might arise from this feature:

• A tiny learning curve bump for new users wondering why their quick treasure text is just \qti[1] or something... I guess

 

[caethyril]

Like you say, I feel like the text codes would probably confuse new users, and their utility seems negligible. The [1] seems irrelevant, too: text codes don't need an argument, e.g. \$, \G.

[Edit: just realised you might have meant the [1] to mean "item ID 1"?]

Also, I'd personally just edit a copy of an existing event. That encourages people, especially new users, to actually look at their events and perhaps learn from the quick event structure.

 

[ATT_Turan]

I have to say I don't really see the usefulness of this suggestion. The quick event creation already provides a default message, if you want it to be different it's very simple to change it (or, as caethyril suggested, to copy from an existing event you already edited).

You may also have to do this for the other quick event templates - for example, I don't use the stairs walking sound effect in my door transfers.

The string could use `%1` for the item name (or gold quantity). A `%2` with the item's ID would also be nice to have for plugin use, to look up and show other item information.

Can you explain how this would be used? I can't see any circumstance in a game where you would want to display the item's ID in the text window to the player.

I don't see how it has anything to do with plugins, as a plugin could directly access the event code (or the gainItem() code) - a plugin doesn't gain any information from you printing it on the screen.

There's actually a larger issue than your suggestion of just adding these quick message terms to the list - I'd imagine that's pretty trivial. However, the game code that gives you the item and the code that displays a message window are two entirely different things.

The Show Text command has no way of knowing what item you just received, so it doesn't have anything to pull the item name from with %1 as you suggest. That aspect of it would require modification to the game's default engine just for the sake of saving some people some copy and pasting

 

[Dark_Ansem]

I decided against this for my own project, I'm making a map containing all the events of the treasure system. Ultimately I think common events are more valuable.

 

[Soap4]

You're all right in that there are workarounds in the form of copy-pasting events, common events, and whatnot. And I could make messages that are friendly to plugin-based string parsing and just copy paste those. I suppose there's no reason I couldn't just implement this control code myself, add it to my message text for a single treasure chest, and copy paste the events instead of using the quick event command. But hey, I thought it was worth asking for.

I wouldn't object to seeing similar features for other quick events, but they all have simpler mass-editing workarounds in editing the content of the graphic/sound being referenced. Like you could delete the stepping sound by replacing the wav file with a silent one. Workarounds like those have their shortcomings, of course, but so does my proposal.

Can you explain how this would be used? I can't see any circumstance in a game where you would want to display the item's ID in the text window to the player.

I was thinking less of displaying the item's ID directly to the player, and more of having it available to include in the string, so that other plugin code looking at the string can replace it with stuff based on that ID.

The code for... probably function Game_Message.prototype.allText could be modified to call a new function that replaces all instances of \qti[1] with the QTI terms string, where %1 is the name of that item and %2 is 1. With this function in place, you could amend/replace it with anything you want. You could use plugin stuff to come up with something more elaborate - maybe you want to display the item description as well, or some stats or something.

The %2 would not be useful to most people at all, but it would be available in case you are using other plugins that add control codes. Like if you had a code \itemicon[x] to insert the icon for item X, then you could put \itemicon[%2] into your Terms entry and the message window would draw the icon as it's displaying the text.

There are probably holes in the implementation of this idea - I sure didn't go through and actually try it myself before proposing it. Maybe I should have - oh well!

Even if this never gets implemented, the act of typing this response to your posts helped me come up with other approaches and encouraged me to take a crack at a copy-paste/plugin implementation later, so thanks for dropping by! This was a nice bit of "rubber duck debugging" if nothing else.