Calling Save Menu During Dialogue

[Chaos Avian]

Hey there, I was wondering if there was a way to call he save menu during dialogue. As in you press an assigned key at any given time and the save menu pops up allowing the player to save their current process.

As with regular Visual Novels you can just clicked and save whenever you want to, RM Ace can't really do that (to my knowledge/ ability). And running a Monster Girl Quest esque save feature can get quite tedious since there are no turn based fights fairly frequently.

Thanks in advance~

 

[Shaz]

Define what you mean by "during dialogue"


At any point, the player can hit Escape and choose Save from the menu, unless you've disabled it.


If that's not good enough and you want them to be able to hit a button on the map, you could either set up a common event as a parallel process, that has a Conditional Branch to check if they appropriate key is being pressed, and if it is, call the Open Menu Screen command (under Scene Control, on tab 3 of the event commands). If you do that, make sure you add a Wait 1-2 Frames right at the beginning or right at the end of the common event (not inside the true/false branch of the condition) so it doesn't make your game lag. Then turn on the conditioning switch whenever you want them to have this ability, which could be the beginning of the game.


The other option is to change your Scene_Map script to monitor for a key press (the same way it monitors for Escape to open the menu), and call the Save scene when it's hit.

 

[Chaos Avian]

Define what you mean by "during dialogue"

When the "Show Text" events are running. Since I'm making a VN the text is going to be showing pretty much constantly with no time to free roam on the map. It's like a standard VN; static background, with characters portraits with speech and events.

 

[Shaz]

You would need a script mod in that case. Displaying text is an action. You can call the save menu before the action begins (before the text appears) or after the action ends (the player presses space/enter and the text goes away). But you cannot call it while the text is actually on the screen.


So yes, a script mod.

 

[Chaos Avian]

Ah right ok thanks.

 

[Shaz]

I tried to create one but it didn't work, and I don't have enough time to keep experimenting.


I'll move this into the Script Requests forum for you, and hopefully someone will be able to help out.

 

[Yato]

I was actually working on it : )

As far as I've tested, this seems to do the job. You can set the key you want save bound to on the first line. This only allows saving after the message has finished displaying, but I assume that is acceptable.

SB = :X #Set the save key hereclass Window_Message < Window_Base  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------  # * Input Pause Processing  #--------------------------------------------------------------------------  def input_pause    self.pause = true    wait(10)    Fiber.yield until Input.trigger?(: || Input.trigger?(:C) || Input.trigger?(SB)    if Input.trigger?(SB)      SceneManager.call(Scene_Save)      Input.update      input_pause    end    Input.update    self.pause = false  endend

Keep in mind when setting the key, it's based on Ace's keys, not your keyboard. So the X I have it set to right now is actually A on the keyboard by default. Also make sure you leave the colon in front of the letter.

 

[Shaz]

What happens if you save a game at that point, then close, then reopen the saved game? If you saved during message 5 of 10, will it go back to message 5 of 10 and start playing them again automatically? Or will it start from the beginning or assume the event had run?

 

[Yato]

That was one of my chief concerns when I first read this thread, but it does not appear to be an issue. I'm guessing because $game_map is saved to the save file, the private instance of Game_Interpreter within is saved as well and it remembers where it was. It does redraw the current line when you load or exit the save screen, which I'm not sure if there's any way around. I actually had to add the recursive call in the method to ensure it did not load on the next line instead of the current one. I figure there must be a better way, but I'm not sure what it would be.


It does seem to do strange things if you change the event after saving where it doesn't acknowledge the change on a continued event (because the event is loaded in the interpreter I guess?), but that shouldn't be an issue with a complete game.