Help with LadyBaskerville's Summoning Plugin

[dennis_the_tennis]

Hi, first post here so I hope this is the right place to ask for help. I'm building a pokemon-ish game using the summoning plugin by @LadyBaskerville and ran into an issue with it. I posted this on the plugin's thread, but I think this might be a better place to post so I'll put it here instead.

Basically the problem is that the summoning spell uses your normal turn, so if the user is faster than the enemy they will summon the actor and then the enemy will attack before the summoned creature gets to act. On the other hand, if the summoner is slower than the enemy, they will get hit before being able to summon. I want to make it so that the summoner can cast the spell first (being faster) and then immediately command the summoned actor, which then acts according to its speed value, either out-speeding the enemy or not as appropriate.

I tried a couple fixes that almost worked, but not quite. Here's what I wrote in the other thread:

First I used Yanfly's Instant Cast plugin, and made all of the summon spells instant. This looked like it solved the problem (allowing me to command the newly summoned creature immediately) but occasionally the enemy got to attack first anyway (before I got to select a command for the summon). This NEVER happened during battle tests from the database, only in the actual game itself. Also, if I saved, quit, and reloaded the game, the problem would go away, and the instant-cast summon would work properly, but only for the first battle of the play session. After that it was a toss-up again. I think this must have something to do with some sort of information that persists on the summoned actor between battles, but I can't reliably reproduce this bug and I'm not sure what could cause it.

The second solution I tried was using Yanfly's STB battle system. This always allows me to command the newly summoned creature immediately, since it inserts the summoned actor into the turn order directly after the summoner. However, that also bypasses speed checks entirely. What I'd prefer is if the summoned creature has its agility evaluated like normal and inserted into the turn order in the appropriate place, rather than just below the summoner. This already happens at the start of each round, I just also need it to happen as the monster is summoned. Otherwise it can result in a slower summoned monster getting to attack a faster enemy first, and then getting hit back twice in a row, once from the faster enemy's first turn, and then again when the next round begins and the slow summoned monster is put into its rightful place in the turn order below the faster enemy.

Any ideas as to how to fix either of these problems? Or a simple fix/plugin option for letting the summoned actor act immediately?

Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated. Thanks for the great plugin!

 

[LadyBaskerville]

I will see if I can add an option to let the summoned actor take an action in the turn they were summoned. The problem is that this would change the normal flow of the default turn based battle (i.e. action selection for all actors -> actions being executed in order depending on agility; when the summoned actor appears in this second phase, the action selection phase is already over) and probably require quite a bit of reprogramming of the battle system, which I'm not sure I can do...

I'll try to at least make the plugin work reliably with Yanfly's Instant Cast, though. If you could post screenshots of your setup (actors, enemies, troop) where it worked in battle tests but not always in the game, that would be much appreciated - even if the bug doesn't happen reliably, it will at least save me some time finding a setup where the bug happens occasionally

 

[dennis_the_tennis]

Well, this is embarrassing. I did some more testing and managed to figure out the very convoluted rules under which this problem could be reproduced, and I had a whole big post typed up ready to send in the desperate hope that some javascript whiz could somehow make sense of it all, and then I remembered that plugin order matters some times and tried moving the LB_Summon plugin above the other ones, and now it all works perfectly. Whoops. Next time that'll be the first thing I try.

Thank you anyways for the quick reply, and the fantastic (and bug-free, it seems ) plugin!