Keep Events Running When Player Leaves the Map

[Redbank3k]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to RPG Maker, and I get the generals of it, but some specifics are baffling me. I was wondering if someone could help with a problem I'm up against.

Basically, in the game I'm making, you have a hunger bar that goes down incrementally and goes back up again whenever you eat food. The amount this goes up by depends on the food you eat. The bigger the meal, the more the bar increases.

To that end, you make friends with a gardener who will grow food for you if you bring him the right ingredients. To make sure I don't babble on endlessly, I'll just talk about strawberries. In order for the gardener to grow strawberries, you have to bring him two items: Compost [Item:0058] and Strawberry Runners [Item:0055]. When you give him the compost, it increases a variable [Variable:0005], and likewise with the Strawberry Runners [Variable:0006].

This then calls a common event called "Grow Strawberries", which says when Variable:0005 is equal to or greater than 1, and Variable:0006 is equal to or greater than 1, then reduce each variable by 1, wait 18,000frames (five minutes), then increase Variable:0012 (Strawberry Grown).

There is also a graphic that appears when Variable:0012 is equal to or greater than 1, so the player can then pick up the grown strawberry.

Everything works fine so long as I stay on the garden map, but I don't want the player to have to hang around for five minutes waiting for it to grow, and nor do I want them to get a grown strawberry straight away. The trouble is, if I leave the map, the event stops running and the strawberry never grows, not even if I later return to the map and hang around for five minutes.

Is there a way to keep the count going even if I'm on a different map?

Sorry if this is really obvious and I'm just being thick, and thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Wavelength]

As far as I know there's absolutely no way to run events on other maps (although I think there's a workaround script somewhere out there - @Shaz did you release something with growing timers?).

The way I would do this is to have a single Common Event running in your game to control Time. This will run on every map, so that you don't need to worry about being on a certain map to make time pass. Track Time using a single variable, or a set of variables, which is incremented each time your Time Common Event cycles. Time would be 0 at the start of your game and keep increasing forever as the player plays.

Then, whenever you enter each map, have an Autorun event that checks how much time passed since you last picked the strawberry (you might need to store the last time you picked a strawberry in a variable). If at least 5 minutes have passed, set a switch or variable or self-switch to make the "strawberry is ready to be picked" event page active for that plant.

• Alternatively, instead of this Autorun Event, you could use Tsukihime's "Custom Page Conditions" script, and make the page condition (for the strawberry is ready page) that the Time variable must be at least five minutes greater than the Strawberry Last Picked At variable).

Also, if you're using my approach, I would probably recommend using a smaller amount of time than 18000 frames before incrementing the variable, since the event might start over when you change maps. You could increment it by one, say, every 10 seconds (600 frames), and so you're looking for a change of +30 to the variable (10 seconds * 30 = 5 minutes) in order to indicate that the berry grew.

 

[Heirukichi]

I made a whole tutorial to explain how to use events for timed systems such as growing plants, spawning new things in another map, etc.
You can check it in my signature.

 

[Andar]

it is technically impossible to run events on different maps - and to give that possibility would increase the RAM requirement beyond all limits.

however as said above there is absolutely no need for such a function due to other ways to handle things, especially by using common events (which exist outside maps and always run) with variables (especially variables to store time sequences and calculate how much happens while the player is off the map)

 

[Shaz]

Multi Timers

Multi Timers 2015.11.14 by Shaz Introduction This plugin allows you to have multiple timers running at once, with no timer display, to execute any command after counting down How to use Add to your plugins folder (name is irrelevant but I use MultiTimers.js). There are no parameters to set...

forums.rpgmakerweb.com

This will allow the timer to keep running when you go to a different map.

 

[Roninator2]

This will allow the timer to keep running when you go to a different map

We'll just call that an oops. MV plugin for Ace thread.
Unless you have a script that does the same?

 

[Shaz]

Ah, crumbs! I'll blame @Wavelength for pinging me

However, the OP didn't actually say they're using Ace, and don't have anything on their profile to say so, and we all know how often people post in Ace support because they can't find MV support, so maybe it's still relevant.

I didn't write such a script for Ace, but I'm sure it wouldn't take much effort to do so, and I am just getting started moving all my scripts and plugins and seeing which ones I can improve, and this one seems like a good candidate.

 

[Wavelength]

I'll take the blame for baiting you @Shaz - my memories of seeing that script were very distant, but I felt like I remembered it was yours and I know you've done a lot of good work for both engines. And I had no idea what it was called, so I didn't look it up.

 

[Redbank3k]

I made a whole tutorial to explain how to use events for timed systems such as growing plants, spawning new things in another map, etc.
You can check it in my signature.

Thanks so much to everyone, but especially @Heirukichi. That's solved the problem, and given me a bunch of new ideas to try out!