State set to Remove by Walking won't go away

[Korokage]

I don't think there was another topic with this particular problem. If there was, I apologize for my weak google-fu.


So, I'm trying to implement a skill that makes the user invisible while on the map (well... they're opacity is reduced by half, but it's good enough for what I intend). I set up the skill so it gives the user an Invisible state. I set up the Invisible state so that it automatically goes away after x steps (for testing purposes I set it to only 10 steps). I have a watchdog common event that reduces the character's opacity and turns on a switch when it detects that the character has the state applied, and reverts the opacity and turns off the switch when the state isn't there.


And then I go to test it and the state never goes away. I have the character run around for 100 to 200 steps and the state never goes away. It's, uh, kind of important that it goes away, since a game with stealth elements can't be balanced properly if the player has infinite invisibility.


Is there something fundamental about Remove by Walking that I don't get? Is it MV? Is it me?


Here's screen shots on how I set up the skill, state, and common event. Feel free to ignore the trait I have on the state, I was just trying to see if having no traits was what was making it misbehave.





...Hope I didn't make the pictures TOO small in trying to get them to fit on here without massively bloating the message....

 

[Andar]

1) is the switch 1 really turned on at the moment? The common event will run only if its switch is ON, and you should not use switch 1 for such cases as too many options default to switch 1. If it is used somewhere else in addition to here, it might be switched off after you switched it on...


2) did you check the correct actor ("Imp")? If the skill is used by a different actor, it will affect the logic.


3) I strongly suggest placing a wait(10) or so at the end of the common event - at the moment it runs sixty times per second, creating a lot of lag. waiting for 10 frames will cause the check to be only six times per second, which should be enough

 

[Korokage]

1) I have used the F9 playtest function to confirm that Switch 1 is in fact on. I will consider using a different switch in light of this information however.


2) The only actor in the party during testing is Imp.


3) Hrm, I will add wait frames to the Watchdog event, and turn off the event that activates the switch it needs once it's done it's job for good measure as well. I will post again if that helps at all.

 

[mistFAWKES]

ehhhhhhhhh all those questions don't address the 'after walking 10 steps' issue. how are you initially applying this state? are u using skill or applying via event? if it's a parallel as well, it's giving the state to the player every frame, so it'll never decay.


do me a favour, if the initial application does indeed only fire once, disable the common event entirely, copy-paste the 'poison' state, set it to 10, see if that works or not? something weird's happening. works for me.


update: not at my coding machine atm, but i'm downloading rpgm to my postproduction machine, cause i want to see what's in that 'auto-removal timing' drop-down box........


edit: ruh roh i broke the doublepost rule. please forgive me!

 

[Korokage]

I'm applying the state via skill.


So, when I added a wait to the Watchdog common event, it took 154 steps to remove the invisibility state (which was set to remove after 10 steps).

By comparison, turning off the common event and having the skill apply Poison and setting that to get removed after 10 steps... worked exactly as it was supposed to.


I then proceeded to have the skill apply the invisibility effect without activating the Watchdog common event... removed after 10 steps.


Something tells me that there's somethin' funny about my common event.

 

[mistFAWKES]

what happens when the 'invisible' switch is set to on? are any auto-run events triggered by that switch?


also, i noticed you'd replaced one of the default 10 states w the invis state. this has caused problems for me in the past. i forfeit those defaults (use em, just dont change the nature of them, and ignore them if you dont want them). since you weren't able to repro without the common event on, i'm guessing this isn't related, but good to know going forward either way.


look around for an event that gives actor 'Imp' state 9 if 'invisible' is set to on

 

[Korokage]

The project is relatively bare. In the future there will be NPCs that react to Imp not being invisible (because, you know, small demon just casually walking down the street is kind of a big deal) but the switch basically just toggles based on if Imp is invisible atm.


Invis state is ID 11 in my project, so I don't think that's the issue... still, I think I'll change how the state grants a visual change to show that the actor is invisible. Relying on a common event set to parallel processing to quickly change things might not be wise.

 

[mistFAWKES]

nahhhh the code there should work man. i run WAY more complex parallels than you do (coming from a c++ background and dumbing down the procedures and methods and game loops). damn. really wanted to figure this out. (ex-Quality Assurance Technician..... i guess i should turn in my badge :/ )


ultimately, if you can think of a workaround, that's like 90% of design anyway hahahha let me know when you come up w a viable solution, i'd love to implement a mechanic like this! (i use the line-of-sight plugins and characters start as peasants, can branch to any class, so it'll add value to the stealthier types)

 

[Korokage]

Super weird that my watchdog common event weirds out the Remove by Steps for me.... Maybe it's because my laptop is overheating (should really get the fan cleaned...). Who knows.


Anyway, I found what I think is the dumb way around: Have the skill trigger a common event that applies the visual effect as well as turning on the Invisible switch... and then using Yanfly's Region Events plugin to turn another common event into a separate watchdog without making it a parallel process. It works perfectly, but it's dumb because this method requires flooding the entirety of every single map with the region tied to that common event just to make it work.


Maybe just getting the Watchdog to check less often might be more elegant....


EDIT: Okay, I put a conditional branch that just had the opacity reset and turning the switch off back into Watchdog and... everything worked perfectly. It still only checks every 60 frames, I didn't change how the invisibility effect is set up from the test in this post... it just works perfectly.


So I guess that solves the problem... but doesn't solve the mystery behind what caused the problem in the first place. *X-Files music plays in the background*

 

[mistFAWKES]

dude i've done QA for a variety of extremely complex, non-game products.... i can't tell you how many bugs we've closed because 'welp works now. resolved.' lmao.