Common Sense Corner

[DerVVulfman]

Hey, on the subject of lengthy dialogs with NPCs, let's not forget the ever loved (loathed) cutscenes.

You know how it is. Sometimes, someone makes a nice cutscene sequence that is interesting. But you had to restart the game and ... oh, dear lord... THERE IT IS AGAIN!. What happens if you died before saving..? ACK! THE LENGTHY A** CUTSCENE AGAIN!

Now I'm not saying that you should eliminate cutscenes. But nor am I saying make them epic monologues of psychobabble and filled with tomes of techno-crazed knowledge. Rather that, use a mechanism to allow the player to SKIP THE WHOLE THING AT HIS/HER LEISURE!!!!!

My personal favorite within RPGMaker XP is by way of having two parallel process events running. ONE event controls the dialog.... your normal garbage "GUY TALKS" ... "OTHER GUY TALKS" ... "PLAY MUSIC" ... "MAKE SOUND OF GUN GOING OFF" ... "SHOW BLOODY CHARACTER"... "CUE THE SCREAM". BUT at the same time, the second parallel process event does a check with the 'Button Input Processing' command to see if any key was pressed. If it was, stop all the music, kill the sound effects, and just go to the next map.