MrMo's ABS Ultimate

[DerVVulfman]

Dear Zexxion. Thank you for showing interest, and what you presented to me is among an extremely small portion of Q&A for this system. In fact, the next time I work on the manual that comes with the demo download, I will include it.

Since my hard-drive crash, I have to do a full rewrite anyway since my help file's project data got trashed.

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QUESTION 1: Is there any way to remove the options that appear when you "talk" to your party members?
Line #569 of the configuration section (or 1 - Config ), you will find the value of "COMPANION_COMMAND" which turns on and off the menu dialog window for your companions. Mind you, the answer to your next question will also take care of this funtion.

QUESTION 2: How would I only make 1 person in the party playable, and the others be "support" characters. In other words, only play as the main character, and if he dies the game is over.
Line #43 of the configuration page is where you will find the "COMPANIONS_ON" setting. The demo defaults this to true, but turning it off will disable your party members from showing and interacting in combat. This will NOT prevent them from being playable.

But before I get to that, the next line below is the COMPANION_MAX value. This indicates how many party members you will have in your game. By default, you probably just want a 4 member party like the default system. This lets you increase or decrease the size of your party. Be forewarned that this doesn't change your main menu. You'll need a custom script to accomodate parties larger than 4.

With that out of the way, back to 'other' party members in play. You want it so only the main hero is in play, and no others participate. Line #53 holds what is called the PREVENT_ROTATE value. Unlike the others, this is not a simple true/false value but a number that represents an RPGMaker XP switch you control in the map events. As you can see, it is set to '2' in the demo. By creating an event on the map, and bringing up a 'Control Switches' in the list of map events, I can make it so you cannot switch from one player to another by setting Switch #2 (yes, that #2) to true. Now, you cannot switch from one party member to another in your game, and more importantly it will not switch from your 'dead hero' to the next available party member. Game over, man! Game OVER!

QUESTION 3: What happened to the menu button. I can't seem to open the menu after adding this abs.
Now you got me there. The demo uses Cybersam's Input system, a classic from 05, which doesn't hamper the ESC button. However, certain other buttons like [X],[D] or the like could be replaced as they are used for various ABS actions. I literally just hit [Esc] to get into the menu 5 minutes ago (at the time of this writing).

QUESTION 4: Is ther a way to disable the abs in certain areas? Ex: Houses, shops, etc.
Certainly! The demo has a couple characters to the very right and above the player when it starts that shows how to turn on and off the game's HUD (Heads Up Display) as well as turning off the ABS system itself. A very useful set of systems. To turn off the ABS, you merely need to create an event that runs a script call of '$ABS.active = false', and use '$ABS.active = true' to turn it back on. Similarly, there are commands to run to turn on and off the hud, but an RPXP Switch (like the one for PREVENT_ROTATE) handles the minimap. Again, the demo has two events that show how to do this.

Oh, and look at the "What's Up RMers? thread and you'll see I've been a little busy recently. Hehehe.