#Is it hard to make a new custom event?

21 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

errant rock
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I'm probably speaking waaay ahead of myself here (please forgive me if I do XD), but is it hard (or impossible) to make a completely new scene? I've seen part on how to edit existing lines and make a custom message, but what about making a completely new scene? Ranging from making a new phone chat, editing existing scene so maybe a character appear/disappear and then do stuff in the scene, or then making a completely new scene apart from the original?

soft vigil
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evt editing is completely possible just kinda tedious-looking, youre mostly typing into a json file and then opening the game to check how it looks
(i know p5 debugs have an event editor but idk what it looks like or how to use it)

buoyant plume
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Indeed, hard/tedious but not impossible. It's also a range, as you allude to... mostly dependent on how much you can rely on BMD/BF files (simple, well-documented) vs. EVT files (tedious, poorly documented), and on copy/paste/tweak workflows vs. totally starting from scratch.

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  • For phone chats, that'd be the easiest. These are just BMD/BF "scriptchat" files, so as long as you know how to deal with flowscript (there's plenty of documentation, and it sounds like you've seen some of it, at least for messagescript) and you know where/how to call CALL_CHAT_ARRIVAL for your new chat, that should be pretty straightforward.
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  • For editing existing scenes to, say, add new characters... that's EVT editing, and that's already a bit tedious (and poorly documented -- you'll pretty much have to rely on help threads here if you want to do it without mostly figuring it out on your own). Since you're starting from an existing scene, though, it would just be a matter of adding the new character to the imports and then placing them according to where the other characters are placed. IMO, character positioning is the most annoying part. Once you have character positions, it's much easier to open up one of the animation editors (GFD studio, Blender GFS tools) to see what animations are available. But getting positioning right from numbers alone will be the biggest slog. This would be where trying to get event editors from the P5 debugs, as oceanstuck mentioned, could be worthwhile. Just to cut down on the "tweak number, save file, compile event, compile game, load game, go back and re-tweak number" loops.
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  • For making totally new scenes, I still think the most tedious part is in character positioning (and how slow the debug loop is for getting it right, unless you can figure out a better approach -- which might be possible using GFD studio or Blender, honestly), but of course this adds further complexity. An event comes with a whole host of associated files: EVT/ECS/TXT/BMD/BF/ACB/AWB. So you'd need to makes sure all of those exist for your new event, in the right places, with the right names. Your best bet would be to copy all of the files for an event that takes place in a similar location ("field", e.g., Café Leblanc) to whatever new path name(s) you want, edit it from there, and call it when/where you want in flowscript using CALL_EVENT.
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In short: I don't want to lie to you -- you will be staring at a lot of numbers if you want to make a new event (that isn't just a chat) 😅 ... but I really want to see more people trying it out, so I don't want to totally discourage you!

manic imp
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can confirm that editing existing scenes just to adjust character position is a giant pain in the ass

errant rock
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Thank you, everyone. Boy, this sounds like a real nightmare, eh? XD. But I guess what's important is knowing that it's not impossible. I got this idea to remake the animated scene into actual game scene (this way, any modded models could integrate more seamlessly into the story). But MAYBE someday in the future when I'm really bored (and got a better grasp on that part of modding)... or maybe when someone managed to develop a tool to assist with that.

soft vigil
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which one(s)

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(there was a tool but it didnt work very well and was abandoned)

buoyant plume
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Enough people have been asking about it lately that I've been thinking reeeal hard about trying to build such a tool off of my existing EVT parsing code, lol. (But nobody hold their breath 😅)

errant rock
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That's okay. It will be fantastic if such a tool will be made someday, but no rush here. Personally I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the message editing.

carmine karma
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I'm also kinda interested in trying to make a visual event editor. Completely tied up with other tool work, but I'd be interested in chucking some pull requests to the repo if such a project began...

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At the risk of sounding like a one-trick pony, I wonder if it makes sense doing it with some sort of blender plugin. Probably a bespoke tool would be smarter, maybe re-using the GFD library from GFD Studio for model loading/animating...
Anyway. Not going to derail the thread. Would be interested if there is a concerted effort from multiple programmers.

buoyant plume
carmine karma
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Yeah if there's a risk of a discussion required a separate thread would be nice.
I'm a bit worried about writing end-user programs in Python (I've done it, maybe you have too and had more luck, I found that it's a nightmare for portability) but could discuss on the point. At least there is GFD loading code written in python that can be ripped from the blender tools.

buoyant plume
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Hm, we can definitely talk portability, too... I'm not opposed to moving to something else--was also pondering a nodejs/canvas tool to just render everything in a browser... I am only slightly biased against C# because the GUI-based tools rarely work on my machine...

...aaand yeah, definitely going to want a thread for this.

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If I make one, would you like me to tag you?

carmine karma
buoyant plume
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That sounds like a nicely complementary set of skills! Hopefully it wouldn't take too much beyond a lot of the work you've already done. But, cool, I'll try to make a thread sometime tonight.