RPgmaker XP help

Alright I am having trouble with a few things in Rpgmaker XP and they are as follow.

1) Day and night
2)talking
3) door and chest animations


Details:

1) How do I go about making day and night?

2) When I do an automatic sequence how do I make my character and the others talk in order and by themselves?

3)How do I make the chest open and doors open when my character acts upon them?

1) Don't bother with that now, especially if you can't do #2 at the moment - it's not worth your time at all until you understand a bit of the command language involved. (Even then, think long and hard about what you actually want to do with a day/night cycle - most of the time it's just a cheap gimmick that really adds nothing to a game besides the screen turning a different color every 10 minutes or so. Also, what you want to do with it will change how it's coded)

2) If you do something like:

<> Message: "Bob: Hello Joe"
<> Message: "Joe: Who are you, I have never met you before"

Then Bob's message will come up, wait for you to confirm, then pop up Joe's reply. Everything in a command list happens in order and usually waits for the section to complete itself before moving on (Big exception: Move Event command doesn't wait directly, you need to add a Wait command)

3) Basic switch theory! Yay! You need an event with two pages.

Page 1:
Precondition: None
Picture: Closed Treasure Chest
Trigger: Action Key

<> Play sound effect, if you want to
<> Message: "Found Eke-Eke!"
<> Change Items: Eke-Eke +1
<> Switch: [0001:RDRR] ON
<>

Page 2:
Precondition: Switch [0001:RDRR] is ON
Picture: Open Treasure Chest
Trigger: Action Key

<> Message: "Empty!"
<>



Easy enough, remember that with pages it will try to activate the highest event it can - preconditions are used to restrict which page the game will activate. In this case, the game tries Page 2 first, but can't because the switch [0001] isn't activated yet. It then tries the one before it (Page 1) and since it has no preconditions, it runs it. At the end of Page 1, the switch is activated. The next time the event is triggered, the game tries Page 2 and is successful, so it prints "Empty!" like the event says and ends the event.

Well for day and night I actually want so I'll know how to do morning,noon ,night.And each will be in an event like so:

Morning: little children are playing and you can talk to them.And some of the might have a sub-quest for you

Noon: some children but I will also have theelderly outside also.Also a subquest or so might appear if you talk to a person more than one time.

Night: Older people are out and some bandit looking people walking to a rugid place in town.

And also some quest have to performed at a certain time of day.See?ANd I will also try what you have stated now thanks.I will post here if I have anymore problems.

Trust me when I say Blue Cube's advice about not doing the day and night thing until you are a bit more familiar with RM2K3 is very wise. Due to such things would be great games are abandoned. "Think inside the box, everyone else is too busy trying to think outside it." (De'vo Vom Schattenreich) But if you still want to do it try Gaming World, they have a few tutorials on it (sorry I'm too lazy to type one out for you myself). Hope that helps, good luck my friend.

Ok thanks I now have the day/night system set up and I have morning also.Though I do have a question and problem

Question:

1) Is there a way to only view a sub-quest or message at a cetain part of day?

Problem:

1) When I place a chest or door it always has a white spot above it or around it how can I make this transparent?

For the first question, BC will have to back me up on this (if it will actually work), but I'm pretty sure you could have a series of switches switching in the background to have your own timey thing, and a few common events. Then you'd just Conditional branch events on whichever character gives you the quest to check for the switch being on - if it isn't, they tell you to come back at a certain time (if you really wanted you could stick in a clock animation using pictures and even more switches ... I warn you now. I have a history for liking switches ). So...here we go!

-----

First your timer.

You need 24 switches (one for each hour - 1440 if you want to do minutes as well (can you get that many switches?)...I'm not even going to mention seconds). You could do this with 24 common events as well (easier than one controlling the whole shabang). The events will look something like this:

If Switch[0001] = ON <>Wait 60 seconds <>Turn Swtich [0001] OFF <>Turn Switch[0002] ON Else <>

I think. And then every common event is the same, but searching for different switches -- DON'T FORGET TO MAKE THEM ALL PARALLEL PROCESSES.

Little tip: To make it easier, have the switch number relevant to the time:-

Switch[0001] = 1am
Switch[0002] = 2am
Switch[0006] = 6am
Switch[0012] = 12pm
Switch[0018] = 6pm
Switch[0024] = 12am

---

As for the events that give you the mission:

If Switch[0015] = ON <>Message: So you want to help, eh? <>Message: Well my chicken escaped last night. Go find him. <>Message: Congratulations! You got a new mission. Else <>Message: Scarper you little fool! <>Message: I have no time for your frivolities!

Don't go trying anything until BC says it works. As well as having a fetish for switches, I've got a nice little track record for fatal flaws.

VARIABLES > SWITCHES

You'd do the timing in a single event that just loops around, for the most part. This is for a 24 hour system and not a pure "morning/noon/night" system.

Add one to the variable [xxxx:CurrentTime].
If CurrentTime is 24, change it to zero instead.
Wait 60 seconds (or whatever you want between the hours, maybe 15.)


If the event is activated via a switch, you can turn off the advancement of time (for being inside of a building, etc). The biggest problem, though, is that depending on the placement of the Wait command within the event, either the hour will still advance once after you stop time, or it will advance immediately after time is restarted.

From there, you can check the time as a range, like

<>Branch if CurrentTime >= 6 <>Branch if CurrentTime <= 10 <>Message: "Cube: It is waffle time!" <>Message: "The President: I do not believe it!" <> :End <> :End <>

Also, you can check to see if CurrentTime = 18, to change the screen tone to dark, or CurrentTime = 8 to change it back to light (or any number of settings) but if you're just doing morning-noon-night, then stick with the basics.
-----------------

You can always just use a varirable that goes between 0-1-2 for morning-noon-night and track the time via one of the Timers built into RM2k3. This has the advantage of being easier and directly applicable to whatever event is happening without checking the hours (if the variable is 0, it's morning, no other things are necessary to check it.) You can also stop and start time in the 'middle' of the whole thing without any problems. I'll go more into it if needed, but I have to head to work in a half hour.