Chapter 4: Scene Construction (pt. 1)
Now that we’ve worked our way through the intricacies of the event structure, here comes the fun part: filling in the rest. To do that, we’re going to have to learn some basic event codes.
The Darkness is your Ally
The first step to mastering events is knowing how to use the fade-ins and cover of darkness properly.
In the Chapter Data Editor (towards the bottom), you’ll see this option. If you’re writing over Lyn’s Prologue, it’ll already be set to fade to black. You can choose to have it go straight to the map (it’ll always start at the top-left corner).
Personally, I always use fade to black. Even for scenes that start on the map, since you can use the darkness to change the camera position if you want the scene to start at a specific area, and you can preload the units before starting the scene. When you have fade to black on, you’ll need to use a special code to end the covering black effect.
OOBB
Yup. That’s it. If you’re opening your chapter with a dialogue sequence, you don’t even need OOBB because loading a background will also end the black out effect.
FADI time //Fade-in with black
FADU time //Fade-out with black
FAWI time //Fade-in with white
FAWU time //Fade-out with white
Time is our only parameter here. I recommend 10 for normally-timed fades, and 5 for slower-fades. Anything above 10 tends to look choppy to me. Play around with the values to get the effect you want (you can have a fast fade in and slow fade out, etc).
While the map is faded in, absolutely nothing will appear on-screen. You can take advantage of this to load units so that it appears that they were already on the map, shift to a cutscene map, load conversation backgrounds, and more.
Manipulating darkness is one of the best ways to give your events that extra level of “polish.” Play with it; it may seem somewhat trivial (I thought it was for some time), but you can be surprised how good your events can look by using darkness to properly hide things.
Basic Text
The next most-essential component of our chapters is text. I’m not going to go in-depth teaching actual text editing, there’s another tutorial for that. Here are the codes you’ll need to know for text.
We will need to add a few more codes to our repertoire, however.
FADI 10 //obligatory fades
BACG backgroundID //displays the background
FADU 10
TEX1 textID //displays the text
REMA //clears the screen
You can, of course, load text without a background. The portraits just display over the map. We’ve got three new codes here, all of which are pretty straightforward.
To find your textID, simply open up FEditor:
That bit that’s highlighted there? That’s your textID. For the backgrounds, you can find those lists for FE6, FE7, and FE8. So, let’s go back and fill in the blanks from the above code.
FADI 10 //obligatory fades
BACG 0x00 //displays the Lyn tent background
FADU 10
TEX1 0x815 //displays the text at input index 0815
REMA //clears the screen
Let the Music Play!
Another one of the absolutely basic staples.
MUSC songID //plays the specified song
You can find lists of songs in your respective Chapter Data Editor folder. In previous versions of EA the code was formerly “MUS1”, but has since been changed to “MUSC”.
MUEN time
This code ends the current song playing, fading it out based on the time specified.
The chapter data editor gives you the option of specifying a song to play at the very beginning of the chapter. Personally, I’ll often just use a MUS1 at the top of my OpeningScene (I like having things contained to my event.txt whenever possible, but it’s a matter of personal preference).
Camera & Cursor Controls
The camera is trained to automatically follow unit movement. It will focus on a moving unit as it moves. This can be useful at times, but sometimes you’ll want to keep the camera static to hide a new unit that’s about to enter the scene, to keep the focus on a commander as his army sorties, etc.
CMOF //Turns off the camera's automatic follow.
CMON //Disables CMOF, turns the automatic follow back on.
You can also force the camera to focus on a particular coordinate or character.
CAM1 [XX,YY] //Focuses camera on tile XX,YY
CAM1 characterID //Focuses camera on a certain character
And also you can force the cursor to flash.
CURF [XX,YY] //Flash cursor on tile XX,YY
CURF characterID //Flash cursor on specified character
It’s all fairly basic stuff, non?
Loading & Moving Units
Of course, all the scene codes in the world won’t build a chapter without any units. There’s certainly more to cover, even with just these four topics, but we’ll come back to the more advanced scene constructions later in the tutorial.
Now that we’ve got a handle on creating units from the previous chapter, we’ve got to start getting them onto the map. In order to accomplish that, we’ll need to use this event code:
LOU1 UnitGroup
The only parameter is a pointer to the unit data that you’re trying to load. Let’s provide an example, shall we?
Cornwell:
UNIT Raven Hero 0x00 Level(10,Ally,False) [3,1] [3,1] [Berveil,SteelAxe,Elixir] [NoAI]
UNIT
.......
OpeningScene:
MUSC 0x0034 //Plays music 0x0034
LOU1 Cornwell
ENUN
CAM1 Raven //Puts the camera on Raven before we see the map
BACG 0x10 //Sets the Background to 0x01, which displays without a FADU thanks to the 'fade to black'
TEX1 0x0820 //Displays text at index 0820
REMA //Wipes the screen of backgrounds, portraits and text.
ENDA
And there Raven will be after the REMA, his unit on the map with the camera centered on him.
You’ll notice that the unit I loaded simply stays in place. When you have loaded units moving to their starting coordinates, you’ll want to follow your LOU1 with another code:
LOU1 Cornwell
ENUN //Tells game to stop reading events until all units in position
Once you’ve gotten units onto the map, you’re free to move them around as you wish. Keep in mind that you can pre-program a movement when you load a unit by having different load/start coordinates.
MOVE characterID [XX,YY] //Moves character to specified coordinates.
MOVE [X1,Y1] [X2,Y2] //Moves character on the first set of coordinates to the tile specified by the second set of coordinates. Used to move generics.
You can also add a third parameter to adjust the unit’s speed.
Wrap-Up (pt. 1)
One more basic code to cover before we move on (because there’s nowhere really good to stick it):
STAL time
This will, as the name implies, stall the reading of events for a set amount of time.
Before we move on, you can study this sample OpeningScene I’ve constructed with everything we’ve got here.
OpeningScene:
MUSC 0x0023 //plays "The Kingdom of Bern"
CAM1 [11,10] //sets the camera to center on those coordinates
OOBB //ends the fade to black effect
STAL 20 //stalls
CURF [12,7] //cursor flash on that coordinate
MUEN 5 //ends the music
FADI 10 //fade in
BACG 0x15 //loads "Castle Hall" background
FADU 10 //fade out
TEX1 0x815 //displays that text
REMA //clears screen & returns to map
LOU1 Good //loads units under the "Good" label
ENUN //waits for units to finish loading before continuing events
ENDA