What do the different unit load commands do?
As you may have noticed, there are quite a few different unit load commands in the event editor, and they all do slightly different things. Most of these commands use one of three different load types: LOAD1, LOAD2, or LOAD3, which you’ll see in parentheses at the end of the command description.
LOAD1 commands are generally used for loading units who are actively involved in gameplay. It’s used for loading player units who join the party, and enemy/NPC units who start on the map. The primary LOAD1 command is “Load units and move. If player unit, join party (LOAD1+ENUN)”.
LOAD2 commands are generally used for loading specific units in cutscenes. Player units loaded with LOAD2 will not join the party (though of course, it won’t remove units who are already in the party), so it’s useful for when you need to show blue NPCs. The primary LOAD2 command is “Load units and move (LOAD2+ENUN)”.
LOAD3 is a bit different, and its name in FEBuilder, “load player units for cutscenes”, is a bit misleading. Like the other LOAD commands, LOAD3 takes in a unit group, but the units loaded will not actually be the ones shown in the Unit Placer. Instead, LOAD3 will load the first X units of the player’s current party, based on recent deployment order, in order of the slots in the Unit Placer list. This can be useful for cutscenes where you need to show a large group of the player’s units but don’t need to specify which ones in particular.
In most cases, you will use variants of LOAD1 and LOAD2 to load groups of specific units. If you are loading units to appear on the map in gameplay, or if you want units appearing in a cutscene to join the player’s party as new recruits, use LOAD1. If you are loading units purely for cutscene purposes, use LOAD2.
The one other load command to be aware of (which probably uses one of LOAD1 or LOAD2 internally, but I don’t know the specifics) is the “Load reinforcements” and “Load reinforcements (Hard mode only)” macros. These commands should be used in all cases where you load enemy reinforcements during a map. The big thing that sets them apart from the other load commands is that, as units load in with these macros, the camera will automatically pan to show where they’re loading. This may seem like a minor detail, but it’s extremely important to do for the player to be made aware of reinforcements showing up. If you’re thinking “haha I’ll not do that to make it a surprise”, no. Stop. Don’t. That is simply bad design. The reinforcements are visible information anyway, don’t make your game intentionally obstructive to the player’s ability to play.
How do I make the camera pan to show reinforcements as they appear?
See paragraph above.
How do I make a unit appear in map events even if they died?
There’s a table you can find in the patches list called the “IsSethLArachelMyrrhInnes Table”. Any unit included in this table will be loaded with LOAD2 even if dead. It got the name because those four units – Seth, L’Arachel, Myrrh, and Innes – are the units in vanilla FE8 who display this behavior.
(For dialogue-only scenes, nothing in the text engine checks the living status of the unit a portrait belongs to, so you don’t need to do anything special there unless you want a unit to not show up when dead, in which case you’d need a CHECK_ALIVE conditional and alternate text entries.)