Auto Event Loops?

[Wavelength]

Based on the current bugs I have in Perversion & Paper, it'd be really tough to test it myself, so I was hoping someone would know this:

Does the "Auto Event is caught in a Loop" message which breaks your game happen during normal gameplay, or does this only occur in Playtest mode? If it happens during normal gameplay, how many loops does it take before this triggers and forces you back to the main menu?

I have an event in the game which loops through twenty modes and keeps asking you questions until you get ten right. To the system, this can apparently look like an infinite loop, even though it isn't. I would like to leave it alone if I can, but I don't want to risk breaking the player's game just to do so.

Thanks!!

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

Yes, it loops.

[Perversion]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

I believe it's 3-5 iterations of the loop before it crashes the game. Can't you just "play" the game to see if it crashes, instead of playing in playtest mode? And yeah, you're not impartial, but you could purposely pick the wrong answers to see what happens.

[Wavelength]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

I believe it's 3-5 iterations of the loop before it crashes the game. Can't you just "play" the game to see if it crashes, instead of playing in playtest mode? And yeah, you're not impartial, but you could purposely pick the wrong answers to see what happens.

The short answer is that I can't! Due to problems in my main event shell, I need to use the Playtest's "move location" function to get to the area where this event occurs. Of course, I could work around it by purposely breaking the shell and adding an event that automatically takes you there, but I don't want to mess with something that's already broken! I've continually picked wrong answers in Playtest mode, of course, and found that it breaks the game.

I appreciate your responses, both of you guys. I don't see the value of having it break your game in normal Game mode when you run into a so-called infinite loop, so I'm really disappointed to hear that this is probably the case. I'll have to either add in a check that breaks you out of the loop if you've gotten a certain number of answers wrong, or redo it to give you a fixed number of questions. That blows.

[Lausen]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

I haven't touch RPGM3 in so long so I could be way off here, but...

I'm pretty sure it's 3 times. I don't know the exact situation or how this scene in the game plays out, but could you warp the player back onto the map to restart the questions? I'm guessing right now at the end of your 20 modes it transitions back to the first mode. If you leave and come back to the map I'm thinking the loop count would reset. Of course it wouldn't look as smooth.

Again, I don't know the situation that triggers it, but is it possible to make it after the first auto event plays throught the questions the player has to activate an event to get the questions again? You wouldn't have to worry about a loop then.

Like I said, I'm so rusty with RPGM3. I'm just spitballing here.

[Wavelength]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

I haven't touch RPGM3 in so long so I could be way off here, but...

I'm pretty sure it's 3 times. I don't know the exact situation or how this scene in the game plays out, but could you warp the player back onto the map to restart the questions? I'm guessing right now at the end of your 20 modes it transitions back to the first mode. If you leave and come back to the map I'm thinking the loop count would reset. Of course it wouldn't look as smooth.

I might be able to make that work, and it's a cool idea, thanks. The only problem is that you'd be nearly guaranteed to have this happen, since the RNG can insert you into the loop as late as Mode 16; you don't always start at 1.

I'm going to look into the possibility of having it fail you after X number of wrong answers (which won't affect the results of the event, but Wavelength will bemoan what a clod you are, and how now you're boring even HIM) - and if that's not feasible, I'll try this nifty warp trick.

Again, I don't know the situation that triggers it, but is it possible to make it after the first auto event plays throught the questions the player has to activate an event to get the questions again? You wouldn't have to worry about a loop then.

Like I said, I'm so rusty with RPGM3. I'm just spitballing here.

A nice idea that would work most of the time, but I'd be playing with fire if I did it here, because I have several Auto Events playing off of one another here, and I don't want to even think about what would happen if enough in-game Time passed to get to the next time period.

Thanks very much for the ideas, they're truly appreciated.

[Perversion]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

Yeah, multiple auto events in one area, especially those working with each other, is asking for nothing but problems. I know you've mentioned before, Wave, that you had the same issue I did with A Series Aside where the coding was exactly right, but having too many auto events does not trigger until you either leave the area and then return, or go to the menu screen and exit back to the game, where it will trigger.

This is why I, by necessity, had to remove a few auto events from some of the minigames, and instead had to rely on clunky button presses to trigger the events instead of having it done automatically. Because, sadly, I could not trust the auto events to trigger as they were supposed to 100% of the time.

[Wavelength]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

Yeah, multiple auto events in one area, especially those working with each other, is asking for nothing but problems. I know you've mentioned before, Wave, that you had the same issue I did with A Series Aside where the coding was exactly right, but having too many auto events does not trigger until you either leave the area and then return, or go to the menu screen and exit back to the game, where it will trigger.

This is why I, by necessity, had to remove a few auto events from some of the minigames, and instead had to rely on clunky button presses to trigger the events instead of having it done automatically. Because, sadly, I could not trust the auto events to trigger as they were supposed to 100% of the time.

Hmmmm. Very interesting... and I know you've mentioned this once before. Until now, I've assumed that my coding must have been wrong somehow, as in set up in a way that RM3 would never trigger the events correctly.

Reading your post now, though, I feel like you're saying that if there are too many Auto Events on a map, even if most of them are Display Off, that usually a given Auto Event will activate, but sometimes it won't? Do I understand you correctly?

That would really suck. I suppose I can add a Button event to begin each time period/activity, but a lot of my events go through literally 40 or 50 modes of code between player actions. If I can't get it to consistently go through those at least once apiece, without ever dropping out of the auto-event-circuit, I will have to end the project (because it will be nigh-unplayable)... and I REALLY hope it doesn't come to that.In my initial build, there were some Auto Events that would only trigger once you did the menu open and menu close trick, but then sometimes there were some that seemed to randomly decide not to activate at all, even once you did that. I think the last time I worked on P&P I was able to turn the "need to open the menu" events into "works smoothly" events; it's just that I wasn't able to fix the instances where the Event doesn't activate at all.

Several of you guys have talked to me about why you used buttons to cycle through modes for this reason, but I never ran into any of these problems in Hell's Dining Room, where I had 14 Auto Events in the dining room, mostly with 10-20 modes, four or five of which chained directly into each other (to end a service, give you your rewards, activate the battles, and then start the next day with a new set of customers and orders. I wonder why.

[Perversion]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

Yeah...I think that this problem is one of the last mysteries of RPGM3 that has yet to be solved. All I know is, I'm glad I'm not the only one that's had to do the "open the menu, then close it" thing to get some auto events to trigger.


And I'm not sure that it's caused by too many auto events. That was mere speculation. It may have more to do with how the events are interacting with each other. Because I've gone into "debug" mode when this has happened, and the modes and everything else are 100% correct, but it sometimes just does not trigger. Other times, it would be on exactly the same mode, using the same events (and most likely circumstances...it's hard to tell when using a PRNG), and it would trigger without a hitch.


I know this is not directly related to your problem at hand, but I thought this warranted mentioning.

[Ωbright]

Re: Auto Event Loops?

Could this be similar to what Pagerron discovered about trap activations, when there are several on one map? there was an order for activation that went in rows from top-left to bottom-right. Could it be the same for auto events? Just a thought.

And I don't know whether this will help or not, but when I was making Pavilion Iron Chef, I had better luck adding a 'dormant' mode to auto-events, and changing them out of that when the time came. I got loop traps when I tried to use display on/off to do basically the same thing. That might not work for this game, though.

Speaking of PIC, for some reason I had to put a "press X to play again" instead of doing it automatically (via decision branch) at the end of the game. I got a loop trap otherwise, a little over halfway through game 2. Apparently there are several conditions that can end in a loop, not just if an event runs 3 times in a row, or whatever. I think it was simply 1 event running too long in that case, but putting a button-activated line in there to break it up fixed it.