MA Tutorial 105: Tips and Tricks (for starters)
By
Bad_Wonka,
Posted on: 2009-04-08 01:11 in Player Guides
Thanks for the tips. And great idea releasing all the guides right before i14 pops and people are browsing the forums to pass the 5 hours, but did you really have to do some many?
Really like the color, size and text variables, this will help with quality is some of my arcs. Thanks a lot!
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Thanks for the tips. And great idea releasing all the guides right before i14 pops and people are browsing the forums to pass the 5 hours, but did you really have to do some many?
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Honestly, given the length of some of them, yeah. Yes, some are short (like this one,) but others are rather long. I didn't think people would want to dig through a 25-page-plus guide just to try to find how to have an ally turn on you. Plus they were set up with the idea that people could print out the one or two they wanted to mess with, do so quickly, and have them in hand to do the walkthroughs. A massive one-post guide isn't quite as friendly for doing that.
Whoa I really need some help - just cant figure some stuff out.....any chance you could point me in the right direction? I am sure its something I am missing.
1. How do I have custom critters saying stuff when I go through a mish? I was in a mish and saw the spawns do this. I am looking to do a fairly simple defeat all mish & I cant tell where to put in the dialogue or captions or whatever they are.
2. Also is it possible to add emotes to the spawns in a defeat all mish?
This stuff is a little tricky for me so any help is appreciated.
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Whoa I really need some help - just cant figure some stuff out.....any chance you could point me in the right direction? I am sure its something I am missing.
1. How do I have custom critters saying stuff when I go through a mish? I was in a mish and saw the spawns do this. I am looking to do a fairly simple defeat all mish & I cant tell where to put in the dialogue or captions or whatever they are.
2. Also is it possible to add emotes to the spawns in a defeat all mish?
This stuff is a little tricky for me so any help is appreciated.
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The stationary spawns in a mission are determined under "Choose Mission Settings > Enemy Group." You can't give them text to say and you can't give them an animation.
Spawns which can talk are Patrols. Adding one or more patrosl will take the place of the base mission enemy group spawn points. You can make them the same or of a different faction or a custom group. Also, a boss to defeat can have several lines of dialogue as it is being defeated.
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Thanks for that - I think I know what is happening.
If you do the Elvis is Everywhere arc (lots of Elvis bosses) you find mobs saying Elvis song words or references. I think that they are all inserted as Fight a Boss or Release A Captive objectives. But I find very few mobs that are not one of these. I guess the questions would then be:
1. Can you run a mish with only your objective related spawns?
2. If you put in the max # of objective related spawns then does this subtract from the total # of mobs that would spawn in the mish? (if that makes sense)
Thanks as always for any help.
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Thanks for the tips. And great idea releasing all the guides right before i14 pops and people are browsing the forums to pass the 5 hours, but did you really have to do some many?
Really like the color, size and text variables, this will help with quality is some of my arcs. Thanks a lot!
[/ QUOTE ] Actually I like how he broke them up, I think they should sticky it with links to each one.
View the story of W.A.R.F.A.C.E. and Septimus Bane here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6785073/1/Meus_Profiteor#
my email chrismfears99@yahoo.com
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Mission Architect Basics
105: Tips and Tricks
Before going on to the advanced options, I felt putting in a quick "Tips and tricks" compilation would be a good idea. Some of these have been mentioned before. This is purely a reference. Feel free to keep adding to it in the discussion as you find or come up with useful bits.
Rearranging missions
You can rearrange your missions by dragging the "book" (Mission 1, etc.) up top over to the front. This allows you to test missions out of order.
Balorn:
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... that swaps the mission you're dragging with the one you drag to. For example, if you have an arc with missions A-B-C-D-E and drag D to A, the new order is D-B-C-A-E, not D-A-B-C-E.
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Tricks with text
Aside from copying and pasting, you can do several things to bring attention to specific pieces of text - much like the orange text seen in more recent story arcs. How?
CLick and drag the cursor over a section of text to highlight it, then right click. A menu will appear. From this, you can not only copy and paste, but add things like bolding, color, text size, or text replacement.
Text replacement and variables
Text Replacement is available, for starters, from the menu when right clicking on highlighted text. You have five options from the menu - Hero Name, Class, Origin, Level, and Supergroup.
But that's not all. You can manually put in *other* variables in some text and dialog fields. For instance, you have a boss you want to notice the player and say "Get him" or "Get her!" How do you do that?
"It's $name! Get $himher!"
This will automatically replace the $name with the name, and say "Him!" or "Her!" where appropriate. There are other variables, such as $heshe, $hishers- borrowing from SoulTrain's post (there have been others,)
$name - the name of the target of your villain/npc/whatever.
$supergroup - that person's supergroup
$type - their Archetype
$level - their Level
$origin - their Origin
$heshe or $Heshe - substitutes "he" or "she" depending on gender (capitalized will cap the substitution)
$himher $Himher - same as above, using "him" or "her"
$hisher $Hisher - same as above, using "his" or "her"
Mix and match
OK, we're not into "Creating custom critters and groups" yet, but one of the things to be aware of is the size of the mission. To keep it interesting, find critters that "logically" fit with your group and already exist in game. You can fill out a group without filling up your space that way.
The big stuff loads once.
Again, not something we're touching on yet, but if you load a custom group and see it's taking half of your space - don't worry. It will not do that for each mission. Instead, it loads *all* the critter descriptions first. Individual missions are small, typically. It will refer to the information throughout the rest of the missions.
Republish!
Need to fix something in a published arc, but don't want to lose ratings? Use the Republish button. It takes a little time to update - but it saves your information. The down side, of course, is that your local files aren't updated. Just the copy on the server... so if you missed something, you do have to edit it all again.
But I only want one!
Sermon:
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when the MA says an ally may be placed with group "single" that, in fact, means that the ally will appeal alone (not with a single enemy).
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LordXenite:
Clue/Goal Order
The creation-order of the mission goals will dictate the order of the clues in the player's clue-list. Make sure to create and link goals according to the proper required order for both your story and the clue-list!
Other tips added... well, honestly, as I think of them or they get added via comment to here. Final version posted after I14 will credit whoever mentions them.
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