Tips and Tricks

[calebrie]

Hey guys, I thought it would be a nice idea to have a central sticky thread that people can share their tips and tricks they have learnt to do in the Ring.

I remind everyone that the posting of any bugs or exploits is not allowed, and should instead send a ticket on what you have found and not tell anyone. This follows the code of conduct and EULA you all accept when loading the game.

I shall start you off with a little tip of my own:

When sending someone a Ring scenario via mail, make sure you Zip it up with a .zip or .rar format. This should help ensure the mail doesn't corrupt the file so it won't play anymore

Feel free to post yours below.

-Cale

[grimjim]

Endless Containers
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Set the behaviour of the container to despawn when opened.
Create a timer trigger nearby and set it cyclic, to 1 second and set it to spawn the container.

Now when someone destroys the container it will instantly repop (Or you can set it on a time delay).

Set Dressing
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I always seem to run out of objects before creatures. The best way to create a feeling of fullness that I have found is to 'cluster' terrain features in small, discrete spots, 2-3 to a spot, rather than trying to spread out trees etc to fill an area. Any leftover creature spots can be used to fill terrain with plant mobs, which helps make it feel fuller.

Creature Patrols
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You can't set them to patrol routes as you can with guards etc but you can chain feed/sleep spots as appropriate and set the creatures to cycle their route from zone to zone creating the same effect. The little footprints will show the approximate path that the creatures will take.

[nephy13]

Hope these are useful to people:

Using an external word-processor
I use a word-processor to write my dialogs before I copy-and-paste them into the Ring editor. I do this to:

• Keeps a seperate record of them all in one place (just in case the scenario file gets corrupted...yes, I am that paranoid).
• Allows me to write my prose in a decent editor (with, most importantly, a spell-checker) before I copy-and-paste them across to the Ring editor.
• I can read and update text off-line.
• I can have newlines in text (you can't do this if you write directly into the Ring editor).

Mutiple use dialog (no longer required)
Due to the limit on the number of entities in a scenario, I've discovered that it is not a lot more work to keep all the one-liner dialogs in a single Dialog Entity. This is rather than using a whole dialog to say something simple like "Hello! I'm a town guard. I guard the town!". I still think it is worth keeping more complex dialogs in their own dialog to avoid complicating things though. You need to enter the dialog at specific steps ("when my_NPC is targetted, start my_NPC_dialog at step N") and put events on each step of the Dialog ("when my_dialog step N is finished, stop my_dialog"). You'll also need to put at least a 3-second delay on EVERY dialog step, or it won't stop properly; any less and you'll get subequent steps firing before the stop event is actually triggered.

**EDIT** This is less of a problem in the patch that occured since I posted this (Was 100 entities, now 200 entities) - also there is now a "pause at end" option which means that you can pause a dialog after any dialog step without using an event.

[seawe]

You'll also need to put at least a 3-second delay on EVERY dialog step, or it won't stop properly;

omg how many days i stressed over that, if only i had known sooner my pharmacuetical bills would be so much less! thankyou gwillim!

[nephy13]

omg how many days i stressed over that, if only i had known sooner my pharmacuetical bills would be so much less! thankyou gwillim!

Glad that helped! Interestingly, I actually found, through experimentation, that a dialog step with a 3-second delay actually APPEARED before one on a 0-second delay (if called directly from an event, rather than when following on from another dialog step).

Now where was that Spawn Point?
Spawn points are not shown inside the editor, but I often want to know exactly where it is, in order to place things that people will see when they enter. When I first enter the editor, I create a little, arrow-shaped zone at the feet of my character. I can then return, at any time, to the exact position and orientation players will have on entering the scenario.

[nephy13]

Avoiding players restarting each others' dialogs
Something that is not very obvious while developing/soloing a Ring scenario is that players can restart a dialog that another player is reading. I'm refering specifically to dialogs broken up with {break}, started by targetting an NPC, rather than "looping chatter" type dialogs. e.g.

1. Gwillim clicks on the Verbose NPC and reads the first couple of pages of text. There are more pages to go after this, but the prose is so well written that he is looking forward to it ( )
2. Gwyneth comes along and targets Verbose NPC and starts reading...What she isn't aware of is that by starting her own copy of the dialog up, she has reset Gwillim's dialog back to the first page of text.
3. Gwillim has to click through ("skip") to where he was up to before now. In all likelyhood, Sal will arrive before he gets there and restart the dialog for him again. Gwillim cries.

OK, so how do you stop this from happening? You must add a condition that the dialog is not to be started unless it is not already running (i.e. create a condition of "dialog not running" on the event that starts the dialog). That way, if someone else causes the dialog to start, then I (Who am already in the middle of the dialog) will not have the dialog restart. This also prevents people accidentally re-targetting the NPC (For example, if someone double-clicks on an NPC who triggers a dialog, then the Dialog with appear, then a second later, it will disappear and appear again).

[sivant21]

Regarding dialogue... what are ALL of the {} type of commands you can use? I know of {break} and [RGB} (colors)