03-06-2014, 09:29 PM
Oops, I misspoke. I don't know of how the party leader can be used automatically, but there are still a few different ideas. You'll need to know how to event hack though. If you don't, you'll need to look at the tutorial first and then take another look at this when you're comfortable. The event dump has examples of all these things (often when I want to look for how to do something, I just look for precedent in the original code).
You can:
1: Look at the code at CA/67A2 in the event dump. It shows a pretty good example of creating extra lines of dialogue when Edgar/Sabin are in the party. You can use CaseWords (don't worry about what they are, just copy what they do) to check if a character is in the party, and have a specific line of dialogue show up if the character checked does happen to be there. The disadvantage is that you'll check for specific characters before others, so the characters that get checked later won't be able to give their line unless the first person is not in the party. You could also make a default message so that only have to give certain characters lines of dialogue with any given character (to prevent the 196 lines of combinatorial explosion that you'd have to deal with otherwise).
2: Look at CA/BAE6. This allows you to create a branch based off a dialogue choice. In this way you could make one dialogue box which allows you to choose between
"Choose Party"
"Chat"
"Exit"
If they choose chat, you can use CaseWords to check who is in the party, and give the player a chance (using dialogue options) to choose who to talk with. You'd have to ask about each character one at a time though, so it would be awkward, and take a lot of work. However, you would be able to reach any character's lines without changing the party.
3: Don't use character specific lines, and just take one of a few at random. There is an example of how to jump to a different piece of code randomly at CA/CD47 (you'd want to simply jump to the text you want to display). It's not perfect though, because if you want more than two lines of dialogue it would be harder to make it perfectly random (you can do it, but I'd recommend just figuring out the basics first).
4: Combine 1 and 3 by randomly checking your party members and taking an option from the first one that is in the active party. I think it would be the cleanest, but also maybe the hardest. It might be a little slow in-game though, I don't know how fast all the jumps would be. You'd also have to be careful with dialogue to make sure the player knows who the conversation is between.
You can:
1: Look at the code at CA/67A2 in the event dump. It shows a pretty good example of creating extra lines of dialogue when Edgar/Sabin are in the party. You can use CaseWords (don't worry about what they are, just copy what they do) to check if a character is in the party, and have a specific line of dialogue show up if the character checked does happen to be there. The disadvantage is that you'll check for specific characters before others, so the characters that get checked later won't be able to give their line unless the first person is not in the party. You could also make a default message so that only have to give certain characters lines of dialogue with any given character (to prevent the 196 lines of combinatorial explosion that you'd have to deal with otherwise).
2: Look at CA/BAE6. This allows you to create a branch based off a dialogue choice. In this way you could make one dialogue box which allows you to choose between
"Choose Party"
"Chat"
"Exit"
If they choose chat, you can use CaseWords to check who is in the party, and give the player a chance (using dialogue options) to choose who to talk with. You'd have to ask about each character one at a time though, so it would be awkward, and take a lot of work. However, you would be able to reach any character's lines without changing the party.
3: Don't use character specific lines, and just take one of a few at random. There is an example of how to jump to a different piece of code randomly at CA/CD47 (you'd want to simply jump to the text you want to display). It's not perfect though, because if you want more than two lines of dialogue it would be harder to make it perfectly random (you can do it, but I'd recommend just figuring out the basics first).
4: Combine 1 and 3 by randomly checking your party members and taking an option from the first one that is in the active party. I think it would be the cleanest, but also maybe the hardest. It might be a little slow in-game though, I don't know how fast all the jumps would be. You'd also have to be careful with dialogue to make sure the player knows who the conversation is between.
Moogles FTW