ff3:ff3us:tutorial:events:action

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One question that you may have been asking yourself is “How do I make the characters move”? Action queues contain a set of actions that you want a character to perform. For example, you could queue up the actions “walk one step up”, “turn left”, and “nod head left”. If you set the action queues up correctly, you can have multiple characters executing a complex series of actions at the same time. If you've been following the tutorial so far, action queues will be fairly straightforward to learn.

Starting an action queue works just like executing any other event command, although the number of parameters can vary depending on how many actions you want the character to take. Any command between $00 and $34 will start an action queue for one character. The Event Command Document has some information on which character will take action. In general, it will fall into one of the following categories:

  • $00 - $0F: Player characters. For example, $00 begins an action queue for Terra, and $01 begins one for Locke. $0E and $0F are special in that they begin action queues for temporary characters like Banon and Leo. Be careful, as the game often uses NPC lookalikes, who resemble the player characters; those fall into the next category.
  • $10 - $2F: Non-player characters. Different NPCs will take action depending on what map is loaded. You can cross-reference the Event Commands Document and FF6LE to figure out which command corresponds to the NPC that you want to move. According to the Event Commands Document, an action queue for the $16 command will begin an action queue for NPC 6 in FF6LE. If you open the LE and select “[014] Narshe, Outside (WOB)”, you can see that NPC 6 is a guard on this map. If you select “[15D] Thamasa, Strago's House”, you can see that NPC 6 is a lookalike of Shadow on this map.

  • $30: The camera. You can make the camera “walk” around the map, just like any other character. If you tell the camera to move upwards eight steps, the player's view will shift eight tiles upwards.
  • $31 - $34: The characters in the party. Often, the player has the opportunity to pick a party of their choosing, so you won't know what characters are in the party during your event. By using the $31 command, you can move whomever happens to be leading the party. Figuring out which character is in the lead (and then moving them manually) would be a lot more difficult.

The main purpose of the second byte is to tell the game how long the action queue will be. Most of the time, you should decide what actions you want to put in the queue before filling in this byte. You can have up to $7F (127 in decimal) actions in a queue, but it's unlikely that you will need anywhere near that many.

This byte also allows you to tell the game whether you want to finish the character's actions before moving on with the event. If you add $80 to this byte (after figuring out how long you want the queue to be), the game will not wait for a character's actions to finish before moving on. This is useful if you want to make multiple characters move at the same time, among other things.

This is the main meat of the action queue, containing the actions that you want the character to perform. There is a list of actions here. The vast majority of these are self-explanatory. Many just tell the character to strike a pose or walk somewhere. The commands from $C0-$C4 allow you to change how fast the character walks when they move. Ignore the commands related to branching or setting event bits for now; these will be covered in later sections of the tutorial.

By default, a character will actually take footsteps during an event, as if they player

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