A nice party change system i came up with!

[Yuffit]

This tutorial is going to teach you how to change out party members while in the field, using a series of Switches, Skills, and a Common Event.
What you will need beforehand:
1 Skill PER character for EACH character, Set as Switch, and only usable in the field.
e.g.: ElsaChangeRiku
ElsaChangeVince
ElsaChangeBalk
ElsaChangeRosella
ElsaChangeNaelo
have one of these for each character you want to be able to have switched out, i excluded the main character, so there is no "ElsaChangeRio"
Now, have switches with the same exact names as the skills, like [0009 ElsaChangeRiku]
Have each skill turn ON the switch with the equal name:
ElsaChangeRiku turns on switch [0009 ElsaChangeRiku]
Now, make a Common event (one for each character will do) that determines the different party members you can switch with the current character.
It should be a Parallel Process, with no trigger switch
It should look like this:
<>Branch If Switch [0009:ElsaChangeRiku] is ON
  <>Change Party Members: Elsa Remove
  <> Change Party Members: Riku Add
  <> Switch Operation: [0009:ElsaChangeRiku] OFF
  <>
:End
Copy that entire block, and paste it above the :End, for each character you want to be able to switch Elsa out with.


Now, go to Elsa's learned skills, and make sure she knows all of the skills to switch with the party members at lvl 1.
If you have done this correctly, you can open the menu in-game, go to Skills or Magic, whatever you've named it, select Elsa, and the change skills should be shown. If you select one, the menu should close, and when you come back, Elsa will be gone, and the hero you selected the skill for, should be in her place.


Any questions, or if you need some sort of explanation/clarification, feel free to ask!
Ciao!

P.S. If you want this to only work with party members that have been introduced in your game so far, so that you can't suddenly summon other characters into your party early, set up a switch that turns on when that character is introduced to the party, and in the common event, put a SECOND conditional branch after the first one, that asks IF the introduction switch has been turned on, if not, then it will skip the option to switch out with the unintroduced character.
Another way you may be able to work around this, is to not have your party know the skill to switch with the character, and when he is introduced to the game, teach the skill to switch with him to all of your party members you want to be able with switch with him.
(i hope you undersand all of that blab XD)

[A Forgotten Legend]

If you wanted to make the amount of skills less, you could have only one skill called Switch out and then it could call a Show Choices command, but it might actually make the coding load a little more because you would need one for each instance.

The best way would be to make a party changing menu common event when the player presses a key it will open and show a menu.  (Usually shows the character graphics of those in the party with those already it grayed out).  Then you would just need to have it remember the character the player wants to switch out when they choose the character they want to switch with.  Its not overly difficult if you learn a basic understand of switches, conditional branches, picture events, and variables.

Just a quick search through the forum and this system came up:
http://www.charas-project.net/forum/index.php?topic=22690.0

This is similar to what I was thinking, only instead of a picture based it is map based.  (Which, for in the field this would work fine)

Overall you provided a nice basic tutorial that would be good for those just getting into eventing and such.

[Yuffit]

whai, thank you!
i was playing around with stuff last night, and i suddenly realized: i know how to use switches!

[zuhane]

Yuffit, have you got any screenies of your game? I'd be quite interested to see it considering all the effort you seem to be pouring into it!

[Yuffit]

i dont have the exact game being made at all.. all i got right now is my collection of 30-page long common events, a 400+ (and growing fast) item list, and my little testing hall i threw together where i test out all of mah stuff. and i have a dumb little scene i threw together whilst idly listening to MIDI's :3
but yeah ill post some today probably