I'm busy this week so the model tweaking stuff will have to wait, as are all the other requests (WLV converter for WA1 and MOFI levels, music editing program for custom music, etc.)
But here's another product that came out of model tweaking. The use here is inspired by me playing Qloof234's adventure and getting sick of the walking.
Remember the map pieces in MOFI? You can collect them but they don't really do anything. Well, it turns out it's actually possible to implement a working map in your adventure, with the help of custom textures and the newly tweaked objects I'm about to give you.
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First, the 3 new objects:
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GC Enhanced: This is an "enhanced" General Command button in the form of a 1-tile square, which you can apply a custom object texture. Furthermore, the texture graphics is shown only when the button is active, therefore giving you clear visual indication of the button being activated by, say, the use of an item. You still have to step on the button to run its command.
"Data0" is "Command", and "Data8" is ActivateID. "Data5" is repeatable (0=yes, 1=no), although for a non-repeatable button, the graphics will disappear once you step on the button (because I think the game actually deletes the button object once stepped on, when repeatable is set to no).
I used this in my test level for the "warp points" on the map.
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Generic Rectangle: This is simply a flat rectangle that you can apply a custom object texture to, as well as resize and reposition. It is a walkthrough object so it should have no effect on the tile it is placed on. This is what I used to display the map.
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LevelExit (Activatable): This is a variant of the LevelExit object, with the added ability to be given an ID and be activated/deactivated. When it is inactive, the arrow is not shown and stepping on it has no effect. This is not used in my test level.
You could of course do the same thing using the GC Enhanced object, but for cases where you don't want to customize the look of the LevelExit, this is probably easier to use.
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Next, the mechanism:
Hidden offscreen (in the test level of course, I didn't bother to hide them behind fake walls etc., so you can see how it works) are some monsters, NPCs, and buttons that form the mechanism allowing you to warp whenever you use the map item. The map item basically activates an NPC Move button. The NPC Move causes an NPC to move through two buttons, one which deactivates the NPC Move (so no further action until the next time you use the map item again), and another that does the warping (using Cmd 7).
On the map area, the "warp points" are deactivated GC Enhanced buttons. The "map piece" items will activate the GC Enhanced button, causing the yellow dot to be displayed on top of the black dot from the map, as well as allow the button to warp you.
This is just a test so while it works, things aren't perfect. Here are some ways you can enhanced the implementation:
1) Instead of directly warping you whenever you use the map, the GC button can instead bring up a dialog that asks whether you really want to go to the map area, allowing you to cancel if you don't want to. The command to warp will be in the answers of the dialog interchange.
2) Since the warping to the map area is controlled by the hidden GC buttons, you can also control which location of the map area level you ended up. That way, you can have it so that when you warp to the map area, you ended up somewhere on the part of the map corresponding to where you came from. I didn't do it in my test partly because I want to force the tutorial to be done the first time you use the map, no matter where.
3) You have great control over when the map piece for an overworld area becomes available, as well as where exactly the warp points on the map take you back to in the overworld area. Care should be taken so that the player can't warp to a location he hasn't actually been to yet, or worse, wrap to a location that is no longer accessible (because some bridges collapsed, etc).
4) Instead of the map showing the entire overworld all the time, you can have it so that parts you haven't visited are not shown. Essentially, you'd make the warp point be an entire section of the map rather than just the yellow circle.
5) The graphics for the warp point is obviously crude. If I were to use it for real, I would make them smaller. I would also make the "activated warp point" graphics slightly larger to make sure it will fully cover the "deactivated warp point" from the map itself.