[E18] fuck essentials, the new chapter (Patreon)

tell me
whomstthefuck
thought it was a good idea to make a gotdamn jumping puzzle over water

WHO .
WHO DID THAT.

shut up. i know. i'm in denial.

anyway this is what i've been dealing with all day, did you know? that it is stupid tedious to get jumps over water to work? i did. i had to do it for the sewer. i should know better. but noooooooooooo

so there's a lot of problems around this even besides the above. i have it all working, but i'll talk t hrough this obnoxiousness in a way that hopefully makes coherent sense, but you know, i have a great track record with coherent sense, we go way back. we're also no longer on speaking terms so you know, whatever, butter my butt and call me a biscuit

okay so first i'll explain how a normal jump puzzle works:

• there are hoppy rocks
• hoppy rocks are two tiles each,
• the top tile can only be stepped on from below, 
• the bottom tile can't be stepped on from above basically meaning there's no way to get onto the top tile normally
• the top tile has to be passable from at least one direction though that way the game knows that this is a place the player can land while jumping
• alternate but identical versions of the top tile are used to make rocks that can be placed next to each other and walked over from one to the other
• events are stuck at each part that could be jumped over and when the player collides with them they check which way player is facing and try to jump in that direction

i'll restate the key point for us right now for emphasis: the top tile has to be passable from at least one direction.

hang on to that.

so surfing, right, works by doing a few things:

• switching to the surf graphic,
• changing move speed, disallow running
• allowing us to walk over water tiles and ignore the fact that we can't normally walk over water tiles
• when we try to walk onto a tile that is not water, disembark

the problem with essentials here is that the "ignore the fact that we can't normally walk over water tiles" part also ignores the fact that the bottom tile of these rocks can't be walked over from above, meaning we can actually just go on to the top of any rock from the front of it while surfing in particular. and visa versa.

normally i would fix this by turning off the passability of the top tile so it can't be stepped on from the bottom. buuuut then there's no passability and RPG Maker (normal function-- not essentials) doesn't think it can be jumped to. so that's a no-go.
what's a girl to do. 

the above gif was taken in one of my attempted solutions to fix this issue.

needless to say, it did not work.

i would like to explain more to you about what i tried, but i have tried so many got damn variations of things today that i really just don't even know anymore.
but that one was funny so i gif'd it.

anyway, i can't tell you what all i tried because fuck knows i tried all, but i can tell you what worked

the solution i found had two parts, because either way alone was insufficient. first, i have an additional tile above the bottom tile of each of these  hoppy rocks. that additional tile, like the bottom of the rock, cannot be stepped up from. unlike the bottom of the rock Essentials doesn't think you're surfing on it, so it respects the passability and won't let you disembark onto the rock that way. 

this was also important in ametrine and some other garbage in there but that's for another day

so anyway, that works for cancelling disembarkment, but it does not work, for whatever reason, for surfing from the top of the rock. you can still do that just fine from any rock even with the extra tile on top of it.
why? i don't know. essentials is dumb.

so what to do about that?
fortunately i had a rather inspired solution to try for that one. i actually came up with it before doing the above. the thing is, this solution cancels surfing off the rock, but does not cancel disembarking onto it. so i dismissed it at first and then realized i had to use the two together

anyway what i did is i have an invisible event somewhere off in the grand fuck-all blue. that invisible event has properties to not be passable, aka it can be stepped off of in no direction. i then amend every single between-rock jump event to, after completing the jump, sliiiiide that invisible event under the player. 

this means that the game recognizes the player can't move down to access the water from the top of the rock, but it still let the player jump to the rock in the first place since at the time it seemed to have at least one passable direction. the impassable event also doesn't prevent collision with the jump events. so that's nice.

i also had to have some of the jump events slide the event awayyy if we weren't taking it with us that way we could jump back to the previous rock properly

to my great fortune, this idea worked like a charm in and of itself... except for the oversight that there's only one such event at a time which means you can still disembark onto whatever hoppyrock that event is not on at the given time. no bueno.

but the extra tiles cover that! so these two contrived bullhonk solutions somehow cover each other and make one fully-functioning surf-jump puzzle. wheeeeeee. 

...there were various other issues like getting the staircase to play nice (normally not an issue but you know, surf) and some other junk with tree tops and the extra tile and blahbalhab i dont care any more i am tired  the point is it is all GUCCI  now, good bye