cascading transitions (Patreon)

hello what's up boysenberries gulfs of mexico and non-pineapple-identifying friendos today we're going to be talking about WATErFALLS and RIDING THEM CLEAN INTO another map because it's actually not clean at all in fact it's a convoluted mess  and to understand exactly how it's time, for a closer look

okay so i've been dealing with this again recently which is what's reminded me how much of a fucktruck this is but for non-spoilery example we'll talk about the waterfalls in ametrine

like this one

right so if you've done your homework you know you go up this baby into the upper floor, and it's cool
you know what's not cool? everything required about how to make it work

ok, so let's start with the basic idea of how it works. normal map transitions are handled via teleports which are in events. you move into the event it teleports you, badabing badabam
except that didn't work because the waterfall HM ends up stopping in front of the event and not activating instead of actually moving the player into it

so i'm sitting in a yurt out in bumfuck nowhere colorado (no joke, was actually in a goddamn yurt when i was figuring this all out) and the internet was fucking aawful and i hate it hughesnet more like pee-ew's net anyway i couldn't google for any help because it would take fucking fifty million years to load a page, so i just had to make some shit up
so i'm like what can we do about this 

wellll we can give the event a teleport event a special name liiike "WTele" and make a change to the script so that as we're going up a waterfall it keeps checking the space in front of us to see if it's an event named WTele and if it is we'll tell it to move the player forward an extra space so we actually properly hit the teleport event and activate it, and we'll make the event look for Event Touch instead of Player Touch since the player isn't choosing to touch it an event just moves it into the thing and it accepts it that way.

so we do that and name the event properly and give it a try, we go up the waterfall it finds the WTele moves the player into it and it should work, badabing badabo-- wait what

lemme go ahead and show you what happens in this case because it's fucking a mess

...yeah.

why does it do this? i don't know.
fucking essentials dude, all i did was add a move up command ;D

but okay, so what if there's water at  the top instead?

as you can see, the player just moves over the event. the above gif also skips a step of this process. because as you can see the player gets stuck ON the very event we're trying to activate for some reason. this is because the event has been given an impassable setting so that it doesn't ignore it as hard when we're on water and already ignoring the fact that we can't normally walk over water tiles
but that just gets us stuck here
and if we make the top of the waterfall totally impassable it just gets stuck there without activating the event anyway...
so what the fuck

so i try moving the event lower on the waterfall or a space up and various things to get it to work. eventually, somehow, i figure out a pattern that does work.

this is the solution:

the waterfall has to skip a tile in favor of normal water, and then the teleport has to be above that
in retrospect this makes a little bit of sense? but like... just a little. it seems to me like the event that pushes the player up an extra tile seems to activate only when ending the waterfall process-- which itself doesn't really make sense because you know just do it while you're still on the waterfall, dayum
but it won't, it has to be done like this. 

even then, there's a quirk to this method. for whatever reason even when it properly finds and activates WTele, it starts playing that event when you get on the waterfall itself rather than when you actually collide with the event
this is ????????????????????? and to this day i do not understand this. it is a little unfortunate because the waterfalls in the greater ametrine area were mapped to show off the map until the player got to the end and moved to the new map, but instead  there are parts we just don't see because it starts fading out too early
but whatever

the other drawback to this is that the tops of those waterfalls were mapped in the view of the player... meaning i can't very well just put a line of still water there before the part that looks like it leads into another map.
sooooooooooo what i did was this

if you look at my row of autotiles there you'll see the waterfall piece is actually there twice. that's because as far as the game knows, one of those tiles is a waterfall and the other one is just normal basic bitch water you can surf over. 

so in our previous example here

the red arrow is where the normal waterfall is, the orange arrow is the fake waterfall tile, actually a surf tile (that row is darker because of the shadow but the shadow is completely separate so it would cover the player too-- NOT THAT ANYONE WOULD EVER SEE IT BECAUSE THE GAME FADES IT OUT TOO EARLY) and everything below it is waterfall normally like the red. 

but no one would ever know!
and it somehow works.

so there's today's bullshit.