[Tutorial] General Information on Triggers

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[Tutorial] General Information on Triggers

Post by President Obama »

Welcome to another round of my scenario tutorials. This tutorial is a part of the series of tutorials I am working on.
In this tutorial I shall be explaining the basic concepts of triggers. In future tutorials I will show how to make specific things but first you got to understand how triggers work. This tutorial will be broken up into 5 sections. There is a picture at the beginning of each section; they have red circles on them which are labeled with numbers. I will be referring to these throughout each section. Most the stuff in this tutorial is preparing you for the next one. I just want you to know what buttons I’m talking about in my next tutorial.

###Objects###
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Objects are usually where it all starts. Objects can be units chosen on the map or an object that is specified. Number 1 is the name of the object, when you select an object it will automatically give it a crappy name. You can put anything you want here.
Number 2, shows the units you have selected. These can be buildings, units etc. Number 4 places numbers before all the names of your objects. Number 5 arranges them in alphabetical order.
6 is used to choose an area for which your units spawn in. You simply tick the box, a drop down menu will open up alongside it and there you choose the area you want your units to spawn in(the area must be made first). You must use a object specification to spawn units, selecting on map doesn’t work.
7 is used to specify an attribute a unit spawned has. This will NOT affect units that are selected on the map. This is where you would modify the graphic scale if you wanted spawn units to be bigger than normal or smaller.
8 is used for conditional triggers. When ticked it will come up with a drop down menu in which you can choose which player has to select the object. You would set up a trigger that uses the object as a condition. This will be explained in my next tutorial.
9 is used for conditions as well. You can set it so that when a unit is visible by the los of another player something can happen.
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If you click on 3 the layout will change (as seen above) and to the right will be 3 boxes. Use the 3C for specifically specifying units. If you want to do a unit family e.g. planes, use the 3B. When making an object for each player make sure to change the owner (3A) otherwise if you’re spawning units it will only make player one units. When creating units, if you’re not using a loop, you can specify how many units you want to spawn in an area. You can change the value you want in 3D to the amount of units you want spawned. If you specify 1 min and 100 max, it will make the 100 no questions asked.
I’m not explaining LOS and has state as they are pretty darn unimportant and you probably won’t ever need them. If you ever do need them, you will be able to figure them out for yourself. I’m only introducing the buttons and menus in this tutorial so that in my next one everyone should be able to understand it better.

###Areas###
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Area is pretty basic and simple. Areas can be used for more than just spawning units. They can be used as trip zones, like if a unit goes in a certain area, it’s killed or the game ends. The circled option is the only option there. If you click it, it will come with continent tile and town tile. I have never used these but I’m led to believe that a continent tile selects all the area on a piece of land surrounded by water. As for the town tile I don’t have a clue. To select and area just click on the map and drag.

###Effects###
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Effects are the climax of scenarios. They are the everything, they modify attributes, graphic size, resources people have, end the game etc. They are everything practical. In most scenarios there will be more effects than any other thing. There can be up to a 1000+ effects easy in a scenario. I'm only going to briefly explain the options here so you know what to click in my next tutorial. 1 is the type of effect, please dear oh god remember that, I get a lot of people asking me where that is, it’s so annoying. Number 2 is just the object you will be using the effect on. Number 3 leads to the many amounts of effects there are. If you change the type of effect, even more effects come up. Have a mess around with them. I will show a lot of the basic trigger work in my next tutorial.

###Conditions###
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These sorts of conditions are not used very often. In a lot of scenarios there might be 1000’s of effects but only 30 conditions. Conditions are used for kill counters mainly and detecting what people say in chat. Number 1 is a dropdown box that lets you select the different types of conditions, a bit like effects. Now with number 2, there are 6 options in there, = , < ,=<, >, >=. These can be quite annoying and just to help life follow Sexacutioners rule and NEVER use =< or >= as they seem to cause a lot of problems. With number always make sure you select the player as you make conditions because if you were making a kill counter you would need 6 conditions (1 per person) and sometimes people forget to change it from player 1.

###Triggers###
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Up to the final part now for the last part I’m just going to describe each one in bullet point form
1. This defines whether the trigger is on right from the beginning of the scenario. You can start with it off and later turn it on with effects
2. This is used for things such as shops. If a child is in an area for so many seconds continue on. This makes sure the conditions are meant for a specific amount of time.
3. This is used to loop the trigger; the trigger will never stop unless it is stop by using a trigger.
4. This is where conditions are added, both objects and proper conditions can be used here. Most the time objects are used.
5. This is used to say that if the condition is NOT true then use the effects etc etc.
6. This adds a delay before the effects. This is different from conditions true for because even if the conditions break it will wait out the delay you said and then use effects.
7. This is where you specify your effects.
8. This is used so that the trigger will start at the start of a scenario if a cinematic is at the start of a scenario,
9. You can use this option for staking effects which I highly recommend as it this cleans your triggers up a lot. What I mean by staking is, if you change this option to ‘and’ you can use another effect. This is great for one off effects which are used at the start of the game like setting unit attributes and graphic scale.

Just a note on how triggers work. For any effects to work you MUST declare it in the triggers option. Just make a new trigger and add the effect. If you just make an effect it wont work. Same with the other things.

Well this is the end of my second tutorial; this tutorial like I said is really just an introductory into the next tutorial so that I don’t have people asking me annoying stupid questions. In the next tutorial I will show most if not all the BASIC practical uses of triggers like spawning units, modifying attributes and giving players resources etc. This tutorial is only like 1400 words long almost, it’s not as long as my other one. I hope to see some new scenarios one day. This tutorial is quite brief but like I said it’s just preparation for my next tutorials.
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President Obama
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Re: [Tutorial] General Information on Triggers

Post by President Obama »

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