Hero selection using dialog boxes

Hello there!

First and foremost, this is my first post here. So, I am glad to be among people that know more than me. Hopefully, I can learn a a few things.

Now, onto business.

I have never really looked at the map editor before. I normally just played the maps that others have made. However, I have suddenly taken an interest in making an ORPG of my own, using concepts from other maps then incorporating them together (such as hero skill purchasing in the Hero Builder arenas, save and load from almost all ORPG maps, and freedom like the DoBRP series). So far, I have not gotten far, as I have been trying to get the kink out of a trigger system I am trying to create.

To put it simply, a player types -heroselect into chat, and it brings up a dialog box. It has 4 options: Humanoid, Undead, Demonic, and Elemental. Each of those buttons goes to another dialog box, each containing 3 more buttons. And, each of those buttons goes to ANOTHER dialog box containing 4 buttons each (for those keeping track, that's a total of 64 buttons and 17 boxes). It's like a flow chat layout, to put it simply.

Anyway. I got the dialog boxes setup, and the buttons have their appropriate integer values in the DialogButtons variable. The buttons works up to a certain point. I can get to the last dialogs of the categories, but when I click on the button to create that hero, the dialog closes, but no hero is created.

Here is the trigger I have for the hero creation.

I got this trigger from a tutorial over at world-editor-tutorials. While the tutorial in their example is for a 2 dialog system while my system is 17, I would think that the basic principles would be the same.

Assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

--Ryuusei

P.S. On a side note, if anyone know how to trigger so that when a player types the -heroselect, it doesn't appear in chat, that would be lovely.

I am guessing that you are using dialogue buttons 1-4 for race selection, 5-16 for stat selection for each race, and the rest for hero selection. In that case, your problem is that in your loop, you are checking again for buttons 1-4 instead of buttons 17-64.

Alright. I'll give that a try when I am back at home and can work on it.

Also, if that is the case here, then I will have to redo the button integers. I currently have them set so that humanoid is 1, then 5 - 19, undead is 2, then 20 - 34, and so on for the other 2. From what I am gathering from your solution, I need to streamline the buttons so that the hero buttons at the end are all in consecutive order.

I'll get right on that when I can.

Thanks!

Not necessarily. Your trigger already first checks if a race or stat button was pressed, so there can be no error if those buttons are also included in the loop; if one of them was pressed, the trigger will stop before it even gets to the loop anyway. So, functionally the order could stay the same but I would still change it because that makes more sense in terms of code organisation.

In fact, I would use separate arrays for race, stat and hero buttons, although functionally there is nothing wrong with consolidating them all into one array like you did.

Furthermore, you could generalise your code even more. You already did it with heroes, using a loop and a unit type array instead of a separate if statement for each hero. You could use a similar solution for races and stats. Again, what you have now can work but there's more to good code than just working correctly.

I don't think you need a separate stat menu for each race. Since the stats are the same for all races, you could also use a single menu for all of them.

Alright.

I went ahead and changed the menus around so that the race and stat selection menus have buttons 1-16, and the hero buttons are now 17-64, and changed the setting for each button array to match. However, I am still unable to get the hero to spawn when the appropriate button is clicked in the dialog menus.

Current trigger layout is as follows:


The changes from the original trigger to this one are; Changed Integer A to be from 17 to 28, as those are the human hero buttons. I also changed the Heroes array to [(Integer A)] instead of [(1)] like it was before. However, with these changes, the heroes are still not spawning.

If need be, I can post all of the triggers I have made so that any inconsistencies with the them can be seen and corrected.

Yeah, I'll need to see the triggers in which you set up your button and hero arrays, I can't find the error looking just at this code. You could also add some debug messages to your loop to see where it is going wrong (does it even run? if it does, does it ever get to the then-actions of the if statement?). I see you already have one game message after the hero is supposed to spawn, does that game message show up?

By the way, why are you changing the title of a menu after a player presses a button on it?

Also, there is an action for displaying a text to a single player, you don't need to do it to a player group. Right now, you are creating a new player group every time you display a text message. Of course, that's such a small memory leak that it doesn't really matter, but if you're going to be using triggers a lot it might become important later, so I'm mentioning it now. Usually, the problem aren't player groups, but unit groups and locations. For example, you are also creating a location when you create the hero (the "center of region" creates a new location every time it is used).

Alright. Here are the triggers as follows:

Please note that some of the comments in the triggers are unedited, as the actions were copypasta from one trigger to another. However, comments are irrelevant to trigger functions. So, no harm, no foul.

Hero array: (note that these are all placeholders, but shouldn't affect functionality)

Human menu:

Menus:
HUMAN
UNDEAD
ELEMENTAL
DEMONIC

Also, I see what you are saying about the menu titles. I went ahead and deleted those actions to prevent redundancy.

As for how far I get in the menus: I can go as far as the final menu where the hero buttons are clicked, but the hero will not spawn, and the text and camera pans do not occur.

Ah, I finally noticed the error in the original trigger, in all your if statements except the first one, you put "skip remaining actions" under the "else - actions".

When storing hero types to the array, you should store them under an index that matches the index of their menu button, so for example Palladin should be stored under 17, not 1. Right now, once you fix the bug that's stopping the hero from spawning at all, you will still get the wrong hero.

SUCCESS!

Thank you so much for all the help, Anitarf!

After an initial test with the skip remaining actions taken out, and units were spawning correctly, I went ahead and changed all of the hero array integers to their appropriate values, and the correct units are now spawning.

Thanks again for all the help (remembers to put in credit in map)