Placeholder Message Faces

In RPG Maker MV, you can create dialog through a series of messages.

To set up these messages, you would use the event editor’s “Show Text” command. Here, you can type in the message you want to show, a face to go with it, along with some other properties like the position of the message.

Now, what happens if you’re making a game where players can choose who they will use as the leader? For example, maybe your game offers players the option to choose between a man or a woman, or from a set of characters each with different backgrounds.

In these cases, it would be strange if the face shown in the dialog didn’t match the face of the player’s chosen character.

However, now we have another problem: how do we actually set up our messages to show different faces depending on the characters? Should we just create conditional branches to handle every possible option?

But what if the players can submit their own custom faces for their character? Now you would have no control over the graphics!

This plugin offers a solution that allows you to easily set up messages that will display the appropriate faces depending on the actor’s current face.

Download

Plugin: download here (right-click, save-as)

Installation

Download the plugin and place it in the “plugins” folder in your project’s “js” folder. Then open your Plugin Manager (F10), double-click an empty row, and select the PlaceholderMessageFaces plugin.

Once it is in your list of plugins, turn the plugin on.

Usage

(日本語の説明はこちらです)

We will be using images that will serve as placeholders. These images will be replaced by correct images during the game. How the game determines what to replace them with is based on their filename.

This means that you can draw anything on them yourself; what’s important is the filename. The purpose of the picture is just to make it obvious what it represents.

Then in your message box, just use these pictures and the game will handle the rest.

There are different types of placeholders available.

Placeholder Actor

This placeholder takes the face of a specific actor based on ID.
Start by creating some images will serve as placeholders. For example you might do something like this

Then name them based on the following pattern:

PlaceholderActor###

Where the ### is the ID of the actor. When the game needs to load that face image, it will look up the specified actor’s face.

For example, if you wanted to use the face of actor 32, you would use a picture with the name

PlaceholderActor32

Placeholder Party

This placeholder takes the face of an actor based on their position in their party.

The leader is in position 1. The second member is in position 2. For example, if you wanted to show the second party member in the message, you might use a picture that looks like this

  

And name it with the following pattern

   PlaceholderParty###

So let’s say you wanted to use the leader of the party. You would name the file

   PlaceholderParty1

Here is an example of how it might look in the editor:

Placeholder Variable

This placeholder uses the value of a variable to determine the ID of the actor to show.

For example, to use variable 4 as your placeholder, you would use a picture called

PlaceholderVariable4

Now, if variable 4 contained the value 6, then actor 6’s face would be used. If variable 4 contained the value 12, it would use actor 12’s face.