Intercepting Full Party Death with Mechanics?

[Gambit37]

Does anyone know if it's possible to intercept the complete party dying, using game mechanics?

I'm trying to correct a sound bug in RTC using mechanics: if the party dies and music or ambience is playing, it continues playing over the "The End" screen, which sounds bloody terirble if you want end game music too... . I thought it might be possible to fix this by activating an action to stop all music and ambience. In theory it would work fine, except for the fact there doesn't seem to be a way to detect if the party is wiped out, as RTC takes over at the point and goes to the end sequence.

Anyone tried anything like this?

EDIT: I've had an idea, will report back if it works....

[Gambit37]

No luck. What I tried was this:

1) Create clones of wall ACTIONS and label them STOPAMBIENCE, STOPMUSIC
2) Place the clones in the dungeon and set each action to deactivate all the SOUND type objects -- (this works, tested independently, so can be used successfully to stop all sounds before an END_OF_GAME pad for example...)
3) Insert a PARTYS_TILE item
4) Add a COUNTER somewhere, count 4, which is set to activate the cloned sound ACTIONS created in step #1
5) Add a TRIGGER to the party's tile, activated by EACH_DEAD_PARTY_MEMBER -- the trigger should ACTIVATE the COUNTER in step #4

In theory this should work, but in practice it doesn't for the following reasons:

1) RTC doesn't match any event that happens until AFTER the next movement event -- so a party member dying won't be matched until you move to another tile
2) RTC seems to intercept everything after the party dies, so no control is returned to the dungeon mechanics at this point anyway...

I tested this also by setting the counter to 1 -- to test just one dead member. Although I got this to work by killing one party member and then moving to another tile, it slowed the game down horribly. I don't think RTC likes checking triggers on the PARTYS TILE for every move in the dungeon...

Anyway, the outcome is that the sound bug can't be corrected by us mere mortals and requires divine GG intervention...

[Duckman]

Very very hard thing... game stops when ye die and so does all delays of triggers.

I'm sorry but I think RTC - suggestions would be a better forum for ye rite now.

[beowuuf]

You would need to do it the other way and filter the monster attacks and fake their damage I guess. Before a monster actually gets to do damage, you would need to have the attack actually generate a comparison. If the attack is in the range to kill the party, then you stop the music for a split second, then have a second trigger restart it again? Or perhaps you trigger your 'tense music' while you are at it to indicate how close the party is to death. If the party does die, then the sound won't play anyway.

Still tricky with missile based spells.

[Lord_BoNes]

How I'd attempt it:
Make your party members drop a unique kind of bones when they die (just one new type for ALL your character, not one each)... then use PARTY_TILE and a FLOORITEM_TRIGGER to intercept the bones spawning (make sure the trigger activates "on floor" and "in air").

[beowuuf]

The trouble is the game freezes the second the fourth member dies, so you can't detect anything falling. You really need to block the damage and interrupt there I would think

[Gambit37]

I'll just wait for GG to add it as a feature, it's far simpler

[Lord_BoNes]

True that.

[Trego]

I've been thinking of a type of training area where the party could get teleported in fight a/the monster or solve a clue and then teleport out on completion.

Because it will be only for training area I don't want the party or character to actually die by the monster. I was thinking of using a counter that records the character/s health on entering and have the monster reduce this counter when it attacks and then have the counter reduce the characters health...so a relay can be set to detect when the character is about to die and remove them from battle.

Could something like this be used to solve full party death?

[Gambit37]

Cool idea!

It doesn't solve the issues raised in my first post though. There are lots of other ways the party can die that can't be intercepted with mechanics, so we still need GG to fix these darned sound bugs

[Lord_BoNes]

Place a trigger on each tile that the party can occupy... make it activate on MISC_BONES on & over trigger. Get this trigger to fire a RESURRECT_PARTY action. This stops any party member from actually dying. The PARTYS_TILE flooritem (as Gambit said above) doesn't actually update until the party turns or moves, so using that won't work. But putting a trigger on each tile does.

However, each time a member is "killed" they suffer the resurrection penalty to their stats.

EDIT: I thought I got this to work, but it wasn't quite working like I thought