Trouble with the Phone

Used searched and have tried to understand the Wiki "Phone" entry, but to no avail.

I can't figure out how to add a sprite to a Phone Entry, or how to set up Professor Oak or Mom. I also don't understand what the "3" means in the following:


How do I add the option to phone Oak about the PokeDEX? And for a limited time, how do I deactivate that comment? Until the first badge, the player doesn't have the PokeDEX, so calling about it would be kind of silly.

Thanks for any help :\ I just don't understand what the Wiki is telling me about it. I see the "Special Contacts" information, but it's not making sense to me.

Professor Oak's phone call is a common event. It is common event #3 which is what the 3 means.

You don't get the pokedex til after the first gym? That's strange. I would just have you not register Oak until then. Like have him "forget"

To register a non-trainer (e.g. Professor Oak, Mom), you will need to use the following script:

pbPhoneRegisterNPC(3,"Professor Oak",27)

The first number ("3") is a unique identifying number for this contact, which determines which phone call messages are used (see below).

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The messages shown when calling a special contact are written in a Common Event whose number is the special contact's identifying number ("3" in the example above). These messages include the "ringing" and "click!" at the beginning/end of the call.

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NPC contacts also need overworld charsets of themselves, to be displayed in the contact list. These charsets are in the folder "Graphics/Characters", and are called "phoneXXX.png", where "XXX" is the identifying number padded to 3 digits.

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All quotes taken directly from the wiki. Are you sure it's difficult to understand?

You are aware there's an example Professor Oak contact in the example maps, right? Have a look at it (Professor Oak in Oak's Lab) and at the common event for him phone calls. Changing what he says when you call him is as easy as changing the common event - the example already changes what he says depending on the number of species you've owned.

But what IS the Identifying Number? How do I put that in the script so it knows which one to use? I see Prof Oak is phone001 in the example, but that doesn't work when I rename Oak to that in my game: his picture stays blank. How do I tell the game that picture phone001 is equivalent to Oak? Because even in the bits you've copied, Maruno, I still don't see that part explained, unless it's buried somewhere else :\ All I see is explaining what the digits DO but not how to actually use it.

To register a non-trainer (e.g. Professor Oak, Mom), you will need to use the following script:

pbPhoneRegisterNPC(3,"Professor Oak",27)

The first number ("3") is a unique identifying number for this contact

Click to expand...

It's really not buried anywhere. It's just a number. This particular example uses 3, which means it'll use a charset called phone003.png as the picture of the contact, and the phone conversation is put into common event 3. You choose whichever number you want. That's all you need to know.

Why aren't you getting this?

So from Rayd12smitty, apparently it's a Common Event number, but it's also the value for the sprite? Inter-connected?

And I get it now. I didn't before because it was rather scattered, and the default Professor Oak sprite was using phone001 yet the Wiki was telling me to use "3" for Professor Oak. I was not getting the correlation between "3" and NPC values because the example game, the Wiki and Rayd12smitty's post all use different examples or are scrambled. The Wiki entry requires you to jump from one section to another and retain all the information from the prior paragraph. For some people, that's hard to do; they need to see everything pertaining to the issue in front of them and not mixed with other things. In this case, there was an opening paragraph, then rebattles, then special NPCs, and somewhere in there the "3" was mentioned.

The issue is that I can't tell what's pertinent to actually put it together in one paragraph to help me understand; that's why I ask here because it wasn't clear. It's like a sentence math question. I'm not good at those either because you have to search for pertinent information, and I can't figure out what's required to solve the problem.

Again, I use the Wiki and the Search. I'll look at both and maul the information over to the best of my abilities. I only ask if I really don't understand or if I completely missed something, as with the Encounter issue I had before. If I'm having trouble, I'm sincere about it; it's not because I'm too lazy to look at the Wiki. I've solved many problems to-date by looking there and through Search and have not posted, such as the Trade Bug - I found that through Search. What bothers me is I get the feeling that so many people ask questions that ought to be easy to find in the Wiki that you suggest in your replies that I'm not actually looking there; that I'm even perhaps dumb. It doesn't make me want to ask questions, in any case, because so far your responses have been relatively aggressive i.e. "Why aren't you getting this?" You made the program, so obviously you know what's going on, but users can't be expected to know everything, and it's to be expected that someone misunderstands or misses something in the Wiki. Just don't mix those who actually try to look before asking with those who simply ask out of laziness.

Thanks. This can be closed.