Overview
This guide will teach you how to have proper weather effects in your game, and how to set them up to activate at certian times.
Introduction
Welcome to my first guide to RPG Maker VX Ace. I hope that this guide will not only teach you how to make proper weather effects, it’ll also show you how to set it up to where it will turn on and off correctly when you leave the screen(s) that you want it set to.
Requirements:
Knowledge of how to use the event editor and setting up events
what will be covered
Setting up weather effects
changing weather effects on the fly
setting different weather effects for different regions.
Why use weather effects?
Not only do weather effects add a sense of realism in your game, it can also help set the mood of the moment, or set how the player and character see the world. It’s also a rather simple effect to add into the game that can make it that more impressive
Step 1: The basics
First thing that you will want to do is open your map, and hit F6 to go into event mode. Once you are in event mode, place your even anywhere that your character won’t be walking on, typically at the edges of the maps works.
on the new even window, change the trigger to parallel process, when its set to this option, the event will start the second that the player enters the area, and will continue running until it is turned off by another process, this is more practical than the auto run trigger, as that will continue to loop forever until the even stops, which for weather it will not.
Now after that you will double click on contents, and go to tab 2, then set weather effects in picture and weather
for this tutorial, we will choose storm. The power setting determines how much is shown on screen at one time. Set the time to 0 for the storm to start instantly, and check off wait for completion. This will make sure that it will loop until you set it to stop.
Step 2: adding sound
Alright so we got the storm going, but if you start it up now and run it, there’s not going to be any sound for the storm. So what you’ll want to do is to set up another run event to play sound while the storm is going. This should be simple. Just add new event > Music and Sounds > Play BGS
Step 3: Adding other effects
So now we got the constant sound going, and we also got the weather showing. How about we add some thunder and lightning to the mix? In order for this to work correctly, you will need to set up a loop, so that every now and then by your determination, the screen will flash like lightning had struck.
So add a new event, then in tab 1 enter loop. Now within the loop section, let’s add a wait command. Remember, the game works in frames, and every 60 frames equals 1 second. So lets make it every 600 frames (10 seconds) a lightning strike will happen.
Now add event > tab 2, screen effects, flash screen. Uncheck the wait for completion box and hit ok. now we will need sound to go with this flash, so, add event > play SE and lets choose Thunder9 as it sounds more like thunder from a storm than the other sounds. You can change the pitch to higher or lower, just remember where your game takes place and how you want it to sound. For this example, i’m leaving it at the default settings. Your event should now look like this
Step 4: Stopping the weather
Alright, so we managed to get ourselves a storm brewing, but what’s this?, you enter a building and the effects are still on screen?
Well we can’t have that, which will break the game wouldn’t it? Or at least ruin it. So this is how we are going to stop the previous event from running.
First we will add a new event, and we will go to weather effects. On the weather effects select none and hit ok. after that, we will want the sound to fade away when the new area loads up, so lets add a new event content, and choose fadeout BGS. The default setting is 10 seconds, but i personally find between 2-4 seconds the best for the game. Make sure that the trigger is also parallel process before you hit apply.
Now all that’s left is to test this. As you’ll see, when you exit the building, the event will start back again as it is set to do so. If you want the event to stop anywhere else, all you have to do is copy the event we created to any other areas you need and it will work.
Final thoughts
Congratulations, you have successfully set up a basic weather effect. from her on, you can add any other effects like snow or rain or wind to your games as well as making your world that much more believable. I hope this helped you guys out and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.