v21.1 Tip Cards 1.2

In the recent mainline games, cards can appear to explain mechanics or give gameplay tips. Why not have these same cards in Essentials games?

Using pbShowTipCard(TipID), you can show a tip to the player.

For example, pbShowTipCard(:CATCH) will show this tip card:


But, what if you want to show more than one tip at a time, especially if they are all related? You can do that, too! Just include more TipIDs as arguments in the pbShowTipCard function.

For example, pbShowTipCard(:ITEMS, :CATCH) will show two tip cards as a group:


Version

• This plugin works for v20.1 and v21.1

Features

• Tip Cards: The key feature of the plugin. Show tip cards to players.
  • Tip cards can include images. In the current iteration, if the image you choose is wider than it is tall, it will appear above the text of your tip. If the image is taller than it is wide, it will appear to the left of the text of your tip. There will be more control of image placement in a future update.
  • The text of the tip can include formatting, such as bolding with <b> or setting a color using <c2=XXXXyyyy>...</c2>.
• Groups: You can group tips together and show them in a slightly different UI. You can move between groups using the JUMPUP and JUMPDOWN controls. Groups are also used to emulate the Adventure Guide item.
  • 
• Seen Tip Cards tracking: When you show a tip to the player, it gets marked as seen. You can check if a tip has been seen to be used in Conditional Branches to conditionally show tips, change NPC text, etc. Only tips that have been seen will be shown when using "Revisit" functions.
• Adventure Guide Item: Using Groups and "Revisit" functions, the Adventure Guide Item that appears in the mainline games can be emulated. Item handling, item icon, and PBS entry are all provided in this plugin.

More Than Just Tips!
While this plugin is designed around showing tips to players, it's structured in a way where you can make interactive reading material, like books. You can use groups as chapters and tips as the pages of each chapter. Then, use the pbShowTipCardsGrouped function to show all the applicable chapters! If you include "continuous: true" as an argument, the player can move to the next group/previous group by pressing right/left on the last/first tip of a group, which acts more like a book.

If you do this, you can set each of the "tips" to use the :HideRevisit setting so they don't appear as if they were tips when using the Revisit functions.


Setup and Usage
Please use the Setup and Documentation document provided in the downloaded .zip for all the setup and how to use Tip Cards. You will need to configure tips for your game, so use the examples in 000_Settings.

Future

• A couple tweaks and cleanup to the code.