Status effect that ends after one action by any combatant

rrldev

Hi. I'd imagine the title is descriptive enough of what I'm trying to do. Basically, I was trying to make a status effect that ends after one action is taken by any combatant. We're using a phase battle system with four player combatants in the party. The battle is not real-time in any way (as far I can tell).

So, for example, first Combatant A applies this status to the enemy. Second, Combatant B attacks the enemy. After that attack has finished completely, the status would then be removed, even if it is still the player's phase. Maybe that would be 2 actions though.

Is this possible? I tried every setting under End Settings > End After but nothing worked. I thought setting End After to "Time" might work because our battle system isn't real-time and the setting under that says "Turn/Time Duration", but when I set that to 1 and tried applying the status in battle, it actually just got removed after one second of real time.

I know there's "End On Ability", but that requires the target to be hit, and that's not really what we're going for.

Any help would be appreciated! And we're on Unity 2022.3.7f1 and ORK 3.16.1.

gamingislove

The status effects don't have settings for that directly, but you can handle this via schematics, depending on your battle system setup either via turn end schematics or by using schematics after each action.

If your battle system has 1 action per turn setup, so each combatant can only use one action, you can use the turn end schematics (default for all combatants set up in Combatants > Combatants > General Settings, each combatant can override with custom setup). Otherwise, e.g. use the ability/item end animations (also set up in combatants) to use a schematic after each ability/item.

The schematic can simply get all combatants (e.g. Combatants type actor) and remove the effect via Change Status Effect node.

rrldev

OK thanks for pointing me in the right direction! I got it working pretty much exactly how I wanted it to.

We may do more than one action per turn with certain upgrades in our game, so I wanted to avoid using Turn End schematics. I tried a default Ability End battle animation, but it was causing every ability to do nothing, unless I put a Calculate Action node as well. Maybe it would still work, but I thought it would get messy once we started adding more unique battle animations to abilities individually.

Then I found the Battles > Battle System > Phase > System Action Schematics > Finish Performing Schematic setting, and I put the schematic that removes the status effect there. It works perfectly as far as I can tell. Do let me know if this is a bad idea for some reason, but from the tooltip it seems like it'll work just fine.

I set the schematic to remove just one stack, so we can have status effects last for more actions by just adding more stacks. Unfortunately, there's no way to remove just one stack of a certain Status Effect Type, so I'll have to go through every status of this type one at a time. Not terrible, but we are planning on making this a big part of our battle system so we may have a lot.

Neither of these are super important because I know ways to work around them, but if I could make two small requests: One would be what I described above, being able to remove one stack of every status effect of a certain type from a combatant, and Two would be the option to add a Secondary Status Effect Type to status effects, similar to how you can add a Secondary Ability Type to abilities. Again, not super important, but if you think they are useful ideas, we'd certainly appreciate it.

Thanks for your help with my issue, hopefully my solution is fine to use, and hopefully if anyone else is trying to do one action duration status effects, they'll find this thread.

EDIT: OK after some more testing I found the Finish Performing Schematic also triggers when a combatant dies. I guess things like that are considered a System Action. However, I was able to just filter out actions like that from within the schematic itself by using an "Is Battle Action" node and setting the Action Type to Ability (we don't use base attacks in our game). Now it truly seems to be working perfectly, but again let me know if I'm still missing something critical.

gamingislove

Yeah, everything is an action, so the system action schematics perform for all of them.

Regarding the ability end schematics - that'd just be a schematic that is performed with the other ability schematics (after the ability's schematics). A Calculate Action node wouldn't be needed in it, unless none of the ability's schemtics use one (and no damage dealer/zone setup is used for damage).