Essentials Series/Dispatchers

Essentials Series
Introduction Industrial Park basics Editing Assets Templates Links Dispatchers Tikis and Enemies
Sound and Music Extracting Models Custom Models/Textures Custom Animations
Boulders Buttons Cameras Counters Conditionals Duplicatotron Particles Platforms Portals Simple Objects Slides Springboards Stage Controllers Talk Boxes Timers Triggers User Interfaces
Porting a GameCube level to Xbox

This page is part of the Essential Series modding tutorials. In this guide, you will learn how to use DPAT assets. Dispatchers are the most basic base asset type. Their only function is to send and receive events, and do nothing other than that.

Using a Dispatcher

Industrial Park has a Dispatcher template. Dispatchers have no unique fields, only all of those present in Base assets, including Links. Dispatchers can be used to help with all kinds of game logic, below are some common examples, but other use cases exist.

ScenePrepare

Every base asset receives ScenePrepare when a level starts. If you want an Entity asset to be set to invisble when the level starts, you can create a dispatcher and add ScenePrepare => Invisible with the target asset as the object to its links (although there are more elegant ways to do this).

Persistent Setups

Persistent assets are saved to the game's save file, and keep their state through loads. Let's say you place a Spatula on your level, and it is on a floating platform. You don't want the floating platform to appear anymore after the spatula has been collected. This can be done with a dispatcher:

1. Create a dispatcher and add ScenePrepare => CollisionVisibleOff with the platform as the target asset to its links.
2. Set EnabledOnStart to false (this will cause the asset to start disabled, meaning it will not send or receive any events) on the dispatcher.
3. Set StateIsPersistent to true on the dispatcher.
4. Add a link to the Spatula: Pickup => Enable, with the dispatcher as the target asset.

This setup means that, once the spatula is collected, it will enable a previously disabled dispatcher. Since the dispatcher is persistent, it will be enabled forever, even after player death and scene reload. The enabled dispatcher will send CollisionVisibleOff to the platform on ScenePrepare, meaning the platform will not appear anymore.

All Base assets can be set as persistent or not, enabled on start or not. This type of setup is used in many different points of the game. For example, when you first meet an enemy, a cutscene plays. At this point, a persistent dispatcher with a link that disables the cutscene trigger is enabled, so it will never play again.

Relayers

Let's say you have four different buttons on your level, and you want all of them to do the same thing when pressed. But this thing involves 14 different events, and if you change it on one button, you have to change it on all of them! Instead of having a copy of all links on each button, you can put the links in a dispatcher. The buttons will have only one link, ButtonPress => Run with the dispatcher as the target asset, while the other 14 are on the dispatcher itself, with Run as the receiving event. The dispatcher will simply relay the events it receives. (note that Run is just an example; you could use any other event, actually).