SA BananaKing13's chocolate box of DYOM tips

[bananaking13]

This is a list of DYOM tips I'd like to have known about in my early days of making DYOM missions. I felt the need to share these tips with others as I have found them over the years. I found everything here by myself unless stated otherwise.

 

How to use hyphens "-" in DYOM text

1. Replace where you would want to put your Hyphen with a 3. So in a mission instead of saying AT-400, say AT3400.
2. After you finish your mission, make a backup because this could ruin it (IMPORTANT)
3. Open your DYOM(mission number).dat file in your GTA: SA data files. If it's the first mission then do DYOM1.dat
4. Go search for the part you want replaced. On Notepad press CTRL+F and replace AT3400 with AT-400 (or however you want to use your hyphens)

 

 

How to add music to cutscenes without downloading sound files

If you watch a lot of television, you would know how well music can be used to improve the atmosphere & make cutscenes more enjoyable to watch. There are two ways to do this.

 

If you're in an interior that has music:

1. Play cutscenes inside of interiors that have music (like Pro-Laps, the Bar, strip club, unused Brothel, etc). Pro-Laps plays CSR 103.9, Binco plays K-DST, the player's wardrobe plays your favorite radio station (doesn't work in DYOM), and the Bar plays Radio X. There are some scripted songs in the game: the Strip Club plays three songs: So You Like What You See by Samuel'le and My Lovin by En Vogue (both from CSR 103.9) and Between The Sheets by The Isley Brothers (from Bounce FM). The racing arena plays Get Down To It by Humble Pie (from K-DST) and the Night Club plays Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald.

If you're not in an interior/in an interior without music:

1. TP the player inside a car and then play the cutscene.
2. You can choose which radio station to play too. Here is a list of cars and each radio it plays by default.
3. If you want your character to listen to Radio Los Santos but drive in a Huntley (for example), then teleport the player into an infernus and play the cutscene with an actor instead of the player in the Huntley

 

 

How to improve your cutscenes

Obviously we can't make our cutscenes as good looking as in the original game, however, you can take action to make them look good. Here are some tips on how to improve them.

• If you want two shots in a row of a character talking, then don't use the same perspective. Here's an example.

Objective 5: CJ: It's me! It's me! Carl!

Objective 6: CJ: Chill!

 

Lets say cutscene 5 shows you the right side of CJ's face. Objective 6 should show you the front view of him or the left view. If this sounds too complicated, try to make a new mission and try it out. It looks so much better than two shots in the exact same place with just different text.

 

• If you want to show a shot that introduced something new, use two cutscenes to do it. Say the start of a mission is CJ, Sweet and Ryder chilling at Sweet's home.

Objective 5: 0 seconds long, very close shot at CJ's face

Objective 6: Smooth transition, zooms away from CJ's face and shows us Ryder & Sweet sitting, 5 seconds long

 

• For dialogue inside a car, don't just show us the car and text coming out. Zoom in inside the car, and take shots of where each character would be sitting. You may want to test your cutscene before doing this though, sometimes you can get a bad shot on your characters.
• I don't know why they are really underused in DYOM, but there are animations from 110-120 that show facial expressions. I think they are really worth taking a look at and adapting into your missions.
• If you're making a cutscene that is only 2 objectives long (or 1 objective), set it to skip fading. It will look much nicer when you play and feels more like the vanilla game, I promise you.

 

 

How to make an enemy shoot from the trunk of a Walton

1. Spawn a Walton or Yosemite (recommended), or other vehicles such as Flatline, Bobcat, etc. But I recommend Walton
2. After that, get an object or ramp. Put it so that when you stand on the ramp, your foot is exactly on the trunk of the truck
3. Stand on the point of the ramp that leaves you in the trunk, then add an actor with whatever guns you want.
4. After making your actor, make sure he is perfect. Because you have to repeat step 2 if you want to make any changes
5. Destroy the ramp object, then add another actor to drive your vehicle. Make him drive whatever route and then you're done, it will now works

 

 

Make your player spawn with a parachute

If you want your player to get teleported to a place and have a parachute on him, it's very simple. All you have to do is this:

1. Add pickup, make it a parachute
2. Delete the pickup then
3. Add an objective to teleport player to position, you should have a parachute on you. Do not press Y or N or else you have to start over
4. Done!

 

 

Make actors use Cameras

I did not find this by myself. I took this from another thread by Stuntzman and he credited it to GTAIndonesia, so credits to them.

1. Add an actor who's a friend (or add yourself)
2. Add enemy actor who holds & direct and is holding a camera
3. Should work like that! I haven't tried it so tell me if it works or not

 

 

Black out screen

If you want to make a blackout screen, all you have to do is this.

1. TP player to the gym
2. Set cutscene to look far up into the black void
3. Voila

 

 

Unused Colors

There are a lot of unused colors in the game's code.

• +h+: Makes the colors lighter, put it after a color code e.g. +b++l+ gives you a lighter shade of blue. You can do this twice too, +b++l++l+ gives you baby blue.
• +l+: Black text (I don't recommend using this)
• +p+: Purple text

You can also put these in your mission titles, mission author name, etc.

 

 

Talk on phone during cutscene

A lot of people want their actors to talk on the phone during a cutscene. Here is how

1. Add an animation so it looks like the player is putting their hand up
2. Add object 181 (phone) on the ground or on where the player's hand would be
3. Test & trial until you get the perfect position
4. Voila

 

 

How to make a blow up objective

Lets say you want to make an objective where you blow up SAM sites. Here is how

1. Add a destroy object objective that can be destroyed by satchels or rockets inside of a SAM site (e.g. a crate or a roadblock)
2. thats it! Done. Make sure your player has a rocket launcher and a satchel and no minigun though, because minigun/combat shotgun can destroy SAM sites without destroying the object inside.

 

 

Photograph objective

This is one of the few features people here don't know about. You might want to make your player photograph a certain person or object, here is how.

1. Add objective > Add object
2. Make the object an 8-ball and make the objective to photograph object
3. Put the object in the actor you need to take a picture of's face
4. done!

 

 

How to make your shootouts better

A lot of people like drive-bys more than shootouts because they're more exciting. But there are so many things you can do to improve your DYOM shootouts. Here are some tips:

1. Don't make it too hard. A hard MP isn't really special on here, but a fun one always will be. Give your actor a good weapon, AK-47 or Pump Shotgun are the best weapons you can give your player, or if you want to make it easy then give him a Mini-gun.
2. Add actors that can one hit you. If your shootout's easy, then add an actor who will run in with a combat shotgun or mini-gun. And hell, if you don't want to scare your player, then add a timeout where one of your friends tells you "watch out! He's got a minigun!" Or something like that
3. If the interior (or place) has windows, then make it so that vending machines and other objects start getting thrown in
4. Don't let your player have a comfort zone. Let enemies come in from all directions. Let some of them have melee weapons so they can stall you from attacking the stronger enemies. Let cars get involved (read the Walton tip)
5. Don't give the enemies too much health. Either limit HP to 250 or just enable headshots. 
6. Amplify sound effects. Use interiors that have sounds in them, add explosion sound effects, do whatever to give off the perfect shootout. Heck, use your own music if you have to.
7. Don't make it one wave of enemies. Let other enemies come in.

 

How to make characters talk while you're driving

If you want to make your characters talk while in a car, it's easy but you need to make sure your dialogue isn't too long. You just need to pay attention while doing it though, or else you could mess it up and it will look really ugly.

1. Add a car with 100 HP
2. Add an objective actor, set animation to sit front passenger.
3. Set his marker color to yellow and his objective text should be whatever dialogue you want
4. Then, hide car after objective, and keep repeating until your dialogue is finished. Be careful though, if your drive is short and the dialogue is long, the player will get to see the cars blowing up and know what's going on.

 

 

Hidden pickups

If you want to reward players for messing around and want to give them a weapon or a health boost etc., then here's how you can do it.

1. Add a pickup
2. Add an object that obstructs it
3. Make that object move when touched (or disappear when destroyed)
4. Boom!

If you don't know, in the mission Robbing Uncle Sam (in vanilla San Andreas) you can shoot the crates to get health, armor or gun pickups. I think it's a cool touch and I didn't know about it until really recently.

 

 

Personal tips

1. Don't hesitate to use mods. A lot of people don't like asking players to download mods for their missions because it is inconvenient, however, it is hard to get attached to characters when they are all just Ryder and Sweet lookalikes. A good way to go about this would be limiting mods to storylines and not standard missions. 
2. This is such a cliche around the DYOM community and PLEASE listen to it but do not make your storylines play out like full games! Asking your player to "use his arrow keys to move around" is not a good look. Also asking players to go through so many cutscenes before finally getting to play the mission is not good either, the DYOM engine is fragile and it crashes a lot and players can rage quit at any time. There are so many reasons to not do this. Your MP is just an expansion of San Andreas, whether it be part of its storyline or not.
3. If you want to really improve at DYOM, play this storyline. This storyline taught me so much about DYOM and it showed me so many things I didn't know where possible with this engine. At its time, I think that MP was the real peak of DYOM. I think that could change if DYOM creators try making a project as ambitious as that.
4. Use template missions. If you want to make your MP truly unique, make a template mission where you could put objects and cars and pickups and then every mission you make in a storyline can use that template. You can have own custom interior which you can go around and whatnot.
5. Be creative! There are so many unique ideas for DYOM missions you can make. A good way to come up with it is to think of the craziest scene you can design, or by asking a player to get a random weapon (like a satchel) and ask him to throw it at a helicopter while you use a jetpack.

That's it! I hope you will use one or two or maybe even all of those tips to make your missions  

Edited July 31, 2021 by bananaking13

[Aymunz]

These are some nice tips, man! I don't understand the part about tropes, though. Can you explain more? 

 

[Super Shizuku]

On 3/25/2021 at 5:54 PM, Aymunz said:

These are some nice tips, man! I don't understand the part about tropes, though. Can you explain more? 

 

I guess it's something like "breaking the 4th wall", "cliffhanger", "plot twist", "dialogue before execution kill", "ambiguity", etc...

 

Honestly though, OP, the problem with trope is not its' use but rather how it is executed. So what if some tropes are overused? If they are at least done with underused methods, then the mission still deserves a praise. I'd say if designer thinks some tropes are cool, then he can just use them and ignore others who attempt to discourage him from using them.

Edited March 29, 2021 by Light Syde Riandy

[Aymunz]

28 minutes ago, Light Syde Riandy said:

I guess it's something like "breaking the 4th wall", "cliffhanger", "plot twist", "dialogue before execution kill", "ambiguity", etc...

 

Honestly though, OP, the problem with trope is not its' use but rather how it is executed. 

Most of these are things that will happen in a story eventually anyways. I get that the designer should try to be creative in his writing approach. But putting barriers as to what a writer should avoid isn't helpful in creativeness. Especially since there's nothing wrong with these other than that they are overused.

[Paulo Dizon]

How About More Political And Controvesial Themes  

Edited March 29, 2021 by Paulo Dizon

[Paulo Dizon]

Im Getting Struggling To Create Dyom Inspired BY Talesfan93

And Im Still Planning It 

[bananaking13]

Bump!!

Hopefully these new tips will help you guys make more missions. 

[bananaking13]

More tips coming your way!

 

How to make a Hunter or Hydra shoot at you

1. Create a Hydra or Hunter, but make sure it's so high up
2. Make sure you're not in a place with high towers, high trees or anything that the aircraft can crash into.
3. Add an actor who is just very close to the plane. Spawn an object to elevate you up and help you reach the aircraft, the closer the better. Then, set animation to sit in nearest car, set the route to Attack Player, set behavior to Enemy1 or Enemy2 then Normal,  
4. Test it. If the plane falls on the ground, then put the actor closer. If it doesn't work, make sure you gave the actor the specific traits needed from step 3 and make sure you set him as the driver (If you mess this up then it's normal!)

 

 

How to make a new line in dialogue

This is a feature that's not used a lot in vanilla San Andreas, but it is there in some missions. For example in Tagging Up Turf, when Sweet and Big Smoke are playing Basketball:

- Come on fat boy, come on fat boy
 -Watch out fool! (Laughter)

 

Not many people know this but you can use it in DYOM. Simply put +n+ after a text to use a new line. This is how it should look like:

 

+b+Sweet+w+: Come on fat boy, come on fat boy!+n++b+Big Smoke+w+: Watch out fool!

Edited August 2, 2021 by bananaking13