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Term for a nondisplayed "check" in game programming that sets off a variable. Event Flags are set off when certain events take place — Boss Battles, Cutscenes, leveling up, One Ups — anything that's important to the plot or to your stats. Flags can also trigger anything, from changing a character's status to activating subquests or side-plots to adjusting what sort of Random Encounters show up.
It's important to note that there need not be any logical connection between the action and the results. Sometimes there is a relationship, as when the completion of one quest makes you eligible for others, but very often the game programmers just decided to enforce the order of events. If the door to the Black Tower is impenetrably sealed, but spontaneously unlocks itself after you give 10 flowers to a completely unrelated NPC on the other side of the world, an Event Flag is the little chunk of computer code that made it happen.
Setting off certain Event Flags is necessary for the computer to know when you've won most games. Sequence Breaking in the wrong places can make the game Unwinnable if a flag that was supposed to be triggered gets stuck in the wrong place.
Generally, a Broken Bridge is "repaired" by an event flag, and an unsolvable puzzle gets its solution from it as well.
Examples:
- One spot in Super Paper Mario is an Only Idiots May Pass area. If you try to delay doing what will trigger the bad event, the character you are conversing with will eventually bring up event flags.
- An infamous bug is found in Ultima VII, Serpent Isle. In a haunted house near a lighthouse you visit early in the game, speaking to certain ghosts shows you dialogue from much, much later in the game. This information is useless at that point and doesn't really make sense yet, but more importantly that conversation sets a few event flags that may cause future areas to become impassable.
- In Super Metroid, the large crashed ship is supposed to be entered from the west; a boss fight there triggers an event flag which turns the power on. Through heavy-duty Sequence Breaking, it can also be entered from the east, but it will be completely empty until this flag is triggered.
- In Prince Of Persia, one might expect that picking up the sword in the first level is an event flag (because you can't very well enter a sword fight without it). Turns out that it's not; through trickery, you can enter the second level even without the sword, at which point you'll magically be able to swordfight anyway.
- Fallout 2 has hundreds of Event Flags, some for as obscure things as the particular branches you took in earlier conversations.
- This is also the case with Arcanum, as well as every other role playing game in which the dialogue choices actually matter.
- Rune Factory 2 has only a very few of these. Those it lacks often lead to rather humorous conversations where villagers ask what you think about their Love Interest after you've married her. And you still respond with "i dunno lol".
- One point in Cave Story has a pretty transparent event flag—there's only critters and bats outside when you first enter Grasstown, but once you've talked to Chaco and she mentions you need to kill a Giant Jelly, the entire place is now magically filled with flying Jellyfish (including several visible from her doorstep).
- A bug in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin makes the game Unwinnable this way: Death has some dialogue immediately after you beat him, and at the end of the dialogue, his "boss beaten" event flag is set. However, if you skip the cutscene, the flag never gets set, so re-entering the room seals the doors just as if you had a boss battle, but the boss never appears; you are locked in the room until you reset the game. Worse yet, if you went back out of the room to take advantage of the nearby savepoint, you obviously can't get through the room, which is where the rest of the game is, and the only recourse is to restart the file.
- Konata of Lucky Star often goes on about event flags as if they happen in real life
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is just about run by event flags, ranging from new enemies suddenly appearing based on your level and/or reaching a certain point in a quest all the way to keeping track of what every NPC is supposed to be doing at any given time of in-game day. However, some of these event flags are notoriously prone to glitching, sometimes with disastrous results. This troper suspects that event flags in the other main Elder Scrolls games work in a similar way.
- Fallout 3 upgraded that engine with a more sophisticated AI system, allowing for more flexible scheduling, conditionals and parameters. There's now quadruple redundancy possible, with event flags set by triggers, spell effects, dialog or AI. A dialog can set an AI flag, which will execute and set a Global variable, which will be checked when a door or object is triggered or a spell times out...and many other possible permutations and chained event flags. Unfortunately, this inconsistency makes it easier to break and harder to debug the chain, which a study of the game in the Construction Set shows many designers have done...
- Skies Of Arcadia has event flags. This presents a problem if you use a cheat to find all discoveries before going to the ice continent, as the discovery of a city on the continent is an event flag - you cannot progress in the game and have to start over.
- Certain text adventures enforce intended solutions with event flags. Wishbringer was a classic example of this. There were two cases where you needed to say something to progress. Even if you know what you are supposed to say already (from having solved the puzzle before), when you type it in, unless you learned it in game, you will see something like "The poodle decides you're only guessing it's name and yaps all the louder." This troper has had to start all over because of failing to do the mysterious steps required to learn the "word of power" on that particular save. It's not enough that one of three is randomly chosen at game start, but if you happen to guess it right anyway, it won't work until the game has told you what it is. And at the time you need to use it, that word of power is Lost Forever if you don't know it by then, as backtracking is impossible. Hopefuly you kept a save from just before you should have gotten it? This doesn't even qualify as a handwave.
- Lampshade Hanging in Flower Sun And Rain. In Scenario 4, there's a point when you will probably have already figured out the solution to a puzzle, but aren't actually offered the chance to solve it. You first have to talk to Stephen Charbonie, who, as part of his usual bizarre rant will mention that "digital games also need flags" and that he's going to "trigger a flag for you." From then on, he mentions "flags" every time he allows you to progress further.
- The Unreal Engine Scripting Language Kismet is designed specifically to manage Event Flags, rather than going through the more complicated Unreal Script or C++ routes, kept for more standard functionality.
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