Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Asking for an advice on finding a gamedev job

« on: 15 Apr 2018, 00:27 »

Hey I would like to link some sites for remote work too (don't know if they are useful, but I have my eyes on them for some time...):

remoteok.io
jobs.github
stackoverflow/jobs
jobspresso.co
weworkremotely.com
indeed.com

How is the market of where you live? Would a local studio near you exist? Are there gamedev groups to be a part of? Also if you want to make games, if your country has any funding for this, you can apply for grants - here in Brazil it's possible to apply for most grants as a company and some very thin grants as a person.

About setting up a Patreon, I see Godot has one and the guy from Phaser has one too. For a open source tool comparison, individual devs, Øyvind Kolås and ZeMarmot from GIMP have accounts there too - but GIMP itself has other means to sustain itself. A successful open source dev in this model is the guy from VUE.js, maybe too far from gamedev - notice he never posts anything in the site. Some people I know from here apply to Patreon and our local equivalents of it. ko-fi and Paypal donation buttons usually are prominently shown in open source dev pages, at least in JavaScript land.  Here is a post from Eran Hammer on payment and open source.

2

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Adventure Game Psychographics

« on: 14 Apr 2018, 22:25 »

Right, playtesting is totally Spencer.

3

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Survey: what is good in AGS and what needs improvement

« on: 14 Apr 2018, 20:49 »

Scripting sequential events is also super-easy. You can write a script which works like a movie script where the game waits for each event to complete before moving on to the next. it sounds simple, but other game engines seem to be designed around things happening simultaneously, based on lots of different inputs.

Damn, I missed this thread when it was written. The above sentence from Ali is my most beloved feature. I love the editor, the intellisense and all, but the way I can just write things in script and they happen in smart order, not everything at the same time, is awesome! Doing this in any other engine is a pain! (callbacks everywhere!!!)

If I could add something, it would be like threads or parallel instances of this queue of events, so things could happen in background and be scripted as easy as blocking functions in normal scripting.

4

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Adventure Game Psychographics

« on: 14 Apr 2018, 20:36 »

Disclaimer: this an article that I sketched long ago, but didn't knew if it was good enough, so I am throwing here to see if ideas can come up to make it better because I want to address this general idea in my blog.

I noticed recently that during the week I am more keen on games that have story depth, but I can get tired if a game is too demanding skill wise. On weekends, I am usually well rested, and like to be challenged.

Once I saw a tweet by @gritfish that said:

"I honestly believe we need to  change the way games do difficulty / game modes to something like:

I'm here for the story
I'm here for challenge
I'm here for a second & harder playthrough
I'm here to take photos
I want to play with the settings and I'm okay if that breaks things"

Well, I like this idea. But I am also slightly lazy, I am not coding different game modes.

I've read Designing Virtual Worlds, from Richard Bartle, and he talks about the 4 types of players he discovered while analyzing MUD: Achievers, who like to achieve defined goals; Socializers, who gets greatest rewards interacting with other people; Explorers, who likes to learn more about the virtual world; Killers, who like to dominate others. He goes on to explain how to create a virtual world that attracts each subset of players.

Players of Magic The Gathering may be familiar with this idea, it's R&D and Mark Rosewater divide players in three categories: Timmy, a social person who wants to have fun winning big (the RTS equivalent would be having a big base before unleashing a final gigantic attack); Johnny, who wants to express himself through the game; and Spike, who plays for the winning and competition. Recently they also started considering hybrids of these players.

On with adventure games. They are mostly known by stories, puzzles, the exploring and the pace on the control of the player. Psychographics can be defined as a quantitative methodology used to describe consumers on psychological attributes. Psychographics has been applied to the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

I would like to propose here psychographics for Point and Click Adventure Games:

 - Stella, who plays for the Story;
 - Paula, who plays for the Puzzles;
 - Ezra, who plays to Explore;

So each time I create a room in a game, I try to look if I am leaving each of these players, something to play with, and also, I usually choose one of them to focus more on each room.

5

Advanced Technical Forum / Re: get current graphic from player

« on: 14 Apr 2018, 14:16 »

Yes, it got solved! I think each .asc listed under script (not rooms) repeatedly_execute, are called from top to bottom and me not paying attention lead to ultimate confusion!

6

Engine Development / Re: Issue : Dialogs skip too fast

« on: 14 Apr 2018, 01:45 »

Ha CW, I found the thread I think you are talking about: this thread here.

From the thread, the available options were:
 - using only mouse to skip text ;
 - modifying alleg-allegro/src/win/wkeybd.c , to remove the section with /* ignore special Windows keys (alt+tab, alt+space, (ctrl|alt)+esc) */ ...  (I don't think we need to prevent alt+tab from being handled in game if it isn't handled... So removing kind makes sense, but I can't understand why this would work ) ;
 - letting go (lot's of games don't play well with alt+tab and people are usually fine?) .

7

Engine Development / Re: Issue : Dialogs skip too fast

« on: 13 Apr 2018, 22:04 »

Hey, a person found this bug with alt+tab, but it doesn't happen in any computer I own, so I can't reproduce. I also couldn't find the mentioned thread in Allegro forum - I also can only Google on Allegro forum, but from itself I can only look the latest 5 topics...

8

Advanced Technical Forum / Re: get current graphic from player

« on: 13 Apr 2018, 02:43 »

CW you are right! I didn't knew I could just use late_repeatedly_execute_always under a RoomN.asc, but apparently I can!!! I also now don't understand the difference between Room_RepExe and repeatedly_execute.

9

Advanced Technical Forum / [solved] get current graphic from player

« on: 13 Apr 2018, 00:37 »

Hello,

I need to get the current graphic from the player, I need to do this every instant, I am using this information to draw things on a surface, so at instant t=7 I need the player frame for instant t=7, and not t=6.

I decided to use the following:

Code: Adventure Game Studio

1. int getPlayerGraphic(){
2.   ViewFrame * ViewFrame_Player;
3.   ViewFrame_Player = Game.GetViewFrame(player.View,  player.Loop, player.Frame);
4.   return  ViewFrame_Player.Graphic;
5. }
6.  

but apparently, this gets in the current instant, the graphic that was on screen on the previous instant, so using this information gets a slightly delay.

So I evolved to do the following thing:

Code: Adventure Game Studio

1. int i_view;
2. int i_loop;
3. ViewFrame * ViewFrame_Player;
4.  
5. function repeatedly_execute_always(){
6.   i_view = player.View;
7.   i_loop = player.Loop;
8. }
9.  
10. function late_repeatedly_execute_always(){
11.   if(IsGamePaused() == 1  || !System.HasInputFocus){
12.     return;  
13.   }
14.  
15.   ViewFrame_Player = Game.GetViewFrame(i_view,  i_loop, player.Frame);
16. }
17.  
18. static int PlayerViewframe::getGraphic(){
19.   return  ViewFrame_Player.Graphic;
20. }
21.  

which sometimes works, but in some rare occasions, crashes my software, because player.Frame sometimes is updated and i_view and i_loop isn't, and my loop for down and up have different frame count than left and right. And sometimes, it doesn't update correctly.

So is there a right way of getting the current graphic the player has ?

10

AGS Games in Production / Re: Future Flashback

« on: 09 Apr 2018, 03:54 »

More Screenshots!

Hello!

Small update! Adding some more screenshots below!





(last one is kind of a small error on player.ChangeRoom ... )

You can see some more screenshots on the game blog or @futureflashbck on Twitter!

We have been testing a slightly change in the game interface that will hopefully make the game better.

11

Modules & Plugins / Re: [PLUGIN] Joystick / Game controller support! v1.2.0

« on: 08 Apr 2018, 22:34 »

Dear Wyz,

if you ever have time, please share the code for the joystick plugin . :] I really would like to take a stab at making a Linux .so version .

12

Site & Forum Reports / Re: Members Profile show Modules/Plugins they have made.

« on: 25 Mar 2018, 14:56 »

I would like to add that login to the wiki is not something anyone can do

13

Critics' Lounge / Re: Trip on this. A moving thread.

« on: 11 Mar 2018, 23:37 »

Hey Moving Thread, tell Creamy that he must get the wheels and place on the proper empty spot, in the pipes, near the boiler, and then shove some coal.

14

Site & Forum Reports / Re: Wiki manual pages out of date

« on: 11 Mar 2018, 11:53 »

I was never able to edit the wiki. If I recall, I started in the forums just to complain about this with AGA.

15

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Writing software recommendation

« on: 06 Mar 2018, 16:16 »

I have used scrivener in the past, but I later discovered Google Docs was easier because it has apps that work everywhere.

16

Engine Development / Re: AGS engine Android port

« on: 28 Feb 2018, 02:49 »

Hey CW! It's the version AGS Editor .NET (Build 3.4.1.12) - v3.4.1, January 2018. Now this is really weird. The DungeonHands.exe (my game name) didn't work too with android. The .ags game file from Compiled/Data wasn't actually from Compiled/Data... I got it from there, placed it in a obb file using :

Code: Bash

1. cd Compiled
2. mkdir obb
3. cp Data/DungeonHands.ags obb/
4. ~/Android/Sdk/tools/bin/jobb -d ./obb/ -o main.3.com.mythsuntold.dungeonhands.obb -pn com.mythsuntold.dungeonhands -pv 3

And later I dumped the content of the obb.

Code: Bash

1. ~/Android/Sdk/tools/bin/jobb -dump main.3.com.mythsuntold.dungeonhands.obb -d out/

Aaaand.. Get this... The md5sum of the file isn't the same.

Text files remain unaltered by the jobb tool. But binary, be .ags or .exe, are modified by it. I don't know yet what's modified though. I will later test with 3.4.0 if acwin can read unobbed ags files.

Edit: No it can't too... It gives a different error though. By running the dumped exe from the obb with acwin.exe it gives the error:
This game requires a different version of AGS (16.0.0.0). It cannot be run.

If it worked I would guess something... Since it doesn't, my next idea is to try the jobb tool from Monkey.... But this is weird because it does work with the prebuilt Ags Androd 3.4.0 ... I guess my next shot is trying to build 3.4.0 to see if my binary is the same as the prebuilt ones - it probably won't be...

Edit2: looking online I can find posts until 2017 of people complaining Google Jobb tool generates corrupted obb files for random combination of files...

Edit3: Ok, I will try to first load a game without using obb, and later test some alternatives jobb tools. I will only do this tomorrow... For some reason I am currently unable to generate non corrupted obb files with google jobb tool :/

17

Engine Development / Re: AGS engine Android port

« on: 28 Feb 2018, 02:24 »

Ok, I have the same error using acwin.exe from 3.4.12 in a folder with the GameName.ags I got from the Compiled/Data folder... I will try to obb the .exe file and see if it works...

18

Engine Development / Re: AGS engine Android port

« on: 28 Feb 2018, 02:08 »

Just a question... In ags/Engine/platform/android/acpland.cpp, when the engine is called with main(1, &psp_game_file_name_pointer), the variable psp_game_file_name_pointer actually has the folder where the GameName.ags is located (in my case, in the device it mounted the obb to a random folder like /mnt/obb/1175cb392d70c5744bffa846b85c5467/ ).I get the error: Main game file not found. The game files may be incomplete, corrupt or from unsupported version of AGS. Now, I couldn't find where it looks for .ags files in the folder, apparently the exception "Main game file not found" is thrown by main_game_file.cpp, in the function OpenMainGameFile and in the function OpenMainGameFileFromDefaultAsset. I couldn't confirm which function is actually being called, or which filename is being looked for. I know only that OpenMainGameFileFromDefaultAsset looks for either game28.dta or ac2game.dta. This is really weird for me because gitblame doesn't show many changes in the android port in 6 years, and I am positive that the prebuilt 3.4.0 finds my game files built for 3.4.0 . :/

So, given a folder, which files does the AGS Engine looks for in the directory?

[Add spoiler tag]

19

AGS Engine & Editor Releases / Re: AGS 3.4.2 - next WIP version (unstable)

« on: 22 Feb 2018, 23:46 »

Hey CW! It worked great here!

Steps for Linux using Play On Linux (I use Ubuntu 16.04):
- Create a new Play On Linux drive, I used wine x86 3.1 .
- On Play On Linux, go to the virtual drive, and under Install Components, install Microsoft Core Fonts.
- After, still under Install Components, install dotnet40
- I created a folder in Program Files called Adventure Game Studio 3.4.2
- Copy the downloaded AGS files and extract the content in the Adventure Game Studio 3.4.2 folder.
- I placed the VisualStudioDark.json theme there too.
- On Play On Linux interface, click create shortcut from this virtual drive, select AGSEditor.exe, I named the shortcut AGS342.
- done! Just run the previously created shortcut!

I added a spoiler tag in the image below because it's big.

Add spoiler tag for Hidden:

342 default theme


with dark theme

(my Wine is emulating Windows XP environment!)

20

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Writing software recommendation

« on: 22 Feb 2018, 12:36 »

This is Twine 1? I am testing the most recent Twine (I think 2.2 something?). I saw people using Google Spreadsheet for planning, with passages being made inside cells.

My actual game is being made in a mix of pen and paper, libreoffice, google docs and mspaint. I try to use dialogs in AGS for dialogs and cutscenes.