What was the hardest thing you ever scripted?

Started by Squinky, Sat 15/11/2003 16:18:47

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Squinky

In an effort to nerdy up this place, I've gotta ask this question:

So, What was the hardest thing you ever you scrapped together in ags?

For me, it was probably DemonSlayer 3. It took me forever becuase I had to keep adding different variables to keep track of all the different states of the monsters. I had used FollowCharacter to make the bad guys keep coming at demonslayer, and for some reason, even when I sent them to another room after being shot, the bad guys would still appear in the room running at him....It took me at least a few days of trial and error on that one...

So, anybody else have any scripting storys?

DGMacphee

The swtich-o character engine for Stickmen (and Stickmen 2) was pain to script, mainly cause I had to be mindful that all events fitted the two characters i.e. I cocked up in Stickmen where one of the characters says he's waiting for himself instead of the other guy.
ABRACADABRA YOUR SPELLS ARE OKAY

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"Ah, look! I've just shat a rainbow." - Yakspit

PureGhostGR

#2
finding a way to make a gui "magic book" animate the flipping pages.

*argh* crazy..

-and I don't mean pure scripting-

Barcik

The timer in "A Xmas Eve Tale". Notice that it keeps running off-screen during dialogs!
Currently Working On: Monkey Island 1.5

juncmodule

Trying to make my NPC's walk around before finding Scorpiorus's CCS plugin was probably the most headache-inducing scripting nightmare for me. Then of course, CCS is a nightmare to put together too!

I spend most of my time with AGS fighting to understand other peoples scripts it seems. Proskrito's SCUMM templates, while great, are a scripting jibbled nightmare.

Also trying to find a way to seperate Rickj's BlueGUI Animation Engine was a task. I finally did it, only to realise it wasn't what I needed.

NPC's are STILL my biggest scripting problem though. I would rather not rely on plugin's so heavily, and CCS has some limitations.

I really wish it was plausable for Chris to add some NPC handling functions to AGS. :'(

oh well...

later,
-junc

Ben

I was working on this game a while back where the player character can move objects telepathically-- You click on an object, and then you can move it around the room and drop it wherever you want. Actually, the worst part isn't the scripting. It's thinking of puzzles that will actually work under that style of control.

It might be awhile before you see that game  :P

MrColossal

working on the sniper view for 6 Day Assassin was hard mostly cause i didn't know what i was doing and i had to make a comprimise by adding the WADS control of the camera when what i should have done was

SetViewport(mouse.x*2,mouse.y*2);

and everything would have worked out juuuuust fine...

working on my mags game has given me quite a scripting headache and that's why i had to call ghormak in
"This must be a good time to live in, since Eric bothers to stay here at all"-CJ also: ACHTUNG FRANZ!

Ghormak

Besides the headache eric has given me, I'm going to have to say: Moose Wars in its entirety.
Achtung Franz! The comic

Scummbuddy

The iMuse for SCUMM, oh wait. That wasn't me, that was just a dream.  Don't you all just see code in your sleep after coding all night?

Nice topic Squinky. perhaps this could lead to others bringing up easier ways around brought up problems
- Oh great, I'm stuck in colonial times, tentacles are taking over the world, and now the toilets backing up.
- No, I mean it's really STUCK. Like adventure-game stuck.
-Hoagie from DOTT

bspeersisdead

One of the things that has slowed down production of "Edge of Reality" for the better part of a year is the mini-game I'm trying to create where you try to set the day's newspaper stories in order based on the sponsor of the day.  It's a card game and you win points based on adherance to the sponsor and readership.

So far it's over 5800 lines of code and will be much longer by the time its done.  And every time I go to work on it, there's another element that doesn't work.  Like cards that flip upside down when you carry them, or disappear, or change pictures, or give the wrong score.

Luckily, I was insane BEFORE scripting this part of the game, so my friends haven't noticed a perceptible difference.


P.S: It's in the old dos version.

Gahh.

Duzz

making the computer player part for FIFA 2004 was pretty hard, but then i only did it for the challenge so it didn't matter...

the coin gui for the latest game i've been working on was a killer too, and so is the 'skill-tester' i'm trying to get going at the moment...
Powerhoof - My new indie games company! | Wintermute Studios - My older AGS games: The Historical League of Bouncy Boxing, Grr! Bearly Sane,  Duzz Quest...

Timosity

I've had many hard parts in LSL3, that seemed easy before I had to script it, but turned out to be rather complex. Some of these things are interesting and maybe helpful to others.

Here's a couple of bits.

When pressing the elevator button, it has to know what level the indicator is on so when you press it, it moves back to the ground level. It also involves manually changing the object graphic on a timer instead of an animation.


when larry is dancing he changes views under each light and aslo at a certain point money is thrown at him, it seemed easy enough but I had to have two seperate complex repeatedly executes to get it to work. so Larry danced in different views and the money still was thrown at the same time.



The mirror in the casino, there is a place on the screen where 3 characters can be at the same spot on screen but at three different walkbehind levels at the same time, That's also in two different places on screen aswell. Also with the mirror larry can be in 3 different views which has to match up with his reflection, also Patty can walk past too. Also the mirror itself was hard to get perfect with the reflection (SSH helped with that bit)



Have you ever tried to have an animating button on a gui and still have the other buttons clickable, I very much doubt it cause I've never seen it, but thanks to some very complex scripting care of Dorcan, I got it to happen, This is the most complex bit of AGS scripting I've seen.


Having complete scenes non blocking eg. on the beach when the natives sell stuff to Tawni, you can still walk around, look, talk etc.
same as in the comedy hut while the comedian is talking, you can get up and leave if you like.



The love scene between Larry and Patti, goes for 10 minutes set precisely to a 10 minute track, with 100's of frames of animation. To get the scene changes to fit correctly with the music changes was quite a challenge.


These are just a few things that spring to mind, and there are many more challenging scripts in the game, but it's great fun trying to work it all out.

A handy tip:

Just one interesting point I found was when I started the game, there was no such thing as regions so I used hotspots for walking onto, when regions were introduced, I started using them, but a handy thing is if you have different actions to perform while standing on a specific point you can use stand on hotspot and walk onto region and they can also overlap which can come in handy for certain situations.

Sorry to crap on, but I liked the topic, and it can help with other peoples thinking.

Paper Carnival

In GM the hardest thing I have ever done was the enemy AI. The hardest part of the enemy AI was the pathfinding, which wasn't good at all (so I had to use another better one :P).

As for AGS, it's that text wich describes the action. I mean, it displays the coin verb and if you highlight the hand action it says "Use <name>", but I can specify with the schema editor what to say. Eg the hand action over a key will show "Pick up key", but the same one with a lever will show "Pull lever". A similar thing applies to inventory items, where having one over a character will say "give <item> to <charactername>", or "Use <item> on <hotspot or whateva>", "Put <item> on <hotspot or whateva>" etc. It wasn't that hard, but it was the hardest thing I have ever done in AGS so far (I have done stuff a lot harder in other game engines)

Squinky

Bah, I may be changing my decision for my hardest scripting yet to my new project: Screwing with arrays, or perhaps it should be called arrays screwing with me....

It's cool to hear peoples experiences with scripting, some were predictable, like duzz and ghormak, but I am suprised by the all the hard work in Timositys game....I just figured that would be pretty straight forward...

And to the dead Bspears I recomend you try out the newer ags, It's seems like all my games that sat on old versions with problems, got solved the minute I updated them and got all the new functions...

Timosity

I just have a new challenge that I'm quite excited about, the bamboo jungle in LSL3, now this seems easy, but like usual things in this game aren't as they seem.

The jungle itself is 72 rooms (to the naked eye) but in the original this was done with 2 rooms. There are 2 different rooms that have an exit to the N, S, E & W, with objects on the screen to block off each direction. this will take a lot of scripting for walking off edges and keeping track of where you are in the maze. Also keeping in mind different walkbehinds and walkable areas for the different possibilities.

I will keep the same amount of rooms for the maze (eg. grid size, 8 wide, 9 high) and I have designed a totally new maze, but to keep the scripting easier and less messy, I have made 16 rooms for different directions, to help with walkbehinds and walkable areas.

Now it's up to the scripting of walking off edges, I've gotta actually start it before I can get my head around how I will keep track, but I've planned it all on paper and all the screens and walkbehinds are in place. I'm looking forward to it.

NB. I know no one really cares, but I just had to mention it.

Nine Toes

#15
The Hardest thing to script PERIOD, or the hardest thing for ME to script?...

Well the one thing that has always been a challenge for me is customizing my GUI's.  One game I was working on, I was trying to make a "yes" and a "no" button, so that when you try to pick up an item, you would be prompted, "Do you want to pick up the *?" (* being the name of the item in question, to be inserted into the sentence via a variable of some type).  And then you would click on either "yes" or "no".  I was also going to use those buttons for pivotal moments in the game, where the game would change based on your decision.

Even though Barcik helped me out with the scripting, and told me how to customize the GUIs for it, it still isn't working properly, and I still don't know what I'm doing.

...damn, I spilled milk on my pants... >:(
Watch, I just killed this topic...

earlwood

 :-\ No heroic scripting obstacles for me, with AGS_225 the game practally writes its self. The hardest thing I have ever had to do was setting an objectview, which I found after someone on #ags told me. But 225 makes it so people can spend more time on there acctual game then scripting, god I hated the dos version!

A totally wannabe scripter,
Earlwood

Ishmael

I spent quite a time on MRC's elevator, the end scene and the screenshotting (has anyone used it? Notice it saves (should, I did test it a lot and it worked for me) all screenshots taken with F12 into a new file isntead of a static name... and F11 lets you type in the name... I forgot to document it...), but they were not difficult, just took time and effort...

EFL's GUI took time aswell, and the position scripts troubled me a bit as I had to calculate where the GUI should be to be set on certain x or y cordinate, and hte corners aswell... well, the script wasnt difficult... I just wasn't in a very mathy mood that time... And the end puzzle was hard, as I had to use a load of variables to check if the player had put the nuke into the analyzer and if the analyzer was activated and so on, and I kept loosing track of those variables.

But I haven't faced anything specially difficult yet... that reminds me...
I used to make games but then I took an IRC in the knee.

<Calin> Ishmael looks awesome all the time
\( Ö)/ ¬(Ö ) | Ja minähän en keskellä kirkasta päivää lähden minnekään juoksentelemaan ilman housuja.

Captain Mostly

#18
The hardest thing for me to get my head round is when you have a whole net of long-winded to-ing and fro-ing chunks of code all sweeping around each other and balancing delecatly on top of each other. VPXT2 is rather akin to a hay-stack that's been crafted into a mobius strip stood on it's end being carried around London by midgets in fog. Precariously held together, and difficult to keep track of.

None the less, the REAL challanges were all in The Chinchilla of Fate, when I was just starting to learn and fight with scripting. The "Slap the slaty minger" minigame seemed horrible to code at the time... And some would suggest not REALLY worth the effort

Evil

NewRoomEx(r,x,y) is about as far as I got... And I still forget the friggen semi-colon... Damned semi-colon...

Ishmael

I'm not sure did I exceed EFL GUI today... I was working on MRC2 GUI. Making sure that any possibly open other menu dialog would close when another is opened is piece of cake, thus I occasionally forgot to add if (IsGUIOn(blah)) blah blah... to EVERY function that needs it. But the Help-system took some time as the fraggin' arrow buttons wouldn't work or something... and the screenshot system, based on MRC's one, but taking a bit less space in the code due to some major cleanup I did, and of cource managed to jam the game a few times before the if and while were set up correct... oops! Am I flooding or something?
I used to make games but then I took an IRC in the knee.

<Calin> Ishmael looks awesome all the time
\( Ö)/ ¬(Ö ) | Ja minähän en keskellä kirkasta päivää lähden minnekään juoksentelemaan ilman housuja.

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