I thought I'd make a little guide to using the awards client.
When you first create your profile and get to picking your nickname, there's a "NickServ Password" field. This is for IRC users who already have a registered nick/password.
If you don't have a password set up, leave this field blank.If you fail to connect, you pretty much have to quit out of the program, fix whatever the problem is, and try again. If you set the wrong NickServ password, for example, you'll have to create a new profile when you restart (it will overwrite the current one).
Of course, you can walk around by left-clicking. However, because the IRC channel we use to communicate these actions has limited bandwidth,
walking is throttled – after you click to walk, it is disabled for a short period. Just wait and you'll be able to click again.
You can also
turn to face different directions by right-clicking:
New this year, we also have animated speech:
... and you can perform a "special action" by pressing the button:
Both of
these things will only work if you avatar supports it – most avatars don't. Also,
in some cases the special action requires you to face a certain direction.
You choose your avatar from the menu at start, and can change it during the show. Some avatars are password-protected (if you have a protected avatar, you should already know your password): on the avatars screen, click the "Special..." button and type in the password:
To see whether the avatar supports animated speech or special action, look at the little letters to their bottom right:
"T" means the avatar has an animated speech view, "X" that it supports a special action.
You can also use a number of the standard IRC commands in the chat. Notably,
"/me wipes a tear from his eye" will be displayed as an action, "*Snarky wipes a tear from his eye" rather than just something I said, and
"/nick MyNewName" changes your nickname to that name (if it is permitted).
You can use the scroll wheel (or equivalent trackpad gesture) to scroll the chatlog up and down. You can use Ctrl-Z/Y to undo/redo text entry, and on Windows you can use Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to cut, copy and paste from the system clipboard.
Buttons that are grayed out and say "(Not available)" are features that haven't been implemented yet.
People who connect to the awards ceremony through text chat (IRC) rather than with the client are represented by "holograms" on the balcony. These holograms are controlled automatically when they're on stage, there's no person controlling their movements.
Edit:Oh, and a couple of words about bugs. Let's hope there aren't any serious ones, but there's always a chance of a crash. At least on Mac (not sure about Linux), the application will just quit without any error message or warning.
If you do get a crash message, please copy it down (text or screenshot) and report it so it can be fixed in the future. The same goes for any other glitches or bugs you might experience: the hosts will be quite busy during the show, so if you just mention it in the chat there's a high risk we'll miss it or forget about it.
There are at least two known bugs you'll probably notice:
- The name of the song/artist displayed by the volume control isn't always updated correctly, so it may sometimes show wrong information
- If you hide the chatlog and go into one of the fullscreen menus (avatar, speech color...), when you return the chatlog text (but not the backdrop) will be displayed. You can click show/hide twice to get rid of it again.
You may also notice people teleporting or "warping" around. This can either be because there's too much IRC traffic (with lots of people walking around at the same time), or often because your framerate is too low for the game to keep up. As AGS games go, it has high requirements. If you're seeing very low framerates, try changing some of the settings in winsetup.exe: make sure you're running in Direct3D or OpenGL if possible. The client often runs better in a window than in fullscreen.
