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Hmm, I've heard of the hyperspeed text thing before in full-screen mode, where on some systems the TAB key seemed to get stuck down after you used ALT+TAB and you had to press tab once you were back in the game to fix it. But I've never heard of it happening in windowed mode before, and I can't reproduce it myself.

CapnDingo, is it just the ESC key that it doesn't recognise, or is it a general problem where it doesn't recognise the first key you press after returning to the game?

It's just the Escape key. It recognizes other key presses on the first try.

And when it recognizes any other key press except Escape, Escape begins working again.

I suppose I should clarify, I've isolated a finer reproduction. It also only happens when you specifically alt+tab out, then bring the game back up. Simply clicking on another window and putting it in front of the game window, or hitting the Windows button, won't do it.

Escape key not playing well with alt+tab?

Are you running full-screen or windowed?

If you're regularly task-switching to take screenshots and stuff, it's easier to run the game in a window.

Full-screen. My concern wasn't so much my own issues with it, but the possible issues players may have with it. Personally, I take my screenshots with Fraps, but they could want to task switch for any number of reasons.

Obviously I could tell them to just not minimize, or to hit another key after maximizing to fix Escape not working. I don't think I've experienced the hyperspeed thing GarageGothic has though. It always goes the proper speed.

But, perhaps it is a combination of a Vista thing and one of the updates to the engine. I run Vista, as does the tester.

It sucks because I can't really help you identify the problem much beyond that. The best I can say is, if you'd like a reproduction, create a game, make a GUI that becomes visible upon pressing Escape. It should work, until you minimize/maximize the game again, then it will stop working until you feed it a different key press. Clicking with the mouse however doesn't seem to re-enable the Escape key. Only keyboard presses.

I presume this is a bug because I've not altered in any way the function of the Escape key. I use it to bring up my main menu GUI, and that's all. It's a single line of code.

Normally, the Escape key works just fine. However, when I minimize/maximize the game, it refuses to acknowledge the Escape key anymore unless I press any other key on the keyboard first. Then it works just fine.

Awkward, yes?

Edit: To clarify, this happens both on my system and on a tester's system.

Hrm. That's pretty nice, but unfortunately I think it's way out of my league. And with the large volume of dialog in my game, I'd have to do extra work for each and every speech line (or I assume).

Plus if it's just drawing the text and not behaving as an actual Say command, I'd still have to manually code the talking animation every time I want it to occur, correct?

Yeah, I don't know. Again, out of my league. I'm a bit noobish for that.

Alright, thanks.

Guess it's time to do more font hunting.

I guess it's a pretty open-and-shut case.

Can character speech be anti-aliased, or am I out of luck?

All my other game text in my GUIs are being anti-aliased as it said they would be in my general options when I enabled it, but character speech is not. Looks very unprofessional, blocky around the edges, difficult to read. I suppose if all else fails, I'll just have to find a fatter "balloony" type font to use for the speech, which is a shame because I really liked this one I'm using now.

And it is a TTF font, as I assume it had to be since it's called TTF font anti-aliasing.

Ahhh, of course. That makes sense.

If complicated movements cause problems I can always figure something out. I just needed a step in the right direction (no pun intended?).

Yeah, sorry, I should have specified. It's not that I DON'T want to move up and down, it's that I want to maintain the left/right facing directions even when I'm moving up/down.

Only issue is the logistics, I'm not sure how I'm going to determine whether the character is moving left or right...

Thanks though.

Oi, are you serious? Thanks.

But I want to beat my head now. :p

I've come from a background of light programming only to be completely stumped. I've tried everything under the sun to get the simplest of things working, but I'm very discouraged.

Tried searching the forums, came up empty.

All I wanted was a GUI textbox to display the name of the hotspot the mouse is over. I used to do this easily in earlier versions of AGS, and now it's a nightmare.

  Label1.Text = MousedOverHotspot.Name;

Well, it's pretty obvious that's what I want to set the label to my MousedOverHotspot. My problem is there's no way to actually GRAB the hotspot and declare it to MousedOverHotspot. There's no compatible declaration type with a hotspot.

I tried:

Hotspot MousedOverHotspot = Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y);

Nope. Compile error. Cannot declare local instance of managed type (?! It couldn't possibly be more cryptic). I even tried declaring it as int, object, and string just to be silly, though I knew those wouldn't work, but I was desperate.

This is becoming a lot of work for something so simple. I was hoping to hit the ground running seeing that I already had coding knowledge, only to fall face-first in the mud at my very first lines of code. Anyone know anything that could help?

As a bonus question (sorry, I wasn't sure whether to ask two questions in one thread or spam up the forum with two threads, so I took the lesser of two evils), is there any way at all to confine my character to only moving left/right? I have no lengthy verticality in my game and so there's no need for there to be deliberate up/down walking animations (which would waste a lot of time for my artist, not to mention I just don't want it).

At the same time, I don't just want to randomly assign one of the side views to the up/down in the event that it makes something behave weirdly (for instance, moving up and very slightly to the left, but it still detects it as up and faces the character right, thus making him not face what he was sent to).

Sorry for the novel. All help is appreciated, I've only just begun and I really don't want to quit this early.