Messages

I think the main appeal of stuff like FMOD is being able to apply effects to the audio in real time, instead of needing to have a full set of different files for example if you want a character's footsteps to have different reverb according to whether they're outdoors, or in a cave, or in a room.

A very common example would be a scene in which the player is outside of, say, a club. The music sounds muffled from the street (low pass filter), but you get the full sound when someone opens the door, and you might even want to add some extra room reverb when the player actually steps into the club.

With a real-time audio system like FMOD, this would all be done in a single track, adding and tweaking effects on the fly via script. In AGS, you would need a separate track for each of these effects and to play them all simultaneously, switching the volumes of each one on and off according to which effect you want, which also takes up an audio channel for each track.

I know @Dualnames implemented this kind of real-time muffled effect for Strangeland's in-game options menu, but I have no idea how he did it!

I helped test this tool with my game's own translation and I have to say that it's an absolute godsend. I was having nightmares, cold sweats and panic attacks just thinking about having to move all the translated text from my Google Sheets file back to the .trs file and this does it in a single click!

It also has super useful stats that show up once the conversion is applied, and it helped me find so many little mistakes that were breaking my translation, such as extra blank spaces, or a comma here, a missing full stop here. So thank you once again @ryu for one of the biggest QOL improvements to AGS that I (and I'm sure many others) could have wished for <3

People who stand on the left side of escalators, who stand in the middle of the sidewalk checking their phone, their baby carriage, or chatting with their friends, who stand in front of elevator doors and look shocked when people come out of it, who leave their shopping cart in the middle of the supermarket aisle, who don't take their backpacks off in the train or the bus.

So in short, people who completely lack situational awareness, or who think shared/public spaces belong to them and everyone else is an NPC.

Check out custom properties.

I downloaded the test client for Windows and was able to connect without issues and click around the stage and faff about with the settings. No crashes or weird bugs for me (except that I appeared on the stage for some reason instead of down in the hall/dancefloor).

One thing I noticed is that the `music_credits.txt` file doesn't seem to have been updated in several years. Since 2021, to be precise. Not sure if it even makes sense to have a list of the tracks from previous years, but the ones for this year should definitely be there. (Unless this has already been take care of for the "real" client, in which case forget I said anything!)

I'd like to know, how many people are actually using 3.6.2 to make actual games at the moment?

I understand that more people are switching directly to AGS 4.0 already, which is good, but are there ones who stay at 3.x and try 3.6.2? This is to be aware of how much potentially tested this version is.

I started our latest game on 3.5.1, I think, and I'm now on the latest 3.6.1 version. I will definitely upgrade to 3.6.2 at some point, and keep updating / patching that one as required, but I won't switch to 4.0 for this game.

[Legend of Hand]

Legend of Hand (Steam / itch.io) has a few arcade sequences, including a fishing minigame and some basic kung-fu fighting.

Sorry, looks like I spoke too soon. My awards nomination page still shows the old username for some reason.

Hopefully fixed now?  Should be correct in the header, game credits, and Awards nominations?

Yes, thank you!

It should be updated in both places now to your "Laura Hunt" username

Sorry, looks like I spoke too soon. My awards nomination page still shows the old username for some reason.

Another issue I've noticed: when I first registered on the website, my username was "notarobotyet", but I later changed it to the one I'm using now. The new site, however, is showing the old one

It should be updated in both places now to your "Laura Hunt" username

It works now, thanks!

Another issue I've noticed: when I first registered on the website, my username was "notarobotyet", but I later changed it to the one I'm using now. The new site, however, is showing the old one both in the top right user menu and in the credits of my games (and games I've collaborated in). For example, here.

This also means I have two different profile URLs depending on where you are:

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/profile/Laura%20Hunt/ or https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/profile/Laura+Hunt/ on the forums.

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/profile/notarobotyet/ on the new site.

I changed my username because the first one was just meant to be a crappy placeholder, so I hope this can be fixed at some point.

[only]

Bonus gear-grinding: calling universally beloved and popular movies/directors/musicians/albums "underrated".

This is extra annoying because there's practically no way to object without seeming like an asshole.

Just this afternoon I was watching a video from a hip hop duo I used to enjoy a lot in the early/mid 00s, and someone had commented "most underrated song on the album!". This was literally the main single from that album and the only one that got a music video! How can it be the "most underrated song on the album"? * sigh *

This ties into terms like "cult movie". If it's popular enough, wouldn't that make it mainstream instead of having a "cult following"?

Yeah, I guess there are degrees and shades of grey, of course, and a very well known work in a specific niche (say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure") might be completely unknown by the mainstream, thus making it a "cult" movie for most people but a "what do you mean you haven't watched it you poser" for people in that niche. But calling stuff like Twin Peaks "cult" in our year of the lord 2025 is just ridiculous, for sure (rest in peace David Lynch).

"Hey, they did retro music back before it was retro!"

Ah, thanks for reminding me of another one of my pet peeves, which is people calling old things "retro". Something is retro not when it's old, but when it imitates an older aesthetic. So e.g., The Crimson Diamond or Urban Witch Story would be "retro", but The Colonel's Bequest or Police Quest are not. If anything, they would be "classics", but never "retro".

And one more complaint, since I'm letting it all out today Does the constant use of hyperbole on the internet (as in how everything is always "the best X EVER") get on anybody else's nerves? Doesn't it feel exhausting?

When "cinephiles" on social media post movie screenshots saying stuff like "best movie EVER" but don't post the title because that would be uncool for some reason; besides, if you're a cool cinephile like them you should know every single movie in existence from a single shot. It's like our "Guess the movie title" thread, but without any of the fun.

And while we're on the topic, people who say "wow, this movie looks amazing, I can't believe it's X years old", as if art were a linear progression and the new stuff should be "better" by default than everything that came before it. (Also, so much stuff that people call "ahead of its time" is so clearly a product of its time.)

Bonus gear-grinding: calling universally beloved and popular movies/directors/musicians/albums "underrated".

Oh, I see! Yeah, definitely a pretty niche case, haha. But interesting! Thanks for clarifying

Are there any use cases for dynamic audioclips apart from loading external audio files? I'm asking mostly because I don't see why any dev would include separate mp3/ogg files with their games. Do you have any examples in mind?

and third to The Tensor by Aruma Studios. I haven't played that, but rumors are our own Postmodern Adventures recommends it.

Actually three members of this community (Postmodern, Chomba and myself) lent this project a hand with feedback and testing! It's a very cool little game, and only 15-20 minutes long, so do give it a try, I'm sure you'll like it

A-ha. I was going by your earlier statement:

The problem with this approach is the one I mentioned earlier to eri0o: "trigger" areas would stop corresponding to their visual representations.

Therefore I assumed you would use both the visible and the invisible cards as trigger areas. But if you think having part of the selected cards be outside of the trigger area and cause them to be unselected is not a problem, then sure.

The key "eureka" moment was CW's suggestion that the invisible cards should not move up and down, BUT their baselines should move to the front or to the back together with the "real" card that's being activated, making overlaps possible and making the trigger areas almost identical to their visible counterparts.

So sure, in the end there's a tiny area in the trigger card that doesn't match the "real" card exactly when the card is lifted (10 vertical pixels to be precise), but in my tests it's barely noticeable and never ruins the effect.

If by "second way" CW means the second alternative I described, it's not quite the same solution.

Honestly I'm kind of lost at this point with all this back and forth But long story short, what matters is that the dummy cards method works great, and it's solved my issue perfectly

Now we leave the cursor in this position. Since the card is no longer selected, it will begin to drop back to its original position, but this makes it pass over the cursor and get selected again

This never happens because the trigger is the invisible card, not the "real" one. In fact, the "real" cards are not even clickable, so they don't get detected by mouseovers or object detections at all. Therefore "this makes it pass over the cursor and get selected again" is not a situation that can happen with this method because the trigger card (the invisible one) never moves.

I was kind of expecting that the "second way" is used, meaning that the trigger zone is always the same, regardless of where the card is located in the current moment.

That's exactly the way I'm doing it, yes.

One way to fix the bouncing problem would be to say that if the mouse hasn't moved, don't update the card selection. If combined with the invisible cards in the stationary positions, I think this will solve the problem completely.

That does look like it might have been a simpler solution! Using transparent objects has solved the problem perfectly though, so now that I've implemented the whole shebang, I'll probably just keep it. Thanks though, something to keep in mind for the future. Sometimes solving problems like these is not a matter of code but of re-thinking the problem differently, and this thread has given me a few examples of stuff that I never would have thought of on my own.