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It depends on the scenario obviously.
I was referring to a situation where background characters walk around and occasionally pass by a hotspot.
Which in many cases are smaller than the character, or cover only a part of the character, so the character will remain constantly clickable anyways.
I feel like you are referring to a very specific situation, where there are plenty of hotspots spread around the room, and Characters are covered by them.
Even then, simply adding one more bool to the function I proposed for when the situation rises that the characters need  to be clickable is , how is that not intuitive?
Or generally making background elements clickable on keypress.
And if the hotspots are bigger than the character, the characters can stay clickable anyways, because they'll never cover the entire hotspot.
It all works totally fine. I see no problem with it.
Can you give an example of where there would be a big problem with this?

Although I do on occasion start drawing on the wrong layer, doh!

Yeah, happens to me too sometimes! When I click to make a layer visible and believe it's also selected because of it, when it's actually not

then select the counter and create a mask from that selection [...] and apply it to the folder with all the sprites that should be affected, so that any part of the sprite that is behind the counter will not be drawn

What exactly do you mean with "all the sprites"?

Well, personally I would do it as well with different characters, but that's a personal preference.

But if you look for simplicity -if that's what ManicMatt asked for-, and you have only one sitting position, then as Ali pointed out, pre-masking the character is the easiest solution,
because you do not have to create a second character and animation.
If you have the arms separately in your image editor, you can pre-mask the character sprite using the table mask as you described, and just layer the arms on top of the cut out character.
So that eventually you have only one single animation and character for the table animation.

Oh ok. I thought my script part made clearer what I meant.
Babar, if you mind my script part in your thread, let me know, I can remove it.


Yeah, for example having the outlines of the object/hotspot drawn on top of the character can be great when a character stands in front of the object/hotspot or when the mouse is over the object/hspt. at the same time. Or the object/hotspot shines through translucently, without that the character changes transparency.
Or have all objects etc. behind shine through characters in front when pressing a key.

The benefit of checking every game loop is that you can also change the label name appropriately in the status line when you display what the mouse is hoovering above, as opposed to you programming it to respond when the mouse is clicked.

Those screen hints you're talking about, how would you imagine them to look like?
A tiny message that appears?

Lol did you actually write "scriptly bound" to begin with, that's funny

We agree on that.

Here's a suggestion:

deleted

[Edit:]

Yes, agree that it's annoying when the character is blocking the hotspot you want to click on. Some devs take great care to avoid the character being placed in a spot where he'll be blocking the hotspot

Throwing this in about that point that has been made in the beginning, that is not an actual problem though. You don't have to go to such lengths to avoid characters walking in front of hotspots, because you can simply turn characters unclickable whenever the mouse is over a hotspot:
in repeatedly execute you write:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{
if(Hotspot.GetAtRoomXY(mouse.x,mouse.y)!=hotspot[0])
character[N].Clickable=false;

else
character[N].Clickable=true;
}

This way the character of your choice is not clickable whenever the mouse is hoovering over a hotspot.
And you can loop through all background characters if you want.

Edit: Did your reply to that just dissappear, Crimson Wizard?

Babar the limitation to that approach is that you have to place the character at ONE specific spot on the table, because the y-value changes as well with x-coordiante on a diagonal table.
So you would have to calculate pixel-perfectly for every new spot.
Also this approach doesn't account for round tables or otherly shaped foreground objects if you want to change spots.
That's why an extra character for the arms gives most flexibility.

I don't know what application you're using to draw your sprites, but in Photoshop you could just import the background as a layer (if not already done), then select the counter and create a mask from that selection (or rather, the inverse) and apply it to the folder with all the sprites that should be affected, so that any part of the sprite that is behind the counter will not be drawn. It should take less than 20 seconds.

This way the arms on top of the table will be cut out though as well or with inverted selection the entire body shows below/on top of the table. So it's probably more than 20 seconds if you consider the arm shape.

If you wanted a different method for the sake of it, you could also create the cut-out of the arms into the table, and do that for the table for every animated sprite.
And then once you have every cut-out for the table you write in late repeatedly:

Code: ags

if(player.View==12&&player.Loop==0)//Selected Sitdown on table view
otable.Graphic=player.Frame 98;//98 would be the sprite ID of the first frame of the table cutout animation,...
//... corresponding to frame 0 of the sitdown animation

This way the table animates the cutout together with the character animation.

But having the arms as a separate character is still the best solution imo as well.
This way the character can walk around with his hand on the table, do whatever you want, and sit down where you want, you just let the hand follow the character.

I suppose that's why that workaround can be a temporary solution.

It would be cool when this gets fixed that you will also be able to do nested tags with ALL tags, not just spoiler and hide tags.
There is so much fun stuff you could do with it in that case.

This does not seem to have been properly debugged.

It happened to me again with ++ symbols.

You may also edit manual source itself, as it exists in a form of a Wiki, although do that only if you sure what you do   (and it's moderated by developers)

I have a question on that: how fast are changes in the wiki transferred to the in-built editor manual? Is it updated with every new release?

eri0o,
I know this is super late, but I promised I would let you know how your script works.
I was just too busy to take a look, so, since I finally got to it:

It works fine, but the blocking part does not.

Thank you! I was stuck! 

You're welcome


Thanks for your feedback, heltenjon!
There will be even more challenges and cool assets in the finished version after the voting deadline, and I will add missing speech and jokes (obviously the corona virus will have something to say as well) , so keep an eye out for it!
I will consider the amount of time. If it feels right, I might reduce the number of dragon's lifes and sick people.

They do the same thing, and that's why you can incapsulate them because the forum code differentiates the syntax of different logs even when they look alike.
I'm curious, when was Spoiler introduced?

I would imagine this is a bug in WINE or a related component and not directly an AGS issue.

Btw. I'd like to mention that it's not obvious that the mask pell uploaded is the one they directly exported from AGS.
To me it seems the image pell uploaded is the one they edited and exported with Gimp.
So it would be useful to know what file pell uploaded, just to avoid drawing wrong conclusions.

Your tutorial worked perfectly. Thank you. I didn't realize I needed to choose a color map other than the one for the current image. That's why things didn't work for me.

Glad I could help. It looked like that was part of the problem.

I'll just add that you still only need 17 colors in your map rather than the whole 256.

That's interesting. I'll keep it in mind. Did you try if it works with 16 colors? (1 transparency color and 15 areas-> 16 colors).

For some reason this post showed up in my unread posts.
Just mentioning that even though the issue has not been improved yet at all, even as it is already you can incapsulate up to four spoilers one into another (so a spoiler within a spoiler within a spoiler within...) by intersecting tags.

In any case, I tried it out, and following the steps I described above, I could eventually import your mask into AGS in Windows.
And exporting a mask, loading it into GIMP, exporting it and then re-importing it into AGS, also works fine for me on Windows.

It might be worth considering if AGS should be able to import a wider range of color formats with mask images in the future to avoid having to pay such scrupulous attention to details for mask image editing and export.

Remembers me of good old high school times...

Maybe instead of
"Please, spare this unworthy acolyte!"

a better version would be
"Please, spare me unworthy acolyte!"

Since acolyte is already not a word used everyday, people will better understand from context what you mean this way.