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Ok, so I've been gone awhile. I kinda faded away before the new .NET version of the editor was released. So my question is... how much different is everything? Can I take my old game and open it in the new editor and everything convert (after some script changes) and things should work as they were, yes? Does the graphic import work from old games to new games with no orphaning?

Mostly just importing graphics and creating views. I do have the title screen and all the GUI's working though and it was quite a bit of scripting for all that to work as I wanted since I had to make a custom inventory handler.

Or would it be safer to use the old stuff and stick with it?

Just came on to say hi... Been awhile since I've been around. Just suddenly got a hankerin to come on here and see what's going on.

How are you all?

Maybe I should get back to working on my game again.

Hey all, long time no see.

Since I know a few of you use different gallery software for your websites, I thought I'd ask for opinions on what you use and why, but to help you out, here is what I require.

Public and private areas without user names.

What I mean by this, is I'd like it that only if I give the person the direct URL could they access the private galleries, however, anyone looking at the public section wouldn't even see a link to any private galleries, but still be able to browse the public.

IE I'd only like to give the URL for birthday and other family photo's to my family, without making them create usernames and passwords.

Lots of customization, everything from thumbnails to the CSS used for each page.

One's I have been looking at and seem close, usually require having usernames/passwords to access the private galleries.

So anyway what do you all use?

Ok you have probably seen me post someone very similar to this. The main difference between that one and this one is I toned down the sprite colors (first go around was really saturated).

Anyway, I'm happy with the style I have, it fits with the rest of the game perfectly, so the only thing I want to know is if he looks proportionate, or if I should shave a pixel here or there.  Lengthen the arms a pixel, you know, tweaks.

This is the part I've been dreading about this game. I've now completed all the rooms, which means it's character time, something I struggle with, and I haven't even gotten to animating them, which is even scarier.... Anyway

1X:

2X:


His face does seem a little squished, but I couldn't figure out a way to give him a more rounded forehead without him looking slightly alien. I even tried to just round his head more, but it make him look more like he had a balloon for a head, so any suggestions on that would be cool.

I have this hallway nearly completed except for not quite knowing what to do with the floor (which is supposed to be a linoleum type surface). I've tried a slightly off white color and some patter brushings, and even lightening where the lights are and darkening the rest, but it just doesn't look right.

So any suggestions on what to do with the floor?

Note: the far right side will eventually be cropped, so don't worry about the incompleteness there)

75%:

Ok this is 2.72, but I noticed something

I have cursor mode 4, (use active inventory) mode named as eModeUseCurI, and at one point I had cursor mode 10 (select your active inventory) mode as eModeUseInven.

What I noticed, that even though the editor recognized eModeUseInven, and eModeUseCurI it didn't recognize eModeUseInven as mode 10, it still thought it was mode 4.

Easy workaround was to change all instances of eModeUseInven to eModeSelectInv, however if anyone else has this problem I just wanted to point out that eModeUseInven will default to mode 4 even if you have UseInven set as a different mode number.

Ok, so I have a custom inventory box. I am handling inventory clicks in script, and I'm not using inventory items as cursors.

However I've run into a strange problem where when I click the use interaction, the talk cursor appears, and any inventory clicks count as if I'm using the talking mode. This is in a non walkable room. In a walkable room it just keeps the last interaction selected.

I've tripple checked, and all the buttons are set to the correct cursor modes on click (using the change cursor mode option). Yet everytime I hit the Use button (mouse mode 4) it uses either mode 1 or the last choosen mouse mode.

I've tried doing it by script (Mouse.Mode) but the result is the exact same.

So my question is, did I do something wrong, or is this indeed a bug?

Ok, from what I understand when making a module if you have a protected function within the struct that you have a public function only allows the public functions/members to be called from within the module.

Now here is my header

Code: ags

struct InvHandle{
  import static function Click(InventoryItem *item);
  //internals
  protected import function Talk(InventoryItem *item);
};

and module

Code: ags

static function InvHandle::Click(InventoryItem *item){
    if (mouse.Mode == eModeTalk) InvHandle.Talk(item);
}

protected function InvHandle::Talk(InventoryItem *item){
    //talk stuff here  
}

Yet when I try to save I get this:
---------------------------
Compile Error
---------------------------
There was an error compiling your script. The problem was:

In: 'Inventory Handler'



Error (line 9): Cannot access protected member 'InvHandle::Talk'



Do you want to fix the script now? (Your game has not been saved).
---------------------------
Yes   No  
---------------------------

I thought since InvHandler.Click called InvHandler.Talk it would work since they are part of the same module, apparently this isn't the case...

What the hell did I miss?

I was playing with the custom cursor hotspot (both the cross hair and use sprite number) and I noticed that if the hotspot (both custom and engine generated crosshair) is outside the origional inventory item sprite area, it is removed, or rather, not drawn.

What my suggestion is, is to allow either:

1) The ability to place the cursor hotspot for inventory items outside the inventory item sprite.

Example: I have 16x16 pixel inventory items, However many of them are large enough to take up most of that area. I'd like to place the hotspot at (upper left of the sprite being 0,0) at -2,18. Using magenta for the Inventory Item, and Cyan for the pointer, black being where no sprite is would look something like this.



2) Keep the cursor hotspot choice within the origional sprite, however allow the game created crosshairs, or user created hotspot sprites to be drawn even if they are not within the borders of the origional inventory sprite.

Example: The engine created crosshairs if placed in the upper right hand corner will only draw the center pixel, the left, and the bottom pixels of the crosshair, the top, and right part of the cross hair is not drawn. The same happens if you have a custom hotspot designator that would spill outside the inventory item sprite borders.

Well, that's it. I hope I explained it well enough.

Thanks

Step 1: Goto http://www.google.com

Step 2: Type "answer to life the universe and everything" into the search box

Step 3: Click the search button

Step 4: Feel emotions of mild bemusement to absolute delight 

This is more of an experiment than anything but anyway I have this room that I am happy with. However at one point the lights will be turned off while the door is still open. So I tried to do some shadows. For the most part, the shadows themselves are exactly as I want to do them, but I just want to make sure  that I haven't missed an angle or something.

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2X:


Anyway, it's mostly to check if it looks like I got the angles of the light correct, that's my main concern.

The origional thread that started this all is here. However, it was getting crowded, and I was going to delete the old and unused sprites off my webserver so here we go.

I finished with the last character, now I have the full front views (well except for the sitting guy) of the 7 characters for the game, I kinda dread animating the guy on the right, I have enough trouble with arms and legs, let alone a walker.

Anyway whatcha think?

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2X:


Also, just because I did finish this, and figured what the hell, the title screen.
1X:

2X



Let me knows what you think

Ok, this is really a shameless plug, but on another website I have an advice column. The premise is that of advice columns such as Dear Abbey, however with my own twist on things.

I'll answer any question you have on anything.
I will answer your question how I see fit, you may ask which type of dog best suits you, and I may answer on how you should get a cat instead.
I reserve the right to make fun of you if you ask something stupid. Or if your question is full of horribly bad grammar and spelling.

All in all, it's gone over pretty well on the website, with a decently steady flow of questions coming in, however the website has a smallish community, and with that, a smallish selection of advice given.

So that being said, I invite you to Ask Alynn: Welcome to Ask Alynn to read from the very beginning, or just Ask Alynn: Mom Mums Memory Money to read the latest entry. You can use the navigation buttons at the bottom of each entry to navigate the difference postings.

If you have any questions send them to askalynn@skytowergames.com, I never post email addresses, and all I really ask is that you give yourself a moniker like they do on Dear Abbey to keep questions asked anonymous. However, I don't alter the body of your email, I keep all your spelling and grammar errors in place, so any personal information you give out there will remain in tact, I do however, do some formatting changes for readability.

All in all, its just in good fun, and it's something I've been doing for people on that site for awhile with it not being a column, but with it's recent reconstruction I made it into a full fledged site feature.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Ok, well some of you may know that my artistic ability is... somewhat limited. So instead of fighting it, I decided to go ahead and try a 320X200 game, with 256 colors. Perhaps by starting small I'll gain the skills needed to come up with something decent in larger resolutions. So I finished a front view of what will be the main character (probably), so I'd like some critiques. Grand total 12 colors, 13 if you count transparancy.

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2X:


I tried making his arms a little longer at first, but it just didn't look right (made him seem as if he had monkey arms).

Anyways, thanks in advance.

Hey all,
I think I've finally decided on my newest computer build. If I keep looking I'll probably decide to change things again...

However, I'd like some feedback on what I have here, just to make sure I'm not missing anything. The last thing I need to decide is if I want to Vista or not, if I do, I will get another 2 gb of RAM. But to be honest, I'd probably be better off with an OEM XP copy for another 80 bucks.

Anyway I'd appreciate comments.

Here's the link.
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=4359946

[Vector Based instead of Array Based:]

I'm sure some of this is in the tracker, but with CJ's graphical upgrade to the editor, and the migration to .NET I thought of a few things to completely objectize the rest of the engine. These aren't all my suggestions, there are some in here that have come from other sources, however as I don't remember who made the suggestion I will just repost them here with my own take on what they should be. This will probably get very long. So please bare with me. Also, I have tons of notes I wrote up for this, and my son convieniently decided to destroy many of them, so I will probably forget something, so feel free to add .

These are the Objects (note, Objects with a capital O refers to the classes (Not sure if .NET uses the same terminology as Java, but since I know java better, so I'm using it's terms) while objects is the name for the items normally found in the editor. In other words capital O is Object in the programming sense, and lower o is an object in the AGS sense. So if you see a capital letter, I'm refering to an Object name, and lowercase I am not.

Vector Based instead of Array Based: For those of you that don't know, a Vector is a dynamic Array. It resizes itself to fit the current contents of the Objects stored in it. They are much more flexable than Arrays. The advantage to this is, those that use way less than the (current) maximum limits will get the benefit of having a smaller memory footprint and game size. On the other end, those that need way more than the engine's current limits will no longer be limited to a certain size Array, and can make their game as big as they want.

Seperate Data Structures (Classes): Currently, certain things like objects, are assigned to a certain room that they are created in in the engine. While I believe that objects should be their own Object and placed in a room by code. This provides objects having the same functionality as characters, so characters can pick up and drop objects in any room (if coded to do so). This brings me to the next suggestion.

Global Structures: Much of AGS is already OO, but not all of it, there are still some methods out there that belong to no parent object. Trying to keep with what AGS already has I'd like to add a few other Parent classes

Screen - Handles Screen rendering methods, such as getViewportX, and Rawdraw.
Room - Handles Room Calls
Character - placement and animation, of characters
Object - placement and animation of objects.
Media - Handles Sound, Music, and Video.
Inventory - Handles Inventory Item calls.
Mouse - Handles Mouse placement, mode, and so on
Game - Handles everything else, such as click and keypress handling.

Now Game holds a Vector of Room. Room holds a Vector of Object pointers and Character Objects pointers that currently exist in it (that is to say, it doesn't actually hold the Object, but a pointer to the Object). This would mean that like Characters, Objects would become global, and could therefore exist anywhere in the game. I'd also like to be able to assign rooms script names as you can with characters and objects, such as rNorthHallway. Also, assigning script names to Views, so I could have cEgo and vEgo one of course is the character script name, while the other is the view script name for that character. Walkable Areas, Regions, and Hotspots will still remain as Vectors in Room, as there is no reason to have those global. However making those vectors as well will make them virtually unlimited (save memory requirements), and make the memory size smaller if they aren't being used.

Now if both the Character and Object Vectors are made public within the rooms, this gives 2 ways to access the data within, by globally calling (such as cEgo.Say) or through room Calls (rHallway.GetCharacter(cEgo)). However, I think the best bet would to make the Vectors protected, so they can not be directly written from the rooms, perhaps only read from.

Consistency: Some of you may have noticed that some things like Character.x and Character.y while everything else is Thing.X and Thing.Y. The naming convention should be consistant across the board. This is personal preference on my part. Now you may have noticed the Media class above, I added this class to add some consistancy as well. For instance, PlaySound() PlayMusic() are script commands that are just straight typed in. Not consistant at all with the OO approach AGS is going for. The Media class will now be the parent class for these types of methods. So now we have Media.PlaySound() and Media.PlayMusic, Screen.GetViewportX, Screen.GetViewportY. Also, consistancy for sprites, right now characters are referenced by the bottom center pixel, but rooms are not. For all sprites on screen, including characters and objects, the same reference point (such as the bottom center pixel) should be used. GUI's are fine using the upper left corner as their reference point, as that is normal with most programming.

More OO Approach: Currently there is alot of directly accessing data inside of the Objects. Such as able to set Character.x. In most OO, it's bad practice to directly manipulate primitives. Instead, use Get and Set type methods. player.GetX(), player.SetX(int XValue).

Serialize For Saves: When saving, the current instance of the game can be serialized (Java term, don't know the .NET name for it, however it may very well be a universial term). And when loaded deserialized. This may make the save games smaller. I can't say for sure, since I currently don't know exactly what AGS saves currently.

I probably forgot a few things, but from the notes I had these are the ones I can remember, and the fact that I have to leave for work, so I was rushed in typing all this up, so I may have missed a detail or two. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that these changes should be done by yesterday. But it's something I'd like CJ to consider for AGS 3.0.

Ok I was going along just fine with my newest background when I hit a bit of spriters block...


2x


The left console as left me blank, I thought about putting more monitors on it like I have on the right side, but that would make it a bit too symetrical, but an entire panel of colored lights seems like overkill.

So could you perhaps give me some ideas on what can go on that left console portion?

I've been trying to make a user.ico for my ags game. I've used 3 seperate icon editors, but for some reason everytime I put the user.ico in my game folder and compile the game exe has a fatal exception error.

I have tried 16 color, 256 color, full color, only 32X32 pixels, and different editor and each time after the game is recopiled and I have the new icon the game exe throws the fatal exception.
---------------------------
STR.exe - Application Error
---------------------------
The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click on OK to terminate the application.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

As soon as I remove the ico file and recompile the game works fine again.

Link to one of the ico's I've made

I mean it's quite possible that I had 3 bad editors, but it doesn't seem likely.

Thanks

n00bs, the scourge of the internet. Wherever there is an amateur game making community, these little blighters come out of the woodwork. To some they are just a minor annoyance, to others mild amusement, but to moderators, they are THE ENEMY.

Join our hero Alynn the Yellow Eyed, the resident n00b nazi of Skytower Games and help him rid the skytower of the evil n00bs that have taken it over, and perhaps help him gain the respect (and some other things as well) of LadyKiki

Some may easily recognize the graphics from RM2K's RTP. This is completely intentional as most of the graphics ARE from RM2K rtp. The reason is that back when this game was origionally envisioned (back in 2004) Skytower Games was a primarily RM2K site. When the game was lost, and later found again, even though skytower has gone away from being a primarily rm2k site, I decided to keep the graphics as is instead of starting over from scratch.

There has been some changes from the origional intro I posted way back when, mostly with the use of modules instead of plugins.

It will have some strange quirky things to it, I'm trying to be reminicient of the old NES style RPG's and the like, hence the small character sizes and limited colors on them.
There will be adult language used, the main character (which is based on my internet personality) has some foul language, and the fireball guy uses it more often then not, not to be vulger but that is just it's personality.

Storyline is based off my moderation prowess on an RM2K(3) website YaBB board... You could also title this game "Alynn vs. the n00bs" as all the bad guys are the n00bs that have taken over the Skytower (The website is SkytowerGames), if you notice the flame guy above, thats Flame n00b (thus the bad language).

All the rest of the staff are captured, and it's up to Alynn to free them from the clutches of the n00b. Although Alynn's main motivation seems to be getting into the only female staff member's pants (LadyKiKi), of whom the Knig n00b wants to make his queen.

Basicly, it will have lots of bad puns followed by rimshots. Sexual inuendos, toilet humor, satire, and all that other goofy bs that I find funny.

Screenshots (click for larger view)



There is currently a demo available playable though to the end of chapter one. I'm pretty sure I worked out all the bugs (2 days of playtesting and I havent found another one), but if you find one please let me know.

NOTE: There is cartoonish violence and deaths in this game, also there is tons of curse words, so this is your warning. Also, it's a 320X240 game but it's best viewed running at 640X480 due to the TTF fonts I use.

Anyway the demo download page can be found here.

FYI I've had a couple of issues with the upload, some things got messed up, so I'm in the process of fixing them so if for some reason the game text looks messed up, double check the setup and make sure it's running in 640X480...

Ok I had things going smoothly with everything until I ran into a small snag.

First I had this room created, which is all well and good.


Well then later on I created this room.


After I was finished I realized that the well should probably be visible in the first room I posted. I'm just having a hell of a time figuring out where exactly it should go, and how big it should be. At one point I was wondering if I had the trees too close to the camera in the first picture, and I should move them back some first.

So anyway The far left corner of the barn in pic one exactly corrisponds to the barn wall to the far right of pic 2. So in game space, they are the same corner.

Can you give me a hand on figuring out where the hell the well goes, or should I just move the trees back on the first room, or both?

EDIT: On a side note, maybe moving the well in toward the barn a few pixels may be a better and easier solution.

Thanks ahead of time.