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Alright here's what I have, one character is the main character and when he uses a certain object an effect comes on to him that makes it look like something is right around him and behind him.Ã,  I have this working by using another character for the effect and making it follow the main character exactly.

The problem is that the sheep character is animating when it is put on the main character.Ã,  That works but when you deactivate and reactivate the item is where there is a problem.Ã,  It works but you get a warning from the AGS editor once you close the game saying "Sheep character is animating while follow is called and may never start following the character".Ã,  Well it does follow the character but it would be nice to get rid of this warning.Ã,  I thought it would make sense to stop the characters animation when the following is deactivated, but I can't figure out how.Ã,  There is no character.stopAnimating() function or anything, and I tried unlockView and setting the view to a locked frame but it still gives me this warning.

Any ideas?


Edit-  Nevermind I figured it out.

Turns out you have to unlock the view BEFORE you set it to followCharacter(null).

Is it possible to use a region tint so that it will affect the background?

It seems to me that when you do a region tint it only affects the characters tint when he's in the region, and dosent tint the background at all.

Right now I just put an unclickable object where the region is and tint that to get the right effect, but if there's a way to do it with regions it would be better.

The reason I can't just draw the tint in as part of the background is because it's supposed to be glowing, so the tint amount is constantly changing in repeatedly_execute_always.


Also I can't get screen tints to work how I want them, if I want a room that constantly fades into black and then lighter then the tintScreen function is what would be good to use.  It doesnt work though since it only takes numbers up to 100 an dyou can't achieve a solid black tint.

So to work around that one I had to make a massive black object that covers the whole screen and has its transparency constantly changing to achieve the right effect.

It still looks a bit weird since it looks like there is some tearing in the object or something, a line is drawn sort of on one part of the object as its transparency changes.

I'm making a game but I'm having a hard time thinking of great puzzles to put into it, I've played all the lucasarts ones but can't think of anything that really stands out that I can incorporate.

Can anyone think of an interesting adventure game puzzle, preferably one that doesn't take much drawing but takes some programming skill.  I was thinking of putting a shooting sequence or pong or something it but it wouldn't make sense with the rest of my game.

Well I've been holding off on announcing this game for a while since I wanted to have a good chunk of the game made before I go ahead and show it.

The game will be titled "The Shadowville Horror", the basic plot is that you are trapped in a house, but you realize that both you and the house are not normal.Ã,  Vampires will be a big part of the story, along with some historical figures.

I have an article about the game on my website at http://www.thescurvyshack.com/TSH%20Article.html and there are screenshots there from it (if it's a rule that I have to have the pictures in the actual thread then just tell me and I'll put them in here instead).Ã,  I also put a nifty wallpaper at the bottom of the page.

Here's the pics from my site:







The game has some neat features to it so far, including:

A very nice Scumm interface

Actively cancellable commands (IE if you click "Open door" then click somewhere else you no longer open the door, no blocking is used)

Tint effects

Two levels of vision that will make rooms appear different (not using two rooms)

Right now I've got a good section of the game done, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a way to get from the middle of the story to the end, and I need to put in more interesting puzzles.

Alright well here's the problem I'm having.

In one of my rooms I have a character that really isn't a full character so I dont want to draw it in every frame since it doesnt ever use them.  All it does is face one direction until your character clicks to talk on it, at which point it looks downwards and talks.

There's a few problems with this though, here they are.

1.  I'd rather put the interaction between the two characters in the room script than the character interaction script.  I sort of have this by using the global on call function to call the rooms script, but I'd like to know if there way a more elegant way. I was thinking of making the one character an object but didnt think that would work for talking.

2.  The biggest problem I'm having is with figuring out how the frames will work since I only have a few since it never faces left or right.  Right now I have it so that before the room fadein it locks the character view to the one of it facing the wall, and then when the main character talks to it it locks the view in another direction.  What will happen though when I try to add a talking animation for the character in since the view is locked?  How can I work around this to succesfully make the character without drawing all the unneeded frames?

Let me know if I need to make my problem clearer.

Ok I've run into a strange problem.Ã,  I start the game and play a midi file, that works out alright.

Next I change the midi file playing for a certain event.

After that I chance the midi file playing back to the original one.Ã,  However rather then playing normally this midi file is all screwed up and sounds very strange.

I tried it with a different second midi file and as far as I can tell it works normally.Ã,  Any ideas on how I can make it so that it will sound right all the time?

Is there a way to reset the midi synthesizer or something?

Edit:  Just to be sure it wasn't my computer I tried it on my other computer, same problem.  This problem just seems so strange.

Alright I am a bit confused with the on_call room function that you use to do local room things from the global script.

The reason I am confused is that it seems to be able to access and change room variables just fine, but it can't call other room functions.

for example I have a function called startFireScene() and when I try to call it from the on_call function it won't work, but if you call it from any other room function it works just fine.

This got me to thinking that maybe the on_call function still counts as a global function that is specialized for that room, however it's not so since it can access and change room variables.  The biggest problem I have is that without the ability to call other room functions from the on call function it means that a few times I have to have duplicates of the exact same code.

For example I have a room variable called booksBurned that gets changed after something in the on call function happens, if two books are burned then a cutscene happens.  Well right now I have to have the cutscene cut and pasted into two of the spots in the on call, since the player may burn the books in a different order.

Is there any way to call room functions from the on_call function?

(the reason I used the on_call function was because it seems to be the most elegant way of making the character walk to an area and do something when they get there, without pausing the script).

I'm trying to think of a way to put a dialog topic in a cutscene for the start of a game.  The problem I'm having is that runDialog() only does so after the script stops.  This is a problem because I want the cutscene to still be going  after the dialog conversation, so the character moves around a bit.

Is there any way I can make the dialog topic start, and block the rest of the script from going until it finishes?

Alright I'm just wondering if there is a better way to do this.

I have an object in a room, a knife that is on a knife rack.  I the knife rack is a hotspot called "knives", and I want the player to be able to click "take knives" and if he does not have the knife object he gets it.  The only problem with this right now is that the knife object counts as it's own thing when you scroll over it, so to remedy that I used object.isClickable=false .  My question is this, either where can I put this code so that it gets run only once ever, or is there a way to make this option part of the objects default state.  Right now my best idea is to put it on room load, but that seems dumb since the room may load many times and the object won't be there after the player uses take on the hotspot.

Alright here's what happened and scared the hell out of me.

I made some bitmap images for an animated cursor in photoshop, then I imported them into AGS, no problems.

I tested the views and everything, it all appeared to be fine.Ã,  So then I set the cursors to be the views and run the game.Ã,  Bam I get hit by tons of errors saying that the sprites are invalid.Ã,  I went to the sprite part in the editor, and got aobut 20 errors saying that the sprites are invalid.Ã,  So now Im freaking out since the only backup I have is 2 days old and I've made tons of progress since then.Ã,  I desperatly try deleting the sprindex file and all of that and after about 30 mins of tinkering around with AGS and getting tons of errors I managed to replace all of the troubled sprites with the default one and the game was now runnable again.

So then I made a backup and then I tried importing the same mouse sprites and doing that again, this time it works though.Ã,  Why would it have done this?

Also, is there any possible way that my game could have a problem in it now after dealing with this?Ã,  I'm hoping that having the tons of errors generated and whatever troubles it caused the engine doesn't somehow manifest itself in my games, even though the sprites are now good.

I think the problem might have been because I accidently had 2 instances of AGS going at once since I wasnt paying attention, editing the same game.

The game appears to run fine I just want to make sure that theres no way that any of my game code could have problems somwhere in it.

Is there an easy way to do this:

When a player clicks on an object and something is run, in my case open door, then the player walks to the door before changing rooms but without blocking the script.

The reason I ask is if it's easy I'd like to have it so you can click "open" on the door and then while your guy is walking you can click "walk to" somewhere else and have it stop you from going to the door and changing rooms.

Right now I have the script blocking when you walk to the door which works fine but isn't very elegant.

I was thinking maybe I could accomplish this with regions, or even better would be a simple if statement.

I've got a strange problem, it doesnt cause any errors or anything but it's annoying to me.

Here's my room script

Code: ags

// room script file

#sectionstart room_aÃ,  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE
function room_a() {
Ã,  // script for Room: Player enters room (before fadein)
cEgo.x= 290;
cEgo.y=140;
cEvil.ChangeRoom(6, 280, 140);
 
}
#sectionend room_aÃ,  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE

#sectionstart room_bÃ,  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE
function room_b() {
Ã,  // script for Room: Player enters room (after fadein)
Ã,  //cEvil.Walk(145, 145);
	cEgo.Walk(145, 145);
	cEvil.Walk(145, 145);
Ã,  
}
#sectionend room_bÃ,  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE

The strange thing is that for some reason cEgo waits about half a second before he starts moving, whereas the other guy doesn't.

I have almost the exact same code in the previous room and it worked without any delays for that room.

I'm pretty sure it has to do with the character stacking, since if I move the characters to start from different spots it works like normal.Ã,  Is there a way I can ignore character collisions?

I posted something stupid, please delete.

I dont know if this is me being stupid or what but here it is:

Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x0043E14C ; program pointer is +6, ACI version 2.71.894, gtags (1,30)

This occured when I had a cutscene, I started it at the start of the game, and tried to end it after a character moved to an x,y location with blocking on.

If I moved it to before the character moved it worked fine but it didn't like the character movement.

Edit:

Nevermind I managed to work around this by using a global int to see if it's in a cutscene, I found out how walking works when you skip a cutscene, it doesnt teleport the character to their destination.

I am making a simple intro and I have run into a few problems that I need some insights with.

The intro will consist of my character not being on the screen, and using SayAt to make his text be on the screen.  I dont want the keys to be able to skip the text (so I set it to mouse only in the game options), but at the same time I want the game script to continue while my character talks so that if I hit a certain key the save/load gui comes up.  The problem right now is what when I use SayAt it pauses the game script I think so it stops listening for keyboard input.  I also need the keyboard input so the ESC key will work and allow the player to skip past the intro to the start of the game (I'll use a global int to set whether or not the game is in the intro, so it knows to take them to the right room).

This is vexing, I'm running into problems every step of the way on what should be simple things.

I want to display the mouse coordinates so I have tried to put them in a string using:

message=("coordinates %d , %d",mouse.x,mouse.y);

However that gets a parse error saying it doesnt like the %d 's, what am I doing wrong?

EDIT:
Nevermind I found out that String.Format is what you need to use to get this to work.  Seems weird though that the other way doesnt work as well, I mean what would you do if you already had a string and wanted to add numbers into it without getting rid of the information?

OK, maybe I'm going about this the wrong way but here's what I want to do.  I'm trying to make a simple cutscene where the character is not on screen but he talks at a certain x y coordinate.  In the room script I put character
[EGO].SayAt(100,100,100,"Hi");

This doesn't compile however, so I'm wondering do room scripts work differently from the global scripts?

Ok I did do a search but I coulndt find/figure out a definitive answer to my problem.

I set the game resolution to 320x240, which doesnt seem to do anything as rooms are still 320x200 be default.

So is the only solution to make background images at 320x240 with 40 pixels of black at the bottom (where the gui would be)?  Or is there a way so that I can just use my 320x200 images to put in the 320x240 room so that I can then use the remaining spot for my GUI?

I'm trying to do some basic photoshop stuff and Ive encountered a problem.Ã,  I have an image and I select a color range which i want to put onto a new slide, the problem is when i cut and pastes the range photoshop makes it smaller (maybe its anti aliasing it or trimming it or something).Ã,  How do i get it to cut exactly what i have selected, so it doesnt change a pixel?

Also with the part i do put onto the new layer, when i try to move it it seems to be snapping to certain points of the image, is there a way to turn this snapping off?

Im trying to draw small buttons and small backgrounds and Im using photoshop but I find it very difficult to work with photoshop on pixel art.  Do other people experience this, or am I just too new to photoshop to know how to work stuff?  If photoshop is very good for pixel art can someone please give me a rundown basics of how to do it, or point me to a tutorial.  If therse a better program could someone suggest it?