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[A cybernetic ménage à (x²-x)]

Fragment

A cybernetic ménage à (x²-x)

After the automated coming-of-age story of Annie Android and the six panel whodunnit comedy smash hit !, get ready for the third instalment in Ben Chandler's and Sebastian Pfaller's ongoing robo emotion series: Fragment.


Timothy Jenkins is an aspiring scientist in the field of experimental cybernetic psychology. He is a loner, working the days away in his tiny laboratory, mostly known to fellow scientists for the unconventional and daring character of his work - often conducted at the borders of the code of scientific practice. His most recent experimental setup, called the Plateaus of Oblivion, was intended to explore human memory and conditions of forgetting, remembering, grief and remorse - but somewhere along the way, in the heat of the moment, Timothy loses control of the situation. An effervescent whirlwind of pure emotional code unfolds, and he soon finds himself confronted with memories from an uncertain past, with fears he had long forgotten and suppressed - and with love, where he least expects it. Can he, a man who has long lost track of the world, handle this digital emotion overload?

Prepare yourself for an introspective and surreal 32-bit colour extravaganza of digitalized emotions!

Get it now as a part of the awesome AGS Fake Sale bundle! And also try Balling Skywards!

[A cybernetic ménage à (x²-x)]

Ben Chandler, Paranormal Investigator and Sebastian Pfaller, Paranormal Tax Inspector present
- after three years of letting the dough rise, just in time for the AGS Bake Sale -
the third instalment in their ongoing “robo emotion” series:

Fragment

A cybernetic ménage à (x²-x)

Timothy Jenkins is an aspiring scientist in the field of experimental cybernetic psychology. He is a loner, working the days away in his tiny laboratory, mostly known to fellow scientists for the unconventional and daring character of his work - often conducted at the borders of the code of scientific practice. His most recent experimental setup, called the Plateaus of Oblivion, was intended to explore human memory and conditions of forgetting, remembering, grief and remorse - but somewhere along the way, in the heat of the moment, Timothy loses control of the situation. An effervescent whirlwind of pure emotional code unfolds, and he soon finds himself confronted with memories from an uncertain past, with fears he had long forgotten and suppressed - and with love, where he least expects it. Can he, a man who has long lost track of the world, handle this digital emotion overload?

Prepare yourself for an introspective and surreal 32-bit colour extravaganza of digitalized emotions!

Fragment features:
- long dialogue, featuring interesting sentences (click mouse to skip)
- puzzles that can be solved by clicking things
- digital representations of both digital and real things to look at
- popular computer psychology
- sorry ass music (access to high quality sample bank: denied)
- valuable lesson for all of us


edit: As of today, this game has been marked as complete.

Well, I have been doing some freelance translation work recently, and this is now the second time the client asked me if I was comfortable working with .po files. The last time I had simply opened the file with a text editor and replaced the former translation, but this time I got curious (I had seen .po files in Wordpress and Drupal projects before) and had a look at the format and its properties - and obviously, the GNU community has put a lot of effort into translation tools like poedit, gtranslator and pootle (and many more I haven't discovered, yet, I am sure).

I remember that the translation feature of AGS had some little irks, like only putting out one unique string for translation when the same sentence ("string") is used on different occasions and maybe in a different context, somewhat unsorted output and possibly missing text (I am not sure if this is still an issue, I remember one game where the GUI texts wouldn't get dumped into the translation file), and the slightly clumsy method of having to handle the speechref.txt file to be able to know who said what.

I know this is not really high priority, but I wanted to mention it and ask the people who know how the editor code looks like (now that it's freely accessible and I don't have to bother CJ with it, haha) if this is a good idea and possible at all:

Could AGS output .po files, or are there dependencies (gettext seems to be a rather huge framework, but I don't have the slightest idea) or technical issues that prohibit that? And it may make sense for websites and other purely text-based content, but is the format flexible enough and easy enough to handle to work with time-based (game) content?

The requests for a reformed translation system might be few, but I think CJ mentioned in some of the development threads that he was planning on rewriting a bit of it, so if this is done at some point in the future by one of the fantastic contributors who will appear from out of the depths of the internet pretty soon, using a GNU standard might be a good idea. Or not?

Yes, that's right. Hello.

I have started my own website, I call it 56modern.com. I want to talk about computer games as an art form, not in a very academic manner, but rather in a fun way to show that "computer game" does not equal "click, turn, shoot, level up".

To give my page a kind of a starting point and hopefully wash a wave of people in, I decided to set up a little competition. I had this idea some days ago, and I love it, I must admit. I want you to fail.

Everybody knows about Speedruns, how they are performed, who performs them and who likes to watch them. But nobody knows about Speedfails, because I invented them today! A simple task: Take your favourite computer game, fail as hard and as quickly as you can, and then post it on youtube as a video response to my own fail.

If you like the idea, read more about it on my site, exactly here: http://www.56kmodern.com/timeray/37/56kompo1-speedfails/

And participate!

Hello there, adept AGS scripters of the world,

I am having troubles with a temporary custom dialogs GUI. I simply copied the examples and modified them to suit the game, and it works like it should and renders nicely, but there are two things I don't really know how to.

Basically, I'd like to be able to make the GUI look like a book page where you can click certain things, others not, and where you can flip pages to bring up the next pair of, let's say, 7 clickable dialog lines.

The first thing I fail at is a line break for long sentences within the dialog_options_render-function. I just don't know where to put it and how to use the GetTextWidth command appropriately.

The second thing is the flipping of the pages - how can I determine that after a certain amount of displayed responses, others should be displayed on the next page?


I realize this could be some trouble to explain, but I'd really, really appreciate it.

Good evening.

I'd love to know if any of you know if the newest version of AGS has made it possible to implement scrolling dialogs via sliders or buttons. I realize that monkey05_06 has released a module for this, "ScollingDialogs", but I fear it is slightly outdated, having been released a good two years ago.

In a certain situation, the game I am working on will feature way too many dialog options for a normal GUI to handle, so I will have to find a way out of this. Now, while I was browsing the manual, I found the new commands Dialog.OptionCount and Dialog.DisplayOptions. I've got the feeling that it might be possible to implement scrolling/sliding dialog options on a GUI with these; I can't, however, come up with an idea how this could be done.

Any suggestions how or if this can be implemented?

Hello there.

I have a rather odd problem and can't think of a solution that wouldn't involve code trash galore, so I thought I might as well ask: I'd like to check whether there is character standing at a certain point where the player clicks. The problem is that the GUI is a home brew verb coin GUI with different buttons, so the mouse pointer will actually end up next to the character in at least 50% and thus not give a response.

Is it possible to define a field to be checked, rather than a single pixel coordinate? A fixed hotspot also won't work, because the characters will be standing at different locations too often.

Thanks in advance!

Ahoi there.

Yesterday I got hungry. Hungry for food, luxurious food. I then looked up a recipe on the Internet(TM), found one alright, well, here comes the point: This was a Web 2.0 cooking community. Everybody shares their recipes, has own cookbooks etc, you get the point.

Gastrically saturated I went for mental stimulation to the AGS pages and almost immediately wondered: How come this is so Web 1.0? I mean, I grew up with 56k and Napster assholes canceling download at 99% and I'm really not one who wants to spend more time on his fashionable and hip online self-portray than on his real life, but:

Wouldn't that be just the right thing for a community like the AGS Forums? You can mark your favorite games, you can mark games you might want to play, you can send friends links to cool new games etc...

I know, implementing this would probably mean killing server and time and money, I know. But other than that, wouldn't you enjoy a more openly accessible AGS community?

Regards,
kaputtnik

Hi guys.

I made up a really good puzzle which fits into my game quite perfectly, but sadly I don't have any idea how to script it; I am quite proficient with ags coding, this puzzle, however, is not a matter of proficiency but feasibility and creativity.

Okay. I want to implement a rope which is tied to a wall in one place. The rope has a certain length of...lets say...20 metres. The character can pick it up and drag it everywhere (over room borders), but only one direction makes sense, of course; he has to tie the other end to a pole or something like that. Do you think I could raw draw that rope, as a simple brown line? And if so, how? And how could the rope recognize that its 20 metres are exhausted?

Hey there.

I've scripted my way through quite successfully up to now but right now I've found myself in a bit of trouble.

I've been trying to establish a constantly visible GUI which includes a button, whose image should change according to the hotspot the mouse is over.
Like the simple @OVERHOTSPOT@, just that I need a button pic to be changed.

I added properties leading to the very pic for every hotspot and tried to script it, but I'm kind of stuck now. Can somebody tell me an effective way to do it? I surely could mess around with mouse.x and y and script my way around it, but I feel there's gotta be an easier possibility.

-

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00420EEC ; program pointer is +6, ACI version 2.62.772, gtags (85,3)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.

(Room 0 script line 7)

That line says "Wait (70);"

When I delete it, the error will move down some lines, to the next "Wait" command. On any line that contains "Wait", it will crash. I dind't tamper with any of the scripts, only added a new character. Any advice?

Hey there.

It's been two months since we - Kosmonaut Produkte, that is - started our first AGS game, Kalle Gonzalez: Rockfall in Paradise. The first version we are developing is in German, I will translate it later on, when we are done.

The story: The year is 1990 (or maybe 1989, haven't decided yet.). You are Kalle Gonzalez, thirtysomething, rowdyish environmental campaigner for a decade and a half. Whenever nature is in danger, whenever someone is about to extinct another endangered species, you certainly are not far, always ready to use your brains, your looks and your fists to rough up the thang.

One day - while saving the whales on a distant caribean island - you get a phone call from your pal Svensson who works as a seismologist in an observatory in the German Alps. Just as he begins to describe strange tremors he had recently noticed, the call is interrupted.

Now you wouldn't be Kalle Gonzalez if you woulnd't leave the whales to Greenpeace right away and get on board of the next ferry, destination Germany. What's expecting you there? An opaque situation, and you don't know who you can trust. IsÃ,  the brave and honest mountain infantry involved? Does the priest know more than he wants to tell? What's the grumpy old hermit got to do with it all? You only know one thing: Whoever is behind this direful conspiration, he will seriously damage the German Alps, wildlife sanctuary and protected landscape. You have to stop that bastard - and give him a completely bio-degradable whipdown!

I used Proskritos Fate Of Atlantis GUI, modified it a bit to fit it to the game's needs, so this is certainly a tribute to Indiana Jones in one way or another. And it is a tribute to an old German adventure game called "Das Erbe", where you had to refurbish an old shack you had inherited from your uncle - but beware, do not do anything that will harm the environment!Ã,  Don't worry, we are NOT fanatic environmentalists (though this is certainly an important issue), we just wanted to play around a bit with clichés and prejudices, of Bavaria and the alps on the one hand (cause Bavaria is where we live), ofÃ,  Ã, those good-natured and lamblike environment-weirdos on the other hand. This is one mean eco-bastard.

Stats so far:

Story and Characters: 90%
Graphics: 20%
Music: 40%
Puzzles: 0%

And here's the screenshots:





Not much to the detail as of yet, I know. I can't give you better screenshots though, because I took these some days ago and now my AGS Editor seems to have some problems. Anyway....

Adios, Sebastian.

edit: Crappy free webspace thang. Now they should be up & visible.

Hey there.
I'm expecting a "no", but I'll ask anyway.

Is there any way of animating backgrounds with more than just the four additional sprites? Or: Is there any way to set the delay between the different sprites separately?