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No, not the XBox game. The point-and-click PC adventure game. This one.

I was going through my games CDs a while back and this one jumped out at me. I bought it at Half-Price books about six or seven years ago and I vaguely remember thinking that the initial few puzzles were annoying and I took an instant dislike to the protagonist because he hates cats. I never got much further than an hour or two of gameplay.
Fable sat on my shelf ever since, but being that I've been deeply missing adventure games, well...I thought about giving it a second chance.

Has anyone else played this? The review I linked to above kinna pans it, but I'd like to hear what others have to say on the subject.

I'm on Day 3 and I've used the White Magic'ed taddy bear to find the correct spot in the dungeon, but I can't seem to dig it up. The walkthrough says to use the pickaxe, which was what I first tried anyway, so I'm kinna stumped...

I have to admit, I'm deeply confused, now. I've been trying to make a GUI system work all morning and I'm just running into way too many half-right solutions that don't work at all.

See, I'm trying to put together the standard idiot-proofing most games have:

"Are you sure? (Y/N)"

But I'd like to make it generic, so if the player has elected to start a new game or quit the game entirely, they get the same "Are you sure?" GUI.
There must be something wrong with my methodology, because I'm very very very confused and nothing I try has worked.

I think first and foremost, I'm confused by GUI controls. What is the difference between a GUI button's script name and a GUI button's Left-Click name? Becaue the script name seems to have no relevance whatsoever to ANYTHING, which the Left-Click script seems to be an actual function within the game's script. The manual just dismisses all the GUI button controls as "self-explanatory" which, I'm sorry, they're not.
And when a script is called by clicking on a GUI button, the function looks like this:

function GUIbutton (GUIControl *control, MouseButton button);

But GUIControl, *control, MouseButton, and button are never used by any of the functions I've seen in the script, so what good do they do? Why are they there at all? I've scoured the docs for n explanation, but all I've really found is the section on pointers, which only sort of describes what *control is, but not why one might use it in a GUI button's function.

And I'm really not sure if any of that is relevant to what I'm trying to do.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

When the player clicks on, say, the New Game button, which is on the GUI called gNewquit (the New Game, Quit Game, and Cancel buttons are on that GUI), I turn off the gNewquit.Visible variable, turn on the gBelt.Visible variable (gBelt is the Suspenders-and-Belt GUI, the one that asks if you're sure; idiot-proofing for mis-clicks) and...that's where I'm stuck.

I've tried setting up a variable that is supposed to be modified by the choice the player makes on gBelt, but because the new_game_Click function isn't paused by opening the gBelt GUI, if conditional statement that checks that variable goes off right away before the player can pick on gBelt, and so nothing gets resolved.

I've thought about passing a variable to gBelt that tells it which GUI the player just came from and make whatever is supposed to happen do so within gBelt (which is why I was wondering if the (GUIControl *control, MouseButton button) part might be important), but I'm not sure if that's the right way to go. I would like the GUI the player was on before gBelt to become Visible again if the player chooses to Cancel from gBelt, which is another reason why knowing gBelt's parent GUI is important. Plus, handling what happens in gBelt would make the function no longer generic.

Unfortunately, the screens that come up with QuitGame(1); aren't available to look at in any script I've come across, so I can't look at those to unravel this.

Can anyone help me out here? I know this is doable, I've seen it in other AGS games...

Thanks.

I know there's Mouse.SelectNextMode(); but why is there no Mouse.SelectPreviousMode();?

I'd love to have one to attach to the operation of the mousewheel. You know how it is:

"I want to look at that object...[right-click, right-click, right-click] Crap! One too many clicks. Dammit. Okay... ...[right-click, right-click, right-click] Crap! Okay..."

Has anyone implemented code to cycle through cursor modes in reverse to make this functionality possible?

So I've started a game, but I've mostly been playing with the GUI system so far.

However, being a 3D animator of sorts, I've created the main character and rendered her out in 3D for all eight of the possible normal walking loops. I'll post some screenies of that at some point, I'm sure, but for now I have a question for anyone else who has done this:

What is your camera methodology?

Lemme explain: I have 3DS MAX (an ancient version, to be true, but it's legal and I'm broke, so upgrading isn't an option right now), just for reference.
I considered rendering my character out using orthographic projection so that perspective wasn't a problem, but this produced results I wasn't very happy with.
So I decided to go with a camera. But this had its own issues, namely perspective. If I placed the camera's viewpoint on my character's middle, she seemed to be looking up all the time. But moving the camera up to the face level had its own issues, such as leaving a huge empty space above the character's head if the frames were made large enough to  fit the whole character.
My eventual solution was the move the camera up a bit (to about chest level) and then tilt it down a bit, so the character filled the frame. The tilt is slight enough that the feet don't appear to shrink much due to perspective, and the head still looked like it was pointing up relative to the camera. So I tilted the head down a bit, which seemed to do the trick.
Of course, this had it's own issues, still. To maintain my lighting, I rotated the character in 3D rather than moving the camera. So now the head appeared to be pointing DOWN. Solution, titlt the head in an appropriate direction for rendering each loop's frames. On the diagonal walks, this meant tilting the head on two axes.

Ultimately, this technique really does look fine; unless you're looking for it, you probably won't notice that's it looks a bit awkward.
But I'm wondering how others who have rendered their characters in 3D have handled this issue.

Maybe this should be obvious, but I'm stumped:

I have a Sierra-style GUI bar that pops up when the mouse goes above y 13. Sometimes this GUI calls other GUIs, like my custom Inventory screen or the Quit/New/Cancel screen. When it does, however, the main GUI toolbar still pops up if the mouse goes above y 13!

How do I prevent this? The only GUIs that will pop-up AND require that the main toolbar CAN'T are called by the main toolbar GUI, so I can just put a command in the script for those toolbar buttons that call the sub-GUIs and turn it back on when those sub-GUIs go away. But I can't FIND one in the docs.

Thanks.

The documentation is a little unclear on these points, so I feel compelled to ask: Is there a way to get carriage returns and quotation marks in text that is displayed in text boxes or speech?

It's been a long time since I've done any coding, but IIRC, in Pascal you used to be able to just put double quotes ("") inside single quotes to produce a quotation mark in a non-variable string you were displaying to the screen, but I don't know if that would work in AGS. If I need a character to say something like:

The title of the book is "Astral Projection", and is on the third shelf.

then I'll need quotation marks.

Similarly, I'm not sure how to get a carriage return in text in AGS. My characters are likely to get rather verbose and I'll probably need a paragraph break once or twice WITHOUT jumping to another Say command. I could probably just plug in the ASCII code for it (13, IIRC), but the docs are desperately unclear on that functionality. In the String Formatting section, %c is the only one that DOESN'T get an example. Where does the ASCII code go? Before the c? After the c? Is c a variable that has to be declared outside the string?

For that matter, is there a way to give displayed or spoken text dimensions? As in, like, margins? If a character has a lot to say, it tends to spread all the way across the screen rather than staying confined to a space similarly sized to the character's dimensions. It kinna loses association with the character that way, and I'd prefer to be able to confine at least spoken text to a certain amount of space above the character, LucasArts-style.

I realize these should probably be self evident, but I'm still confused. Sorry, and thanks!