Topics

LusoAventura é um projecto que tem como fim juntar os amantes de jogos de aventura portugueses e brasileiros numa comunidade onde possam falar entre si na língua materna da paixão que até agora só têm podido conhecer em Inglês.

Não que haja algo de mal com o Inglês. Mas caramba, o Português é uma língua linda que também merece ser protagonista de um jogo de aventura!

http://www.lusoaventura.webs.com
http://www.lusoaventura.proboards.com

Espalhem! Publicitem! Apareçam! Divirtam-se!

***

Non-Portuguese people: this is an ad for LusoAventura, a project which I hope to see grow until it becomes a community for portuguese and brasilian adventure game lovers. Thank you for your pacience.

Hello there, AGS boards! Long time no see! Sorry I haven't kept up, but I really became a lot more interested in interactive fiction (text adventures) recently. I can't check back here as often as I'd like to, and I've really lagged behind on AGS. Well, it was tough, but hey - however many times people say "It's not the graphics, it's the story", using AGS without any visual artistic ability is a bit of a bummer in the long run. Also, I've found the freedom of a text adventure (when properly programmed - see "Infocom" for what I mean) refreshing after a long period of graphic adventures. Also, I don't use the mouse as much, so my wrist gets a rest. It's all good stuff!

Now for the reason I'm posting this. I'm posting this here because it's adventure-related - or so I think. If it ain't, well, would a mod kindly move it to gen-gen?

There are english and american adventure-game communities (duh). There are german communities. There are spanish, italian and french communities. There are russian communities.

There are no portuguese one, and no brazillian ones.

Ok, so we're a minority - and we portuguese are even a smaller minority than our pals from across the ocean - but maybe it's all in taking the first step, you know.

So, here's what I'm leasurely doing. Right now I'm collecting adventure games in Portuguese. My next step will be to make an Inform 7 extension with which portuguese text adventures can be made (though the code remains in english). One day I hope to put them all together into a site, link to AGS and Wintermute (yes! have said the W word! Fear me!) as well as TADS, ADRIFT, SUDS, and whatever utilities I can think of. Possibly set up a free forum. And then advertise, and watch for about a year as the site gets absolutely no visitors. Then maybe something will happen, some spark, and it will kick off.

See, I got it all planned out.

Now, here's what I'm asking *right now*: if you know of a Portuguese adventure game, or a game which has been translated to Portuguese, let me know. Do not PM me, as I'm still rather disconnected from this place - use either pedro_correia_pires AT hotmail DOT com or peter_pears AT hotmail DOT com (don't ask). Feel free to send me the games you find. If you feel free to send me a virus, I'll feel free to send it back. Share and share alike! I'll keep on the lookout myself, of course.

Here's the meager list so far:

Diacho (BASIC source code, runnable with QBASIC, text RPGish thing)
Overrun (BASIC source code, runnable with QBASIC, text RPGish thing)
Larry (Spectrum z80 snapshot, an actual text-adventure translation of Leisure Suit Larry 1!)
A Lenda da Gávea (Spectrum TZX tape)
Mad in Cashcais (aka Mad in Cascais, Spectrum TZX tape)
Paranoia (CYOA, windows EXE)
Maniac Mansion Deluxe (AGS remake of MM, includes Portuguese translation)
The New Adventures of Zak McKracken (AGS game, includes Portuguese translation)

...ok, it ain't much. But it's a start. For a hobby, it's not half bad. Only three quarters so.

Ok, I might have overstayed my welcome now. On unrelated issues, keep on growing, AGS! My blood pumper doth fly out to thee!

I'm at the five skulls puzzle. I've tried many different words, but it's rather useless - this puzzle is an anagram in french, and I simply am not fluent enough in that language, even though I did manage to play and enjoy the game up to this point. I don't even like anagrams, anyway.

The letters are C, H, T, A, E. So, what french words can be derived from this, and/or does anyone know the solution?

Ok, so I took it into my head to play all RON games sequentially. Again. Because really, why the heck not.

Of course, there are many infamous problems with the early RON games and XP, because XP doesn't like early AGS games. But what do you know, by checking the game's AGS version, going to the archive and downloading the correspondig AGS, taking its DOS engine, renaming ron.exe to ac2game.dat and running ACDOS.EXE with VDMSound (for some reason DOSBox don't like AGS either, go fig), I got it all running perfectly, including the apparently-infamous Nightwatch.

Well, all of them *so far*. Now I'm having trouble with a more recent AGS version, 2.40, and I'm talking about the game "The Postman Only Dies Once". Besides, I spoke with Dave Gilbert and he seems to run the game fine, so it might well be a specific problem to my machine - this is what I'd like help in.

The game has been compiled using the 2.40 windows engine, and merely trying to run it as it results in:

---------------------------
Adventure Game Studio
---------------------------
An internal error has occured. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, contact Chris Jones.
(ACI version 2.40.261)

Error: roomstruct::allocall: out of memory

---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I've had this error before in that forgotten movie-like-thing that was a Lord Of The Somethingorother, in 11 or so installements, doubt anyone remembers it, but anyway. Usually I give up, but not this time. Hey, I'd really like to (re)(re)(re)play this game. Blame the Gilbert-hype.

If I delete acsetup.cfg, the game at least loads, but in 320x240 (and the game is supposed to play at 640x480) and too slow to be playable.

If I try and play it in compatibility mode Win95, then it also loads but I get a *MASSIVE* slowdown which resulted in 45 minutes to open up task manager and kill the "postman.exe" process.

Using my "dos-hack" didn't work either, because it keeps telling me my monitor does not support 320x200, or 640x400, which is news to me. Hey, maybe it doesn't in DOS mode, what do I know. Maybe if the game were 640x480, or 320x240, I wouldn't have this problem. As it is, though, VDMSound has proven useless. And DOSBox still doesn't like AGS games.

Right-o, here's my problem-o. Any ideas?

Since voting for the awards ended, I don't seem to be getting any e-mail notifications of new posts on topics I'm watching. Can it be related?

EDIT - I'm not even being notified of PMs. Am I the only one this is happening to?

Thought I'd start a topic instead of using any of the 3.X threads because this might hi-jack said threads.

Now, I never thought I'd ever advocate bringing back the DOS engine for AGS. It's an old OS that no one uses anymore, and which Windows itself stopped using since XP.

But then there's this thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33666.0

At the time of writing I don't know if this person's experiment did well, dunno if he managed to play it on a mac. But it IS intriguing. If there are cross-platform ports of DOS-running-apps, then a DOS version of an AGS game could be cross-platform. Maybe via DOS, we could finally get our Linux and Mac game engine ports, ports that don't need to be specially and specifically updated every time a new AGS version needs it.

Thoughts? Is it possible, or just gibberish? Do the cons outweigh the pros, or is it the other way around? Gilbot, I'm relying on your support here, you DOS-lover you.

I'd like to know, because I've just been guessing around and now I got caught up on a *fixed* bug that made me restart a game, how loading savegames across different versions of a game works.

Ok, so when with different resolutions are at stake no go. Got that.

When the global script is changed, no go. Got that too.

But what are the circunstances in which I can load a game saved with a previous version and have it run normally... and under what circunstances will the saved game seemingly play like the previous version? How does the whole thing work?

Once again I need help identifying some films from my childhood - late '80s, btw. You've already helped me so much with especially Nausicaa, I have great hopes of some of you recognizing some of my descriptions.

One of the might be anime-style - I don't really recall. If not true anime, then it has an anime look and feel. It revolves around the discovery of some huge object which seems to be part robot and part spacecraft, something a bit like a Transformer (I used to think it WAS a transformer, and maybe it even was, I dunno) - the "phoenix" theme featured largely into it. This was somewhere in the future, I believe, and the cast obviously included a teenage-or-something boy and a white-haired professor or scientist or whatever. Does any of this ring a bell? It might have been an episode from a series... but I don't think so, I think it's a film. Had lots of those scenes where you just see the craft/robot/thing, the camera panning up and down and sideways, against a starry background, or looking imsense, to some epic-ish tune.

Another one revolves around lots of dogs, mostly puppies I believe, going around trying to find the bones of a dinosaur that disappeared from the museum. Not anime-style or anything, just play cartoon. Pretty sure it's a film too. I had it on the same tape as "Land Before Time", and maybe because of that it grew on me - anything after "Land Before Time" tends to hit you a bit differently than "solo" -, because other than that the film is, as I recall, rather unremarkable.

Finally, there was a series, about two groups of lords, or knights, or whatever, which I really enjoyed - they had each of them gone to some cave and had been gifted with the power of transforming into the animal which represented their main trait (so the fast one could transform into a puma, the wise one into an owl, the fierce one into a tiger, I think there was an eagle too somewhere - probably due to great eyesight). The "good" guys gained this power from their, er, "flagpoles" I think it's the word - that thing where knights often carry the flags and coat of arms and whatnot of their king, or themselves, or whatever - as you can see, I'm not very well versed in these matters. That "flagpole" had the image of the animal in it, and the bad guys had that image in their armors, in their chest. Once transformed and gone back to normal, they had to go again to some pool and dip themselves or the flagpoles in it to restore the power. It would make a good adventure game, actually, come to think of it.

Heh, hope I'm not taxing you too much.

I am rather stuck, it would seem. I have the room key and have just acquired what seem to be newspaper cutouts. Some black thing scared April and she wants to leave the hotel, but the only way I can do it seems to be via the window, which is not a good idea.

Clutching at straws here. Is it another pixel-hunt, like the rubber glove and the room key weren't enough?

Here's 100 of 'em...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcl_FjicM9k&feature=related

...and here's 100 more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2krVT5R9PQ

Some of them are rather similar, yeah, and some just don't really connect. Still, it's a nice way to waste 10 minutes, and hey, there's some voices and styles he got SPOT ON.

Ok, so today I got given a tire-shaped clock. Cool, huh? But the best thing is definitely the box it came in.

"ELEGANCE CLOCK", it said. "Simulation a true style".

I thought something sounded wrong, but what the hey, it was obviusly a cheap thing. Then, in a fit of boredom, I started reading the WARNINGs, of which there are two:

Use the batteries wrong will cause the batteries broken or the pile out, And do damage to the people and property.

I knew what I was in for, and it just kept going downhill, just as as my laughter kept getting increasingly harder to control.

Do pay attention to the followings:
1. Do not install the batteries with the wrong polarity, and the supply terminals are not to be short-circuited.
2. Only batteries of the same or equivalent type as recommended are to be used.
3. Do not mix old and new batteries.
4. Do not burn the batteries or put batteries.in a high temperature circumstances.
5. Replace the exhausted batteries as soon as possible.

Sure, some are funnier than others, but I never expected to find any of this. I must have thought it was a urban legend or something. Anyway, it was my first.

WARNING:

1. Please don't place it in the following place.
a) nearby strong vibration
b) in the dusty play.
2. Please do not touch it movement
3. Please don't clean it case by using paint thinner or other chemical materials. Neuter soap or cleanser as cleaning liquid is recommendable.
4. Please change the battery once a year. Exhausted battery may leak and damage your product.

Ok, so may it's not funny to you - in which case, you just had to be there.

I actually find these quite funny - in some site or other, I read a sign outside a chinese something-or-other shop:

CUSTOMERS WILL BE EXECUTED IN ORDER

So I thought, this wouldn't be any worse than the Crap Joke thread. So hey, feel free to add to the collection (Geoffkhan, I'm looking at you!).

RELATIVELY OFF-TOPIC: http://www.allowe.com/Humor/book/Actual%20Courtroom%20Testimony.htm This is my favourite collection of this "whoops" tyoe of humour, even if it ain't all true. My favourite one HAS to be:

47. Q: When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station?


Q: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot.

If this is some oversight of mine, I'll feel really stupid...

Ok, so I have the following code:

Code: ags

    String tempsyn=Room.GetTextProperty("RoomExtraSynon");
    if (tempsyn!="") {
      lstHiddenObj.Clear();
      while (tempsyn.Contains(".")) {
        Display(tempsyn);
        lstHiddenObj.AddItem(tempsyn.Truncate(tempsyn.Contains(".")));
        tempsyn=tempsyn.Substring(tempsyn.Contains(".")+1, tempsyn.Length);
        Display(tempsyn);
        if (tempsyn.Contains(".")) Display("Yes");
      } 
      //Display(tempsyn);
    }

Basically, there's a property in each room. In this case, the property reads "opening.desk.stool". The idea is, get each of these words and put them in lstHiddenObj.

It didn't work for quite a while, and eventually I added the Displays to see what was going on. I noticed that even when tempsyn was down to "stool", it still displayed "Yes" and it still triggered the while... which of course errored out.

I tried changing the periods to commas, both in the property (opening,desk,stool) and in the code.

It didn't change anything, so I switched back to periods.

Now here's the interesting bit - nothing changed. It processed the first two items, checking for periods, and stopped at the end because it seemed to find a period somewhere in "stool".

Why is it interesting? Because I'd forgotten to change the property back. It was checking "opening,desk,stool" for periods, and FINDING them, where there are commas.

Well, any thoughts?

EDIT - And I do know that I might have to include an extra line after the while in order to include the last word, the one with no more commas or periods, but until I solve this, there's little point...

Quick question:

For several reasons, in my IF template, I've substituted labels for list boxes. Which meant I'd have to find out a way to word-wrap (and to properly display "[" as paragraphs, but that's done, no prob). I did, but I'm not really happy with it.

Basically, when writing to the listbox, I use the following check:

desc.Length*LETTERWIDTH>lstRoomDesc.Width

"desc" is the string passed to the function this is on, i.e., it's the full string. It gets truncated as each line is added to the listbox.

LETTERWIDTH is #defined as 4. It's a guess-timate for the width of the average character in the font I'm using (default font).

lstRoomDesc.Width, as it suggests, is the width of the listbox.

Having a resizeable listbox doesn't make it any easier on myself... anyway.

The character 'i' is one pixel wide. The character 'L' is more than that. I have no idea how many pixels are in ' '. So most often, the line either wraps before reaching the end of the listbox (quite a bit before it does, in fact), or continues a bit past the end of the listbox. Fine-tuning is impossible - the difference between 3 and 4 is quite big, and I'm pretty sure I can't use a float... can I?

Basically, is there a better way to do this? I'm guessing not, but asking never hurt...

Arguably not as depressing as losing a tune contest, but ah well.

Luciano Pavarotti, one of the greatest tenors of the century, has passed away this morning. What exactly will the world miss?

One of the most beautiful voices ever.
One of the most appassionate singers and interpreters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mX7ugJ5NM8
(E Lucevan Le Stelle)

One of the most amazing actors in opera - although he didn't move about as much as Domingo, his acting was in the detail. His eyes are his second most amazing feature when singing - his first is, of course, his voice.
One very intelligent singer, who understood what was hapening with his voice and always took the best out of it (starting as a light-liryc, progressing through lyric, finally singing dramatic - it's very risky unless done properly).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATmgtmR5o4
(Nessun Dorma)

One of the biggest tenor voices ever to come along since Corelli.
And someone who tried to get opera and light music together, thus breaking a senseless barrier between pompous-opera-goers and the rest of the world, merging the best of both world in order to create music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7FGPIRJx6I
(Too Much Love Will Kill You)



Rest in peace. You were the last great tenor of this generation.

So I just bought the "Forgotten Realms - Deluxe Edition" pack (Neverwinter Nights and 2 expansions, Baldur's Gate 1 and two plus expansions, and Icewind Dale 1 +expansion and ID2).

I just don't get these "expansion packs", so here's my question - what *are* they? Are they a sequel to the game, meant to be played after you finish the game? Or are you meant to install them and play them as you would the original game, profiting from a few bonuses offered by the expansion pack? If I install the "expansion" and play it, would I in fact be playing a different game using the same engine? If I install the expansion, can I still play the original stand-alone? Furthermore, would I want to?

Sorry if this seems obvious stuff to y'all, and I appreciate it probably does, but I've found no documentation around, everyone seems to assume people know what this is. I just can't figure out whether expansion packs are basically patches, sequels, or what.

Really, gamma setting is one of those things that every game should have.

But, even though AGS currently has that possibility, no one actually uses it. A shame. And most, if not all, AGS games look extremely dark on my computer - I have my screen set to a low enough gamma not to hurt my eyes. I shiver when I think of the brightness that the games' artists' must set their monitors to.

So I'd like to request - please! - a gamma setting available on the WinSetup thingamajiggy.

I stumbled across this link, and opened it, for a bit of a laugh.

http://www.churchofsatan.com

I didn't know quite what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting something of this calibre. It doesn't even sound like a religion - it sounds like a protest against catholicism, and at times even comes close to Von Glower's philosophy. Be sure to check out, under Theory - Practice:

The Nine Satanic Statements
The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth
The Nine Satanic Sins

Some of it is quite reasonable, and you can clearly see where everything else is coming from. Now, I don't want to start another hot-religion-thread, God knows we have enough of them (God, in this case, being CJ, the forums' owner. Implicit pun which is only funny at 1.30am), but some of the points are, indeed, rather interesting, and are so clearly aimed at some principles of catholicism that we can't help but rethink some of those catholic principles. For instance,

4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!

5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!

6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires!

Accourse, a world full of Satanists like this would be as bad or as good as a world full of Catholics (but both would be preferable to a world full of hard-boiled Puritans!).

EDIT - Should I, in the morning, look at this thread in a more awake state of mind and stare in wonderment, unable to understand how I could have ever posted it, I'll disavow any knowledge of any of this at all, and brain-wash myself in order to forget all about it, and maybe someday repeat the mistake because forgetting it means learning nothing from it.

Oh yes, I did it my way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3WqYB6VEHI

Maybe this is moot, maybe it wouldn't happen anyway in 2.8, but I guess I might as well let CJ know just in case.

It's a little thing, but it's inconvenient. I copy-pasted, without thinking, an hotspot's NAME into its SCRIPT NAME field. The name was "Wine book", and I managed to paste it into the SCRIPT NAME just like that, with the space. Naturally, it screwed up when I tried to save:

---------------------------
Compile Error
---------------------------
There was an error compiling your script. The problem was:

In: 'Internal character defines'

Error (line 28): Expected ',' or ';', not 'Books'

Do you want to fix the script now? (Your room has not been saved).
---------------------------
Sim   Não   
---------------------------


---------------------------
AGS Editor Warning
---------------------------
The error occured in an internal AGS script. This should never happen; try re-installing the latest version of AGS.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

Of course, after only minimal head-scratching I understood what had happened. Hardly a big thing, but it could bear fixing, don't you think?

Some experimenting made me realize how wrong I was in some assumptions I'd made when I first read the manual.

0: the video will be played at original size, with AVI audio
1: the video will be stretched to full screen, with appropriate
   black borders to maintain its aspect ratio and AVI audio.
10: original size, with game audio continuing (AVI audio muted)
11: stretched to full screen, with game audio continuing (AVI audio muted)

Assumption #1 - with flags 0 and 10, the video would be placed at coordinates 0,0.

Correction - it's placed at the center. Which makes sense.

Assumption #2 - with flags 0 and 10, the areas outside the boundaries of the video would be transparent.

Correction - they're black. Also makes sense.

Thing is, I'd always assumed that it behaved the way I thought *because* that'd allow, I thought, for some interaction while the game was running. Something on the lines of Urban Runner, or Quest For Fame, or even Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. In a sense, the game kept going, but you could still interact and do stuff and whatnot...

Ok, I stand corrected. But I wonder, how feasible would it be to see this implemented eventually? This sort of behaviour, I mean. I appreciate it's low-priority, and while it would be nice for the game I'm working on it's by no means necessary...