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Today is the 13th of September, or the 256th day of the year.
Therefore, I wish everyone, from those who've only touched a little python on a whim, to experienced programmers with decades of work in the industry, a very happy Programmer's Day!

Especially those of you in Russia. 

[Happy New Year!]

Being on the east coast of Australia, I have the pleasure of being able to enjoy the new year a couple of hours earlier than most people here, so let me say:
Happy New Year!

Now that's over, I need to get in my flying car to go buy the new release of StarCraft 8 with neural connection.

...suckers.

I was sent this the other day, and feel the need to share it:


We wanted to send some sort of holiday greeting to our friends and colleagues, but it is difficult in today's world to know exactly what to say without  offending someone.
So we met with our lawyer yesterday, and on advice we wish to say the following:



Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral celebration of the summer/winter solstice holiday practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.



We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendar of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great (not to imply that Australia is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.



By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms :



This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting.
It implies no promise by the wishers to actually implement any of the wishes for her/him or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
The wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.


Best Regards (without prejudice)

Name withheld (Privacy Act).

With the arrival of my new Laptop computer imminent, I have been putting some thought to what software I should install on it in the early stages, before everything gets cluttered. Any good ideas?
Also, on the subject of cluttered computers, I would specifically like to find organising solutions, since my last attempt at keeping things all neat-and-tidy was rather terrible. 
Only free software, of course.

Since it has spent some time inactive(soz), the Colouring Ball now feels the need to be IN YOUR FACE!

No scaling or warping.
Rotation allowed.
Probably trophies by me(ew) or anyone I can beat into submission(Babar, JimReed, whoever).
Enjoy!

For the OROW game I was making - and still am making - I've been doing the walking loops for the characters.
This is my first attempt:
Standing

and walking


(If you cant see the above images, go to http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Abs_standing_fwd.png for standing and http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Abs_fwd_no_stand.gif for walking]

I like how the standing frame is, but I'm not fully happy with the animation.
Any pointers?

Thanks to a certain low-pressure system, we've had more rain in the last twelve hours than we had in the entirety of last year!
A good bit of drought relief, certainly!

* wonkyth is excited!

Me, SinSin and FSi decided to have an impromtue HourGame comp, using a topic(Lost Souls) set by our personal stopwatch dude(CalinLeafshade)!
the results are:
My game: http://shutupload.com/dl/4f1314f27ce2/.
FSi's game: http://rghost.net/1726787
SinSin's game: http://shutupload.com/dl/7ae26a24dfe8/

Hope you enjoy, tell us which one you like most(and for what reasons), and maybe join us some time...

P.S. mine is the only one with the Game part. 

For quite a while now I've had my eye out for cases of Modern Musical Genius, and have been thoroughly enjoying those that I find.
At the moment I have:
The Phantom of the Opera;
the Rocky Horror Picture Show;
Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog;
Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds.

Can anyone add any more?

I've decided to see if I can improve my art in my spare time.


I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to achieve, but surely some greater being can show me how I might improve it?

I just noticed that if you look at a laptop screen from below, you can sometimes see hidden text. 
Not always though, it doesn't seem to work every time.

try it:

Spoiler

READ ME

[close]

Sorry, just me thinking out loud...

In  the manual, for all the CreateFrom functions it say this:

"IMPORTANT: If the DynamicSprite instance is released from memory (ie. there is no longer a DynamicSprite* variable pointing to it), then the sprite will also be removed from memory. Make sure that you keep a global variable pointer to the sprite until you are finished with it, and at that point call Delete."

I'm not quite sure what it means here.
Does it just mean that if I release it, it's lost?

This is done all the time, so there has to be a reasonably easy way around it, but I cant seem to figure it out.

OK, You have a Bullet. it's moving in a direction at a certain speed. that direction can be nearly any angle, in fact it can be any angle you can get between the mouse and a given point. if you're drawing the Bullet straight onto the screen using surface.Draw() type commands then obviously you need not just a point in Euclidean space , but a point on your Cartesian graph(screen).
Obviously you can just round the numbers in your Euclidean space to find the place where your pixel should go, but I cant seem to get it right.
The Bullet then needs to move, say, three pixels -every frame- along the line and be rounded again.
And then you need t...........


I'm lost, I need help.
If you can't understand what I'm trying to say, then maybe I can make more sense if I answer small questions.

thanks.

I probably would have posted this in the module section, but I couldn't find a "start new topic" button there for some reason.

Just recently I started transcribing a game I was working on in C# to AGS(for reasons not worth mentioning).
Unfortunately, my game used things like KeyDown and KeyUp, which AGS doesn't (currently) support.
So I started making a module to allow it.
what I have here is the mouse version, because I haven't yet finished the Keyboard one (it has allot more input to handle).

Code: ags

bool MouseLeftDown;
bool MouseRightDown;

function Mouse_Left_Down(){
  
}

function Mouse_Left_Up(){
  
}


function repeatedly_execute() {

  if (mouse.IsButtonDown(eMouseLeft)){
    if (MouseLeftDown==false){
      Mouse_Left_Down();
      MouseLeftDown = true;
    }
    
  }
  else if(MouseLeftDown==true){
  Mouse_Left_Up();
  MouseLeftDown = false;
  }
  
if (mouse.IsButtonDown(eMouseRight)){
    if (MouseRightDown==false){
      Mouse_Right_Down();
      MouseRightDown = true;
    }
    
  }
  else if(MouseRightDown==true){
  Mouse_Right_Up();
  MouseRightDown = false;
  }
  

}
 

Obviously this isn't the best way to go about it, because there is still a hell of a lot commands I don't understand.
So I was wondering if anyone could give me a few pointers as to how I might get this code closer to acceptable module code?

Anything I add to here I'll also implement in the Keyboard version.

thanks.

I'm doing a fairly simple piece of drawing:

Code: ags

    DrawingSurface *surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
surface.Clear();
surface.DrawingColor = 63;
surface.DrawLine(mouse.x, 0, mouse.x, 600);
surface.DrawLine(0, mouse.y, 800, mouse.y);
surface.DrawingColor = 0;
surface.DrawCircle(CharX,CharY,8); 

surface.Release();

But for some reason it clears pink, not transparent.
I've tried using COLOR_TRANSPARENT, but it makes not difference.
Any Ideas?

I've been a Joss Whedon fan for quite a while, but as I've only really seen Firefly, no Buffy or other more well known titles, I wasn't sure whether I had an accurate show of what Whedon's work was like.
Then I found This: Dr Horrible.
This is quite possibly the best piece of film I've ever seen.
Based on this alone, I could say that Whedon is the best thing that ever happened to film.

I just cut-and-pasted some code in a script module, and as soon as I had done it an error box came up containing a message telling me to post the following here:

Error: StartIndex cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: startIndex
Version: AGS 3.1.0.60

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: StartIndex cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: startIndex
   at System.String.InternalSubStringWithChecks(Int32 startIndex, Int32 length, Boolean fAlwaysCopy)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.CheckFunctionForLocalVariables(Int32 currentPos, ScriptFunction func, String scriptExtract)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.GetListOfLocalVariablesForCurrentPosition(Int32 currentPos)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.FindLocalVariableWithName(Int32 startAtPos, String nameToFind)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.GetFinalPartOfExpression(Int32 currentPos, ScriptStruct& memberOfStruct, Boolean functionsOnly)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.ShowCalltip(Int32 openingBracketPos, Int32 parameterIndex, Boolean functionsOnly)
   at AGS.Editor.ScintillaWrapper.scintillaControl1_DwellStart(Object sender, DwellStartEventArgs e)
   at Scintilla.ScintillaControl.DispatchScintillaEvent(SCNotification notification)
   at Scintilla.ScintillaControl.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

If it helps, I might have had the game debugging at the time, but I wasn't really paying attention.
It didn't appear to doing anything other than display the exception message.

Since I've started making my own Script Modules I have found that my current knowledge of scripting commands and functions isn't really satisfactory.
Is it possible for people to explain the following to me?:

Importing/Exporting Functions;

Extender Functions;

Enumeration;

Pointers;

The term "Static"(cant find anything in Help);

Structs.

I shouldn't need it spelled out to me too simply, as I think i should be able to understand most concepts rather quickly.
Again, Any Help Appreciated.

#1. Recently, while using the Keyboard Movement module(in Ver. 3.1.0), I noticed that when you move diagonally it doesn't use the respective loop(5-8), it just uses either the first direction you pressed or sometimes it just uses the horizontal loops. Is there an easy way I can modify this so as to use the right loops?

#2. I know that a characters position is based on the bottom-centre pixel, but what if your sprites base is something like, say, six pixels wide? What happens then? For the purposes of precision, I would really like to know.

#3. What would be the best way to have (at least the equivalent of) the the baseline of a character in the sprites centre? Is there any way to set the baseline like that, or would I have to put something through RepeatedlyExecute, setting a variable to x above the characters position?

#4. How does movement offscreen work? I'm planning on making a game that has a lot of characters moving in other rooms, but I'm not sure if it would work if I cant make room script activate while your not in the said room. Can you still have things like IsCollidingWithChar and such?

I hope these questions aren't too cryptic, and if they are complex enough for the Technical Forums tell me and I'll delete this and ask in that Forum instead.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Wonkyth.

Over the last twelve months or so I've been learning to program. Nothing formal, just looking at various tutorials and buying the occasional book. Also, around about the time I started my self-tutoring I had an Idea for a game, one I reckoned I could make with AGS( the only Programming related thing I then knew about). I gave it a try, but as my game wasn't an Adventure Game, quickly realised that having to fit everything into rooms would make it impossible to do.
So, I started learning C#. it all worked, until I got to graphics.

Basically, this thread is to ask if anyone could point me to a good tutorial or something similar, it doesn't really matter what programming language, as having messed about with a few object-oriented languages, they all seem similar enough that I wouldn't run into any trouble.

Thanks.