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Okay, there are a few things I've been asked by Mr. Rmullen (my partner in crime and recent new member here).

Is there any real explanation for why we can't load save games from different resolutions or 'window' mode?  I would assume its something to do with memory states, but it is a little frustrating.  I believe that the old SCI games were similar, though, windows and dos savegames weren't compatible.

Is there a way to do something like 'OnLoadGame'?  We'd like to do some fade/transition from the load/save GUI to the loaded game, but I don't know of any way to do it, save for making my own save system, which I do NOT want to do. 

I added my input to the tracker post for loading info from savegames without opening them.

Okay, I don't feel quite so noobish on this one.

I've got two distinct GUIs, both use a TTF font that I like.  I've never used them in AGS before, so I thought I'd give it a try.  The anti-aliased one looks semi-great (well, the AA isn't perfect, but pretty nice), but for some reason another will not AA.

Are there any known limitations on TTF fonts antialiasing?  It seems odd that they would work in one label on one GUI and not in another.

Also, when importing a TTF, does AGS crop the font to the standard box, or can you use really large letters if you want?

Okay, I feel like a noob again (no offense intended, but I've been here since DOS days, on and off).

Is there a simple (non re-make) way to change the color scheme of the default boxes?  Its just for a bit of polish on a rolling demo, and I didn't want to spend a couple hours re-making them since I'll need to do that eventually and I don't have a clue what I want to do with them yet.

Thanks for any help, I searched the forums and the help file, but not everyone uses the same terms.

Okay, I was thinking back on the good ol' Sierra games (never got a chance to play the classic Lucas games) and realized how subtly they avoided scaling their characters.
I love that CJ has included scaling into the engine.  However, on the beautiful, sierra style pixellations, they quickly lose their features.

I'll have to find my copies of KQ 5 and 6, to investigate further.  I wondered if anyone else had looked into the different ways they accomplished a clean, in-perspective look without scaling.

I was aware that in KQ5, Graham had two different scales he could be seen at.  This was most noticable when walking in the desert.  He would walk behind a dune at one scale level, and emerge at another. 

I also noticed that they sometimes used animations to simulate Alex's walk animation scaling into the distance.  I don't think I noticed more than one scale level for Alex.

Another trick I remember, but have not tried to use:  In KQ5, they used insets for small areas, effectively scaling the room down to Graham's proper size.  In particular, the shops in town do this quite nicely.  By placing the 'shop window' over the original room, they made it feel like part of the same area, and didn't resort to lots of dead space or foreground objects.

Just thought I'd see what you all thought, before I lose interest again. 

Hey!  I'm back again!  I got kinda frustrated (my partner in crime sorta got married...) and was working on other projects, and moved again.  Well, anyway I'm here now.

I happen to have two excellent sketch-artists for best friends.  We discussed using primarily pure-sketch for backgrounds (save for animations) and decided it should work, and offer an interesting style.

Here is a sample of one room:


The problem I have with this is making good characters.  Fortunately, Dan is very skilled with life drawing.  I'm just wondering about the character style, since I will probably be doing most of the pixel animating.

I have a few options:

1: Use transparent, sketch-style characters which overlay the backgrounds.
2: Use opaque, sketch style characters which would look like cut-outs
3: Use characters such as my previous one posted here.


I know there's problems with the animation, but why fix it if we're switching to a different style?

Depending on suggestions, I'll probably post some placeholder characters on the background...

Oh, and thanks for looking! 

Okay, I've been working on my animation skillz, since I'm really hoping to get better, in order to work on the many ideas I've got.

I took the keyframes that a buddy drew by hand, and placed them in Gale, coloring them and trying to touch up the lines frame-by-frame.  Here's my first effort...



Now, I haven't got to shading in the blocked out colors except the sleeve, but what do you think?  I'd really appreciate any help you could offer.

This character is supposed to be a little cocky, but fairly athletic and fun.  I know he appears to be stomping, but I liked the general feel of the animation.  Any advice on how to proceed?  I'm actually fairly pleased with it so far, now that I got the 'bobbing' to look natural.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to anything you have to say!

I've been looking around for this sprite, I thought I had it, but I was missing half the frames (the steps appear to be limping, like the right leg never goes backward and the left never goes forward.)

I've heard that Junc has it, but the download link on his Wiki isn't working for me.  Any suggestions?

Well, I'm working on a rather ambitious project right now.  We have decided that we really want speech, but can't do it right now (TTTT, I don't really know how and was having trouble figuring it out.)

How hard is it to put this in after completion?  On the other hand, would it hurt anything to put the tags in and then never have any speech?

Finally, I wondered if you could feasibly dump the whole speech text as you would for translation, then add in the tags to that, then re-import it.  Would it work?  I'd like to try, but thought I'd ask first.

EDIT-
DUH!!  eFileAppend!  Sorry guys.
Anyway, once I get it working, could someone put it in the archive?  It seems like a good idea, making it easy to add new interactions while running, effectively teaching the game, although you need to make some basic changes to it before it will actually work as part of the script (like add vocabulary words).
EDIT

I'm getting used to the new object based scripting, but I have a minor problem.  Basically, I'm adding a log to my parser which will save the input to disk.  Now, I thought I'd be able to just open the file and add a new line at the end (using WriteRawLine) but apparently it always writes at the beginning of the file.  Now is there someone more experienced with the file IO that could help me get this going?  I think the function, when done, will be quite helpful for parser fans.

The basic plan is to detect what the player typed, check to see if it contained addresponse (if(Said("addresponse rol"))) then ask for the new response to that interaction (of course, this would only work for things like "look at tree" and "eat rock")  Then it would append a new, formatted statement to the file in this format

Code: ags

 if(Said(INPUT)) Display(RESPONSE); 

I realize that won't work exactly, but I know how it should work.  I can figure it out mostly, but I can't seem to dream up a way to append text to the file (this may be quite obvious, but I'm still stumped.)

I just did some serious re-coding of a demo I was playing with (you wouldn't believe how hard it is to play with someone else's code sometimes) and it started up okay, but there was a missing 'export' that I had to include, so that crashed.  I put that function back in, and voila, I get a startup crash (it doesn't get as far as it did the last time) with this message.

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x7C911E58 ; program pointer is +9902, ACI version 2.70.790, gtags (0,36)

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.

Most versions of Windows allow you to press Ctrl+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.

I always have trouble finding what I'm looking for when I use the search function, so...

Does anyone know the exact 'offset' between where an object (lets say OBJ1) is and where RawDrawImage(GetObjectX(OBJ1), GetObjectY(OBJ1), GetObjectGraphic(OBJ1)) would place the image of it?  I wanted to use MergeObject to 'stamp' the object image, but it locks the object from further manipulation.

After working on many backgrounds, I have to admit that I can't seem to get a semi-realistic style down.  I should probably just work until I find my own style, but it doesn't fit with the type of games I like.

I have recently been playing with photoshop, and have discovered a way that I feel makes some good backgrounds, using photos and filters.  For complicated ones, it might work to just 'paste up' different photos into something resembling what I want.  What do ya'll think?  These were borrowed from MacDesktops, then backgroundized.





To me it seems that there is a little too much 'noise' in them, especially on the grass.  I think there's a way to remedy that, but I thought I'd seek advice first.

I saw a thread over at AGDI that kinda inspired me.  There were some darn funny screenshots there, such as Prince Alex holding up Monolith Burger, a beheaded Graham (after being caught with the woodcutter's wife), and others.  It would be kinda like the MSPaint game, but using old screenshots as the base.  The rule could be:

Must begin with a screenshot of a published adventure game (free or commercial)

Can't think of any other rules that would be necessary.  Does anyone else think this is an OK idea?

Has anyone ever 'spoken' with an AliceBot?  Some years ago A.L.I.C.E. was given the award for most lifelike computerised personality.  Not really an aI in my opinion, but getting closer.  It works somewhat like the text parser in AGS, using synonyms and recursion to determine the simplest form of what the user was trying to say.  After 'speaking' with Alice, I found that her responses, while sometimes rather dense, were very much more lifelike than most NPC characters.

My question was this.  Would it be possible to make AGS use AIML (by plugin or other means) or to easily simulate it?  I know it can be done by lots of parser 'if' statements, but would it be worthwhile to script an engine for AGS to actually read the AIML code and use that for its language processing?  Alice is composed of a bunch of text documents formatted into a language called AIML.  A parser reads these documents and determines what Alice will say to any given question or statement.

The real benefit is that the characters could all use the same 'core' intelligence, but each have a different individual responses that can override the core personality.  This would greatly reduce the number of "I don't know anything about that" generic NPCs.  You could program it so that townfolk all know about a fair, but only a shopkeeper knows about selling things at the fair, etc; Still having a similar amount of coding than regular 'dumb' NPCs. 

Back to work.

I know, I know.

It just popped into my head.  Im still regularly thinking about MoE Adventure, that Sliders suggestion I made, and actively working on DQ3, but I still like discussing ideas in case someone likes them as well.

I am a good writer, but I don't think I'm good enough to think up a Cussler-ish story, myself.  But I can imagine Dirk Pitt being an excellent character.  Perhaps a multi-character game with Rudy Gunn and Al Giordino?  Saving the world from a pack of American anti-Muslim terrorists and their half-assed genetic experiments?  lol  Anyway, I kind of wonder what Clive would think of a fangame?

For those of you who have not read them, some of my favorites are:

Inca Gold
Treasure
Blue Gold
Atlantis Found *excellent
Sahara

Wow, I thought it would be another hack and slash borefactory, but this is really amazing.  It is basically a sequel, if you will, to Alice in wonderland.  Not the Disnified version, but the original opium laced story.  It is just as strange, but much darker.

I get kinda 'CD cover'ish below, but its pretty accurate.  I have played it for a few hours now, and every new level knocks me over. The voice acting is superb, and the gameplay is pretty enticing.  Alice's slaying of the card-soldiers is pretty gruesome, but this is just a dream, remember?

Poor Alice is caught in a housefire that kills her parents and family, leaving her near death.  The stress causes her to retreat into her mind, or so her psychiatrist at the Rutledge Private Clinic and Asylum believes.

Either way, she begins an adventure in wonderland once more.  It has been twisted, terribly dark now, by the Red Queen.  Alice must save wonderland if she is ever to wake up from her nightmare.

All her old friends are there, the rabbit and cheshire cat appear early on.  Rabbit has been telling people Alice is their saviour, and Cat, he's just there to help her on her way.  Even they have not avoided the demented bending of wonderland.

I like it so far, but I've only made it as far as the Fortress of Doors

UPDATE: Discovered the reason for this crash.  Ever called a NewRoom from inside a Player Leaves Screen function?  Don't.  See last post.

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC00000FD occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x0044CD9E ; program pointer is +6, ACI version 2.61.747, gtags (14,78)

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 209 script line 91)


Most versions of Windows allow you to press Ctrl+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.

___________________________________

I am now recieving this message in the Verb Coin room, where I never did before.  Line 91 is simply GUIOn(2);

Not a big issue, but I thought I would mention it.  I am sure it will all come out in the wash.

I bet you're all getting tired of me buggin you.

Does anyone else even use the MoveCharacterToHotspot command so as to let me know if its just me?Ã, 

In the original DQ2 Factory, a particular cutscene calls MoveCharacterToHotspot repeatedly to move Roger from one place to another, not sure why it was used rather than coordinates.Ã,  When he was just standing there like an idiot, I figured I goofed something up and would fix it later.Ã,  When I got to the SCI0 room, though, the same thing popped up, except that it directed the player character to move, and locked the game in the wait cursor mode.

I never used this command before, but the syntax appears to be right.  Could it be just a bug that no one noticed because no one cares?

Another asinine question from the H_Man, king of asinine questions.

Any clue where I could find it?  I tried Magintz's links, they're all broken, as is Junc's.

I am working on the DQ3 text parser, but can't quite get it working without a template that works already (the newer versions of AGS chew up the old demo game so I can't figure out what's what.)

Did the parser room ever work right?  I can't remember.

I have managed to get the authentic 'right click=walk, left click=look' to work, but my parser won't accept a 'return' and then GUIoffs and won't come back.

Thanks,

Could we implement it so that on especially long games, or confusing ones (like 5 Days a Stranger) people could chat using a parse-like box, but other than that have a completely separate gaming experience?

I can imagine the chats that would go on.  I don't really know the limits of the plugin, but this seems like it would be simple, and a neat addition to any upcoming game.  Could it be used cross-game, if users aren't using the same game or version?