Messages

Alright here's what I have, one character is the main character and when he uses a certain object an effect comes on to him that makes it look like something is right around him and behind him.Ã,  I have this working by using another character for the effect and making it follow the main character exactly.

The problem is that the sheep character is animating when it is put on the main character.Ã,  That works but when you deactivate and reactivate the item is where there is a problem.Ã,  It works but you get a warning from the AGS editor once you close the game saying "Sheep character is animating while follow is called and may never start following the character".Ã,  Well it does follow the character but it would be nice to get rid of this warning.Ã,  I thought it would make sense to stop the characters animation when the following is deactivated, but I can't figure out how.Ã,  There is no character.stopAnimating() function or anything, and I tried unlockView and setting the view to a locked frame but it still gives me this warning.

Any ideas?


Edit-  Nevermind I figured it out.

Turns out you have to unlock the view BEFORE you set it to followCharacter(null).

Alright so I'm somewhat new to AGS and have never made a transition between versions.  If my game is 2.71 uses some obsolete ways of doing things will I be ok when I switch or will I have to go through the game carefully checking that there's no problems?

Well as an Update I'll say that I have been working on it quite a lot and it's going to have a few minigames in it now which should be pretty neat.

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong maybe or something but so far the code in my game is MASSIVE.Ã,  Like each object in the room has about half a page or more worth of stuff that has to be done on it.

For example I have a drawer in one room, so if he looks at it he has to face it.Ã,  If he opens it he has to say if he sees something in there based on wether or not the item has been taken.Ã,  He has to play a grabbing animation to open the drawer and another for taking the item.Ã,  The drawer has to be able to close again as well.Ã,  All of that has to be cancellable on top of all that.

Part of the problem was this is my first real AGS game so I didn't organize it with enough functions, next game I make I will probably have something like SayAndFace() to eliminate on room code.

It's coming along though, and I'm hoping to do some things with AGS that havn't been done, or at least not done much.

The reason I'd prefer to use a region if it was possible is that it lets me do two things at once:

1.Ã,  Have the area constantly changing tints so it looks as if it was glowing.

2.Ã,  Be able to trigger an event when the player walked onto the glowing region.

Right now I have to use a non clickable object and then draw a region on top of it to do this.

The other problem with using the massive black object is that if you want to position other objects it becomes difficult, I guess the best way around this would be to do the black object last.

Screen tints look like a promising thing to achieve the black effect but they don't work as well as character tints yet (which take 0-255 and have saturation and luminence).

As for using background frames, it really doesnt work for what I have set up in a few spots.Ã,  If you want a true glowing effect you need more then 5 frames really, which makes the tints nice since you can achieve more than enough frames to make it look like it's glowing.  Plus I'm trying to be conservative on the amount of stuff going on, so I think changing background frames all the time might be worse than tinting.  I've been running my game on a 3.2ghz processor with tons of ram so it's run fine.  I don't know how it's going to run on something slower, I guess it all depends how hard it is on the computer to constantly change the tints.

In the AGS manual it said that the tintscreen causes slowdown, but I don't know if that is still relevant or not since that could have been written when the average computers were much worse than they are now.

Thanks for the feedback, and as a result I think I've thought of another small puzzle that is good because it makes you use another thing that you get more than once (don't want to give it away since it's far cooler than an item).

I was specificly thinking of trying to put something in my game more like a minigame or something but am having a hard time trying to think of one more (already have one) that would make sense in the games atmosphere (dark style game).

Maybe I'll look around on flash sites and stuff for minigames that are fun and see if I can adapt a thing like that into my game, I'm confident in my programming abilities so if it's possible to do under AGS I probably can.

I'm having some story problems figuring out how to make the game still make sense from the begging to the end.  The problem was I started the current game I'm doing with no AGS knowledge and as a result that has impacted the story from something relatively simple into the complex thing I have now.  As I learned how to use AGS better and thought of cool effects to do it's in a way forced me to change the story so that it can make some sense.

Is it possible to use a region tint so that it will affect the background?

It seems to me that when you do a region tint it only affects the characters tint when he's in the region, and dosent tint the background at all.

Right now I just put an unclickable object where the region is and tint that to get the right effect, but if there's a way to do it with regions it would be better.

The reason I can't just draw the tint in as part of the background is because it's supposed to be glowing, so the tint amount is constantly changing in repeatedly_execute_always.


Also I can't get screen tints to work how I want them, if I want a room that constantly fades into black and then lighter then the tintScreen function is what would be good to use.  It doesnt work though since it only takes numbers up to 100 an dyou can't achieve a solid black tint.

So to work around that one I had to make a massive black object that covers the whole screen and has its transparency constantly changing to achieve the right effect.

It still looks a bit weird since it looks like there is some tearing in the object or something, a line is drawn sort of on one part of the object as its transparency changes.

I'm making a game but I'm having a hard time thinking of great puzzles to put into it, I've played all the lucasarts ones but can't think of anything that really stands out that I can incorporate.

Can anyone think of an interesting adventure game puzzle, preferably one that doesn't take much drawing but takes some programming skill.  I was thinking of putting a shooting sequence or pong or something it but it wouldn't make sense with the rest of my game.

How long it will be I don't know since I have to start up university soon which will slow down production.  It will get done though forsure, I've invested too much time to stop now , plus I really like making it.  I do plan on making another game after this though (entirely new game I think, not a sequel or anything) so I'd like to get it finished sooner rather than later.

So far to get about 50% of the way through it's taken me about one and a half months of working on it here and there.  Of course I knew nothing about AGS at the start so now it's much faster doing the programming side.  I'm pretty bad at doing drawings so I'm letting someone else do them, so really how long the game will take is up to them.

Well I've been holding off on announcing this game for a while since I wanted to have a good chunk of the game made before I go ahead and show it.

The game will be titled "The Shadowville Horror", the basic plot is that you are trapped in a house, but you realize that both you and the house are not normal.Ã,  Vampires will be a big part of the story, along with some historical figures.

I have an article about the game on my website at http://www.thescurvyshack.com/TSH%20Article.html and there are screenshots there from it (if it's a rule that I have to have the pictures in the actual thread then just tell me and I'll put them in here instead).Ã,  I also put a nifty wallpaper at the bottom of the page.

Here's the pics from my site:







The game has some neat features to it so far, including:

A very nice Scumm interface

Actively cancellable commands (IE if you click "Open door" then click somewhere else you no longer open the door, no blocking is used)

Tint effects

Two levels of vision that will make rooms appear different (not using two rooms)

Right now I've got a good section of the game done, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a way to get from the middle of the story to the end, and I need to put in more interesting puzzles.

Thanks for the reply, I'll stick witht the on_call way of doing it then.  The reason I like it being in one room is because it just makes it easier to do location checks since stuff will probably be happening in the room at the same time.

Plus the code for having the one character be a "ghost" is in the room, and other than this room the character never appears anywhere else.

I'm not using a template or anything though, everything so far is from an empty game.  I may post something on it soon, I've been holding off since I'd rather have a substantial part of the game done before announcing.

However with the amount of work I've put into it now, it will be done eventually.

Alright well here's the problem I'm having.

In one of my rooms I have a character that really isn't a full character so I dont want to draw it in every frame since it doesnt ever use them.  All it does is face one direction until your character clicks to talk on it, at which point it looks downwards and talks.

There's a few problems with this though, here they are.

1.  I'd rather put the interaction between the two characters in the room script than the character interaction script.  I sort of have this by using the global on call function to call the rooms script, but I'd like to know if there way a more elegant way. I was thinking of making the one character an object but didnt think that would work for talking.

2.  The biggest problem I'm having is with figuring out how the frames will work since I only have a few since it never faces left or right.  Right now I have it so that before the room fadein it locks the character view to the one of it facing the wall, and then when the main character talks to it it locks the view in another direction.  What will happen though when I try to add a talking animation for the character in since the view is locked?  How can I work around this to succesfully make the character without drawing all the unneeded frames?

Let me know if I need to make my problem clearer.

Ok I've run into a strange problem.Ã,  I start the game and play a midi file, that works out alright.

Next I change the midi file playing for a certain event.

After that I chance the midi file playing back to the original one.Ã,  However rather then playing normally this midi file is all screwed up and sounds very strange.

I tried it with a different second midi file and as far as I can tell it works normally.Ã,  Any ideas on how I can make it so that it will sound right all the time?

Is there a way to reset the midi synthesizer or something?

Edit:  Just to be sure it wasn't my computer I tried it on my other computer, same problem.  This problem just seems so strange.

I was just getting a function undefined token, so I did as you suggested and put the on call below the function it had to call and then it worked, horray.

I didn't know that the order they appeared in the script made any difference so originaly I just had the function at the bottom.  I usually use java and there the order doesnt matter, so I guess it's just unique to AGS/c++.

Thanks.

Alright sorry I'll try to explain it better, but pasting code probably won't help since the way I have it set up is so complicated that you'd need all of the games global and room scripts to understand.

The original problem was this, I wanted to make it so you can do something like "open door" and your guy walks to the door and then when he reaches it he opens it.Ã,  On top of that I wanted it to be such that as you are walking to the door any click will cancel the movement and you will stay in the current room.Ã,  This same idea applys to every item in my game, IE if you click pick up on something your guy starts walking towards it then picks it up, but if you click somewhere before that he will go there instead and will not pick up the item.

To do this I made a global function called queuedCommand which basicly uses a bunch of things to tell if its in a queue and stuff, and when if it reaches the destination succesfully it calls the rooms on_call script and then does the action.

I've managed to get all of that working perfectly, so each room has its own on_call function implemented in it for queued commands.

The problem is that the on_call function seems to be a bit strange.Ã,  In the function it lets you call up variables that are unique to the room, so if I made a room variable called lightOn I can set it and read it from the on_call function.Ã,  This would make it seem like the on_call method is completely in the room script (which would make sense), however it has something different with it because you can not call other room functions from the on_call function.

so say in one room I have a function called doFireCutscene() and I want to call the function after a queued event, so I put it in the on_call function.Ã,  That won't work for some reason and I can't figure out why, it's definitly not spelling or something because if I call the doFireCutscene() function from any other room function (like after fade in) it will work.

This leads to problems because with in my queued commands there are multiple ways to get to the cutscene, so logicly it would be best to have a function which executes the cutscene rather than having the entire cutscene cut and pasted into multiple spots in the on_call function.Ã,  I can get it to work right now by doing just that, but if I do try and use a function to make it cleaner it won't let me.

Any ideas?

Again if this is hard to understand (I know it's pretty complicated) then I'll try to elaborate even more and provide some code snippets.Ã,  As I said though the codeing is very complicated since I could not figure out a more elegant way to do this with the AGS engine, it was kind of a workaroundsince you can't exactly call room functions from the global script (other than on_call which is exactly what I'm doing ).

Edit: so to sum up the problem isn't lack of executing, it's that AGS spits out an error when I try to call a room function from the on_call function.

Alright I am a bit confused with the on_call room function that you use to do local room things from the global script.

The reason I am confused is that it seems to be able to access and change room variables just fine, but it can't call other room functions.

for example I have a function called startFireScene() and when I try to call it from the on_call function it won't work, but if you call it from any other room function it works just fine.

This got me to thinking that maybe the on_call function still counts as a global function that is specialized for that room, however it's not so since it can access and change room variables.  The biggest problem I have is that without the ability to call other room functions from the on call function it means that a few times I have to have duplicates of the exact same code.

For example I have a room variable called booksBurned that gets changed after something in the on call function happens, if two books are burned then a cutscene happens.  Well right now I have to have the cutscene cut and pasted into two of the spots in the on call, since the player may burn the books in a different order.

Is there any way to call room functions from the on_call function?

(the reason I used the on_call function was because it seems to be the most elegant way of making the character walk to an area and do something when they get there, without pausing the script).

I'm trying to think of a way to put a dialog topic in a cutscene for the start of a game.  The problem I'm having is that runDialog() only does so after the script stops.  This is a problem because I want the cutscene to still be going  after the dialog conversation, so the character moves around a bit.

Is there any way I can make the dialog topic start, and block the rest of the script from going until it finishes?

Alright can I ask you one more thing about objects since I've been dealing with them all today and have gotten stuck on another thing?

I have another object, a drawer, in one of my rooms so I decided it would be good organization if rather than using a room variable for checking if the drawer is open I used a variable that's attached to the object.Ã,  So I made a custom property for the object which is a boolean called isOpen.

I can get the data from that variable fine, but I can't figure out how to set it since I coulndt find another post about it, SetProperty doesnt exist, and using GetProperty("isOpen")=1 doesn't do it either.

I also typed in the name of my object then scrolled down the list of available functions and didn't see anything that looked of use.

Edit:  Make no mistake, I'm not an idiot getting stuck on absolutely everything.  In fact I've managed to make a very nice save gui, and a nice lucasarts gui where every function is cancelable after you click on something.  It's just that when you've been working in AGS for 4-6 hours a day you tend to run into problems, especially when the manual doesn't seem to hold the answer.

Alright I'm just wondering if there is a better way to do this.

I have an object in a room, a knife that is on a knife rack.  I the knife rack is a hotspot called "knives", and I want the player to be able to click "take knives" and if he does not have the knife object he gets it.  The only problem with this right now is that the knife object counts as it's own thing when you scroll over it, so to remedy that I used object.isClickable=false .  My question is this, either where can I put this code so that it gets run only once ever, or is there a way to make this option part of the objects default state.  Right now my best idea is to put it on room load, but that seems dumb since the room may load many times and the object won't be there after the player uses take on the hotspot.

Alright here's what happened and scared the hell out of me.

I made some bitmap images for an animated cursor in photoshop, then I imported them into AGS, no problems.

I tested the views and everything, it all appeared to be fine.Ã,  So then I set the cursors to be the views and run the game.Ã,  Bam I get hit by tons of errors saying that the sprites are invalid.Ã,  I went to the sprite part in the editor, and got aobut 20 errors saying that the sprites are invalid.Ã,  So now Im freaking out since the only backup I have is 2 days old and I've made tons of progress since then.Ã,  I desperatly try deleting the sprindex file and all of that and after about 30 mins of tinkering around with AGS and getting tons of errors I managed to replace all of the troubled sprites with the default one and the game was now runnable again.

So then I made a backup and then I tried importing the same mouse sprites and doing that again, this time it works though.Ã,  Why would it have done this?

Also, is there any possible way that my game could have a problem in it now after dealing with this?Ã,  I'm hoping that having the tons of errors generated and whatever troubles it caused the engine doesn't somehow manifest itself in my games, even though the sprites are now good.

I think the problem might have been because I accidently had 2 instances of AGS going at once since I wasnt paying attention, editing the same game.

The game appears to run fine I just want to make sure that theres no way that any of my game code could have problems somwhere in it.

Usually you import your own sprites and use them, there is no way to change his clothing short of manually editing the images in paint or something.

You can use the default ones if you want, most people don't since they don't look so great.