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Hey,

some people had problems with my game. The editor gave an error message in one instance which pointed me towards solution -- one character somehow is not "on".
Now, I've fixed their problems with doing character.on=true in global rep exec, but I have absolutely no idea how it got "off". Is it some new feature? When does it kick in?

A nameless country, somewhere in Eastern Europe, is deep in financial depression.
To the metropolis capital come two foreigners: Christian and Donna.
They both keep to themselves and are seen only at night.



Their stay at the Eldorado Hotel is interrupted one night by mysterious visitors who break into their room and shoot Christian. Some bullets hit Donna, who falls to the street below and finds herself naked in the middle of the hostile, unkown city; what’s more, the dawn is coming and let’s say that her skin isn’t prepared for meeting the sunrays.



The player controls Donna, who, after securing her life, goes on a quest of vengeance to find killers of Christian, meets mad inhabitants of the metropolis, gets into a love affair, and discovers the true reason behind Christian coming to this country.


The game is long, maybe one of the longest among AGS games.

It contains nudity, sexuality, drug use, smoking, lesbianism, violence, politics, metapsychical questions, and vampires (I swear to God I started to make this game BEFORE Twilight, in 2001!)

Download now, weep later:

http://donnathegame.wordpress.com


EDIT:
Ah, yes... mirrors, please?  
EDIT2:
Enough mirrors already. I love you.

Hallo! Hallo!

I'm testing my game. It's a long haul. It's very frustrating when I'm at Night 5, my notepad swollen with things to correct, so I go and change them, and then: bang! I have to play from the beginning, Version Has Changed. Over and over again.

I think I'll narrowed it down to changing graphics or character views, which makes the previously saved games useless. Am I right? Do you have any other info about it?

What can be changed in a game until the saved games go to waste?

Cheers! :-)

Hello!
It's me.

I've been wondering whether I should add an option to change the game speed.
See, I've often been frustrated with old games running too fast.
Will my game run too fast on machines faster than mine? Like, in 500!1!1 years?
Will it help if I let the player on a mega-computer select, say, game speed of 10? Or 1? With default being 100?

Hilfe!

After completing many-framed animations in my game I've noticed that the character is much bigger in her front loop than in left/right ones.
It's not that I'm lazy - it's just resizing them (and drawing transparency around the silhouttes) would take a lot, a big fat lot of time.
Is there a way to use some scripting magic, I wonder, to make certain loops ALWAYS scaled some percent less than other loops? Or a way to resize frames in engine?

To the rescue, oh please!

Erm, hello from parentland.

Ok, to the point: I've implemented an "undo" function in my game so that you can go back to the point before you died.
I've tried both ways: set restart point and save game to an unused slot.
The problem that is inherent in both ways is like this:

Imagine that early in a game you enter a room with an alligator.
The game saves automatically (or sets restart point).
The player, scared shitless by the sight of the alligator, saves his game as well.
OK, he gets past the alligator and enters another room with, say, a bomb.
The game saves automatically (or sets restart point).
The player cannot disarm the bomb, it explodes, death screen.
Now the player has two options: "undo" or "restore saved game".
If he chooses undo, he is back in the room with the bomb.
If he restores the game, he's in the first room with the alligator. Say, this time he cannot escape and is killed by this beast.
Now, if he chooses "undo" from the death screen -- he will go to the room with the bomb!

Thus, I would propose that setrestartpoint stores the game state not by saving a game, but in memory.

[A MAN WITHOUT A MOUSTACHE LOOKS LIKE A WOMAN WITH MOUSTACHE!!!!]

A MAN WITHOUT A MOUSTACHE LOOKS LIKE A WOMAN WITH MOUSTACHE!!!!


That's right, mates!!!


Let's be two steps ahead of fashion (or behind, which equals to the same).


I urge ALL REAL MEN in AGS forums to grow a moustache and post it in this thread!!!!!

Mine is still small, but you can already see how much testosterone it pumped into my previously whimpy brains!!!!



Waitin' for your 'staches!! Stop fretting, go for it. BE A GODDAM MAN!!



Disclaimer: you must know that in today's society, moustaches work a bit like chastity belts. But then who cares, women are for queens anyway!!

Hello.

I don't know if it's a "beginners question" or not, but it sure drives me into black desperation.

I want to have my own custom GUI that will work like the default InputBox does.
So, I made a GUI ("gInputBox") with a textbox called "InBox", it's set to PopupModal and everything.

Let's say that player clicks on his/her Bible of Satan.
Such script is then executed in the inventory interaction:

Display("What are we searching for?")
gInputBox.Visible = true;
string answer;
Display("Alas! Your search for %s is in vain", answer);

As it is now, when you click on your Bible, the game immediately displays the GUI and "Alas! Your search etc." without waiting for the player's text input.

The script doesn't wait for the player to type anything in the text box.

Unlike the default InputBox.

I could put all that in the textbox's "On Activate", but:

1) It's a terrible work, as my game uses plenty of "Input boxes" and I would like to keep the respective scripts in the rooms where the gInputBox is called;

2) Plenty of reactions to the player's text input deal with objects and other stuff that CANNOT be run from the global script.

How can I pause the local script when the gInputBox is displayed and then continue it when the player types something??...

Help!

Dear native speakers,

the gui in my game has - among plethora of others - two buttons: one is "use", second is "operate".

"Use" is reserved for using inventory items on other items, hotspots, NPCs, et caetera.

Now, "Operate" is for acting upon an item, hotspot, and so on. For example - turning on a machine, opening a door, reading a book, pushing something.

Recently a terrible doubt has surfaced in my mind - is the word "operate" proper for this functions? Doesn't it only refer to operating machinery?

I need to write my monthly column for a magazine, and driven by laziness I got and idea to check if I said something witty on the old forums, so that I can translate it and present to the editors.

Alas! Lo and behold the tragedy of the mortal forums!

I managed to login to my ezboards profile, but most of the posts are deleted ("unknown user, post non-existing").

Is there a backup of our happy past somewhere on the net?

Dear friends, I've come upon an obstacle that fries my non-visual brain.

Here's the background:


Now, the totally odd-looking thing you see on the right is supposed to be a stairwell (behind a bulk that is now open) leading to a lower level.

I've spent long hours trying to make it look right - yet it doesn't, and I don't know how to fix it.

Sure, it's too narrow, but widening it doesn't help at all.

Can you, with your amazing knowledge of vanishing points, perespectives and other things that make me feel like a drunk baby in the mist, help me in this predicament?

Hello,

inspired by Garage Gothic's suggestion on how Terranrich could improve one of the puzzles in his game (sorry, I haven't played it, so I'm unsure of the details) I've added a signal-scrambler-sortish kind of machine to my game.

Now, I don't have a perfect ear, but I've dealt with music ocassionally, so I'm unsure how difficult this puzzle is to an un-musical person.

Could you give me some of your time and check how this small machine works for you? And maybe you have some suggestions how to improve it?

link: http://www.geocities.com/hermann_rottweiler/machine.zip
(right-click, save target as)

Thanks in advance!

Hey,

my girlfriend's going to have a presentation of her workshop's project.
It's going to be a slideshow in a movie format (avi) - just some photos appearing one after another.
The problem is with adding titles to them. They're supposed to move in and out, scroll, roll, appear and disappear etc.
Dominika has done it in Adobe Premiere. It seems that Premiere doesn't handle adding titles too well - the movement is really jaggy and jumpy and it's not the fault of any codec used to export the movie.
It seems that Premiere just sucks this way.

Here comes a question to you, my wise friends from the whole world:
Do you know of any programme (freeware VERY preferably) with which you can add titles to a movie? We are looking for something which gives you complete control of the titles whereabouts, their movement and position, font etc.

Help?

Anyone?

We're going to mainly use it for photoshopping, typing and live music (on reason software). The soundcard plays no role, as I have the MobilePro audio interface.
The laptops to choose from:

1) Acer Aspire 1681WLCI,
Centrino 1500M, 15,4"TFT
512 Ram, HDD60 GB
DVD/CDrw
Radeon 9700, WIFI G, 3in1, IRDA

OR:

2) Hewlett-Packard zv5000
Athlon 64 3000+ 1,8
512 Ram, HDD40 GB
DVD-R/RW
GeForce 440 GO 64 MB III

From what I know, it is much better to have DVD-R/RW than a combo, which tends to be faulty, but let's say I might order to have the drive changed in the Aspire.
I'm completely at a loss however as to the superiority of other specs (especially graphics card - which one is better?)
If any person of deep knowledge and understanding of laptoppy lore could express their opinions, I'd be grateful!

Hey there,

I've decided to post here because you are a brilliant group of computer-literate people.
Two days ago I've tried to use a proxy in my IE, a british proxy at that, running at port 80. Success! It went very smoothly.

But - all things move towards an end - Lo and behold what came to pass!

Since then, the Outlook stopped to function - it just cannot connect to servers.
Similarly, Opera and IE don't connect to servers unless I activate a proxy at port 80. If I want to activate a proxy at port 8080, it doesn't work as well.

Is it possible that my Internet Provider's server went down and I still can connect to the Internet through an anonymous proxy?... I mean, I connect to the internet through England, which is a bit farther than my IP is located... how is it possible? What should I do? I rage and despair.

Please help.

Hello,

I sometimes use random events for characters talking in a room. I use DisplaySpeechBackground for this.
Now, it often happens that even when random's value is high, the speech is triggered while the previous one is still on screen. This makes for ugly and illegible clusters.

Would it be possible to make an existing background speech auto-disappear when the character says something new?

I've been replaying Planescape: Torment some time ago and I marveled at the fact how much this favourite game of mine is actually a damn good adventure game.

See, this time I allocated all the points to "intelligence" and "wisdom" (to those wondering, YES, surprisingly the game is much more easier when you do this) so I could avoid most of the combats with smart talk. Anyway, I don't know how many of you know Torment, but there are long parts of it that consist of solving puzzles using inventory and - the best ones - solved with talking to different people.
Inventory-related puzzles must have been really easy to script, as all of them are solved using the dialogue engine (and are still involving!)

The best thing about Torment is that it paradoxically combines the player's freedom characteristic of RPGs with memorable characters and a great and thought-provoking story. The case is similar with two Fallout RPGs.

RPGs feel much less constrained in terms of player's choices because GUI is the king there. You choose to attack a person important to the story and the protagonist doesn't go all "I cannot!", "He's much stronger!", they just do it (in such cases the designers save their story by making the important person strong enough to kick the protagonist's ass blindfolded.) In Fallout I can go back to my village and wipe the entire population - I will fail my quest, but hey, I have free will, right? The houses don't appear on a map when I learn about them, but when I go north, they just are there.

Whereas RPGs have simpler and less varied graphics, the designer's effort goes into scripting much more characters and more ways of getting out of a predicament. You have hundreds of characters instead of - what - 20, 30? Also, they're more life-like, as you have to sustain the life of the main character, dress him/her, feed him/her, sleep (when you feel like it, not when you solved everything the designer wanted you to during this "day") AND solve puzzles in a world of characters with own agenda.

Of course, it's not true of all RPGs, but in my opinion Torment, Fallout, Ultima, Nomad Soul (which was an action game as well) and Gothic (the latter most combat-heavy, but still a great experience) are just adventure games with more freedom to the player (nice plots, puzzles, important dialogues - forget the Deus Ex's one-liners).

All this (and the fact that RPGs still do sell) made me wonder whether RPGs aren't the future of adventure gaming...

Part 1:

Is it possible to give the Designer more control over where character portraits in "sierra style with backgrounds" appear?
In some rooms I've got important stuff on the left side of the screen so I'd like character portraits during dialogs displayed on the right, and vice versa.

Part 2:

Is it necessary for RunDialog to disrupt the script it is called from?
I'm speaking about the instances when I'd like the script perform something after calling a dialog. As it is now, the RunDialog command executes the rest of the script first, and after it finishes, the dialog is called, so I'm using set-globalints in the dialog to be later checked in repeatedly execute, and according to them the game executes later parts of the script. This is a rather complicated and dull process.
Any chances on making rundialog behave like a normal function?

yours,
Blazej Krzysztof Dzikowski

My dialogue options are displayed always in black, and yellow when highlighted.
Now, yellow doesn't look particularly legible on a white GUI I'm using to display the options.
Is there any way to change the highlight colours?