Messages

Congrats, Vince et al!

I'm sure it's an awesome game. Shame I won't have time to play it for a couple of weeks.

[Screen7PresentsAStemshock InteractiveProduction]

Screen7
Presents

A
Stemshock Interactive
Production



A Summerbatch Game
(if it's finished in time and accepted)

Story

Somewhere along the east coast of Africa, pirates have attacked a luxury yacht! They have taken a few seemingly wealthy passengers as their hostages, a family and an old man, hoping to collect a hefty ransom for each of them. When the hostage negotiations go awry, the rescue duties land on the weak shoulders of an unlikely hero. Little does he know that the ship's crew, that stands in his way, is composed of some very weird and silly individuals.


Screenshots


Hostage negotiator extraordinaire.



This diarrhea ain't gonna cure itself.



Impress youths with your inability to sing.


Trailer

[embed=640,360]<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gRl089VN_lM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>[/embed]


Other awesome stuff



A preview of the soundtrack by Sine Cadenza!

Progress

Development began in mid-February this year with just the two designers. After that we got some scripting help and a couple of musicians to compose an awesome soundtrack for the game. In late April we had an alpha version ready for playtesting, ie. checking if the puzzles made any sense at all. And some of them did! Wow! After that it's been the usual fare, ups and downs, falling behind schedule, and a hell of a hurry to make deadlines.

We're going into beta phase in a couple of days. After that it's going to be less than two weeks of hard work getting it finished and polished. There's still lots of eye candy stuff missing, such as walking to hotspots, cutscene stuff etc. but the game is fully playable and background art and most of the essential animations are done. Yay!

To be released sometime in July!


Update - 2012-07-05

Almost there! Just a couple of minor things left and we're ready for a couple of weeks of rigorous testing! One of those weeks may or may not be reserved for resting after a month long crunch.


Features

- The first 1280x720 resolution AGS game?
- 18 wacky characters!
- 15 rooms to explore!
- Lots of lazily made animations!
- Bingo!
- Karaoke!
- An inflatable lady!
- Hitting bad guys with a cane!
- Based on early alpha playtesting, at least two hours playtime!
- Some technical magic that nobody really cares about.


Credits

• Aki Ahonen (AJA)
  Game design, writing, programming, character art and animation, background design, project leader
  
  
• Joni Ahonen
  Game design, writing, character and background design
  
  
• Ari Huuskonen (MadReizka)
  Background and cutscene art, music, sound
  
  
• Tommi Kivistö (Ishmael)
  Scripting, writing
  
  
• Joni Karvinen
  Music
  
  
• Sini Haapanen
  Background consultant

Special thanks

• Denzil Quixode
  For the amazing Lua plugin and the even more amazing tech support!
  
  
• Screen7 and other Summerbatch participants
  For motivation and finally luring me into making a game that's not for an OROW competition!
  
  
• SkyGoblin folk
  For the custom resolution branch of AGS!
  

Follow us on twitter @stemshock and facebook: Stemshock Interactive

No problem, that's great news! Less work for me.

I'll try to replicate this over the weekend and see if I can find a way to fix it. Unfortunately there are also some other things to fix since a while back I managed to break the new version I'd been working on.

First of all, that's weird. Second of all, that's really really weird.

Do the actual z-order values change? (Can you even access them in runtime?) I don't see how the plugin could screw that up without messing with AGS's internal stuff. But then again, I'm no DirectX expert, so who knows how badly I've messed things up.

After you've opened the video just set video.isLooping to true.

Works great! Thanks!

And yeah, the error message thing was a bit of a long shot.

Still doesn't quite work. Different error, though, so that's progress. It seems ags.object[id].Clickable is nil after a restore/restart. Visible and Baseline are also nil, didn't try any more of them. If I comment out the instantly crashing part of code, everything seems to work fine until I a script tries to access an object.

Is there any way to make the error message clearer in this kind of a case where stuff is read from a saved game? Since now it's just: Error: [Lua] [string ""]:0: attempt to call method 'Clickable' (a nil value)

Wow, great work! Worked really nicely on my iPod Touch 2g, iOS 4.2.1. I tried out a couple of my games:

- How Many: FadeOuts didn't seem to go all the way to black. Pixel hunting was a bitch. Performance was very good.

- By the Numbers: Crashed once at the very beginning when I turned the screen to horizontal mode. Everything is out of sync since the framerate is only 20 fps. Talking heads run at about 15 fps, making what little there is of the game totally not fun to play. Raw drawing stuff seems to be working correctly, though. File access and 8bit colours, too.

- Barrier: 640x400 @32bit and with some big damn objects, runs even slower, at about 13-15 fps. A big full screen iris in/out animation dropped the framerate to about 6 fps. Other than that it worked great all the way through.


Very very awesome, JJS!

Hmm, here's a weird bug. When I restart the game or restore a saved game, something (the plugin?) seems to override the compat.lua script. When I normally run the game, everything works fine but when I restart, the game crashes with the first call to set a character's x coordinate (because now it's a number value). I load all the scripts in game_start.

AGA, I sure hope that log doesn't contain the after party.

Thanks, Bici and Duals and everyone else for organizing this!

Nice, thanks! Seems to be working fine so far.

Any chance there'll be a fix for the nil/null problem I mentioned earlier, Denzil?

I ran into another case where it was a bit troublesome: You can't actually cancel FollowCharacter calls since you can't call ags.cEgo:FollowCharacter(nil). That just gives an error that a Character was expected for arg #1.

Luckily in my case I only wanted to undo following because I hit AGS's limit of following characters. So, it was easy to fix by changing the limit in the engine. But if I needed to cancel following, I'd be in big trouble right about now.

Nice! Thanks for posting that. 

The engine's modified too. And it's really not finished as it is.

The least you would have to do is set some default settings in the engine when they're not found in the ini file. If you build a 720p game and delete the acsetup.cfg, everything will break. The setup program shows the resolution as "1024x768" and the graphic filters do nothing. Also, opening a "normal" AGS game into the editor breaks things as well even if you don't modify the resolution. And mouse sensitivity is all over the place in full screen, at least with 720p resolution. I've hack-fixed that in my own slightly modified build which is not available for download right now.

So, this isn't really ready to be merged into more "official" versions. It's more of a quickish hack at this point. But I'm using it anyway for an upcoming game. No big problems so far, apart from the missing cfg file issue.

No idea how/if it works in DirectDraw mode, though.

Yeah, sounds like a Dialog Designer plugin is not going to happen until the API supports this properly.

But thanks for the info!

Another problem was (I was trying to make an importer plugin) that I couldn't add dialogs and update the project tree. The new dialogs weren't even saved with the game. Do you know if this also was because of my stupidity?

It would be nice if we could od simple Lua to AGS script function calls using the CallGameScriptFunction and QueueGameScriptFunction plugin API functions. Even though it's limited you can at least pass the proper parameters by reading them from Lua inside the AGS script function. Right?

And what about the undocumented bool Character.on property? That would be useful to easily hide the player character.


-edit-
Oh, Lua + AGS, how have I ever been able to live without you?

Anybody ever wanted to do something like this?

Code: ags

player.Say( "Who's that behind the door? Hello?" );
dude.Say( "It's me. The dude." );

cutToRoom( ROOM_ON_THE_OTHER_SIDE_OF_THE_DOOR );

// Now we're in the other room and the script continues running...
dude.Say( "I'm right here, can't you see me?" );
player.Say( "Oh, there you are." );

cutToRoom( ORIGINAL_ROOM );

// And we're back...
player.Say( "Well, that was fun." );

Well, you can! I'll share all the neat stuff I've hacked up in my AGS-Lua framework sometime in June, once I'm finished with my game. Just don't expect everything to be consistent and pretty.

Wow. Someone's using this. Thanks, I'm glad you find it useful!

Still, is there any risk of breaking my game using the dialog editor?

Secondly, is there a way to import a dialog while AGS is running?

I haven't come across any problems so far but it's a possibility. I don't think there's any problem using it with AGS 3.2.1. The export to AGS function just modifies the Game.agf xml file and adds/replaces dialogs. And if I remember correctly, it makes a backup so if anything goes wrong, no permanent harm is done. That's also why you can't currently export while AGS is running.

Are there any other dialog editors that have been fully integrated into AGS' user interface?

As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, part of the reason why there's no editor plugin version of this is that AGS editor plugins can't modify dialog scripts. At least I found no way of doing that. Now that the editor is open source, it would be possible to change this but I guess the powers that be must first organize the open source AGS project somehow. So yeah, I don't think there are any dialog editor plugins out there yet.

If you find any problems or have ideas for improvement, I'd be happy to see what I can do when I have some time to spare. Though I am a bit afraid of seeing how big of a mess the source code is.

I'm willing to maintain it! I just kinda... haven't been 

Understandably.

Some of the bugs that you describe I think - not certain - but I think they are already fixed in the development version, but it just never got turned into a release version. Either way I will try to sort out a new proper release version soon (and feel free to yell at me if I take too long again ).

I tried saving the game with the dev version you sent me and it hasn't crashed so far! Great! Thanks!

The getplayer function is still acting oddly, though. Calling ags.getplayer():Room() to get the room number actually calls my Lua defined table called Room. And the editor bug is still there too.

Why aren't the game.variables available to the scripts?

This might be a restriction of the plugin API. Accessing struct fields is a different thing internally to accessing properties (which are really just getter/setter methods).

Good point.


I'm thinking of releasing the framework I've written in Lua once I've finished my game. Maybe that'll get more people interested in the plugin. The framework pretty much removes any need for scripting in AGS; you don't even have to link events to their handlers, just the AGS objects to their Lua counterparts.