Messages

 
Somehow in my head I'm not comprehending having to deal with Covid-19 way into November...

Indeed, as CrimsonWizard said, I have nothing against the code, I was more referring to the very concept of situationally changing the interactivity of a character being problematic, and not really a good solution to the problem quoted from Cassiebsg.

For a complete change of pace:

I have no issue with the code being in this thread, but I feel it is answering the wrong question. If the character is clickable/interactable in the game, that would be for a reason (at some points(s) the player would have to interact with them), and then having code that makes the player uninteractable in those situations wouldn't be helpful. The only way around this situation (other than having very weird and unintuitive, situation-dependant interactability of the player character) would be to always check if the walkto location is in front of a hotspot, and then move the player nearby where they wouldn't be in front of a hotspot. In this situation you'd always have to make sure your BGs don't have clusters of hotspots that would result in the player having to walkto a point too far away.

Even if the character needs to move, just change the view of the character for that (you'll likely need to change the view of the character anyhow, from standing still doing stuff to walking).

For immersion, I too prefer direct control if it is in 3D, with keyboard and mouse, though: I think intuitiveness of a controller depends on what you're used to, and I much prefer KBM.

As I said before, it may be a bit nitpicky, but most of the examples of puzzles given as reasons to have walking be a separate interaction are very easily (without any extra complexity in terms of development or playability) be implemented without walking. There definitely ARE some position based puzzles that WOULD require walking, but the vast majority of adventure games (especially those made with AGS) don't have such puzzles. If your game did, then of course, you'd have a walk interaction, but if  you didn't, then my question follows: is it still meaningful to have a walk interaction?

I wasn't expecting this turning into an interface system discussion, as the question would apply equally and irrespective of all the interaction methods, but as I said, the the implementation of the interface depends on its usage and situation- One and two button interfaces seem universally understandable, if you need more, then it seems we get diversity of opinion (LucasArts permenantly visible verblists, Sierra pop-down Verblists, Verbcoins, etc.)- I've had a bit of a hate-hate relationship with verbcoin, even though I'd like to think I gave it a fair shake- I even tried designing my own here a while back with the help of the community to get the best practices down, but that failed dismally, because each choice lead to two possible (both bad) results:
- Can't have the verbcoin be covering the clicked spot, so make it hollow- Need to have each interaction equidistant to the click point with predictable and expected button positions, so made it radial, making it radial means you can't reach corners. If you want to reach corners, then you have to offset the radial menu, which eliminates its usefulness.
- Aimed for a single button interface for simplicity and portability- walking if there's nothing to interact with, and opening interface if something interactable. That caused problems with opening inventory when you wanted to interact with it irrespective of something on the screen. could be bypassed by having inventory as a pop-down menu, but then that messed things up for being in the corner of the screen, and since inventory usually has a different interaction system, it becomes inconsistent.
- Closing the interface was also a problem- for desktops I eventually had to allow right-click to close (even though it was a single button interface), because the other options- moving the mouse out of range or clicking an X made it worse

So I'm only being a LITTLE facetious when I say it is the worst interface ever 

An image example of your scene (or a video of where you implemented before) would be helpful. Because the situation doesn't seem all that complicated: just place the sprite exactly where it should show, and put it in front of the desk?

I can very much understand your feelings, while not in a risk group myself both my parents are, and my mom especially have worried greatly over getting infected.

Personally though, I don't feel a global lock down is a feasible or sustainable solution, and I feel that it would be better to focus entirely on protecting the risk groups rather than trying to make everyone isolate themselves,
especially since in Sweden at least, there's a shortage of proper masks, made worse by charlatans and otherwise healthy people hogging them all for themselves, when they should go to medical staff and people who
really are at risk. It just seems like a better strategy to try and give just the risk grops the most extensive protection possible rather than spreading it out to people who aren't at risk.

But this situation also highlights just how vulnerable a global society is, and there will always be risks for new pandemics, and there needs to be more solutions than just trying to put everything on pause like a Sims game.

It's not just about risk groups vs non-risk groups, because all the groups only have access to the same resources. So as a over-simplification, if a hypothetical country only has 10 hospital beds and 20 medicines, but a population of 100, of which 50 people are older and 'at risk', aside from all the spreading and such, even if one of the younger, not at risk people sick to the level that they need to go to the hospital, they're using resources others could have been using (and not just other people infected with the virus, but people who need to go to the hospital for other illneses, chronic conditions, accidents, etc.). The point of the social isolation is that along with attempting to stem the spread of the virus, it would slow it down and stagger the infection among the population.

Long term lockdown is indeed probably not sustainable, but something for a few weeks? We've never it done on such a scale before, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

For me, it's probably just about any Bob Dylan cover. Weird fact: I like Dylan's songs, but I can't stand his voice. Many of my favorite songs are covers of Dylan songs. Guns and Roses "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," and the Ramones' "My Back Pages." Every one of them a Dylan song sung by better vocalists.

That's not a weird fact, it is a very normal reaction to Bob Dylan. His voice and random accordion insertions do not do his songwriting skills any favours.

Yes, I meant Tales of Monkey Island. It's the fifth game isn't it? Therefore it's Monkey Island 5. If I say Monkey Island 3, you know I'm talking about Curse of Monkey Island, right?
Also, I don't care what their excuse is, the Wii has nothing to do with that click-and-drag control scheme. There's a perfectly usable nunchuk with an analog stick on the Wii.

It's the 5th game, but it isn't "Monkey Island 5", the same way Telltale's Sam & Max games aren't "Sam and Max 2" (and 3 and 4...), or Telltale's Borderlands game isn't called Borderlands 3. And I'm not sure what you mean that the Wii had nothing to do with it. Obviously the control scheme wasn't the same on the Wii, the drag system was TellTales' conversion of the system from the Wii to the PC.

The problem is, what's the alternative?
The single click interface is bad because it simplifies interactions too much, allowing brute-force-click-on-everything gameplay.
The two click interface is bad because no one ever presses the right mouse button, therefore being exactly like the single click interface, but without the character giving context to anything.
Half of adventure game creators (like you) hate the verbcoin for seemingly no good reason. (And I've heard the arguments, none of them are compelling.)
No one ever talks about the Sierra interface (and personally, I don't like it).
The 9-verb interface has been declared "old" and "outdated".
No one in their right mind would use a text parser.
Apparently direct control is considered too "action adventure".
And no one seems willing to come up with an entirely new and original way of playing adventure games.

Everyone is always willing to complain about the interfaces that are available, but no one is willing to improve them or make their own.

You've listed problems with each interaction system, but that doesn't mean there aren't situations where each of them are appropriate- except the verbcoin, of course, that is just universally (and AGS-Forumly) proven by science to universally suck  .
There are use-cases (even today) of each of those interaction systems (including the text parser too).

Being nitpicky, but:
scrolling rooms don't really need walking player characters, there are other ways (e.g. moving mouse to edge of screen)
almost every adventure game maze I've seen (the stuff near the end of Fate of Atlantis wasn't really a maze to solve) involved the entire screen being a room/step in the maze, not the entire maze on the screen
some position based puzzles could do with being better designed ("you're not close enough to push the button" is useless in the non-text parser age)
But yeah, I agree, some games do incorporate position-based puzzles. I'd still maintain they're rarer than games that don't.

(My biggest "this crap is overused and overrated and it should disappear forever" pet peeve is in fact the 2-button "left-look/right-interact" interface, but let's not open that can of worms here )

I want
you
to,
please contribute 
(personally I hate the verbcoin way more)
And I haven't heard of any of those games, sorry! I can't actually think of a "traditional" (puzzles, combining stuff, talking to people, inventory items, etc.) adventure game in first person, but there are lots of first person games with heavy adventure elements.

And Danvzare, yes, I listed immersion as one of the few cons including a walking interaction had. That's my question in this thread- is it worth it? I mean, if we're talking immersion, as already mentioned, a good (non-tanky) direct control system is even more immersive.
PS: I don't know what Monkey Island 5 is, but if you meant Tales of Monkey Island, yeah, the  first episode was designed with the Wii in mind or something, so it had very weird controls.

No, Babar. If you were creating a RoN game, you wouldn't spend the whole game destroying the old characters and the universe itself, unless that was what it was about

There was some RotN games that did. But I'm not sure RotN is an appropriate example, each game adds to the characters and their arcs, the entire collection is like a season of TV.

Really? 
Firstly, Star Trek is the type of show that doesn't need the original characters, as proven by the success of the spinoffs.
It's the universe of Star Trek that's interesting. It's just too bad writers can't recreate that universe anymore. Probably because it was an optimistic look at the future, and writers like being edgy.

Secondly, the Mandalorian and just about every Star Wars game that has ever come out, has proven that Star Wars is also about the universe and not the characters. Thankfully it seems as though there's been more success at recreating that universe than with Star Trek.

Thirdly, removing John Connor from Terminator is like removing Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island. He's the main character, it's his story. The universe of the Terminator films never really got much added to it, so he is the universe. (There's a reason why Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers were eventually brought back after disappearing from one movie in their respective franchises.)

Fourthly, if you want the easy money you get from making something that's part of an established franchise, then you've got to accept the cost of having higher expectations. It's as simple as that.
Companies keep making stuff that's part of already established franchises, because they know that it'll sell. But the thing is, it has a price, and that price is that people will expect more.The bar will be raised. The mediocre will no longer be acceptable. If a company can't accept that, then they should've made something original.

Unfortunately everyone only seems capable of seeing things from one point of view. Either from the point of view that "it's got the name of a popular franchise, therefore expectations are higher" or from the point of view that "taking it as it's own thing, it's at least average", which results in petty arguments such as this.

There hasn't been a really successful spinoff since TNG. The next best series (DS9) had only half the estimated viewership of TNG (can't really compare the newer series, since they're measured with different metrics.
The Mandalorian leans in pretty heavily on nostalgia.
John Connor featured in only 1 of the 2 good Terminator movies, and he was an irritating brat in that (I personally liked the TV show as well, but he was pretty bland in that as well). The star had always been Sarah Connor for me. And Arnold, I guess.
Expectations of higher quality aren't really relevant. Simply attaching a name to a property is often more than enough. For example, every single one of the new Star Wars movies (bar one) grossed over a billion worldwide.


What are we pettily arguing about, again?

I think chronological order of release is fine. They're good books, enjoy!



...reading 10 year old immortalised conversations with long gone people is a bit disturbing.

Picard, Data, Han Solo, John Connor, etc, etc, etc. The new "writers" have a need to destroy all these characters.

Is it all that surprising? I'd say it is almost necessary if they want to continue:

Any attempts at creating new characters and story arcs in a decades-established canon will fail, or at least not draw people with the same level of nostalgia as seeing something familiar would
The familiar actors are old, it would be hard to centre a franchise around them.
Any attempts at recreating or recasting those characters would inevitably fail, because people are too used to the original actors for those characters.
The characters are too well defined and with completed story arcs. It would be hard to add anything new.
Any attempts at sticking as close as possible to the original characters and their arcs would also inevitably fail, as there would always be differences that people pick at, and those stories were a product of their time, and may not necessarily fit well with today (plus this would be the creatively boring choice).

The best option is therefore to kill off the old characters after they've handed over the torch to the new ones.
I suppose another option would be to keep the very basic character premises and settings, and change everything else every couple years, like in James Bond or Doctor Who, but characters and a universe like the Star Wars setting don't really lend themselves well to that, and you still have whiners complaining when that is attempted ("Thor is a woman now?! That's horrible, and against the character!").

While I watched TNG when it originally ran, and I've got a couple of the movies and books, I've never been a super-fan of Star Trek, so I wasn't pinning my hopes on some grand revival or anything. I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak to whether they captured the "essence of the characters" or the universe, or whether this or that nostalgic reference hit me. I watched this, and enjoyed it while I watched it, but I have no illusions that 25 years down the line people will still be talking about it.

The scenario I'm talking about is in the context of traditional adventure games (i.e. the vast majority of what people here on AGS make), where the player controls a character on the screen.
What I'm questioning is the necessity of a "walk mode"- whether as a separate walk interaction (like in the Sierra interface), or a walk interaction integrated into the the system (like the default action in a LucasArts verblist or verbcoin system, or what happens in the 2 button interface when you click an area of the screen with nothing to interact)

Essentially, there would be no way for the player to intentionally decide "I don't want to interact with anything right now, or talk with anyone, or move to another screen, but I want to change the position of the player character from this position on the screen to that position on the screen". If the player interacted with an object, or clicked on the edge of the screen, it is possible that the player character would walk over (or maybe even not then, but that's not what I'm emphasising on), but other than that, there would be no way for the player to cause the player character to move within the same screen (and do nothing else).

The only GAMEPLAY reason to have a walk interaction I can think of is for screen-position related puzzles (e.g. an early puzzle in the first KQ game had it so that if you PUSH BOULDER while standing downhill from the boulder, you would be crushed and die, but if you do it while standing on the other side, it would roll away and you would be safe). However, most games don't have screen-position related puzzles.

The only "GAME DESIGN" reason to have a walk interaction I can think of is that being able to control the character makes you associate and inhabit the character and make them "feel" more related to the player character.

Thanks for the info. I suppose the "droplets in the air" was about some trace left under specific weather conditions or similar (?).
Anyway, when I go out I do keep at least a 2 meter distance, though I noticed most others don't bother and will pass you within half a metre or such.

Just start coughing. That should scare them away 

You are supposed to buy those (one use gloves), in a box. I use them, although I doubt it makes much of a difference - given the virus is airborne anyway.
Also, I have to suppose that I was already infected weeks ago, and in that case over it.

From what I understand, the virus isn't airborne, it is transferred through droplets. I mean, it COULD become airborne (e.g. someone sneezes into the air, and the thus aerosolises the virus, and then you breathe in that air before it settles on some surface), but that wouldn't be the usual way it would be transferred.

But see this is exactly why gloves and masks one EVERYONE is critical. The idea is that if everyone participates, those that are ill (perhaps unknowingly --it can take days for symptoms to develop) are less likely to pass it to others. The gloves and masks help keep the germs localised to the infected person.

But if I am wearing gloves and a mask, and go to the supermarket, rub my eyes, then touch a shopping cart, then someone does something similar in reverse, the gloves and masks haven't helped anything. I agree that they do help in terms of reminders, but if everyone just didn't touch their face, we'd all be good anyways.

I do not know - the local experts say that there are droplets in the air, so people should not go out unless they have a set thing to do. I assume they do not mean from someone having sneezed/coughed a short while ago (?).

Social Isolation isn't advocated for because outside is dangerous, it is because being around other people is dangerous.

You are supposed to buy those (one use gloves), in a box. I use them, although I doubt it makes much of a difference - given the virus is airborne anyway.
Also, I have to suppose that I was already infected weeks ago, and in that case over it.

From what I understand, the virus isn't airborne, it is transferred through droplets. I mean, it COULD become airborne (e.g. someone sneezes into the air, and the thus aerosolises the virus, and then you breathe in that air before it settles on some surface), but that wouldn't be the usual way it would be transferred.

So, you can click an object at the other end of the room and take it without walking there?

Depends on the game, but even in the most traditional style of Point and Click adventure games, that wouldn't happen. You'd click an object at the other end of the room, the character would walk there, and then take it. However, there would be no interaction to click WALK on the object on the other end of the room, and have the player just walk to the object and do nothing else.

PS: You can post a smaller version of a screenshot using img width and height tags. e.g. to get your image scaled to 800px, you can do [ img width=800 ] ...

It is my understanding that the virus is spread through respiratory droplets (so coughing, sneezing, spitting, etc.), being breathed in, swallowed, entering the bloodstream, going into the eyes.
In that sense, I'm not sure wearing gloves (even for as short a time as going out to the market) really helps: You'd be touching door-knobs, shaking hands, patting(?), then touching your face and eyes and breathing in those droplets (or other people would be then touching their faces and breathing in YOUR droplets). Whether or not you wear gloves won't change this.

If everyone was wearing gloves, goggles and a face-mask when they go out, then when they come back in, throw away their gloves/mask and wash their goggles, it would make more sense.

If I'm wrong in this understanding, feel free to correct me.

EDIT: I suppose handing out disposable gloves at the supermarket would help in situations where you might be infected/have come into contact with the virus somewhere on your hands, you wear the gloves, do all your shopping, DON'T touch your eyes or cough into your gloves/wipe droplets with them/sneeze into them, interact with someone else who might have the virus, and then throw them away once done. So they're not useless, but I feel a better system should probably be put into place.