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Weird...I am able to access it through the first link.

If I recall correctly, this was one of the first AGS games which showed quite an effort in graphics. Even though they seem pretty garish today (check it!), it shows that more than some sweat has been put into them. For sure it contributed raising the bar for subsequent AGS productions.

What? Whaaaaat? I remember 5DaS to have pretty meh graphics. They were certainly functional and consistent (which is pretty important, I'm not discounting the importance), but no more so than any other two dozen or so full-length games released at that point. There were games with effortful (and better) graphics put into them before 5DaS, that were of comparable length! Permanent Daylight, King's Quest 1 and 2 by Tierra/AGD, bloody hell Apprentice, etc.!

As for 5DaS, it seems to be the game that brought loads and loads of people to AGS, but I don't really remember much about it. It was engaging when I played it. For a nitpick, the verbcoin/inventory thing didn't really work well for me?

Thanks Fish! And happy belated to AJA too!

I am yet unsure how easier that would be for beginners to learn it. I think only people can tell.

Not at all being qualified to weigh in on any of the other stuff, but I don't think that THAT specific scenario is really the problem at all. If someone who knew nothing about either AGSscript OR Lua approached making a game in AGS, I'm not sure learning either language would be more difficult than learning the other.

Again, I don't know about the other problems, or the technical issues in either Lua or AGSscript so I am not qualified to speak on those, but it is true, even with me being knowledgeable about programming languages in general and how syntax would usually work in most languages, sheer laziness would definitely be a major factor in me continuing to use the usual AGSscript, as opposed to downloading the Lua plugin and using Lua to code in AGS (even though I should probably learn Lua at some point , seeing how widely used it is in the game industry especially).

I...don't know anything about the theory of music, unfortunately, and wouldn't have gotten the fourth at all.

Someone else had trouble with the four horsemen one and the seven wonders one as well (of being non-religious and not knowing about the concept of the "seven wonders").
If it is obvious you are supposed to derive numbers from the poem, people would probably get it much more easily, although personally (and this is totally unrelated to this thread, probably should rant about puzzles elsewhere, especially since I don't know exactly how it is implemented in your game, but still ), unless you've figured out and engineered some very strange situation where the existence of such a puzzle would actually make sense in the context of the game world, it would end up seeming a very tacked on, puzzle-for-the-sake-of-including-a-puzzle puzzle.

Anyhow, if it is for a wide variety of players from a mixed or unknown background (such as here on AGS), I'm not sure you'd be able to find a "sweet spot" of general knowledge that you can use for the riddle without making it ridiculously easy.

And to you, Ponch!

Thanks Chicky and Peder!
And thanks, Tabata! Those pianomice were...interesting .
And happy birthday to you too, Blaze!

But would your code work with cutting the x counter in half if one of my hotspots had both bounds in one side? It would never find the leftmost coord of it, no?

Yeah, I need it for every hotspot, not just whichever is leftmost and rightmost, and also I use the IDmax for total number of hotspots in the room (can't find any other way yet).
And thanks for the Game.CharacterCount, I missed that!

Khris, the way I've set up the conditions, following Crimson's advice, wouldn't it catch the maximum x faster, and then skip that condition statement every time after that?

Sorry for the double post, but for completionness's sake, here is what I ended up with (which is totally working, which I am completely happy about), after applying some probably very unnecessary efficiencies :

Code: AGS

  int cc=0, x=0, y=0;
  int hmin[50];
  int hmax[50];
  int IDmax=0;
  Hotspot* HatXY;
  while (cc<50)//initialising the hotspot max and min coord arrays
  {
    hmin[cc]=Room.Width+1;
    hmax[cc]=-1;
    cc++;
  }
  
  
  while (x<Room.Width)
  {
    while (y<Room.Height)
    {
      HatXY=Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(x, y);//Checks left side of screen for min coord of any hotspot
      if (HatXY)
      {
        if (HatXY.ID>IDmax) IDmax=HatXY.ID;//to find the total number of hotspots
        if (hmin[HatXY.ID]>Room.Width) hmin[HatXY.ID]=x;//if found and value not already filled, fills it
      }
      HatXY=Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(Room.Width-x, y);//Checks right side of screen for max coord of any hotspot
      if (HatXY)
      {
        if (HatXY.ID>IDmax) IDmax=HatXY.ID;//to find the total number of hotspots
        if (hmax[HatXY.ID]<0) hmax[HatXY.ID]=Room.Width-x;//if found and value not already filled, fills it
      }
      y++;
    }
    x++;
    y=0;
  }

Speaking of which, is there a way to know the total number of hotspots in a room? Or total number of characters in a game? And aside from assigning custom properties and manually inputting them, there any way other to know the width of a hotspot?

D'oh!

Stupid mistake! Thanks for telling me.
Thanks for your improvement as well!


Also, it isn't ATZ2 ...

Hello everyone!
Been a long while since I posted in this forum...please don't hurt me too much .

So I'm trying to find the leftmost and rightmost x value of all the hotspots in any one room. This is what I have so far (runs in room_Load()):

Code: AGS

  int cc=0, x=0, y=0;
  int hmin[50];
  int hmax[50];
  int IDmax=0;
  Hotspot* HatXY;
  while (cc<50)                            //Initialising array
  {
    hmin[cc]=Room.Width;
    hmax[cc]=0;
    cc++;
  }
 
  while (y<Room.Height)
  {
    while (x<Room.Width)                    //Going through Room pixel by pixel to find width of all hotspots
    {
      HatXY=Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(x, y);
      if (HatXY!=hotspot[0])
      {
        if (HatXY.ID>IDmax) IDmax=HatXY.ID;
        if (x<hmin[HatXY.ID]) hmin[HatXY.ID]=x;//Gets minimum x value of hotspot HatXY
        if (x<hmax[HatXY.ID]) hmax[HatXY.ID]=x;//Gets maximum x value of hotspot HatXY
      }
      x++;
    }
    y++;
  }

And it doesn't work. I've checked with debugging, but putting a breakpoint inside the if, but it never enters into the "if (HatXY!=hotspot[0]) {...}" condition. I had replaced "hotspot[0]" with "null", that didn't help either. My room DOES have hotspots and it is NOT a scrolling room (although I'm curious if that matters if the viewport is set to zero). I tried putting the code in room_AfterFadeIn() as well, but it still didn't work. I randomly tried declaring the pointer inside the loop, and even assigning the GetAtScreenXY value outside the loop, it doesn't work.

Could someone please tell me, or help me figure out what the problem is?

If you have the games in question, you can use Scumm rev 3 to check the total BGs (including some weird unincluded BGs) and costrip ti check the characters and animations in LucasArts games, and Scistudio to check the charcters and backgrounds in Sierra games.

From as long as I can remember, "Multiple endings" have been a selling point or something praiseworthy in adventure games, but I've never quite understood why. The ways I have seen it done didn't seem to be good methods. Honestly, the only only "good" way I've seen it done isn't in adventure games; it is in those open-ended free-roaming RPGs that essentially give you total freedom anyhow, and I'm not sure how easily that could be applied to adventure games. The way adventure games do it seem to fall into 3 groups:

The first way, which I'm sure everyone can agree is a bit silly is everything going the same, and then right at the end, you have to make some sort of choice (through dialogue or some such thing), and then depending on that, your end cutscene/text is different.

Similar to the first way is one where the choices are in the middle of the game, or littered throughout, or hinging on something like whether you got a particular inventory item, or used it or such, and then depending on that, the end cutscene/text is different.

Finally, there is where the game forks out before the end, and you play a bit (or a lot), and then depending on which path you took, you get a different ending.

Now in the first and second case, it would be pretty silly to try to make it a selling point (although a number of non-adventure AAA games do just that even today). In the third case, perhaps it is because I've never seen it implemented properly, but it annoys me somewhat. The way I've seen it used is to provide "lesser endings" alongside the optimal ending. I've even seen this suggested (even on AGS) as a useful method of allowing variable puzzle difficulty: Someone solves the really difficult puzzle, they get the best ending. If they are unable to solve it, they get one of the secondary ending. I don't know about anyone else, but I am really not fond of this...it feels like a form of punishment, especially in some games where after the game is finished it gives a message like "You have completed the game on easy, you should now try completing it 'properly' for the 'proper' ending!".
Again, I can only speak for myself, but having just completed a game, being told (or seeing) that what I did was something lesser, I'm not usually in the mood to restart and go through most of the same game all over again till I get to the point of the fork to choose the different fork (this becomes an even more annoying problem when the fork is something like not having picked up a particular inventory item at one point, or not using it properly...something you might not even know).
The way I end up having to deal with this becomes an incredibly immersion breaking thing...if something pops up that appears to be a fork, usually in the form of a dialogue choice like "Do you want to do X or do you want to do Y?", I usually save (or more often load a slightly older game, get right before that point and save, because you can't save during dialogues), and then proceed. If I'm seeing signs of this being a "lesser path", I load and try the other. I realise fully that this isn't the way the game is supposed to be played, but why should I continue down a path in a game that I KNOW is going to be one of the lesser paths, and probably end with a less than optimal ending?

How do you deal with these multiple ending games? I've got to admit, replayability itself in adventure games isn't something that's worked on me, so I might not be the intended target for "multiple endings"..it took me almost 9 years, with long gaps inbetween to finish all three paths in Fate of Atlantis (although that was an example of multiple solutions, not multiple endings).
Perhaps I have missed out on some major adventure games that had proper multiple endings that didn't have one or two be the "good" ones and the rest be lesser endings. If so, please enlighten me, I would appreciate it.

Also, in the interest of honesty, I'm actually using the 2nd method I listed in my game , where a number of totally optional items, if picked up, will very superficially change the ending, but none of them in a negative way, unless you don't find any of the items at all, which would be difficult to do.

Easy!
AAB=A
CAC=G
ACC=S

As I'm sure you realised, I was mostly just reverse engineering what I saw as 3 units of a 3 character code, and figured, on AGS, people would use "AGS" as a thing to code

Another riddle (dunno if this actually is a riddle):

AABCACACC

I made this code up and I have no idea whether it's incredibly easy, super hard or somewhere in-between to break, so let's see! Can anybody tell me what that means.

EDIT: It's just the 9 characters above, the text before and after has nothing to do with it.

"AGS"?

*Cue angry debate on what does or does not constitute an adventure game*

Batman

m0ds probably figured Dizzy wasn't an adventure game?

That was fast! You are absolutely correct, Stupot.


Got one for us?