Messages

S-w-e-e-e-e-e-e-t-!  Can I get a copy of your copy, Igor?  (Hey, I'm cheap!)

Is your character facing the right direction?  The direction your character is facing determines the speech view.  So if your character is facing left (i.e. Loop 1), then Loop 1 of your speech view will play. 

Barring that, have you checked that each of your 11 frames in fact contain different sprites?  It's hard to tell if the sprites are very similar because of their small size in the View viewer....  And on that note, are you sure you've imported 11 unique sprites?  What does the talking view look like in the preview pane (under character, check animate for your talk view and look through the loops).  If something looks wrong there, it's probably one of the above.  If everything's fine, you've stumped me.

LATEST CHART UBER-URL

I couldn't find a version where other prominent right-wingers had added themselves -hopefully they'll reenter their info and update the url.

In the happily-biased-towards-the-libertarian-right quiz I got PERSONAL 80% and ECONOMIC 80%, and I'm happy with that.  There were no questions about brutalizing the criminal element so I didn't bounce back towards the centre this time.

BAM -that's nailed it!  Thanks Gilbet.

@RickJ -An array is a good idea for keeping track over time (I just need the next to last one for now), but it was extracting that item number for use in add/remove inventory (or whatever it's called now) that was hanging me up.  Thanks for the ideas!

Well, I guess I'll be hanged with Bicilotti and RickJ.....

Hey, that's a misquote!  Are you getting all multinational-corporation-misinformation-disseminating on my ass?

Well, I guess I'll be hanging out with Bicilotti and RickJ.....



Economic 5.75 (right), Social  -0.31 (libertarian)

Like RickJ I thought all that "Multi-national Corporation" bogeyman nonsense added a laughable degree of bias to the survey.  Still, I ended up more or less where I expected economically.   I figured (also like RickJ) that I'd be more of a libertarian, but I guess deep down I'm cool with wrong-doers getting their ass kicked.  Still, that must have cancelled out some equally libertarian radicalism to land me back in the centre....

      Of all the hippy ranting I've read so far I thought Leafshade's theory of the right trusting the electorate and the left trusting the establishment was the most insightful.  I agree with him that the electorate is basically selfish and stupid, but he loses me arguing for more control for the "establishment".  Surely the "establishment" is as culpable, if not more so, for the pre-existing ills that they (supposedly) are so valiantly striving to remedy?  To my mind, laws govern real people, so real people can provide the best feedback as to whether those laws are desirable or not.  Are real people an inconvenience in utopia-building?  You bet!  But if your hippy climate-change legislation gets shot down because doubling gas-prices will sink a couple million voting citizens financially I don't see how your "value all humans" agenda is forwarded.  Suddenly their kids aren't eating.  I know!  Let's regulate a school lunch program paid out of taxes!  Oh, wait, we just lost 50% of tax revenue by beaming the economy back to the mid-twentieth century.  Well, heck, let's borrow!  Oh wait.... is there anyone from Ireland in the house?  Greece?  Britain?  Having fun with that deficit reduction thing yet?
       If these ideas like stopping climate change aren't moving forward consider that there is a reason, and it is that real people will be adversely impacted in a serious way.  The trick is to make these changes more palatable, easing folk into lifestyle changes rather than setting their living standard back 60 years with some "establishment" regulation regime that will save the world.  Don't fight the market, baby, use it.

      I guess I've said my piece.  Go on, vilify me.  I said VILIFY!

Quick query -does anyone know how to extract a clean number from a pointer?  I'd like to be able to keep track of what inventory items a player has thought of using (i.e. player.ActiveInventory, but save the item number that was in use after ActiveInventory changes to a new item).  I'd like to save this as a char/short/int, but ActiveInventory is apparently a pointer and I can't easily grab the raw number with something like

int oldinv = player.ActiveInventory

because there is a data type mismatch, or something like that.  I fleetingly considered writing out a function that lists every item and converts it into an int, but there must be an easier way to convert or extract that information from a pointer.  Any ideas?

EDIT -Topic Title.

I think you're right, since I don't want it to look like Display.  Even switching the graphics manually in a function and using DisplayAt would inherit problems like Display being blocking until the user clicks....

However, resizing a regular GUI with custom borders seems difficult (the appeal of the text window GUI was that it did that for you).  Can anybody recommend a tutorial or thread that would give the uninitiated some pointers on how to accomplish this?

EDIT MUCH LATER INTO THE NIGHT:  Well, never mind .....for now.  I've been playing with dummy characters and invisible speech views and I think I can use the built-in speech box after all.  It's not exactly as I'd envisaged the speech system, but it's close enough.

It's late, I'm tired, and I can't seem to think of the right search terms to get the answer I need.  I have decided what I need is a custom extender function that will allow me to place portraits and text exactly where I want them.  I've got the extender function working but -there's always a but - I can't figure out how to display text on my custom text window GUI.  Do I need a label?  There doesn't appear to be the option of adding labels to a text window GUI.....  What command would add, say, String chartalk to gTexty and display it for me?

   Thanks for all the input, guys!  You are, however, just a teensy weensy bit late to make any changes in the princess' basic design.  I've been animating her for two months, and there's no way I'm going back and tweaking all those frames!
   Since folk are still curious in this, though, I will share an update.  This is basically how she'll look in-game (my browser wants to make this full-screen which does show some embarrassing flaws, but if you resize her to approx. 150 pixels you'll get a better idea of how she'll look).
    As for commentary....

There's no need to have looking every girl lika a (hungry) model .

    Originally I was trying for that "slender model" look, but she just didn't look healthy to me.  I'm much happier with how she looks now, and I appreciate that others do too.

Will she be the only girl in the game or will their be others?
What do the other characters look like?

    So many characters.... So little time.....

Duty calls! Looking for a programmer/consultant/motivator for a long term project. Lots of gfx ready to play with, comedic fantasy setting, needs some fresh blood. PM me if interested.  

  Are we talking this or this?.  Either way you could throw me down as a consultant/motivator.  The programming bit I probably don't have time for....  Er, not to mention the requisite skills.   Good luck!

-----------
EDIT- Dammit!  I thought I'd gone PM on this one.  Well, I stand by it in public nonetheless.

[CrAzY]

Hey, whatever happened to the Mentor Program from back on EZ Boards?  Resurrecting that would bring all kinds of newbies into the fold.  Think of all the CrAzY projects we can help jumpstart!  (cap/miniscule alternating spelling for old time's sake).

EDIT: OMG we can call it the Padawan Program!  This must happen.

I'm no expert on the technical side of things around here, but I have experienced problems trying to run a game from the editor when Norton's "Sonar Protection" is running (runs fine if I load directly from the compiled folder).  I just mention this since AGS seems to have worked fine for you in the past, so maybe it is something else interfering with your game?  Then the trick would just be to find that thing and disable it while you're working on AGS.

Yes, this is the pace I work at.   :

Anyway, thanks for the quick reply GG.  Your solution definitely keeps the NPC locked in place, but an unanticipated side-effect is that the background vibrates slightly when my main character walks at a steep angle.  I think it has to do with the uneven frame delay in the walk-cycle.  I've browsed through the module you recommended and that seems overly complex for what is the only scrolling room in my game.  I think the solution for me is going to be some combination of clever plot editing and controlled viewport panning using your method -not full scrolling.

Thanks!

Are you currently accepting apprentices?

Basically I like to name technical threads after oldie songs to get them stuck in programmers' brains.

But my ulterior motive is to stop my NPC from vibrating.  The NPC is usually perched on the GUI, but when I have a scrolling room he vibrates when I update his coordinates using the room's repeatedly execute:

Code: ags

  if (cPlayer.Moving){
cFrog.y = GetViewportY () +488;
  }

Note -the room only scrolls vertically and the vibrations only occur vertically. 

     It appears as if the NPC's coordinates are not updated every game cycle, since he vibrates in the opposite direction of the players movement.  Thus, when the player walks down, the NPC appears to bounce upwards (anywhere from 1 to 5 pixels), then snap back into position, then immediately start moving again (technically it's the viewport moving and he is stationary, then snapping back into relative position).  When the player moves up he bounces down.  I've slowed the game speed down massively to observe this.  It's not the player.Moving condition because when I remove that the effect is unchanged.  Can it be that GetViewport is not updated every game cycle?  I suppose the viewport must be dependent on character.y, so delayed frames in the walkcycle might make it look choppy, but setting all delays to 0 makes no difference either.  Really, if the viewport is moving and the NPC is stationary momentarily, then it's repeatedly execute that might not be repeatedly executing, but that seems very unlikely.  So I'm stuck on this -anyone got any ideas?

Sorry Cat, I'm going with elliot87 on this one.

    The nostalgia for old-school point & click adventures when they were no longer being made by big studios demonstrates an enduring market for story-based and puzzle-based adventures.  People -not all people, of course, but many - LIKE this genre.  So long as there are fans, the genre will never die, and I don't see the fans all dying off.  Sure, the demographics will change over time, but it's reasonable to conclude that adventure gamers will be around for a long, long time.
   Economics change, however.  When point & click was cutting edge c.1990 people might pay $90 for a "top of the line" adventure game.  A large part of that cut went to retail distributors (50% ?), and then there was the price of printing everything, publishing disks, and shipping and labour that all came off the top before profit.  But by 2000 the novelty had worn off -no sane consumer would pay that kind of money for an adventure game.  But without those big price tags, big studios just couldn't make their business model work and so were shut down.
    But another change is happening in the background around 2000.  Nostalgia was kicking in, creating demand for adventures, and with ever more powerful personal computers and internet penetration it suddenly became feasible for amateurs to design and distribute their own games.  This is a second golden age for the genre!
    Now to 2010 -these small studios and many talented developers that have cut their teeth on freeware games are hitting a wall.  The genre has plateaued, and they want to "take it to the next level".  Their time is limited, but their ambitions heightened by ever more powerful tools at their disposal.  The logical solution is to go commercial, try to get paid for your work and satisfy your artistic drive.  That's the dream anyway, and I for one applaud (and support by purchases) the folks around here that have been daring enough to make the jump.  The economics are different -distribution costs have plummeted compared to 1990, but so has the price-point the gaming public will accept.  I'd be surprised if even a posh professional looking title can ask more than $30 and make any kind of serious volume.  But the point is this is where the genre is heading, and it's creating changes in the AGS forums as a result.
     So finally to the forums.  This place was an exciting frontier in the second golden age of 2000-2005, and I regret getting into it as late as I did.  There are still occasional bursts of the same raw enthusiasm, but now it is more likely to be tempered by experience and the discipline required to make a "respectable" game.  The bar has been set higher, and I can see how this would be discouraging to newbies from the get-go.  The loss of the point & click script editor as of version... 2.7?  By 3.0 for sure -definitely made amateur game making less accessible than it had been previously.  All of this makes for fewer willful but modestly entertaining development trolls, but also fewer whimsical newbie projects, while the rest of us plug away at increasingly ambitious projects that take us away from squandering time on the forums.  Finally, as the core of the community ages it is natural for the zeal of youth to slowly fade into the staid composure of wisdom, which has its own benefits but doesn't always make for the most entertaining forum posts.  Thus there have been no spectacularly public departures of prominent community members lately, and the moderators are less inclined to let immaturity have free reign in threads.  As we get older and wiser we see the consequences of these things, and so try to nip them in the bud.  Expectations change and the community modifies its behaviour as a consequence.  All of this is natural and by no means indicative of a less vigorous community or genre; we're just slowly changing.

November already.....   
I usually give this a shot, although I've yet to break the 30K word mark by the 30th.  Some writers are eekers, others gushers -that's just the way of the world.  I don't think I'll find the time this year, but I will be following all your progress with eager eyes.  Good Luck!

I'm pretty sure you can use script commands in dialogs in more recent versions of AGS, but you are correct that it will take some fiddling.