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I love everything about this project.

I remember the Blackstone Chronicles (1998?) being pretty intense for an adventure/puzzle game.

Also, as a pro-tip, if want to always use that GUI and don't want to add the argument every time you call SayBubble(), you can edit the SayBubble() function in the module to add this line at the very top (should be line 967):

(In an upcoming version I'll add a default-GUI property to the module so that you won't have to do this.)

Thanks for the quick help yet again!

Another small hiccup I'm having... if I have an inventory window open and look at an item, the saybubble appears behind the GUI(whereas the say function would appear in front of it). IS there a way to set an always in front priority? I don't see ever wanting to have the speech bubbles behind anything. Maybe it's already there and I missed it.

Here's a walkthrough of Chapter 1, which shows off all of the new visual additions (including major color corrections using a monitor calibrator, smooth scrolling, multi-layers, Snarky's world bubbles, etc...) and some player-friendly changes. A few bugs still to fix!

If you've been interested in the art but aren't sure what the heck this thing is all about, I'd suggest watching a few minutes of it and seeing if it's your speed. Chapter 1 is 100% free and the next content updated (the final 2/3 of the game) will also be free. I'm doing this for fun:

Knobbly Crook Playthrough on Youtube

[Bavolis, please don't redo the room]

Bavolis, please don't redo the room:

I'll wait to see what you can find out - any way I can help, let me know. I thought maybe it was a screen position thing and tried moving the character all the way to the bottom of the screen and the bubble still appeared below him. It's worth pointing out that there's nothing complex going on in this room, too - it's just a straightforward cinematic with lots of says.

EDIT: Snarky solved my problem - it was due to a normal view being tiny when what was being displayed in the idle view was proper sized. It comes as no surprise that the issue was on my end, but I appreciate the troubleshooting to help me find my mistake!

Great news on the first solution! Sorry, I've been at work all day, so just now getting to answer. Here are the details:

1024x768 is my game resolution and the room size.

These are the settings I changed (in the global script):

Code: ags

  SpeechBubble.BorderColor = Game.GetColorFromRGB(255,255,255);
  SpeechBubble.BackgroundColor = Game.GetColorFromRGB(0,0,0);
  SpeechBubble.BackgroundTransparency = 20;
  SpeechBubble.PaddingTop = 8;
  SpeechBubble.PaddingBottom = 5;
  SpeechBubble.PaddingLeft = 15;
  SpeechBubble.PaddingRight = 15;

I didn't change any of the code outside of the global script settings.

The two speaking characters are at:

397, 752 <--working fine
552, 483  <--this is the one having problems. The character's top Y coordinate is at 185.

Line positions (Winfillow only because Snipshadow is working fine):

Code: ags

cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&1 You'll have a much bigger name than that."); <--BOTTOM
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&2 We have much to discuss.");<--TOP
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&3 No. You are me. Now listen..."); <--TOP
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&4 You must meet me at the peak of the Knobbly Crook."); <--BOTTOM
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&5 O'Sirus the Could Have Been...");<--TOP
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&6 O'Sirus the Never-Was..."); <--BOTTOM
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&7 Both are apt names."); <--BOTTOM
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&8 Horse."); <--TOP

I had some problem with the first room being corrupt and had to recreate it. If you don't see any reason for this bug, I can go ahead and redo this one too and see if that fixes it. This is my second oldest room that's gone through a few AGS updates.

Everything's working very smoothly with only a couple of minor hiccups I'm trying to sort out. They may be on my end:

1. I have one cinematic scene where a floating head is in the middle of the screen. For some reason, it keeps shifting the SayBubble between above and below the character. I thought maybe it was a text length thing, but it puts some short ones on the bottom right next to long ones and then go back to the top for the next line. I don't seem to have any other characters with this problem. In the following example, all the SnipShadow lines play above his head, but cWinfillowFace alternates (but not in any kind of pattern) Here's what it looks like:

Code: ags

function room_AfterFadeIn()
{
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&1 You'll have a much bigger name than that.");
cSnipShadow.SayBubble("&10 Gah! Spooky voice has a spooky face. Perfect.");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&2 We have much to discuss.");
cSnipShadow.SayBubble("&11 Who are you? Are you me?");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&3 No. You are me. Now listen...");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&4 You must meet me at the peak of the Knobbly Crook.");
cSnipShadow.SayBubble("&12 Right. Sure.");
cSnipShadow.SayBubble("&13 Um. I'm just going to head back home now.");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&5 O'Sirus the Could Have Been...");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&6 O'Sirus the Never-Was...");
cWinfillowFace.SayBubble("&7 Both are apt names.");

2. The text displays fine when I've got voices turned on, but if I turn them off in the game options, the larger text boxes close way too fast, even if I set my game text speed to 1 (which should be 1 character per second, if I'm not mistaken. The default 15 closes extremely fast. I'm not sure if this is due to AGS 3.4 or this module.

This is working flawlessly for what I need - well done!

Now the only issue I have is a corrupt memory error with one room after my upgrade to 3.4. The oldest room that's gone through the most AGS upgrades, of course.

Awesome! Definitely going to play with this one. Thank you!

afaik someone has tweaked the Phylactere module to now accept speech...

Do you remember reading that here? I found the main discussion thread which had the code I pasted above, but it doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Definitely staying tuned.

The transparent background isn't as big of a deal as the sound files not playing. It looks pretty great even with a solid background in the bubbles. But yes, the transparency did have some weird neon pixel behavior with the artwork behind it.

Experimenting with it a bit tonight, I can play a sound effect style file of the speech instead instead of the traditional one and then stop it before the next line, which works, but man the thought of doing that for 1000+ lines is a bit daunting.

Thanks for the quick suggestions! I'm going to look into these.

So Phylactere (the french word balloon one) is *almost* perfect. It does exactly what I want display-wise and the game looks much more professional. In fact, I want to go back and rework the game to use this and ship with it. However, I've got one tricky stumbling block - it doesn't recognize the following format:

cOsirus.Say("&13 This line has an audio linked to it");

The &13 displays in the actual line rather than reading it as an audio file. Browsing/translating that French thread, they seem to have come up with a solution, but it's not working for me. One of the scripters suggested adding a specific code (posted below this paragraph) into the Phylactere definition and it seems to remove the &13 from the display, but it still doesn't play the audio. I thought maybe they were trying to simply have the line run as long as the length of the audio and put a cOSirus.Say("&13"); in front of the Phylactere line, but it waits for the audio to finish to move on, so that's not working. Obvious to say, I'm way out of my league here, but hopefully somebody has an idea what I'm doing wrong? I'm to the point where I'd be willing to drop the spoken audio and just go with the text because it makes the game much easier to understand.

Code: ags

 String voice = ""; 
  if (str.StartsWith ("&")) { 
    int i = 1; 
    while (str.Chars [i]> = '0' && str.Chars [i] <= '9') i ++; 
    if (i> 1) { 
      voice = str.Substring (0, i); 
      str = str.Substring (i, str.Length-i); 
    } 
  }

Either way, thanks for the lead in the right direction. The core of my problem is solved here.

Yes I'm still posting in beginner because I still consider myself a duct-tape and staples dev when it comes to anything more complex than the basics.

The problem:

I go nuts with tiny details in my backgrounds which makes the text extremely hard to read in some cases. Because my spoken language is gibberish, text comprehension is critical. Changing font and color is not doing it for me because some rooms will contrast well, but others still cause problems. I love the old Lucas style of text above the head and I have set up speech animations on the actual characters instead of the portrait style. I'm wondering if anybody has run into this problem before and how they solved it. My perfect world solution would be having the code always render a 50% transparent black box beneath the text that would shape itself to always fit the shape of the dialog.

I'm considering trying a font with a black block background, but I can see that causing a lot of weird problems in the long run.

Any ideas? Talk to me like I'm a zoo chimp when it comes to coding.

A lot of his fans are cheering for this "burn," but it's pretty frightening when you realize his skin is so thin that anybody can throw a jab at him and he will not be able to shrug it off. That includes world leaders, reporters, and even the families of fallen soldiers. To me, that's somebody who is extremely easily manipulated. A global power without a poker face.

Dude, your art is pretty and crazy, it's amazingly consistent and I just watched the youtube videos from your channel. I am intrigued. And I like you like colours. Your game is very colourful. I like green. And your characters they look a bit like made from offscourings, from a scrapyard, I don't know if it's the intent, I feel it is, which is cool and they would make cool toys.

Thanks! The junk theme is completely intentional - the Knobbcrookians are basically "junk golems" and all have some element of metal since they're the "scissors" in rock, paper, scissors. That lore will be explained in the upcoming chapters. I agree that they would make cool toys and it would be a dream come true if I had a shelf full of these guys. One can dream!

Random Bloodlust memory: guy upside down with a funnel up his ass while it's raining nails. Ah memories 

Ahh the good old days of making super-cheapo mini-games with Troma. Gutter dev has never been more fun.

Amazing design as always! Are those question marks on his beard-like area?

They're parts of the Knobbcrookian flush swirl, a symbol for bankers.

Augustus the Combustus has some O'Sirus-caused chest pain. The white part will be ultra-jiggly, which is why it has less detail.