Messages

Ashen: That's a good workaround, thanks. It's hard to get the timing right, but I probably could just use a TextOverlay instead.

Pumaman: Okay, thanks! Gonna give it a go.

Thanks for your reply. I already tried SetCharacterSpeechView(GVYNN, -1), but AGS reports it as an error. I'm calling it from a room script and am using v2.62.

I want to use an animation as a talking animation in a special cutscene. To do so, the animation needs to be non-blocking, and the speech view of the character needs to be disabled because the speech view overrides the animation that's playing when a character talks.

It would look like this:

SetCharacterView[GVYNN,19);
AnimateCharacter(GVYNN,2,1,1);
*disable speech view*
DisplaySpeech(GVYNN,"Blah blah...");
*enable speech view*
ReleaseCharacterView(GVYNN);

There's still the possibility of using two special talking views, but then I'd waste two views for a really small animation. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Thanks!
Quality of game, you say? Hmm, depends on what you mean by that... I doubt I ever could reach the overall quality of, say, Apprentice 2.

Maybe you're talking about technical factors, like the controls and gameplay mechanics? The GUI should be easy and fast enough to handle, it's pretty much like, say, DOTT or Monkey Island 2, with right-clicks for standard commands and cancelable actions.
The character needs 3 seconds to go from one side of the screen to the other. That's a bit slower than DOTT, but a lot faster than Simon the Sorcerer.
The first part of the game is split into chapters which you can play in pretty much any order you want, and later on, the main characters form a team. I think the technical side of games is what I can handle best.

Or maybe you mean the story. While it can't be too super big for a ~40 room game, it should be interesting enough. Then again, I'm not really much of a writer, so I can't promise you'll like it.

Or maybe it's the puzzles? This is probably the most important and also hardest part to do for me. I'm having a hard time to judge if they're hard or easy, especially since they're still on paper. I guess I gotta make some of my friends beta-test once I've implemented a few puzzles.

Thanks for the feedback!

I can't change the tax collector anymore because he's already animated. I'd have to change a lot of frames, and my time budget is very limited at the moment.

A quick progress report: The puzzles are 40% complete, and the story is finished.
I also drew some backgrounds. Here's one:

A colored sketch:



A tax collector:



By the way, I was wondering if a post still counts as a double post when you post it below one of your posts after 6 days of no posts?

Thank you!
I already have most of the story done, but still, thanks for the offer.

As it is now, the game will have several chapters staring 3 different characters with special abilities (sneaking and cooking spells would be the more notable ones), who'll end up having to work together in the end.

As for the scripting part... the engine is complete, I just need to make the actual game now. Since a lot of the old backgrounds won't fit anymore, I'll have to redo a lot of them. But the game won't be super huge anyway, so that's not too bad (seems to be at about 30-40 playable rooms at the moment).
When everything is set (when story & puzzles are done), I can make up to 4 backgrounds per day, which, I think, isn't so shabby.

Also, a picture:

Glad you like them!
By the way, the characters were drawn for 320x200 res, so they may look a little squashified.

Hi! No update in a while, but I'm still working on this game.

I recently moved into a new house and didn't have any time left for computer stuff, but now I'm all set up again!

Here's some artwork and a bunch of sprites. So far, all those characters have at least walking and talking animations.



I'm redoing a lot of the story, but more on that some other time.

I think your best bet would be getting DevC++ or a similar compiler and downloading the Allegro SDK. (Without one of those, you can't do much).
Allegro is as easy as it gets when it comes to real programming, and focuses on 2D. It can do some 3D as well, but doesn't support hardware rendering.

I'm not sure what an 'sth' is, but anyway, for standard messages when there's no action defined, use unhandled_event.

Example:

function unhandled_event (int what, int type) {

if (what ==1) {if (type ==1) {DisplaySpeech(GetPlayerCharacter(),"That's not really interesting.");}} //look at hotspot

if (what ==1) {if (type ==8) {DisplaySpeech(GetPlayerCharacter(),"It lacks handles and door-knobby things.");}}Ã,  //cursor mode 8 on hotspot

}

Check the manual for all possible 'what' and 'type' combinations.

The game looks nice so far, keep it up!

You have to download two zip-files. Look carefully there are two links for the game in my first post and one for a walkthrough.

Heh, how could I miss this?

Anyway, I just downloaded it and wanted to say that I really love the old school look of the characters - they remind me of Sierra's SCI text parser games, well done!

The download doesn't seem to contain the game exe file. Please fix it.

Ah, Fallout 1 & 2, Gothic 1 & 2 and Torment - I love those games very much. For some reason, I don't really like other PC RPGs, but those games feel different. Fallout had this really nice turn-based battle system, and Gothic offered a great dialogue system without too many characters saying the same thing, as seen in some RPGs.
Planescape Torment... I liked it because of its story, atmosphere and deep dialogues. The battle system wasn't my kind of thing, but it didn't turn me off either.

All those games borrow some adventure game elements, but I'd enjoy some of them much more if they were just a bit more like adventure games, more story-driven and would feature characters with at least some personality (Torment was a step into the right direction).

I think that RPG/Adventure game hybrids as opposed to your standard PC RPG (Baldur's Gate) would be a genre to look into - I'd definately buy games like that. Hmm... might as well make a game like that some day.

Thanks for the comments!
yaron - The reason for this is that I'm thinking of making a special action GUI. I still need to see how I'm going to implement this, that's why there's no button present at the moment.
For testing purposes, space switches modes for now. In any case, it will definately be switchable through a GUI of some sorts in the future.

I'll look into this, I think I know why it's happening.

Great, thanks!

About the text thing - if the game isn't blocked, the text is being pushed along by the screen edges and is always completely readable (it does that with background speech, at least), so I figured that this would happen to normal text, too.

Haha, thanks!
I've actually gotten quite fast at spriting and making walkcycly things, and they only have 6 frame cycles and 4 directions too, so it really wasn't as much work as it may sound. I took me about 2 days to make them. I've been thinking about redoing them for a quite a while, though.

Zootyfruit - Connecting those ovals might look nice, kinda like in the middle... gonna try it out.

Oi, found another small thing... when you switch to an idle view (for example on keypress), it sometimes takes quite long (well, 1-2 seconds at a frame rate of 30) for it to kick in with delay 0. This happens only when the character stands, though. Also, it works fine afterwards, happens only when setting it.

However, if you activate the idle view just before the character stops walking, it starts immediately.

Hmm... not sure if this is important enough an issue to post about it, you be the judge.

EDIT - I managed to fix it up by setting it to the first frame of the idle view and releasing it before setting the idle view. That probably means it's related to animation delays, maybe it waits for the current frame delay to finish, or something.

EDIT 2 - Another one - when doing custom scrolling in rep_ex_always, the displayed Lucas Arts Style Text can go beyond the screen edges when the game is blocked.

Thanks! ^^

Recently, I grew tired of the current character designs. So I've decided to redesign them, and like them much better now (they're also easier to animate, done walking cycles and talking anis for all 3 of them).

Here's a pic:

In AGS, this could be done by using two characters. Make one with body only, the other one with the head. Set the head characters' x and y pos (or FollowCharacterEx with FOLLOW_EXACTLY) to the body one. Note that both head and body character need to have the same frame size or the scaling will look bad. I've done something like that before, works just fine. :3