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I recommend you speak with Rachael Presser.

I believe she's on here as FamousAdventurer7 or something like that. She is the tax lady for Himalaya Studios and knows her stuff.

No Surprises by Radiohead

The word you are looking for is Orthographic. It refers to a camera in which points are not adjusted to account for perspective.

For an example of a 3D game rendered like this see The Sims or Magicka.

You put the message on the gui:

lblThink.Text = message;

This line displays the text on the gui.

just like this

Code: ags

void Thinking(this Character*, String message) {
  lblThink.Text = message;
  gThink.Visible = true;
  this.Think(message) // your think font is blank so no text is displayed but ags will still catch all the clicks and handle the timing.
  gThink.Visible = false;
}

The problem you have here is that you arent calling Say or Think at all so theres no opportunity to play the sound file.

Before the days of Lua, I got around this kind of restriction by changing my speech font to a blank one and running say/think as normal.
All the think logic, including mouse catching, runs as normal but you can display it on a GUI however you like just by enabling it before the think call and disabling it after.

It will probably just make you more desperate...

@CrimsonWizard

I've always wondered: Is the purple bit on the head supposed to be hair or the lining of the hood?

In my latest AGS game I am experimenting with not using the AGS save system at all.

Using Lua (i know, lol) one can serialized data *in lua* so you can save a file that looks like this:

Code: lua

return {
 characters =
 {
    { -- Character 0
      Room = 3,
      x = 5,
      y = 6
    },
    { -- Character 1
      Room = 1,
      x = 180,
      y = 25
    }
  },
  rooms = 
  {
    -- now save the room states 
    -- In our new lua based system rooms are global and so they can be changed and accessed at any time
    {  -- Room 1
      objects = {
        { -- object 0
          x = 60,
          y = 85,
          visible = false
        }
        -- and so on
      } 
    }
  }
}

Then you just load that file as a lua file and it returns an object already formatted for you which you can distribute to the various objects automatically.

This is quite simple to set up and guaranteed to be future proof since you can assume default values for new variables not contained in the save file. You can even save a game version number to the save so you can handle the logic manually.

I find this approach to be better simply because adventure game states are actually very simple. Usually its just a couple of object/character positions, the inventory and a handful of state variables. Also, the whole process can be automated fairly easily by having a "game state" object where you put game state variables:

Code: lua

 gameState = {}
 gameState.hasSeenEventOne = true

 --then we can just serialise this object as well.
 --This approach also makes it easy to track the game state.

Mine is a royal cat imbued with divine right.

"I am the state" - King Cat

Not sure what I think about this one.

I like the fact that its not another DOTT, monkey island or *insert other lucasarts or sierra title here* tone-clone (seriously, stop making those, people) but it does feel a little... amateurish and i'm not entirely sure why. I can't put my finger on it.

The excessive umms and hmmms and ahems in the dialogue certainly don't help but besides that I think the dialogue is fairly well constructed (except for an apparently scottish man using the word "boyo" which is a welsh/irish expression)

The constant corridor walking was also an issue and the multiple artificial gates bothered me. Some of that I can forgive since I realise this is supposed to be a kind of nightmarish experience for the player character but from a player's perspective I think it could be a little jarring.

I actually didn't like the music much. I felt it lacked coherence as a soundtrack and there wasn't enough meat to it. I don't think it was necessarily bad but I think a lot more could've been done with it and it was an opportunity wasted.

The story was "light" if i'm being generous, "empty" if i'm not. The problem with the reveal is that it's sort of evident quite early on but also nonsensical with the information available at the time. So you kind of go "I think I know what's going to happen but that makes no sense" and then it happens and the fact that it doesn't make sense is just hammered home twice as strongly. I don't mind ambiguity but ambiguity that is telegraphed very early in the story is problematic when it tries to resolve later.

On the plus side, I enjoyed the lead actor's performance. I always enjoy that particular class of British voice actors in games because it seems exotic for the medium to me somehow (see Dear Esther for another excellent example). I also really loved the

Spoiler

huge bags.

[close]

They were superbly creepy.

The visuals were good except for that massive, ugly font obscuring the screen. It should have been half that size *at least* unless you can provide a justification for it.

The interface was very solid but I'd expect nothing less from a game with 304's involvement.

All in all I think it was a positive release and I had fun playing it. Despite my perceived problems it's still a head and shoulders amongst the competition. Seven stars out of 4 and a half elephants.

It sounds to me like a z-sorting issue of some kind and it would make sense that certain drivers resolve z-sorting differently.

I too, have never encountered this issue despite messing around with AGS a lot and always in D3D.

I'm a little surprised by the response here actually.

While I appreciate that the situation is not perfect surely the importance of our basic tenets of justice trumps all other concerns?

Innocent until proven guilty, the chance to face our accusers, a fair trial.

[scripting]

These kinds of discussion, as far as I'm concerned, illustrate why a compiling language is a bad choice for a scripting language.

Why should one have to concern oneself with pointers or forward declaration in a high level environment? These things have very good rationales in system programming environments, namely speed and security but it seems absurd to me to force these things onto casual programmers. The idea that one might need to get a function pointer by passing the name of a function as a string to some helper function is just patching a hole that shouldn't be there. I appreciate that we have done this discussion to death at this point and I am very much in a minority but I'm baffled that people think continuing on this programming paradigm is a good idea.

Are you accusing me of discrimination against owners of penises and pickup trucks, Mr Andail?

I was specifically interested in what ladies thought but I am interested in all comment and criticism.

This is a sort of sister post to the current tropes vs women thread and I'm interested in what the feminist ladies have to say because I seem to disagree with all the feminist angles I've read.

PZ Myers, a popular atheist and feminist blogger, has just accused Michael Shermer of multiple accounts of rape: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/08/what-do-you-do-when-someone-pulls-the-pin-and-hands-you-a-grenade

As far as I can see this is just straight out libel and slander. Rape is a serious business and you can't throw around those accusations without some evidence.
PZ doesn't seem to provide any evidence except that someone told him so but even if he did have evidence I still don't think it would appropriate to publish such information.

Feminists argue that, by publishing the material, PZ is possibly protecting women from future assaults and that it's better that Shermer be libelled than another woman be raped.
They also argue that evidence collection for such a crime is difficult and requires swift action and that, even with evidence, such a crime is difficult to prove.

So is our justice system necessarily biased against victims in this case due to the doctrine of innocent until proven guilty?
If so, then should women use other tactics such as potential libel and slander in order to protect themselves and others?

[(Edited by moderator)]

(Edited by moderator)

monkey_05_06 wrote a post, since deleted:

While these types of games are a refreshing departure from the standard formula, and something I'd generally like to see more of, the focus is still squarely on the male characters and so at their core these games are really deconstructing the player's assumptions about the traditional hero archetype. A true subversion of the trope would need to star the damsel as the main playable character. It would have to be her story.

What? Did she really say this? [offensive comment]

"Nope. Can't be feminist unless a female is the protagonist and defeats all the male characters by herself without any assistance from any male characters. Derp derp herp."

Two quick points:

I said that AGS *Script* has a steepish learning curves. Not AGS which I admit is easy to use generally.

I said that most *scripting* languages don't have float and int distinction.

However, I would like to hear your thoughts on why you believe AGSscript to be well designed, especially for new users because, to be honest, every time I examine this all I see are *bad* design decisions for a scripting language.

Would you respond to this? I am genuinely interested.