Messages

If the real issue here is a dwindling amount of discussion, either side could be right.

If the board is now more balanced and conservative viewpoints are more acceptable, there should be less argument between the two sides, which would dry up the amount of offensive/defensive postings.

If the board is now more staunchly liberal (which I don't happen to see), then the conservatives (such as myself) may feel shy about expressing their viewpoints and thus decline to do so.

As for me, I haven't paid attention to the political trends because I'm not a politically minded individual.  I've never feared attack from any other forumer, though.  None that I fear would back me into an intellectual corner, at any rate.

Hmm, the use of so many frames per animation is an admirable goal to be sure, but it's also somewhat counter-intuitive to the "retro" nature of this community.  AGS was built to allow emulation of the old-school Adventure style.  Part of that is tight conservation of resources.  To partially answer your question, there are indeed other methods of introducing more animation to your scenes, one of which is the use of animated backgrounds, the frames of which, to my knowledge, are not numbered among your Sprite Count.

However, you can only have five frames per backdrop.  Now, a good animator can make a beautiful looping seascape with only five frames.  Same goes for a smoothly animated fire.  This would obviously rob you of any sense of randomness to the wrath of the sea and flame, but the truth is that those of us so firmly bolstered to the old ways see a real beauty in that forespoken conservation.

I honestly can't even imagine a single object moving to the tune of a thousand frames, though I would love to.

Sorry about the misinformation regarding Sprite Count, Pumaman.  I was referencing the documentation contained with the 2.72 release.

1. Is there an upper limit for rooms, and does this affect playback speed?
2. Are there any known memory leak issues?
3. Can I do anything to make my game run faster, apart from reducing the screen size?
4. I have several sprites that have over a thousand frames each. Could these be automatically imported, or would I need to add each frame manually?
5. Is it possible to create a complete AGS game in a text editor?
6. Is it possible to write custom functions to replace built in functions if the need arises?

1. There is a superficial limit of 300 rooms, but that isn't true, strictly speaking.  You can have as many rooms as you want, but AGS will only keep up with the states of 300.  If you want to save states in additional rooms you will have to do so by way of variables.  I hear that there is actually a stern limit to the total number, but I think it's above 2,000, or maybe right at it.

2. I believe that 2.72 is very, very stable.  I'm sure that 3.0 will be as well.

3. Game speed is directly affected by screen size and color depth, both of which can be set from an easy-to-use menu.

4. You can use a tiled import function to import sprite sheets as seperate sprites; you can also import animated GIF images as seperate sprites.  Know, however, that the total limit on sprites is 15,000.

5. I'm not 100% sure about what you mean here; you can't use a text editor to completely build an AGS game, no.  You have to use the AGS interface to import sprites and build views and loops.  There is a very nice text editing environment built into AGS for the purpose of coding, however, so you won't need an external editor.

6. Yes, indeed!  You can also write complete modules and plugins.

Indeed, Nacho.

I muddled through the Spanish site as best I could (having no Spanish language skills) and from what I can tell, the program will air at 7:00 PM on Tuesday the 27th there.  I can't tell whether it's the first episode of the series or the second, though, sorry 

Here's the link.

The Discovery Channel is currently featuring a documentary about video games titled "Rise of the Video Game."

Level One was the first of the series and featured the true original video game... "Tennis for Two" (as played on oscilloscope!) and rounded out with a look at Tetris and Pac-Man.  It originally aired on November 21st.

Level Two will feature the 8-16 bit generations with some Playstation for good measure.

What is of note and (more importantly) what makes this fit the forum's topic is that Level Two will feature interviews with both Al Lowe (Liesure Suit Larry) and Tim Schafer, who likely needs no parenthetical explanation.

Check it out Wednesday, November 28th at 8:00 ET on Discovery Channel.

Thanks!  It worked beautifully after a couple of minor repairs, one of which KhrisMUC pointed out.  Here's the code I ended up using after consulting the manual on the great direction in which you pointed me:

Code: ags

while (ech.Contains(".")!=-1){
 ech=ech.ReplaceCharAt(ech.Contains("."), '-');
}

As said, that works perfectly.  I posted it for the benefit of anyone who may run into this problem in the future.

Edit to add:  It turns out that the only "special" character I could find that didn't cause problems was a hyphen, though it really didn't matter whether the character was special or not so long as the altered string matched what was in the parser list.

I've been attempting to implement a function in which my player character can inquire about a computer file (complete with extension) by way of the text parser.

When I enter the word in the parser list as "filename.ext" I get problems.  The code works perfectly if I simply use "filename".

I'm certain that I'm updating both the parser list and the calling function.

So is the problem that periods can't be used as regular characters in the text parser?  If so, is there a known workaround?

Pfew. Glad I remembered that correctly. Can  it, then, be applied to humans too? Like, the more "like us" a species is, the more negative we might recat towards it?

I  believe that according to Uncanny Valley, perhaps a creature that walks on two legs and has two arms would provoke a positive response.  This positive response would remain truer and truer as the creature looked more and more human.

However, if the creature looked exactly human except, for example, the eyes were noticeably smaller and farther apart, that would disturb us and put us off of the creature.  I know that's how I'd initially react.

On the other hand, we already like the creature that merely has two legs and arms.  Having the same eyes set the same distance apart on that creature would not have the same impact, because we accept that this creature isn't like us already.

Yeah, the Uncanny Valley is a theory about robotics which states the following:

If you give a machine human characteristics, you will notice an increasingly positive emotional response from humans who view it.  The more human the machine appears, the better the response.

However, there is an "uncanny valley" near the mark of perfection... or actual human.  Any level of "realism" within this valley causes a negative emotional response as you go toward the "bottom" of the valley.  In other words, if you have a robot that looks very nearly human but there's something small that isn't quite right, it will disturb the viewer.  It's better to be further from reality than "almost there."

Cooool! I thought this was going to be a stupid Lost thread

I thought the same thing, but I was excited  :'(

I rather like LOST.

No problem!

It's talking about the image for the inventory object.  In that example, the actual sprite for the key.

Whee!  Robot!

Heheh... I like the design, and couldn't resist a paintover.



As you can see, I took out some of the darker outlines (especially around the feet) because they were robbing your 'bot of a sense of roundness.  I also took out the segmentation on the chest, because Scraseface was right about that.  He was also right about the eyes... I added dark lines above them to make them look deep-set and more sinister.  I also widened them by a pixel each and moved them down a pixel.

As for a mouth, I don't think that's necessary at all.  Some of my favorite robots don't have mouths.  Err... anyway, with a simple design, you can achieve a lot of expression with limited features.

To further promote the roundness, I added an additional color... a lighter shade of your gray.  You can see that I used it as a highlight, which was something that was very badly missing.  Your shadowing was very nicely executed except in the case of the feet, where it was inverted from the rest of the image.  I altered them significantly.

I also changed the color of the dots on his chest to make them stand out more since the indentation was removed.

[global]

Mmm, yes.  I once had to comb my game's global script for a missing endbracket which was allowing the game to run but causing some sinister effects when certain actions were carried out.

Good for you, though, coming back to it after so much time and frustration.  Hope everything keeps going well!  The game looks very clean and cool.

In your game's folder there should be a program called "setup.exe."  You need to send her that program and ask her to run it first and adjust the settings so that the game does not run in 320x200 mode.

I don't know if you'd call them "rituals," but I do have odd idiosyncrasies and compulsions.

For instance, if I'm reading an article of any sort, I tend to randomly highlight text and then click off and repeat the same thing over and over and over.

I can't concentrate on what I'm reading if only part of a row of characters is visible at the top of the window.  I absolutely have to scroll up or down until the text is either completely hidden or completely revealed.

In support of you experiment, Nacho, I am American and I did not know about this until now.

Truth be told, I probably would have still been the last person on the planet to hear about it if it had happened here in America... I'm not a news-minded sort.

You could use RawDrawRectangle() to make a series of bigger and bigger rectangles that eventually overthrow the screen, and then do it all again in reverse.

Can someone stop this thread?I hate Phoenix !! 8)

OBJECTION!!!

Yes, getting people to direct their anger at their targets has always been the tricky part.