Messages

Hello! Apologies if this was answered in the thread already, but I was wondering if there was a way to make the bubble always appear over the character's head? Specifically, in the following situations:

1 - the character is walking and I want them to talk using the sayBackgroundBubble command. I'd like the bubble to move with the character. Right now, it stays in place where it is drawn.
2 - the character is on a scrolling background and I want to move the "camera" left or right while they are talking. The bubble stays in the same screen position while the rest of the graphics move.

Also, is there a way to have TWO bubbles on screen at the same time? My game has a number of background conversations (using background bubbles), and if my player character says anything it stops the background bubbles from playing.

Nothing to add except that I just implemented this for Old Skies and it works SO WELL. Thanks!

edit: dang it I spoke to soon. I am noticing that the camera defaults to starting on the left side of the screen, regardless of where the player is placed on RoomLoad. After the room loads, the camera zips across the screen to center on the player like normal. I noticed earlier in the thread that someone else had this problem but an update fixed it. Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case for me. Any light shedding is appreciated!

This game was exceedingly good. Well done!

Dunno why I didn't see this reply before, but yes! Those would be super useful.

This was a gutpunch I hadn't been expecting. Jesus. Edmundo and I were just talking about him the other day.

Once upon a time, Larry Vales was THE game. It was one of the first complete games to be made in the engine, and Phil himself was a pillar of this community when it was in its infancy. He pre-dated ME joining, and I joined in 2001!

I didn't know him well. I chatted with him occasionally on this forum, on IRC (back when that was a thing) and the social medias. He always seemed like a genuinely sweet and funny guy. I had no idea he was going through so much. I am heartbroken that he passed almost a year ago and I never even knew. As Robin Williams famously said: "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."

Dang it. Belated RIP, Phil. Dunno what to say.   

Been awhile since I visited this thread. Hi all! The game is still underway. Here's a new little sizzle reel:

Hi all. I love the feature to "Add all sprites from folder" when adding an animation to a loop, but it has one small issue that makes it a tiny bit annoying to use.



It always leaves a blank sprite at the start of the loop which I then have to delete. Could there be a "REPLACE all sprites from folder" option that replaces all the frames in a loop, as opposed to just tacking them onto the end?

Hello all. Right now we have commands like control-G to bring up the global script, but would it be possible to create custom keyboard shortcuts to bring up additional module scripts? There are a few that I have to open up a lot, and being able to open it with a quick keyboard shortcut would be handy. Especially since I have a lot of them buried in folders.

And while I'm here, a shortcut to automatically open the sprite or global variable tabs would be nice as well!

Yayyy! Congrats Hob's Barrow team!

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/master/Editor/AGS.Editor/Resources/splash-mittens.bmp

Look at those fresh-faced babies! So young. So innocent.

I agree the Valentine's Day/Xmas splash photos could probably be removed, but if the others are just fun easter eggs that you need to enter in a specific keyboard command to access... why not keep them?

Uhm, I talked a bit with CW yesterday, I think the easiest way right now would be to run the game under the VS debugger. With it we can see how AGS is allocating ram across things to see what's going on - why we get this Out of Memory, maybe something else is using the RAM.

About adding more information when things like this happen, I don't know if CW had any additional thoughts.

Pardon my ignorance but what is VS Debugger? I feel like this issue is beyond the scope of this thread so feel free to DM me.

8318416=2079604*4=1922*1082*4

It looks like it's a GUI that is the size of the screen that has a nonzero transparency is the specific case reported, but I wonder how is the memory usage in general.

That's exactly when it happens (when a fullsized GUI's background graphic is changed). I'm curious what those numbers mean though. I see "1922*1082". Does that refer to the GUI's size? It's *slightly* bigger than the game's resolution of 1920x1080. Could that be causing it? I checked the GUI and it's the correct size of 1920x1080.

The problem with the "out of mem" error, is that when it happens nothing is safe anymore. The state of the program objects may be invalid, and any tiny extra allocation may fail in these circumstances.

But then, asking scripts about their current locations may also not be reliable and lead to a program crash, because "out of mem" could have happened while script was being created, or was allocating something during its run.

Hm. This sounds like the problem goes deeper than I realized. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. I feel like if it there was a memory leak, the crash would happen at random spots. But my my case it consistently happens at the same point. I'm making the assumption that I somehow caused a memory leak AT that specific spot, so knowing the location could help find the cause. But you know what they say about "assume!"

I see your point, but in most cases (or at least, my cases) the crashes happen consistently at the exact same spots, which leads me to believe that knowing the script position could help pinpoint why it happens.

Hello! So I've been getting a lot of "Out of memory" errors when testing my game lately. Like this:



They are easy enough to fix once I narrow down where in the script the error occurs, but the error message doesn't give the script and line number where the crash occured. So finding that spot can take much longer than it would for a traditional crash. Is it possible for these error messages to spit out where in the script the crash happened?

Thanks!

-Dave

THANKS!! That did the trick.

Sorry it took me awhile to reply! Was launching another game.

I tried your suggesting of making the "right" sprite a square, but sadly issue still remains. Do the other sprites need to be made a square as well?

Regarding this script:

Code: ags

CDG.gui_height-Game.SpriteHeight[CDG.borderDecoCornerDownright]-Game.SpriteWidth[CDG.borderDecoFrameRight]);

You said that the "usage of width instead of height" is a typo. I replaced "Game.SpriteWidth" with "Game.SpriteHeight" and this is the result:

Hello! I decided to update the graphics to make them a little snazzier, and I've hit another snag.



As you can see, there is a weird chunk cut out of the lower-right. The chunk remains the same size regardless of how large the window is. All I did was replace the graphic sprites. I've uploaded the sprites here. Any idea why this may be happening?

Any light-shedding appreciated!

-Dave

Hi there,

The plugin looks really cool and useful, but fore some reason, all my dialog text got wiped out. In every dialog in the project. The options were not affected, everything else is suddenly blank. I'm using AGS build 3.6.0.31 if it helps.
I have some backups, so it should all be okay, but I'm not sure whether someone reported this or had similar problems.

This happened to me a few months ago. Not fun, but it's unrelated to speech center. The bug has been fixed, so be sure to update AGS. Also, remember that backups are your friend!

I've been supporting my family off making adventure games for almost 16 years. I don't feel comfortable giving exact numbers, but we manage to eek out a comfortable middle-class life in Brooklyn, so take from that what you will. I am aware I'm a bit of an outlier, though, and I've been extremely lucky.

Some basic bits of advice:
- Start small. Don't start out by making your big epic game. You don't know what you're doing yet.
- Your first few games will most likely sell badly. Plan accordingly.
- Grow organically. Once you make some small games and gain some experience, make bigger ones!
- Don't undercharge. You sell a game for cheap, the game will FEEL cheap. Plus it's easier to sell one copy of a $20 game than four copies of a $5 one. Save the price drops for the seasonal sales!
- The long tail is your friend. It's not about what you game will earn right now, but what it will earn years from now.

With all that said, if your goal is "earn money" then you are definitely in the wrong line of work! Earning money can happen, but it can take awhile. It took me at least five years before I could call myself financially stable. I love doing this, but I'm the first to admit that there are much easier ways to earn a living. If you aren't enjoying it, or getting personal satisfaction from it, then you are in for a miserable ride.

Thanks so much! Will dutifully check it out in the morning.