Messages

[MusicChannel]

This is one of those occasions I really hate the new AGS sound system. You used to just be able to play a new tune and it would automatically fadein and fadeout, but no longer.

Anyway, enough griping!

I discovered that Edmundo's lovely tweening module can tween the volume of audio channels, WITHOUT blocking. This is ideal, since I can fadein/fadeout between music and ambient sound without stopping the action.

I have three audio channels: MusicChannel, MusicChannelb and MusicChannelActive.

How it works is I start playing music on MusicChannel, then switch over to MusicChannelb (using the tween module to fade up the volume of one while fading down the volume of the other) and then setting MusicChannelActive to the new channel. I also have a silent music clip called aSilence that I use when I want to turn off the sound.

Here's the function declaration:

Code: AGS

import function MusicChange(AudioClip*thisclip, int vol=50, int time=500,  bool repeat=true);

And here's the juicy code:

Code: AGS

function MusicChange(AudioClip*thisClip, int vol, int time, bool repeat)
{
  float ftime=IntToFloat(time);
  ftime=ftime/1000.0;
  if (MusicChannelActive.PlayingClip != thisClip) //check to see if the active channel is already playing the requested clip
  {
      if (MusicChannelActive==MusicChannel) //switch to musicChannelB
      {
        if (repeat==true) 
          MusicChannelb = thisClip.Play(eAudioPriorityVeryHigh, eRepeat);
        else 
          MusicChannelb = thisClip.Play(eAudioPriorityVeryHigh, eOnce);
        MusicChannelb.Volume=0;
        MusicChannelb.TweenVolume(ftime, vol, eLinearTween, eNoBlockTween);
        MusicChannel.TweenVolume(ftime, 0, eLinearTween, eNoBlockTween);
        MusicChannelActive=MusicChannelb;
      }
      else if (MusicChannelActive==MusicChannelb) //switch to music channel A
      {
        if (repeat==true)
          MusicChannel = thisClip.Play(eAudioPriorityVeryHigh, eRepeat);
        else
          MusicChannel = thisClip.Play(eAudioPriorityVeryHigh, eOnce);
        MusicChannel.Volume=0;
        MusicChannel.TweenVolume(ftime, vol, eLinearTween, eNoBlockTween);
        MusicChannelb.TweenVolume(ftime, 0, eLinearTween, eNoBlockTween);
        MusicChannelActive=MusicChannel;
      }
  }
}

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{
  if (MusicChannelActive == MusicChannel && MusicChannelb.Volume==0) 
    MusicChannelb.Stop();
  if (MusicChannelActive == MusicChannelb && MusicChannel.Volume==0) 
    MusicChannel.Stop();
}

At game_start, everything is set to these values:

Code: AGS

  MusicChannel = aSilence.Play(eAudioPriorityNormal, eRepeat);
  MusicChannelb = aSilence.Play(eAudioPriorityNormal, eRepeat);
  MusicChannel.Volume=100;
  MusicChannelb.Volume=0;
  MusicChannelActive=MusicChannel;

The result of all this nonsense? It works... half the time. Half the time, the music doesn't change at all. Once in a while, the music doesn't even begin at the start of the game. It seems totally arbitrary and I have been spending ages trying to sort out why. So... help? What am I doing wrong? Or is there a much better way of doing this entirely?

Thanks in advance!

-Dave

This is such a broad question. It depends on the artist, the game, and the style you want. I've paid as much as $500 per background on a project, and as little as $25 per background on others. Determine what kind of budget you have, and how much of that you can allocate to backgrounds. Once you know that, it's just a matter of finding an artist who is willing to work within that budget.

Hey, what about Linux release, how did it went? Scott Baker was very persistent on building it, and now he does not tell any news. I do not even know was it released yet.
(Unless I missed something)

We're still testing it, but it's a bit slow at the moment. iOS took priority, but it'll get there.

So have you wanted to buy this game on the App Store but couldn't?  WELL NOW YOU CAN!

Gemini Rue is now available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch!

I am not fully sure, but the behavior is a bit like what happens if the speaking character is currently is different room.

....

Oh. my. GOD.

Was it really that simple?

[goes to check]

Yes it was.

[Bangs head on desk]

So much for the "advanced" forum. Thanks, CW!

After making over seven games which use talking portraits, I seem to be having a lot of trouble with them lately.

So, my game uses talking portraits. For the main character and almost every other character in the game, they display just fine:



However, for one specific character, the dialog is displayed in a very bizarre place:


(portrait is obviously placeholder)

The most obvious cause of this is a misuse of the SetSpeechStyle command, but I have checked and it is only used once at the very beginning of the game to set the speech style to eSpeechSierraWithBackground.

This does NOT happen to any other character in the game. Only this one.

So, yeah. Any light shedding is much appreciated!

Thanks,

-Dave

Hey cool! I am swamped at PAX so I wasn't able to take part, but congrats to Vince, nik, Shane, and Janet!

Got it to work! I did not know about the DynamicSprite.crop command. It solved everything.

Thanks.

So my game takes place in the wintertime, and I have a snow animation the plays whenever the characters are outside:


(black layer added so you can see the thing!)

I also have interiors with windows:



What I would like to do is take a small piece of the snow...



and display it over the window and animate it:



I've looked in the manual, and while there seems to be a way to resize a whole image using rawdraw, there doesn't seem to be a way to just cut out a small piece. Is such a thing possible? Currently I've been importing the whole snow image as an animated object and using one huge walkbehind area, but I was wondering if there was a more elegant (not to mention memory efficient) way of doing it.

Thanks!

-Dave

I liked how Dave pointed out in his talk how profitability and graphical quality were somewhat inversely related.  Really kinda makes you think....

Kinda. Players definitely care about the graphics - they wouldn't have complained about Deception as loudly as they did otherwise! - but they care MORE about the gameplay, story and puzzles and things. As with anything, you need to balance your time and money to where its most effective. By spending so much time and money on the graphics for Convergence, I spent LESS on the game design and it definitely suffered for it. That's the main reason why it didn't sell as well as it could have. That and I sucked at PR back than.

Brilliant, great to see this!

Although the super paranoid Sophos at work won't let me see your screen shots.

High Risk Website Blocked
Location: www.davelgil.com/boe/epi/BE-shot1.png
Access has been blocked as the threat Troj/Unif-B has been found on this website.
Return to the page you were previously viewing.

sophos web protection

I just looked on my phone and they look great!

Weird! I moved the images to the wadjet eye website (where they should have been in the first place, really). Do they display now?

[Blackwell Epiphany]

Wadjet Eye Games presents:
Blackwell Epiphany
(Blackwell #5)

Teaser Trailer

[embed=720,405]http://youtu.be/6ZLCmUiC7SQ[/embed]

Launch Trailer!

[embed=720,405]http://youtu.be/WAK_CcCDE84[/embed]

Release date:
April 24, 2014

PRE-ORDER IT NOW FOR $14.99!

The story
A dead man's soul cries out against the force of a ferocious blizzard. He cries for help. He cries for answers. Then he screams as he is torn apart like damp tissue paper.

This wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last.

The police are powerless to stop it, so the duty falls to the only who can. What force could be so powerful - and so malevolent - that it would destroy the very core of a life in order to get what it wants?

Rosa Blackwell and Joey Mallone mean to find out, even if it means risking themselves in the process.

Screenshots

Rosa fortifies herself with coffee. The dead don't sleep and neither can she.


Joey talks to a ghost in an abandoned building, who makes the usual amount of sense.


The Blackwell homestead - now seen from a different angle!


Sam Durkin returns.


The void between worlds.

Team
Written and programmed by: Dave Gilbert
Background and Character sprites by: Ben Chandler (ben304)
Music by: Thomas Regin

Also, Abe Goldfarb and Rebecca Whittaker both return as Joey and Rosa.

FREE DEMO HERE!

Estimated release
April 2014

It's happened to one other person that I know of (there's a thread about it on the WEG forum), so you're not the only one! We really bent over backwards to fix the bugs and not invalidate savefiles, but apparently we missed this one set of circumstances. Sorry about that!

-Dave

The game was updated earlier this week. If you are playing the Steam version, that would have been updated automatically. Are you playing the new version of the game, but using a savefile from before the update? That's the only thing I can think of that would cause that error message. We tried to avoid corrupting savefiles when making the update, but it might have effected this one area.

Do you get the same error if you restart the game and try it again?

Not related to the topic, but I noticed something and thought I'd give a warning. If you plan on using voice acting in your game and are also using multiple playable characters, do NOT use "player" with the "Say" command. Always use the character name. AGS uses the character name to determine which VO file to play, so if you use "player" it will royally screw it up. I have done this myself.

Hi all. Sorry to resurrect this ancient thread. This port seems have started and stalled several times. We are VERY interested in getting our games to run natively on a mac (natively meaning not through an emulator - just click on the game and go), and we are willing to pay for someone to do it. I've been told many times that there is a way, but for the life of me I don't see how. What can we do to make this happen?

More details on the recruitment forum thread.

Thanks!

-Dave

[natively]

Janet and I have decided that this year will be the Year of Porting. An iOS port of our games is coming soon, as well as Linux. We really want to go for the hat trick and get Mac builds out as well.

From what we can see, there have been several attempts at a Mac port but none of them have been finished. What will it take to make this happen? Our short term goal is to get Mac and Linux builds of our games running natively (e.g., not through an emulator - you run the the EXE and go) and push them all to the Humble Bundle folks.

There's no official deadline, but we'd like to get this done before or around summer. Please contact us through PM or at the usual place.

Thanks!

-Dave

Maybe also double-check that you dont call SetSpeechStyle function anywhere in the scripts to set different speech type.

THIS WAS IT!

Buried in the game init code was a SetSpeechStyle command that reverted the sierra style to nonbackground mode. Yeeshus can't believe I missed that.

Hah. No, don't buy a warehouse. Usually they are called fulfillment services, or "pick and pack." That's probably what you are using in America. They pack up the items, address them, and then ship them. But instead of getting them indivudally shipped from America, you'd ship ALL of them to a warehouse in Europe, and then get them shipped individually out from there. It could be cheaper, depending what the shipping costs within Europe are. I meant to look into it, but as I said I ran out of time.

edit: And by "ship them all to a warehouse" I don't mean sending all of them individually to one place. You'd put all of them into one box (or two, depending on how many there are) and ship that to a warehouse in Europe. Then the European warehouse will take out the items and individually ship from there. The cost of shipping 1-2 large boxes might not be that much.

edit2: And this is way off topic. Drop me a PM if you want to talk more about this. I used to do shipping for a garment manufacturer so I know a lot about this crap.

Hi Voltan. I tried that, and it worked, but only for dialog options. The background still does not appear when the characters speak.