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This has been bugging me to no end, and it's on my list to fix, so I guess I can tick that one off and save some well-needed time. Thanks, greatly appreciated

This is extremely useful, Calin, thanks a tonne

By the way, what kind of license are you providing this under? If it wouldn't be too much trouble, when/if you next update it, could you include a license in the zip?

SonnyBondsAtOnce (SB rocks btw), it's possible you didn't mean to come off the way you did, but even as someone who isn't completely used to the mentality of these forums, I too thought you came off sounding like a dick, as did most, I'm sure.

Imagine you've been working at the same company for 10 years, you've become an expert at what you do. One day this new guy starts, and he doesn't quite know the ropes, but instead of hanging back a bit to get a feel of the culture of the company he walks up to you after not even a week.

"Hey, you," he says, not even introducing himself. "I've looked everywhere for information on how to file this report. I need you to show me how to do it, what to do with these CHECKBOXES and these FIELDS here!!!" his voice high, and not a little bit shrill.

You look at him wondering if the guy is for real, before he continues. One or two of your co-workers have clearly stopped what they are doing, to listen to what's going on.

"Now, I don't just need directions, go through these forms for me now and show me EVERYTHING so it's all PERFECT. The instructions in the back says the P712 form is used for this request so it SHOULD be right," he stops for a moment to catch his breath, then slams both hands, palm down, on your desk and look you squarely in the eyes. "HELP!"

You flinch, then give one of your co-workers a look trying to figure out if this is a joke. She gives you a shrug.

"Aaaaah!" the guy exclaims, throwing all the paperwork up in the air before walking away.

This is how I pictured you. As the crazy guy. Does this seem normal to you? It's not. Maybe it's a language thing, maybe it's interpersonal skill thing. Whatever it is, you need to adjust your apparent attitude if you want people to help you willingly and without hating your guts. If people perceive you this way in real life you will no doubt have been punched in the face several times in your lifetime already.

Sorry for carrying this topic even further off topic...

Mind mapping programs are great for these things, but I do tend to plot story progression down on paper first just because it "feels nicer" and more hands on. For dialog it just takes too long that way since I write out a sentence, look at it, read it out loud, realise it sounds stupid when spoken, and revise. Repeat this a few times and I've killed a small forest..

I would have done it in AGS directly, but because the dialog editor is really only useful if you're not planning on making any changes, a mind mapping program was the best solution. FreePlane/Mind are good in that you never need to use the mouse, so you never need to take your hands off the keyboard and this keeps you (or at least me) very productive once I start writing

I use FreePlane (fork from FreeMind, I find it to be better, more thought through), and that's the best way I've found so far to keep dialog trees in a good overview.

I've tried pen and paper, I don't see the point myself with all the good mind mapping progs

I did some calculations before and it looked like I was going to hit the limit, too, but then made some tests and realised if I just rendered every 3 frames I'd be fine with some room to spare, and the result is also more "hand animated".

If you're proficient in 3D modeling, animation, and rendering, you might as well go that route. I can set up a shader perfectly and render it out to 2D, not having to rely on whatever half-assed solution there is in e.g. Wintermute.

Ideal would be a full 3D framework for Unreal, or Unity, but until we get that, this is the next best thing for some of us.

From the A.V. Club review:

Note: Gemini Rue can be enormously difficult to get running on a computer running Windows 7, 64 bit. There are workarounds, but the troubleshooting process is more trouble than it’s worth, and finding a machine running an older version of Windows is preferable.

I've tested GR on a custom built Win7 x64 workstation, on an old-ish Dell laptop w/ Win7 x64, and on a modern Acer laptop running Win7 x64, no problems, but the PC market is known for these issues. Plus, it gets extra difficult to troubleshoot without the big resources of a big publisher with a decent PC QA. Man, if I could I'd just develop for consoles and iOS devices..

I prefer the lower resolution graphics of those inventory items, but I'm a sucker for more pixelated graphics (also, I actually like dithering in 2D graphics mainly because it makes a nostalgia gland or something inside me squirt a little, something my previous art director was totally befuddled by). The risk with increasing the resolution is that it can take some of the magic away for people like me, who like to fill in the blanks with the imagination, a bit like when reading a book. Definitely not a reason not to do it, though! It all looks good

I trust Henrik to do a good job with the character animation, he is a very talented and experienced artist and should -with the sufficient amount of pain inflicted upon him- deliver excellent quality.

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the result!

What was this game you canceled? I'm intrigued.

I hope you'll find out before too long as I haven't cancelled it completely It's just on ice for the time being, while I focus on my backup project (which is on ice while I spend 1 week making a prototype ). Having done more art tests I think I'm okay with the low res in AGS, I just wish I had more OPTIONS, or designed for a specific resolution (e.g. iPhone, DS, etc)... or a 3D equivalent AGS!

Scenario: you pick up an inv item in room 3, you need to use it in room 7... now if you don't pick up the inv item what do you do when you need it?

A: hint and allow the player to go back and get it?
B: give player another option to the solution?

A, but ideally B. I have a few B's in one of my designs but it does add that extra time, and use it too often and the player starts expecting the solution is always nearby.

I also notice that some games refuse to let you leave that room without having picked up an item in that room..

I'd do that as a last resort, "I have a strong feeling I shouldn't leave quite yet..." or something. Give the player hints a couple of times, and if they still leave, feel free to punish them later. Though hopefully I've designed my game well enough that these issues don't arise.

A: Arrows depicting exits
B: Mouse over Hotspots
C: Combining more than 2 inv items

A, this depends on the rest of the art direction. If UI elements like these are common in the game, I don't have a problem with it.
B, I prefer this. I'm assuming the exits are visible to the character, so if the player hovers over an exit there should be a clear "EXIT" telling me I can leave that way, just like a mouseover telling me "dirty rag" lets me know that undefined lowres pixeljunk is a dirty rag. If the exit isn't obvious to the character it's because something is blocking it, and only after clearing the block an "EXIT" will pop up on mouseover.
C, no problem. I've played enough games where you have to combine 3+ items in certain order without it bugging me. As long as it's not entirely illogical it usually makes me feel like MacGyver, which I don't mind at all.

I made the same choice you did, theo, going the 3D way with my characters, and I don't regret it one second.

If I had to draw everything by hand it would probably take me a few years to finish my project. For a stupid reason I recently had to go through and change one of my main character's shirts and his hair, and that meant a total of about 300 frames that needed to change. Because of how the 3D scene is set up I can go in, change the colour, hit a button and render out 150 frames, then automatically automatically crop files, tweak the levels, sharpen them up slightly, and re-import them AGS.

The sad thing is, it's the re-importing into AGS that is the real time sink

There's however the tradeoff that Armageddon mentions. It's difficult to get that lovely handcrafted look in 3D animation without a really clever rig, and talented animation. I'm not that talented, but the result I get is good enough.

I feel you with the resolution issue, though. I've put my initial project on hold partly because of that (the art style didn't lend itself well to the low resolution I had to use), but also because having whiteboarded the game 80% through, I realised I can't make it in time, so I went to plan B, a smaller scale game.

Don't mean to rant off too much about my own game, I like reading what you've posted so far in your blog. Post more

EDIT: I see you went with Rapid Rig. Good choice

Yeah, after you've entered the description of the room you must save the project (Ctrl-S) before navigating away from your room, for the description to be updated in the Character pane.

There might be other ways, but this is one that works for me.

I guess you don't want to have lots of duplicate code, right?

That was my main concern, yeah

Your suggestion seems to work nicely, so thank you very much!

(Also thanks for being overall helpful, I've been doing so much searching on these forums, and you (and monkey, etc) have been tremendous sources for information over the years. You guys should consider adding Flattr buttons to your sigs )

[stop]

Time to throw this issue up here and see if you guys can help. I hope it's not too advanced for Beginner's Tech.

Like a few people before me (judging by the search results) I've run into the issue caused by dialog.Start() always executing at the end of a function.

This hasn't been an issue so far, but this time the control is taken away from the player as he automatically follows an NPC, and the dialogs are initiated automatically, such as this:



It's a fairly long cutscene and the dialogs are used to set global variables to different values, that are called later on in the game (different things occur depending on the character's answers).

Now, it was suggested as a solution in a post by pumaman that it's best to put the rest of the code just before the stop in the dialog, but since I have 5 dialogs, each with 4 stop points on average, doing it that way just seems like a bit of a nightmare.

I might be able to design around this issue as I'm still whiteboxing the game, and I'm flexible with it, but this is how I would ideally like to present this cutscene.

Any suggestions/ideas would be appreciated

Hey guys.

I'm David, and I'm posting under my full real name to keep myself in check, since I have a tendency to get passionate about things, and by keeping my name fully visible I can't cower behind a shield of anonymity.

I'm 31, Swedish, and I recently moved to Norway to be with my family after having been in the UK for a few years working at a Warner Bros.-owned game developer, primarily as an artist (although I also did some camera work, cutscene direction, UI design, and 2D animation, plus various technical aspects of artwork).

Right now I work full-time on my own AGS title (funding it with my savings + occasional freelance gig) that's going to be a commercial release, and the production is still in its early stages (too early to give details).

I enjoy a lot of games, but character- and story driven games have always been my biggest passion, having gorged myself in the Sierra and Lucasfilm/Arts games as a youth, them playing a huge part in me learning English at an early age. Recent years I've become infatuated with games such as Mass Effect, that have great characters and story (though a bit heavy on the action, but I like that it's in there if only for the sake of pacing!).

I've been lurking here from time to time since about 2003, but I hope to become a more active member as I make progress on my game, bugging you guys for answers! So far I've been a good forum user, and if you've seen a huge spike in forum searches here the past month, that's probably me (filling my Pinboard.in with useful stuff).

As I'm starting to get into more advanced scripting, to the point where there's specifics that haven't necessarily been covered in previous posts, I might throw a few questions your way.

That's all, I think. Thanks for reading