Messages

Judging by this topic, I'd say you don't have much sanity to lose.

Two points:

1.) AA the left edge of the lit table in the front a bit.

2.) Show us a character that fits this style, I suspect it's going to be very hard to draw these.

Good luck though, the rest looks fine.

1. Okay, I need the RawDrawing in rep_ex ( ) for my project here, but I'll take note to advice people to only use the game in DirectDraw-Mode. Actually, in DD-mode, the RawDrawing is reasonably fast. You can paint the 320x200 screen all one color in 320 vertical lines every frame and still be at the 40fps limit, at least on my 5-6 year old pc.

2. I see, I'll resort to one of the work-arounds then. But how would somebody design his classes as in my example (with map and camera) and not need both to interfere with each other? In order to draw the map, you need the camera-position and in order to move the camera, you need to check the map, where the walls are.

Thanks for the interest, everybody.

[suggestion]

Okay, thanks for the help here as well, monkey.

Now, my suggestion stands: sharing information between scripts/modules has to become easier and more flexible, please!

Oh, and you're right with your guess there, monkey!

Hmm... No, I'm sure I used the Empty Game Template. It comes with a room as well, though. Maybe the addition of rooms in 8-bit to any template should be over-thought again as it can cause problems, especially with people new to the editor or version?

Ah, I didn't even have a background imported. That used to be impossible to forgot due to an error in the older versions, now with 3.0 you can actually leave the room black and run your game (which is great), but it can cause these ugly errors. Hmm... Maybe a simple message-box could help here, CJ, warning the user when the background color-depth is wrong? Definitely leave it so that you don't need to import an image for a room though (I really love this as I hated how you had to have black-only images floating around on your hard-drive for creating simple test-games in the older versions).

Thanks monkey!

That'd be quite possible. But also quite ugly and against the whole script/module split-up in my opinion, thanks for your input, though, I'll be sure to follow your advice if no other possibility turns up... There HAS to be a prettier way though! If there isn't, I strongly suggest a different way to share variables between scripts for AGS, it's quite daunting at the moment, I can only imagine how lost a complete beginner would have to feel here.

[Bug, bug, bug...]

Bug, bug, bug...

And a pretty big one, if I'm not doing something wrong somewhere.

I'm trying to RawDraw a sprite/image to the screen. I have the game set to 16-bit, have the image saved as standard 24-bit bmp-file (same configuration worked perfectly fine in all older ags-versions), I call Surface.DrawImage ( x, y, sprite_slot ) with the slot and it comes out like this:



In the editor, it looks perfectly fine though (compare to my current avatar). Am I doing something wrong?

(AGS 3.0 Beta 15 - DirectDraw 5)

I can't believe no one would've picked this up until now, though, so I'm kinda sure I have done something wrong somewhere... I've tried it on multiple projects (including empty games), it's always the same.

[1. About the old RawDrawing]

So, I upgraded to 3.0 recently and now I have two tiny questions that used to be no big deal with older versions, but now I'm not so sure anymore:

1. About the old RawDrawing

Is this the correct, best and fastest way to draw:

Code: ags

function CRenderer::StartDrawing ( )
// prepares the renderer for drawing a new frame
{
      // init surface
      this.Surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground ( );
      
      // clear screen
      this.Surface.Clear ( );
}

function CRenderer::EndDrawing ( )
// shuts the renderer down after drawing a frame
{
      // release surface
      this.Surface.Release ( );
}

I call Renderer.StartDrawing ( ) in the beginning of rep_ex ( ) and Renderer.EndDrawing ( ) in the end of rep_ex ( ). In between both calls, I then draw my lines and pixels.


2. About sharing variables in between scripts

I have several modules or scripts in my game to nicely spread the source-code out into several files. The two functions you see above are part of the Renderer-script, for example. Now, I also have a Map- and a Camera-Script. The Map-script holds all information for a - well, you guessed it - map (or level, in which the player can move around) and the Camera-script holds all the information of the - you guessed it again - camera (position, angle).
Now on to the problem: I have a function called Camera.Move ( ) in order to - third time you guessed right - move the camera. This is needed because I have to do some camera-calculations at this point. Those calculations include checking the map, whether the player is going to be standing in a wall and then blocking the movement for collision-detection. This would be no problem, if the Map-script wouldn't need the camera-script to get the position and angle to then draw the map correctly to the screen.
So, basically I have two scripts with structs in them, that both need to know about each other respectively.
My files are set up like this: in the header there's the struct-definition like this:

Code: ags

struct CObject
{
      int a;
      int b;

      import function   Test ( );
};

import CObject Object;

And in my script-file, it looks like this:

Code: ags

CObject Object;

int CObject::Test ( )
// test, test, test
{
      // do the darn test
}

export Object;

This way works great when one script needs a struct from another script (by also moving them in the right order in the hierarchy-pane on the right in the editor), but when I have two scripts that need each other structs, it won't work this way. Is this possible somehow else or will I have to suggest this?

Thanks ahead of time.

Because some monitors can handle 320x200 and others can't (especially newer ones). Seems like all the ones you used to test and program the game on, did support it and hers doesn't.

Hmm, looks interesting. I wonder when he'll release a game outside of the Trilby series?

He has:
Rob Blanc, Oddyseus Kent, etc.

Plus, the great Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment.

So, yeah, now that I'm a little further in the game, it is frustrating, has its little flaws and I definitely chose the wrong skills. Still, it has me hooked and is yet another worthy Yahtzee-title, if I had to name my favourite ten AGS games, numbers 1 - 5 would probably be taken by his work. I'll be back later and maybe go into detail about what I thought could've been better.

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.

Exactly the same here. I've seen loads of people sharing the same behavior though, especially #1 with the constant highlighting of the text while reading. Some psychoanalyst ought to take a look at that.

Personally, I could imagine that reading text white or almost white on black is somewhat relaxing for the eye. Not necessarily more relaxing than black on white, but at least it's different and sometimes the eye just craves for contrast.

Nice, thanks for the info. I'm off to checking it out now, the description sounds awesome!

Thanks for the response there, Pumaman. Here's the screen, I do NOT have "large fonts" enabled.

Note that Photobucket has downsized the screen to 800x600, my resolution is actually 1280x960...

I'm happy with all your answers. The tab-indents were a main problem, the rest is really, really minor, so it's definitely no problem if - for example - the order of newly-created tabs stay the way they are at the moment or anything.

I've been using the last day to work into the new 3.0 editor and I really dig it so far. It's really improved A LOT!

My knowledge of AGS in its newer versions is a bit rusty, so please cope with me. Plus, while having read a lot of the threads on the development, I can't promise I've seen all the information - so, I hope I don't repost any issue - if I did, please excuse that.

First things first, I have only very minor complaints sorted kind-of by importance from very to not-very:

- I dislike the way tab-indents are handled. In the old editor and all other programs, a tab is not broken up into the "spaces" it consists of, the new editor does that. It's really confusing for tab-lovers such as me. You press tab, hit left-arrow (which used to jump back a tab) and now, with 3.0, you're going back one space "into" the tab. I didn't see anything wrong with the old, standard way of tabbing.

- I love how modules are "gone" and now represent a new script-file, that's very nice. While it's been possible to split up code between several files (or modules), it's always been quite the annoyance with the module-manager etc., now it's really awesome. However, I would suggest to add directories for the files. For example:

Code: ags

+ Mouse cursors
+ Fonts
- Scripts
      + Renderer
      + Tile-System
      - Global Script
            o Script
            o Header
      + Other file
+ Plugins

I know that this is a matter of taste, but the "double" entries in the scripts-hierarchy are somewhat confusing (as the only difference lies in the last letter of the file-extension). What do the others think?

- It was somewhat tricky with the manual to get the way RawDrawing works now. I managed to get it down, now, but maybe there should be a dedicated entry in the manual for "old" users? Or have I overseen that?

- New tabs open on the left. I think I read something about this, but couldn't find the post now. To me, that's very irritating. I expect new tabs to open on the right, not on the left pushing all other tabs away to the right. If this is really down to taste and other people prefer this "left-way", then maybe make it customizable in the preferences?

- I noticed *= and /= are not supported. Any special reason for that? I think both symbols are pretty useful.

- When I load a bigger game, the editor appears "stuck" for a few seconds. Specifically, after clicking "Ok" on the "load-recent-games" dialog. The dialog appears and nothing happens for a second or something. Then the right-hand side hierarchy-pane blinks and the game is loaded. How about a small "Loading game..."-message-box in that time? Especially for users with slower machines working on larger games.

- And, the least important issue: when I start up the Editor, the hierarchy-pane on the right-hand side isn't pulled to the left enough. The words (for example "Inventory Items") are cut off in the middle. My resolution is 1280x960 with WinXP, I suppose this is a simple calculation flaw?

I'm very happy with the new stuff, though. Amazing work!

Sorry to not be of any help, but I just gotta ask: what kind of frame-rates are you getting from your renderer? Are they interactive? Awesome work anyways!

Read my original post again, prog. I'm not wondering why threads have been moved, I just wanted to ask about or point out that little misunderstanding that's been going round the entire community about the purpose of that specific forum-area, mainly because its name "Popular Threads" is linguistically misleading. Hell, I mainly find it somewhat amusing that people have been mixing up the purposes and actually posting/moving popular threads in that area, not popular-threads.

And why am I "starting another GD thread"? Do I do this a lot? I don't think so. Does this thread have a purpose? To me it has, but if nobody cares a whole lot about what's in there or not, so be it. There have been more pointless threads before.

Well, if people need cooling down, maybe we should talk to those people and not move the threads around to somewhere where they'll rust to death. It's no big deal, really, though. I just wanted to point out (and confirm) the shift of meaning I saw behind the forum.

[I]

I know I'm not a moderator and shouldn't act like one, but I've recently come across a bunch of comments that were indicating a general misunderstanding of the "Popular Threads"-forum pretty clearly.

Now, I am pretty sure it's meant for threads asking questions in a similar fashion to polls. For example: "what's your favorite kind of pizza topping?" or "what's your favorite brand of cars?" - of course this needs to be applied to adventure-topics. As in: the thread asks for your favorite something.

People (and even a few moderators moving threads, if I remember correctly) seem to (start to) think it's meant for popular threads (like, threads with lots of response). Moving those threads to a different forum-area makes no sense in my opinion and just confuses readers (therefore coming close to "locking" the thread since interest - and participation - is drawn away from it) - all that shouldn't be done to "good" threads, whether they're popular or not.

So, any clear-ups? I know this doesn't exactly look like a very important issue, but it's been crossing my mind since I first read one of these misunderstandings and noticed they were apparently pretty spread out.

OR am I just being stupid here (and the forum-subtitle is very unclear in that case) and that area is (for whatever reason I can't see at the moment) in fact for threads with lots of interest and responses?

Could you elaborate what exactly looks out of place with the title (the wording "StarCraft 2 Fansite" would later be replaced by the name of the page, obviously, like "The Nexus" or whatever). Is it because it's just simple white font? I'd like to stick to using text (instead of a logo-image with stylized letters) though - so what would improve the "out-of-placeness"? A different font or color? Different size or position?

About the "help"- and "links"-boxes, read the original post - they are to be ignored, they were in the initial design from the starcraft2-kit, I can't think of anything to put in the last two boxes though, so they shouldn't be there. Although I'm not sure what you mean with "too tall" and "falling off the screen"? What resolution do you run? Even at only 1024x768, they are still visible all the way. Is that even what you mean?

About the border: I agree, I wanted to add a complete border in the style of the border-pieces I have in there right now. The graphics aren't the problem, I can take and modify enough artwork to fit that, but I'm not sure how to implement this with html/css in a way that it surrounds the whole post (with varying size respectively) dynamically - similar to AGS Textbox GUI's, I'd need 9 pieces - all corners and the middle-parts. Including that system into the news-page seemed very hard, so I stuck to the parts of borders. I'd be all for complete borders, though, if I could find a reasonable way to do this.

Thanks for your feedback, Radiant, and sorry for the returned questions with issue #1 and #2.