Messages

[game_start ( )]

Yes, you just need to parse the information you get.

Look at this (for AGS 2.71):

Code: ags

String return_date ( )
// this function will return the date in a descriptive, long way
{
	// longdate is a string that we will fill with the long description
	// of the date ( for example "April 15, 2006" )
	String longdate;
	
	// shortdate is used to retrieve information about the current date
	// from AGS ( for example "15/04/06" )
	DateTime *shortdate;
	
	// first of all, we need to get the current time in short format
	shortdate = DateTime.Now;
	
	// now we need to express the month
	
	if ( shortdate.Month == 1 )
	// if it is january
		longdate = "January";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 2 )
	// if it is february
		longdate = "February";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 3 )
	// if it is march
		longdate = "March";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 4 )
	// if it is april
		longdate = "April";
		
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 5 )
	// if it is may
		longdate = "May";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 6 )
	// if it is june
		longdate = "June";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 7 )
	// if it is july
		longdate = "July";
		
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 8 )
	// if it is august
		longdate = "August";
		
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 9 )
	// if it is september
		longdate = "September";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 10 )
	// if it is october
		longdate = "October";
	
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 11 )
	// if it is november
		longdate = "November";
		
	else if ( shortdate.Month == 12 )
	// if it is december
		longdate = "December";
	
	// next, we will need to simply add the current day
	longdate = longdate.Append ( longdate.Format ( " %d", shortdate.DayOfMonth ) );
	
	// finally add the year
	longdate = longdate.Append ( longdate.Format ( ", %d", shortdate.Year ) );

	// we are done, we only need to return longdate
	return longdate;
}

This function does it all. That's quite basic actually. I just wrote it in a few minutes and tested - surprisingly - it works!!1!

To use it, you could for example put this inside your game_start ( )-function:

Code: ags

Display ( return_date ( ) );

Simple as that, really.

If your "printscreen" button is broken, you can still capture screenshots by pressing F12 (as long as you didn't change this behaviour in the global script file of your game).

I don't think a lot of people will download a gui, create a new game, import you GUI, start the game, then come back here and give you critique. But if you take a screenshot and post it here, there's going to be a ton more of activity and help for you!

First of all, welcome, Ravi! Can't wait to hear your entry.

Here are some others:

www.yousendit.com
www.rapidshare.de
www.putfile.com

Thanks!

I am still awaiting further (constructive) criticism, though. I know, Nikolas promised via PM to give his opinion.

I feared people would call me crazy because I named this "classical", when it really isn't, but compared to my other stuff, this is.

Looks and sounds very good to me. Don't take your wife so seriously, she just might not know what she is saying. :p

The sprite is great, although it's appreciated on this forum to post your artwork in a different format than .bmp because of their loading time and size (.png or .jpg are better for example).

Welcome to the forums!

The question is: how far can you go with creating a mood such as scariness through graphics alone? In my opinion, especially scariness is emitted more by music, atmosphere, story and presentation than graphics. Take the good old 5 days a stranger as example. Any of yahtzee's backgrounds weren't scary at all on their own in this game - however through music and story elements, he built a very scary atmosphere and great tension up in a smart way!

To actually help you, one thought I recently had about this came to the following conclusion: thin things are a lot scarier than thick things usually. Think about a tree - imagine it thick and thin. Combine that with the previous mentioned sharp edges and unusual shapings - you already have the proper colors - and you're there (if you also add the right music and story elements of course).

That is very strange! I'll need CJ's help to interpret those numbers, I guess.

Well, Rap4Life could obviously run the demo game as well as Steve, I think.

Thanks for reporting, Rocco, I can't wait to find out what causes this!

Ah, ok. I got it, although that is not very good puzzle design, in my opinion.

But still, the graphics were really good and mixed well with the older ones. An outro wouldn't have heard either, but I guess we'll get all that in the full game.

cjhrules:

Thanks for the help, but:

Spoiler

I plugged the radio back in, but I could never take the green uniform, because Indy said he wasn't sure if he needed it... Now I am stuck again.

[close]

Argh, that's a dead end. I didn't pick it up and can't go back anymore!

Allright, I can't wait to see how the game goes on, so I'll play it through again!

Keep it up, can't wait for the full game!

It's very nice (and better to play in your new demo version with skippable intro as well), however some minor critic:

- Why don't you use punctuation in your dialogs? It makes the game appear more unprofessional than it is, really!
- Don't quit the game automatically because Indy died. Although we don't have to watch through the whole intro again, it's still a pain to restart the game every time he dies.
- At the airport, the waving flag is obviously an object, because you can see the GUI change once the mouse hovers over the flag. This looks strange, however, because you can't interact with it.

And I need a hint, too...

Spoiler

I am at the airport scene. The guard stands inbetween me and the plane and the zeppeline. I can't walk back and I can't use any other hotspot than the plane. I do have only the officer uniform but whenever I try to do anything, the guard calls me, identifies me and I lose...

[close]

That's great to hear, He-Man! Remember, you still have almost 4 whole days left to get your page back to work and upload the song there. Alternatively you can always use some free uploading service (which may not be as user-friendly or fast but still works). For example savefile!

[GarageGothic was faster]

GarageGothic was faster, but I am still posting because my function does support different GUIs to be used and uses a more OOP-approach...

Assuming you use AGS 2.71:

Code: ags

function RemoveListboxItemByName ( GUIControl* listbox, String name )
{
	int i = 0;
	while ( i < listbox.AsListBox.ItemCount )
	{
		if ( listbox.AsListBox.Items[i] == name )
			listbox.AsListBox.RemoveItem ( i );

		i++;
	}
}

This is absolutely untested and from the top of my head, but it should work. This function simply loops through all items in your listbox and then checks if the name of the item that you want to delete equals the one that we're currently looking at. If they equal, the function removes that entry.

I don't know what the creator of that plug-in used (chances are he didn't even use AGS's native drawing functions but other ones that are available only when you are writing a plug-in for AGS), but the simple flashlight effect is quite easy to simulate anyways -- just create a GUI with a black rectange that has a transparent circle in it and position this GUI so, that the center of the circle is always where the mouse currently is. That's just a bit of playing around with offset values, and then you can enable or disable your flashlight by showing or hiding this GUI.

Additionally (if your game is 32-bit), you could add alpha transparency which is going to improve the look of your flashlight effect even more.

Was that understandable? If not, feel free to ask again!

What's the problem? Did you try it yet or don't you know how to start at all?

Just use variables (look them up in the manual) and if-statements as well as simple addition and subtraction to give or take money from or to the player and check whether he has enough to - for example - buy a certain item or whatever.

[this]

After quite some time, I decided to go back to composing classical scores in MIDI format. I got the idea for the main theme of the following piece while doing tapping exercises on my electrical guitar somehow.

So, anyways, I am looking for critics on this work-in-progress classical soundtrack. It's really only a few ideas but I don't want to spent days and days on it and head into the wrong direction understandably. It's only 50 seconds long and thus a really, really small MIDI file to download.

Thanks for your time and don't forget to leave any kind of feedback here after listening.

Thanks, Rap4Life!

SSH:

Allright, no problem. This is taken straight from the beginning of the modules source code:

Code: ags

// EXPLANATION

// this particle module works in a very easy, yet effective way: every particle has its own properties
// ( such as position, velocity etc. ) and will be called every frame in order to update its values.
// additionally a particle can be either active ( which means that it is currently somewhere on the 
// screen and in use ) or inactive ( which means that it is not at the screen or in use ).
// of course all particles are inactive in the beginning. once the user calls the 'spawn_particles'
// function to request a certain user-chosen amount of particles to a certain user-chosen point on the
// screen, the requested amount of particles will be marked active and thus be updated, drawn etc. every
// frame automatically. to make sure that we don't run out of free and inactive particles after a certain
// amount of them have turned active, we need to deactivate them again. thus, a particle is deactivated
// as soon as it is outside of the current screen ( for example when it falls through the floor ).

So, the module has one big array full of particles - the good part is that only active particles need to be processed and using a backward while-loop the module can always find any remaining particles. First of all this makes sure that only particles that are really on the screen are rendered currently and nothin more. Considering speed, of course the module works faster when the user doesn't use the blending/transperancy options, however you can still display up to 1000 blended particles which is really more than enough to symbolize quite realistic looking smoke etc. I can't think of any way of speeding the drawing process up more using AGS, but as I said before, would love to see new entries and how they approach this task.

Go to the "GUIs" pane on the left in AGS and take a look at the "Z-order" property that every GUI has. Looking this up in the manual would tell you that you can change the drawing order of GUIs using this variable. The GUI with the higher number will be drawn over others, you you'd need to give your smaller number for example a Z-order of 200 while making sure that your large GUI still has 0, 1 or anything <200...

I really hate to have to interrupt this interesting discussion, but this thread is really not the place to talk about this. If there's still need to discuss this matter, EldKatt, I'd like to see a similar argument over at the General Discussion forum. I do think you have a valid point.

Anyways, great entries. I didn't even have the time to listen to all your pieces, but I will download them all and listen to all of them - one after the other - once this competition has timed out. So, thanks to all for participating!

Wow!! Great entries, everybody. Seems like the gypsy-scale rules are quite popular after all. I will give a short comment on each piece as soon as this competition is closed.

Anymore entries?