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This "joke" has already been found and pointed out here by someone a few months ago. I hope I don't need to add that real scientists have proven that this won't work, right?

[dialog script]

Look up the "dialog_request" function in the manual that comes with AGS. You can add a line like this to the dialog script:

Code: ags

run-script 1

This will call the "dialog_request" function and pass a "1" as parameter. Now use this "dialog_request" function:

Code: ags

function dialog_request ( int parameter )
{
   if ( parameter == 1 )
   {
      // do what you want (ie. give the player an inv. item)
   }
}

Oh, and welcome to the forums.

For shoot-out sequences you'll have to do so much scripting by yourself, that you might as well add those "character zones" to your script manually.

For the sake of the original question: add a "run script" interaction to the "on any mouseclick" trigger of your character and add something like this:

Code: ags

if ( mouse.y > ( character[CHAR].y - ( CHAR_HEIGHT / 3 ) ) )
{
   // if player clicked on the lower third of the character
}

else if ( mouse.y > ( character[CHAR].y - CHAR_HEIGHT + ( CHAR_HEIGHT / 3 ) )
{
   // if player clicked on the middle third of the character
}

else
{
   // if player clicked on the upper third of the character
}

This should work - just remember to replace the "CHAR" with the script name of the character that you want to perform this script on and "CHAR_HEIGHT" with the size of this character along the y-axis (it's height) in pixels.

It's great, but I don't like the composition. A desk in the middle of the room? That may be realistical but it doesn't look optimal in an adventure game. The cabinets on the right aren't placed well either, the space they create behind them and in front of them needs to be either filled out with objects (plants, more cabinets or whatever) or should be eliminated.

So, overall, your drawing style looks very professional and satifies, but you should probably spend a little more time on thinking about where to place the objects in the room. Additionally, (something I said before when I wrote a quick tutorial as a reply to another C&C thread) the outline of your room is very, very basic. It's just a room with no edges or nothing (there's a back wall, a left one, a right one, the ground and the ceiling). It makes a room a ton more interesting if you add stuff to this outline before even starting to draw really. For example you could've added an edge to one of the corners or a higher level to one side of the  floor etc.

It's just not normal that one object slows your game down! This shouldn't be the case. Anyways, I think everybody has his or her own preferences when it comes to what one uses to represent a certain object or whatever. Use what fits best and gives you the most control in the easiest way possible and you're fine.

[EDIT:]

Hello and welcome to the forums first.

Your object will not be handled (moved in your case) if the player is not in the current room, because you have a rooms rep_ex function is only called if the player is in the room.

So, to fix your problem, you'd probably have to think about things differently. In order to help you with that, we'd need to know how exactly you want it to work. You could change the position of the whenever the player enters the room (as you do with the first time player enters room at the moment).

Sorry if this isn't much helping, I'd be glad to give you a suggestion if I'd know more!

EDIT: I think I just got you. Do you just want to make this car disappear when the player returns to the room the second or third (etc) time?

Oh, darn it. Thanks SSH. But I know that Rachmaninov (sp?) did make a cover of it or something. I have an old record by him that features this track...

[Mozarts "40th Symphony" followed by Rimsky-Korsakovs "Flight of the Bumblebee"]

Here are my two videos on google:

Mozarts "40th Symphony" followed by Rimsky-Korsakovs "Flight of the Bumblebee":

Click the image to watch the video...

Liquid Tension Experiments "Biaxident" followed by a little shred-session:

Click the image to watch the video...

Make sure to read the additional notes I wrote on the page.
The sound is better on the first.

This looks quite interesting, Farl! One thing about the GUI: I noticed the green cross on the ball. Will you be able to give the ball some kind of drift with this? It would be cool to be able to not only control power, side and height but also the drift, so that you could aim for the middle (side-wise) and then make the player hit the ball far on the left side for example, which would give the ball a drift to the right while being in the air and make the shot go to the right although you aimed at the middle area...

Just a thought, anyways - can't wait to play this. Keep it up!

The code you posted is correct. It should set the transparency to 66 the second time you run it (etc). The problem has to be somewhere else. Are you sure you are calling this script correctly?

Hint: that's french.

I managed to beat the first stage but I couldn't press any buttons at the same time. It's definately a nice concept but seriously quite hard. Nice work nonetheless, I know there are people that are really good at those reaction-games and they will enjoy your game, I'm sure. Did you know that you can still move while having the game paused though? I used this and that the ball stops after a pause extensively but still failed to finish the second level (first I thought there was no exit, but then I discovered it scrolled).

Overall nice, but too hard for my taste. Maybe it will be easier after a little practising.

EDIT: Oh, yeah. And I liked the...

Spoiler

... math question in level 2...

[close]

... quite a lot. But I had to pause it to concentrate and then answer.

...epic in all ways, from the instruments to the scale of the piece.

What exactly do you mean with that? What would make a scale or an instrument epic?

Good theme, I might enter.

Shouldn't this work by putting this line into the repeatedly_execute function:

Code: ags

// update the player position NON-BLOCKING
MoveCharacter ( EGO, mouse.x, mouse.y );

Basically just make sure you are calling the move-function non-blocking! I never tried this, there may be problems with this.

[MINI-TUTORIAL]

I would advise you to work on a completly new graphic-style. This will require you to pretty much start from scratch, but - if done correctly - you might be a happy artist in a few weeks.

For your new style, I'd suggest you to pick these rules:

> Draw in low resolution (320x200 or 320x240), it will make everything way easier. If this isn't enough, then go even lower. Choose 160x100 (or 160x120 respectively) and draw in this resolution - just remember to enlarge the background after you've drawn it up to 320x200.

> Choose a limited palette. Spend a few seconds on picking a good looking color and then use this one.

> Don't use any tools in paint other than the line (or pen), the select, the fill and possibly the erasor tool. NO airbrushing as you did in the forest, it doesn't look good and is instantly recognizable.

> Try to add very simple shading or shadows.

To help you even further, I'll show you some simple steps with a simple example background following those rules from above. Try to recreate it and change things around. I know that I am not a great artist, but I know (or atleast I think I know) that I went through something similar before, so this might just help you.

------------

MINI-TUTORIAL

So, let's try to draw something in a new style. I know what you are waiting for - the result. This is how the outcome of this tutorial will look like:



> First of all, let's think about the setting. I chose some kind of room in a space ship for now. So, welcome aboard. Also think about the dimensions - as I said, the fewer pixels you need to place, the fewer can be wrong, so let's go for something really low: 160x100. We will also leave some pixels black at the bottom of the screen, because that's where our GUI is going to be at in the game. Open Microsoft Paint (or whatever tool you use) and start a new image in our chosen size.



> As you can see, I use either x4, x6 or x8 zoom to work on pixel art. I suggest you do the same (the best value depends on your monitor size and desktop resolution). Additionally I activated the grid by pressing CTRL+R. This makes it easier to count pixels. Since this changes the colors, we will only use the grid to draw the geometry. Once we color the background, we will deactive it again.

> The nest step is to come up with a vanishing point. This simple point will help us draw perspectivelly correct (using the proper technique). You can place it wherever you want, but I'll suggest you to place it somewhere in the middle. I placed it at (80,36), which is horizontally centered. I calculated the coordinates by drawing two helping lines in red - as seen below:



> Now go ahead and erase the lines, leaving just the dot (or point) where they crossed. This is it - our vanishing point.

> Allright, now comes the first "real" step. We will draw the outline of our room. In order to do this, we choose black as color and then simply draw lines using either the line tool or the pen tool. Remember to pay attention to the perspective, otherwise your room wouldn't turn out any good. This process is hard to explain, if everything fails, then just take a look at what I drew and copy it:



> This is the outline of the basic shape of our room. The green lines show examples of how to use the vanishing point. I don't have the time to explain the concept of perspective using one vanishing point to you in detail, so please refer to other resources on the net on this topic (and I know that there are plenty). Also, note that the room is symmetrical. If you use this fact wisely, you can save yourself some time while working on those outlines using the copy, mirror and paste tool.

> Anyways, now has come the time to really think about your room. We only have a very simple cube-like object. In order to make it appeal interesting to the player, we need to work on some details right now. A lot of people just start by adding colors now and then go crazy adding simple details later - this is wrong! The best time to add good-looking details is now! I do this by imagining the room in my head and then think about how it could look more interesting. For this room, I decided to actually build a higher, second floor to the back, which is connected to the lower floor by two ramps. If you don't know what I mean yet, just take a look at the result or the following images:



> Again I marked some lines green to remind you of the correct usage of the vanishing point. Drawing this second block inside the first one is basically the same. You will maybe need to fiddle around with the size until it looks right (I drew the second block to high at first). It's important that you don't hesitate to delete stuff that doesn't look good and redraw it. If you can't wait to keep on going with this little tutorial and don't care that you really drew this or that thing not in the best way, then it is ultimatevily going to ruin your whole image. Trust me, I know it!

> So, let's add yet another block. I think that this technique should be self-explaining by now. Just take a close look at the presented images if you are still unsure:



> Ok, now it is time to add the ramps. We basically use the same technique as with the blocks, just that we connect the right points directly to get the shape of a ramp. Again, this is probably near-to-impossible to explain in simple words, so take a good look at the following picture:



> This is enough for the basic geomeotry. It already looks more interesting than the plain room, doesn't it?

> What I do now is to add geometric details. This doesn't mean normal details (I am not talking about posters or colored objects). I decided to draw two doors, a rail so that the space ship interior is work-safe and I rounded off the connections from the side walls to the ceiling (using the same technique I used with the ramps).



> Again, I left some green lines in there. Additionally I didn't just draw plain doors, but I added some kind of opening seam, just so they look more detailed. You could add an animation for the door opening later in your game where the two divided parts move to their side letting the player pass, which would possibly look quite cool and better than the normal door (especially in a high-tech environment).



> Now comes the second round for more geometric details. This time I added a fourth door to the right (this is important so that the space on the right actually serves a purpose - imagine if the door wouldn't be there, the player would never need to go there as long as no puzzle requires it, that's generally a bad idea), I added two small slots to the right, a circle to the right (both those are useless and meaningless details) and once again I did stuff to the ceiling. I drew this vertical window into the ceiling so that we have something of interest up there and so that we have a rough idea of a lightsource in the room. It's not really realistic that the light comes from a window if there is only deep space behind it, but that doesn't matter for now.



> That's better.

> Next I continued to color things. At the end, I wasn't satisfied with the door colors and the space-outside-the-ceiling-window colors, but I decided to change this later.




> Additionally I changed the size of the smaller door in the back, I think it looks better now and is more consistent to the style.

> Up to the next task: We colored everything, but we still have the original geometry outlines black. We need to change this to give the background more depth. Simply select a reasonably darker shade of the inside color and fill the outlines with it using the line or pen tool (this can be quite tricky, because you can't say who "owns" a certain outline if two objects share the same, just play around and experiment as much as possible in this case, until you are satisfied).



> Ok, this really improves stuff again.

> The last task: Add even more details and do whatever you wanted to do before but didn't (which is the changing the door and space colors). So, I first simply played around with the door colors until they looked a tad bit better. Then I thought about the space behind the window. I thought that it did already look good, there was just something missing. After a few seconds of thinking, it came to me: another shaded missed! So, I took the shade from the space and made it quite a lot brighter and drew over some parts. After doing that I was finally satisfied with it. Last but not least I added more lighter shades to some objects (check the door frames) and I added even more useless details using a darker shade to the back walls. This is what it looked like afterwards:



> And that's it. I hope you learned stuff, feel free to keep on asking questions if you didn't understand a part of this short tutorials, I hope I made everything clear and good luck with your game.

------------

Phew, that took me quite long to prepare, draw, write and put together all this. I feel tired now.

What I meant with cliche wasn't necessarly negative all the way. Just that "make-somebody-look-away-and-grab-something"-puzlle is a little overused in my opinion. This is of course not your fault, buloght, as you took the puzzles from the original. Those puzzles have another advantage: I could solve them! 

I didn't play the original title yet, but I loved your work, buloght, very impressive. Your graphic style is very effective (not over-complicated but still quite detailled and just overall beautiful). The puzzles were a tad bit cliche, but still fun. Keep it up!

Use Timers (look them up in the manual - F1) or count the frames manually (which I wouldn't necessarily recommend for a beginner).

Good luck and ask if you have trouble with timers!

You have done everything correctly with the objects if I am not mistaken. But did you check that you didn't set any walk-behind areas? Objects are going to be drawn behind the walk-behind area as well!

The guy with the red shirt looks like he loves goats.