Messages

Sure, I'll help ya out, as long as it is indeed a relatively short file! 100% native speaker!

Next time in Germany, is that what I'm hearing? If so, SWEET! Finally I might be able to make it!

Can't wait for pics, going through Mittens photos has almost become a yearly tradition to me, sounds like it was a blast!

I do indeed, PMs sent!

[I'm still looking for more people!]

I'm still looking for more people! Even if you can't do anything with your router or don't have one, it's fine. You really just need to be able to spare 10 minutes of time and be willing to download and run a 17KB program I wrote that will try and connect to me and vice versa!

No worries! If there's anybody else willing to help, I'm still looking for more people to try this with! If you're capable of accessing your router and have a relatively normal, standard internet connection (and are able to get onto some instant messenger, too, for instruction and such) then please let me know, it helps me out greatly!

PMs sent! Anybody else?

[I'm looking for a handful of people that have stable internet (speed doesn't matter, it's good to test both fast and slow connections), are willing to spare 10 minutes or so every now and then, are willing to add exceptions for my programs to their firewall and - if they are behind a router - have access to the router to check for blocked ports and such.]

I've been looking into multiplayer programming (commonly called "netcoding") over the last couple of months and now I would love to find a couple people to actually test my work with. This is neither game nor AGS related (yet?), so I decided to post here and not in the Recruitment area, if that was the wrong decision, please kindly move the thread where it belongs!

I'm looking for a handful of people that have stable internet (speed doesn't matter, it's good to test both fast and slow connections), are willing to spare 10 minutes or so every now and then, are willing to add exceptions for my programs to their firewall and - if they are behind a router - have access to the router to check for blocked ports and such.

Let me know if any of you are kind enough to help me out by posting in this thread and I'll get back to you! It goes without saying that whatever we'd end up testing is all 100% safe software but you will have to take my word for that!

Code: AGS

float position = 122.3;
int rem = FloatToInt ( position * 10.0 ) % 10;

Completely untested and I'm in a rush but that should work. rem is the first decimal point (0-9) of float position.

You are probably either hitting CTRL+D or clicking the little star in the address bar on the right side on accident!

So under repeatedly execute, you do something like
if (GetBackgroundFrame == 0){
    aSound1.Play ();
}
else if (GetBackgroundFrame == 1){
    aSound2.Play ();
}

The problem with this is that it will start to play the sound over and over again every frame. We need to make a distinction here between game frames and background frames. A game frame is what the AGS renders for you 40 times a second and puts it up on your screen (you get 40fps by default). Background frames are the two frames you have in your background animation! You set their animation speed to 40 which means that once a second the frame will change! So, for 40 game frames we are on background frame 1, then it changes to background frame 2 for another 40 game frames. So when you put the code above in your repeatedly_execute function, it will check if we are on background frame 1 or 2 and start playing the respective sound EVERY GAME FRAME.

Khris' solution only tells AGS to start playing your sound once every 40 game frames. This is like someone pushing the play button on an mp3 player once as opposed to spamming the button down continuously.

I hope this explanation as to why Khris' solution is much better makes sense to you, if not, let me know and I'll explain more/better/again!

There was a thread on this recently but it wasn't exactly fruitful. Here's a link to what I wrote in there.

The way I did it in that Street Fighter II clone was to give a simple hit box to each character (just one rectangle as both characters are fairly square and when players duck it simply shrinks). And then the game stores a hitbox for every attack as well, this information could look like this for a punch for example:

Code: AGS

#define PUNCH_HITFRAME 3
#define PUNCH_HITBOX_X1 5
#define PUNCH_HITBOX_Y1 -25
#define PUNCH_HITBOX_X2 7
#define PUNCH_HITBOX_Y2 -29

So when the player or AI throws this specific 'punch' attack, the game will wait for the frame where the actual impact is occurring (in this case it's frame 3 of the punch animation), and only while that particular frame is being displayed, it will have a hitbox with the given dimensions respective to where the attacking player is located at. Then the game just needs to check whether or not any current attack hitboxes overlap with the player hitboxes, deal damage, stun the opponent etc. if that is the case.

That's the basic gist of how I did it, no idea if this is how it's commonly done in fighting games but it works well. You should invest time into working on a very good debug mode for your game that draws out all the hitboxes and additional information (such as current animation set and frame), because fine-tuning the attack hitboxes can be tricky otherwise. Also make sure you mark frames as 'done' when damage was dealt in them, you don't want the game to deal damage every frame that is drawn while the two hitboxes overlap, once per attack animation is enough.

This concept can easily be improved upon, allowing attacks with several 'impact' moments (a spin kick that hits with both feet for example) for example.

Hope this helps you out.

Guys (and Ponch), I have just received shocking information: Ben has ditched us all, the community and the podcast, under false pretenses. He doesn't work weekends, he sold out and applied at Google where he is currently making sure every single Youtube view counter glitches out at exactly 304.

There's certainly a security problem in the sense that plugins can already contain malicious code. But with plugins, especially ones that have already been tested by the community and, more importantly, are made by people with established names and history around here, you can be reasonably sure not to run into problems. The danger multiplies greatly, however, when you give the game authors (who will, as opposed to the plugin authors, oftentimes not be familiar or integrated in the community, or use a fake account) easy access to mess with the data on your hard-drive. That's what I'd be extremely careful about and I know that CJ justified the decision to limit the file handling in AGS to its own directory for the same reason.

The problem with a plugin like this, and I've mentioned this somewhere before, is that it's a huge security liability. If you allow game creators to write files to anywhere on the hard-drive, they can easily create malware using AGS. That's the reason why AGS is limited to writing to its own directory, that way you KNOW that any AGS game that you download is at least never going to mess anything up as far as your computer and OS is concerned, no matter how bad it might or might not be. :p

What I was trying to say is: what does the player have to do to survive? Is it just moving somewhere? Or a complex inventory item or hotspot interaction? Without knowing, there's no way to give a good time estimate.

You know, something tells me this has to with... I don't know... the actual puzzle?

:p

What you're looking for is a dynamic array (most notable the std::vector class in C++ for example). Unfortunately this is one of the biggest shortcomings of the AGS engine at this point: it doesn't support dynamic arrays for non built-in types.

So you are indeed stuck on setting up an upper limit on how many objects you want - how much this impacts the memory depends on your class and its members of course. If you're just storing a handful of ints and strings and maybe a few float values then it's not going to be a problem unless you wanna have extremely many objects (but then, you couldn't ever render all these in any way, shape or form) - when you start storing maybe big dynamic sprites, those all of the sudden do indeed take significant amounts of memory away and - I believe - AGS has its own memory consumption limit that you might hit.

So in a nutshell, what you're looking for is indeed extremely important for making a 'real' game, AGS script doesn't support it yet so you have to work-around - and how to do that exactly will vary on a case-by-case basis.

In addition, you should try windowed mode and Direct3D 11 is actually absolutely independent from Direct3D 9 so because you have 11 doesn't mean you have 9, this is a common assumption people get wrong. Check if you have Direct3D 9 installed as well! It's also a possibility that your graphics card doesn't support pixel shaders 2.0 if it's older (ie. 5-6 years old) - although I believe the error message is different if that's the case.

Is it an AGS game and did you run it with Direct3D graphics driver? Run it in windowed mode as well, just to be on the safe side (although this shouldn't matter). The game should run just fine with a yellow FPS counter in the top left corner of the window. If that isn't the case, what exactly do you get?

EDIT: Just re-read your post, you have to start FRAPS (DON'T record yet) the game and when it's running you start recording! That's the order!

Ben's been sick you monsters! MONSTERS!!