Messages

Dusk: By the way, if you want to I can help you by sending over some music-pieces from the movies (I don't got all of them but I got some) and also I've got some sound effects. If you want just tell me and I'll send them straight to you.

Thanks, but we already have some Gbytes of Star Wars music and sfx
But if we can't find something particular in our collection I'll remeber to ask you!

AGA: It's not very nice to bully with others because of you don't like guys say "May the Force be with you". If you don't like it, don't delete the posts, just ignore them.

I think/hope he was just joking...

I too am a HUGE (old school) Star Wars fan.  I was working on my own Star Wars game awhile back ...

Ehehe, I know, I read about it and saw your nice cartoon-like graphics searching "star wars" in the forums ; )
We're waiting you to finish it someday, uh! : )

but anyway, if you need any help (as Barbarian said) let me know I'd be happy to lend my [geeky] knowledge to your cause.

Great, thankyou
(Uh, funny to read this Star Wars speech here on the Forums... lol...)

Looks great!
Though I will say this:  KEEP THIS UNDER THE RADAR.  LEC has lawyers with itchy trigger fingers, man.

Thanks. Yes, we thought that... we wrote the disclaimer on the website trying to be clear about the fact that SOTE is a no-profit project and that we don't want to damage LEC and Star Wars copyright owners in any way... let's hope they'll let us finish the game.

I used to be a real Star-Wars fan, and sort of still am (though I'm more of a fan of the first original three movies). If you need any advice / input from an older-timer Star Wars fan, just ask.

Thankyou! Your Star Wars knowledge will be obiovlsy useful in testing phase. By the way, we prefer the original three movies too.

*May the Force be with you. 

Always
D.

Are those backgrounds original cause they look awesome.

Our artist uses his own technique of graphical-editing, a mixture of photo-editing, digital coloration, photocomposition of pre-esistent images with additional stuff painted pixel by pixel, and obviovlsy many filters... So, maybe they aren't 100% original, but hey, I think they look awesome too

By the way, thanks for the immediate feedback!

[Hunting the Hunter]

[03/08/2012 - Hunting the Hunter prologue gameplay video on YT]
It's been a long time, isn't it?
Well, just to show that we're still alive and the project is paused but not dead (we've put too much time and energies to just abandon it - we *have* to complete and release it someday), we uploaded on YT a gameplay video: it's the beginning of "Hunting the Hunter".
It's a small part of what we released to Italian beta testers around three years ago.
We hope that you enjoy it!

So, click here to watch the video on YT!

[05/08/2009 - Hunting the Hunter portion given to italian beta testers]

About a year after the last update of this post, I'm here to tell you that the first part of our game has been released to italian beta testers.




It's our first "big" release, after the old tech demo and the prologue (to italian testers) about a year ago.
We are now waiting for feedback and of course we would appreciate any of you AGS guys (able to understand italian, of course) joining the beta testing, so if interested just step here.

If you want, you can support our recently opened facebook page, we'll post some minor news and background material there, at least until we go for a site renewal.

So, SOTE is *alive*, slowly approaching the complete public release.
Trust us: we worked too long and hard to abandon the project, so, someday, the complete, international release will happen.

Dusk & Hexence
(yeah, we changed "Death Star Games" to something less fan-boyish... )

[08/08/2008 - Hunting the Hunter screenshots]
Isn't 08/08/08 a nice date to show you a pair of screenshots from Hunting the Hunter?

Hunting the Hunter screenshot 1
Hunting the Hunter screenshot 2

I hope that you like it as I do!
Well, since more three years are passed from the Tech Demo release, just a few words about the state of our project:
first, SOTE is *not* dead as often they ask us. We had many work/studying slow downs in the past years, but we're not gonna let the project die. And in this August we're working passionately to complete the first episode of the full game, that we named "Hunting the Hunter".
While it covers just part of the SOTE storyline, it should feature some hours of gameplay (with a pair of little surprises).

We hope to start the beta testing/translation phase in a few weeks, so if you're interested in helping just step into our forums and let us know. 

I hope to post some other news in the near feature!

Bye,
Dusk & DSgames

[26/05/2005 - Tech Demo 1.1 online]
So, did you like Episode III? We did
By the way, a quick update to announce that the Tech Demo 1.1 is online for download... http://dsgames.guerrestellari.net/sotedownload.php

the website hasn't been updated yet because BobaFonts is busy with Episode III stuff for guerrestellari.net ... by the way, the archive in online (a tar.bz2 one, use winrar on windows and "tar xjf sote_adventure_tech_demo_1.1.tar.bz2" on linux).

Who should really download it?
- Linux users, because it contains fixed scripts and the updated engine by EvilTypeGuy, and the game doesn't crash anymore.
- German players,  thanks to Dennis "Hurrican" Pauler translation

We're a bit busy with work/university at this time, but work on SOTE (slowly) goes on.
Bye! Thanks for the 6000 and more downloads of the SOTE Tech Demo!

[01/01/2005 - Tech Demo released!]

Finally, the SOTE tech demo download. The site hasn't been updated yet, but the archive is there, ready to be downloaded!

http://dsgames.guerrestellari.net/sotedownload.php

Epic new year from Death Star Games - we hope you enjoy the game! : )

Mods: the tech demo is in practice a complete short-game... can we insert it in the AGS Games page?

[18/12/2004 - Tech Demo beta ready]
Ok people, we (almost) did it.
We released a first italian-only beta of the SOTE Tech Demo to a limited number of testers a few days ago, and we plan to upload a new beta as soon as the English translation will be complete. We fixed what we could, but we still have a pair of problems, maybe engine related (we'll ask in the Tech Forum as soon as the beta2 is uploaded).

We won't publish a download link here on the forums because we'd like to have a bugfree public release, I hope you understand us. By the way, if anyone of you wants to be added to the tester mailing list to help us, this is a good moment to ask.

Two updated screen shots for you:
(I remove the old ones to keep the page loading quick.)
Bye

tech demo screenshot 1
tech demo screenshot 2

[03/09/2004 - first announcement]
I'm very happy to finally introduce on the AGS Forums "Star Wars Shadows of the Empire: Graphic Adventure".

We're working on it since April and now we have enough stuff to introduce our work, including about 40 backgrounds and a working multi-character personalized interface that required many hours and many hundred lines of code.
Today we've opened the SOTE:GA website, that I hope you'll give a look, where you can find more info.
I hope we'll release a tech demo soon and a game playable demo around Christmas, but nothing is sure at the moment.
The plot is an expansion to the union of the Shadows of the Empire book/comic book/action videogame, and in our plans it will be a really long game.
In the future (and on the Critics Lounge forum, of course) I'd really appreciate the help of the AGS community regarding any critics, ideas, suggestions about the game and, as the AGS scripter of the project, discussion about improving the code (I'll post some stuff soon, on the Tech Forum). Help with eventual poor english on the website (writing from Italy ) is also really appreciated. Thankyou

Here you are two screenshots, we don't put them on the website because characters and objects you see in it in are temporary/incomplete... and may change completely, but.. better that nothing

[old screenshots removed]

If you, say, have two items. Ex: like a key and a cheese ball. and you only want the cheese to work wíth the mouse... What do then have to write?

You have to check what item is selected in the USEINV interaction script of the mouse.

Code: ags

#define ITEM_CHEESE 21 //your number here
if (character[GetPlayerCharacer()].activeinv == ITEM_CHEESE) {
//it works
} else {
//random "not working" speech
}

bye,
D.

My question is, has anyone implemented a "click once to walk, double-click to run" feature in an AGS game, and can I see the script used?

This topic should put you on the right way: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=12190.0

bye
D.

In terms of writing your own dialog system, would having some lower-level functions such as:

ShowDialogOptions(int topic)
RunDialogOption(int topic, int option)
GetDialogOptionText(int topic, int option)

Uhm what would ShowDialogOptions(int topic) do differently from RunDialog(int topic)?
By the way they should come handy, especially RunDialogOption I think.

By the way, IMveryveryHO, the problem with complex dialogues is that you can have to check many conditions and adjust options, and the only way to do it is using dialog_request(int parameter).

Improvements (taken from the todo list) could be
* "if globalint 5 == 10" support for conditionals in dialog scripts
* dialog_request_ex(int topic, int parameter)  pass in the topic number

The first would give a quick way to check conditions directly in the dialog script, while the second will make dialog_request_ex readable ad usable in large games too, cause you could organize it by topic and in a standard scheme, and call

Code: ags

#define OBJECTCHECK 1
#define ALREADYTALKEDCHECK 2
//etc...
function dialog_request_ex(int topic, int parameter) {
  if (topic==1) {
      if (parameter == OBJECTCHECK) {
          //in topic 1, if you have money turn on the option "I wanna buy a cake"
          if (character[GetPlayerCharacter()].inv[MONEY]>0) SetDialogOption(topic,2,1);
          else SetDialogOption(topic,2,0);
     } else  if (parameter == ALREADYTALKEDCHECK) {
            ....
     }
   } else if (topic==2) {
    ...
   } 
}

At the start of each dialog you could then call the needed run-scripts

Code: ags

@S
run-script 1
run-script 2
....

to setup options.
But at this point it would probably be easier to support defines in the dialog-scripts, coming back to the origin of this thread 

I can understand that this stuff is probably low-priority, no problem... I'll get what I want in some way : )
thankyou again

(uhm I think I write too much, btw )

uhm ok... thanks Pumaman, Steve - I think I'll try to write my dialog system from scratch. Alternatively, I could write dialog scripts using my constants and then run a find/replace with some text editor (a kind of hand-made preprocessing )

By the way I'll think about writing the complete system, maybe a tree-based implementation different from the usual AGS dialog treatment.
I recently read about unofficial struct support, and it should give the possibility, in conjuction with arrays, of making something of really flexible. Good, good 

Thanks again, bye

I think that it would be a really useful thing : )
thanks,
bye

Hi all,
I was starting to code a dialog subsystem/extension using globalInts and
dialog_request... I thought that using #define and some tricks I could get a readable and powerful generic system to handle particular dialog situations. The game I'm working on with my team is getting big and we need an easy way to implement complex dialogs...

I explain my idea... I set a bunch of

Code: ags

#define DLG_CONDITION 1 
#define DLG_ACTION 2
#define DLG_WHAT_ROOM 3
// 1,2,3... free globalints
...

to store "parameters"
and others costants like

Code: ags

#define DLG_BEEN_IN_ROOM_CONDITIONAL 1
#define DLG_PLAYERHASGOTOBJECT_CONDITIONAL 2
#define DLG_GOT_OBJECT1 3
#define DLG_ADDPHRASE 4
...

and I insert a generical dialog_request working this way:

Code: ags

function dialog_request(int what) {
  int ok = 0;
  int action = GetGlobalInt(DLG_ACTION);
 //check what condition
 if (what==DLG_BEEN_IN_ROOM_CONDITIONAL) {
	if (HasPlayerBeenInRoom(GetGlobalInt(DLG_WHAT_ROOM))) ok = 1;
 } else if (what==DLG_PLAYERHASGOTOBJECT_CONDITIONAL)
	...
 } else if (what==...) {
	...
 }
 //end conditions
 if  (ok!=1) return; //condition not satisfied, do nothing
 // else check what action is requested and perform it
 if (action==DLG_ADDPHRASE) {
 	...
 } else if (action==DLG_GIVEOBJECT) {
	...
 }
}

The idea was that this way I could have written in the dialog scripts something like

Code: ags

set-globalint DLG_ACTION DLG_ADDPHRASE
set-globalint DLG_WHATPHRASE 12
set-globalint DLG_WHATROOM 14
run-script DLG_BEEN_IN_ROOM_CONDITIONAL

and I think that's not so bad in reading/writing and once written a good set of condition/actions it would be useful (and of course released here ).

By the way, I just began to try a basic action and immediately got stuck: it seems that in dialog scripts #defines are ignored.

I tried to put #defines in the script header, and also to copy them in the dialog script... no errors, but not working. Replacing with numbers in the dialog scripts works, so I concluded that #defines aren't supported in the dialog scripts. But I hope that I'm wrong... any ideas?

Obviously, writing something like

Code: ags

set-globalint 1 4
set-globalint 2 12
set-globalint 4 14
run-script 1

is not really readeable/useful.

As usual, sorry for my terrible english and goodbye!

Dusk

I just recently finished my second grueling semester at University. I have decided to take less credit hours and as a result actually have the time I need to begin work on AGS for Linux  / BSD again.

Just a quick post to write that I really appreciate your work and I think that having AGS games playable under Linux is an inportant goal.
I'm trying to avoid using plugins to preserve compatibilty of my team's game cause I want it playable under Linux too.
So thankyou, and bye

a quite-absent-from-the-forum-I-m-busy-at-the-university Dusk

A workaround in your case would be to set a global variable from the on_event() function and then check it in the global repeatedly_execute:
<cut>

This is a really nice trick, but doesn't work well in this specific case... I tried, and there's a fastidious delay before the creation of the overlay, while calling setParallaxObj() in "player... before fade in" works perfectly. Patience.  By the way, I think it will come useful for other things, so thankyou again Scorpious.
I realize that I'm doing stupid errors not having completely understood the precise behaviour of the AGS engine, but things start working day after day - I hope to show you something soon. 
Bye

Thankyou Scorpious, you got it... putting a call to setParallaoxObj()  into "Player enters screen" works... 
I was trying to avoid having to put scripting in the room scripts (room preparation isn't  "my job" in the game we're making - I do the scripting), but seems that I can't solve this problem with the global script only, as I hoped to do.

By the way, if I can make a suggestion, I think that the on_event function is great, and it would be useful to have more events to use with it (such as Player enters creen aft. fade in, like this time).

Thanks again, bye  8)

I have a set of room properties that define dinamically a graphic overlay that will move parallax-scrolling style...

Code: ags

int overlay,overlayX,overlayY,overlayZ;

function setParallaxObj() {  
  int startx;
  overlay = GetRoomProperty("ParallaxObj");  
  if (overlay>0) {
    overlayX = GetRoomProperty("ParallaxObjX");
    overlayY = GetRoomProperty("ParallaxObjY");
    overlayZ = GetRoomProperty("ParallaxObjZ");    
    startx = overlayX-(GetViewportX()/overlayZ);
    overlay = CreateGraphicOverlay (startx,overlayY, overlay, 1);    
   // MoveOverlay (overlay, startx, overlayY);	
  }  
}
 
function clearParallaxObj() {
  if (overlay>0) RemoveOverlay(overlay);
  overlay = 0;
}

function ParallaxScroll() {
  if(overlay>0) {	  
   MoveOverlay (overlay, overlayX-(GetViewportX()/overlayZ), overlayY);	
  }
}

function on_event(int event, int data) {
  if (event==ENTER_ROOM) { 
       //... other stuff
       setParallaxObj(); 
       //... other stuff
  }
       //... other stuff
}

function repeatedly_execute() {
 //...lots of things
 ParallaxScroll();
}

I hope the code is clear: now, the problem.
If I enter a large room from right, I have a little horrible delay before the overlay goes into the right screen position. I've tried unsuccesfully to debug it... only one idea: does createGraphicOverlay allow me to specify negative coordinates? I obviouvlsy need it because entering from right some overlays are partially offscreen... moveOverlay does the job, but it's too late. I tried to put a moveOverlay immediately after the creation (you see it commented out), but nothing. Where am I wrong? Any known walkaround/suggestion?

Thankyou for reading 

Great work with the editor... thanks 
Trying it I've noticed a possible-bug.
Let's take as example the multi topic example.dg: if you add a phrase to say in the option 4, before the "goto-dialog 1", it won't be showed in the preview (or probably it is showed, but with no delay).  Nothing of really important, of course - in AGS the dialog will work perfectly - but it should be simple to fix, when you do the next release : )
Bye 

if (keycode == 361) SaveGameDialog(); but  when i save game, it says :

Error (line 108): parse error:unexpected 'if'

I think that there must be an error *before* the if...  
bye

Rather than switching to a dummy character and back, the easiest way to re-sort the inventory is simply to call the  UpdateInventory  command.

Great! I think that for now it's perfect. Really thankyou

The other workaround you could do is to store your inventory in a seperate array, then when you want to add an item to the inventory have your own custom function which clears the player's inventory and adds items back in the correct order.

Ok... this sounds perfect, and I'll do this way at the end... shame on me, I thought for a moment that there wasn't a way to declare arrays in AGS... but reading the forums I'm seeing a lot of undocumented-really-cool-and-useful-stuff : )

Thanks again,  bye  8)

Thanks SSH, thanks Strazer (I have read the thread).

I think I'm going to make a personalized inventory window with buttons as suggested by SSH, cause I'd like to have maximum flexibility... items aren't simply right aligned, the inventory window is composed by more lines of 8 items each. It auto-scrolls down if needed, but due to the inventory window properties they went up in the first line, while I wanted them in the the 3rd line (the visibile one). So I made my AddInventoryEx/LoseInventoryEx that keep an indipendent item count and filler adjust, to change the GUI behavior/scrolling when needed.

I can't explain exactly in English.. by the way I think it's cool
The filler is item number 1, so if I make a double swapcharacter-and-back with an invisible-follower character I think that I can solve the problem... but items will be sorted only by their number after that. In general, it would be great to have them placed in the order one pick-ups them, as occurs temporarily before a swap-character.
The best thing would be to have a structure to completely manipulate the inventory position of an item... now the inventory is a
short inv[MAX_INV]
it would be perfect IMHO to have
typedef struct { short count; short position; } invitem
and so
invitem inv[MAX_INV]
so that we can do
character[GetPlayerCharacter()].inv[3].count++; //gets the item
character[GetPlayerCharacter()].inv[3].position = 1; //places the item in a specific inventory position

But I am sure that CJ has to do many more important add/changes that this..  so I'll find a way : )
Bye