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I was going to make a divine comedy game.

You still could! My version is not the traditional view. I mean, it's very close to the poem in that the right things happen and in the right order, but I haven't gone for the traditional approach: blood and violence and absolute evil. That just doesn't make sense to me. (How can spirits feel physical pain? Are noble pagans really punished whereas morally questionable Christians go to heaven? Would a loving god torture people? Was Brutus, who's only crime was to remove a dictator in order to restore democracy, really one of the most evil men who ever lived?)  My game basically looks at everything from a different perspective - the facts are the same but the interpretation is something that Dante added when he got back.

So what I'm saying is there is still room for a conventional "infinite evil and infinite pain" version of the story if someone wants to make it.

Hmm. The spirit virgil has seen the leopard but refuses to tell Dante that (he says he hasn't seen any animals). Have I glitched the game or am I just doing it wrong? Either way I think it should be altered in subsequent versions as it makes no sense.

Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to have a look at the wording. If Dante says 'have you seen a leopard' and Virgil says no, that would be a glitch. But if Virgil simply doesn't mention it, that's how it should be. Why should he say everything to a stranger? To Virgil, the leopard is just one more weird thing ina day full of weird things. No more weird than discovering you're dead and have been transported through time.  It's only Dante who recognizes the Biblical symbolism.

Can Les Miserables and Dante's Inferno be added to that list?

Dante's Divine Comedy is finished and ready for download!

The free demo goes as far as the first two circles of Hell, and the complete game includes all of Hell, plus Purgatory, plus Paradise. Unlike the EA games version that gives up after the first third of the poem.



The web site  has a couple of teaser videos plus about a hundred screenshots and more stuff. If you like the demo and buy the full game then you also get Les Miserables free, plus a discount code to get the next game free as well (Genesis of the Gods, based on Hesiod's Theogony). All my games join together to make an ever expanding game world full of classic stories. In a few years it will be the world's largest adventure game - it's already the largest in terms of ambition and geography.

Enjoy!

Try to upgrade/downgrade (yes, downgrade, and this happens sometimes) the graphic card's driver, and/or upgrade DirectX.

Thanks for the quick response! It's my Dad's computer so I'll have to do that when he's not looking.

I tested some 2.72 games on different computers today. One computer did this:

Running full screen: window borders are seen, game music plays, but the screen is black.

Running in a window: game music plays, but the window is transparent. If you drag another window in front then remove it, the window will refresh just once, so you see a snapshot of wherever the game is at that time.

It's not my computer so I don't know what's on it. I do know that it played games perfectly a year ago. Any ideas what's happening and how to fix it?

Does anyone know where I can find an invisible TTF font? I've replaced the default 'say' command with a GUI, but need an invisible font for speechView etc. An invisible bitmap font will crash when it comes to accented characters.  Google is coming up with a lot of dead links.


edit: scratch that. There's a wonderful freeware invisible font here: http://www.angelfire.com/pr/pgpf/if.html

Following feedback I've made a lot of changes and fixed a lot of bugs and have now uploaded test version 2. (More details) Once again, if anyone is willing to test it I'd be very grateful.

My game is entering its testing stage, so I'd value any feedback! You can find about a hundred screenshots on the main site, plus a teaser video to give you an idea what it's all about. Please PM me if you're willing to test the whole game.

The test version is complete but lacks polish, and that's where I'm hoping you can come in - suggesting easy improvements, spotting bugs, suggesting more dialog, etc.

I'm trying to keep all the discussion in one place for convenience, but if you'd rather post here that's fine. Thanks for reading!

what kind of variable is myOverHotColor? Is it just an int, a short or otherwise?

Gosh, I wasn't expecting a response from your good self! myOverHotColor is just an int. And it worked perfectly for the past year, so I'm not blaming you code, but changing that line fixed it and that's what matters to me   it was lazy coding by me, anyway, to calculate this every frame. My new code only needs to calculate room colors once per room.

Yeah, sorry, I'm no longer investigating problems with AGS 2.x.

I wouldn't expect you to I just hope you don't mind me posting about it occasionally. 2.72 was a remarkable achievement, and I expect to still be using it long after everyone else has migrated to 5.x. So I need to keep notes of any minor problems and how to work around them.

Some people like me are still using 2.72, so I'm posting this here for future reference.

I use Gilbert Cheung's excellent 'OverHot' code. I've adapted it slightly so that after right clicking a person, the following code runs every cycle until the next right click:

Code: ags

if(overhot_text ==""){	overhot_text =rcPersonName;
			if(overhot_text !="")	// showing a person's name?
			{myOverHotColor = speechColor + 29248;	
			if(myOverHotColor > 65503) myOverHotColor =speechColor -590;
			}

This code worked fine for the past year, but of course my other code is always changing. Today I found that right clicking a person then moving the mouse over a few objects always caused this crash:

Code: ags

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00427F18 ; program pointer is +5, ACI version 2.72.920, gtags (18,26)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.



Most versions of Windows allow you to press Ctrl+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

The numbers are always exactly the same. I found that by removing the addition part of the above code, it no longer crashed. I don't know if this has any relevance to 3.x.

FOUND IT! After two days, and stripping back the code to bare bones (and then commenting it out to within an inch of its life) I traced the evil and exorcised it.

The answer to the question. "can any other function change a character's room" is yes. The function is followCharacter.

To recap, using 'ChangeRoom' caused my NPC to obediently change rooms (I saw him there on screen during the 'Display' message). Then as soon as the function ended he immediately changed rooms back again, as if being snapped back on a piece of elastic.

It appears that during an earlier cutscene my NPC had briefly followed another NPC. Originally I ended that sequence by setting 'followCharacter' to null, but somehow that line got deleted. It didn't strike me as significant, because I thought a 'dormant' room could not reach out from beyond the grave and kidnap a character from an 'active' room. Shows how wrong I was!

Does the NPC stay in the room permanently when the delays are there, or just for long enough that you knew they WERE there?

Permanently.

Anyway, after two days of experimenting I've decided to cut the Gordian knot and just re-write my 'add NPC to room' code, making it much simpler.

Thanks everyone for your replies.

[Display("%d", character[npc].Room);]

'No', (unless you're using 2.72 or earlier, and there's an Interaction Editor command at work).

I am. so I'll look into that. Thanks.

Have you tried inserting a Display (e.g. Display("%d", character[npc].Room);) command to check where the character goes?

I've spent the last two days adding those infernal messages When messages are inserted, the code slows down and runs perfectly. Which makes me think it's a queuing problem. Without those delays the code simply doesn't do what I tell it to do.

I call character[npc].changeRoom(player.Room,x,y) in the middle of a function. But the character remains in his old room. By inserting Display("text") at key points I can briefly see the character appear, but then he's gone before the function ends. Yet I never told him to go away. So...

1. Is there any other mechanism that can change a character's room?
2. Is it possible that 'changeRoom' could be called, then canceled later in the same function?

I can post the code if you like, but the relevant functions are about ten pages long.

you need to install as a minimum the acwin.exe and acsetup.cfg files to a writable directory somewhere so that AGS can create its writable files (eg. save games, tem files, etc).

Would this be necessary if a game required no save features at all? For example, one of my - er my kid's - favorite games was "Barbie's Magical House.' All you do is wander around and find things to click. It was lots of fun.  There was no reason to save anything yet there was tons of replay value.

It would be possible to implement a kind of save game feature, by offering all possible saves at all times, but in a way that only the most recent save made any sense. For example, imagine a world treasure hunt based on a  map of the globe. You remember the last city you got to, and just start from there each time. Just an idea.

Thanks. I am feeling the inexorable force of destiny dragging me out of the dark ages and toward  3.x...

Thanks. Can I just confirm that the whole of the translation file is loaded into memory at the start? If it's read from disk each time then I could just rename the file between each game. But somehow I don't think that would work.

And regarding passing translated strings between games, I haven't tested that yet, but I imagine I can translate it before it's sent across.

Edit: My long term goal is to have 100 stories. The .tra file could be over 50 MB! I may have to seriously consider using 3.0. My main reason for being a Luddite is that 2.72 has better Linux compatibility. But for me, translations are even more important than Linux (the OS is just a tool, after all). What a dilemma.

According to this thread, a game will only ever use one winsetup file, even if you use RunGASGame. Which raises issues with translations. Let's say I have the following files (created with 2.72):

game1.exe
game1inFrench.tra
game2.exe
game2inFrench.tra

Now let's say I start game1, using game1inFrench.tra. Now I use RunAGSGame to run game2. AGS will still be using game1inFrench.tra, right?

So the only way to use translations with RunAGSGame is to create one giant translation file that includes both games:

allgamesinFrench.tra

Would that work? Or is there an easier way?

And if I had a hundred games and a humungously giant .tra file, would this slow the game down?