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Hey, everyone.

I've got a problem with putting the game in full screen mode. Whenever I do I get the following:


I can't change this by altering settings in after compiling or before it seems, and I have no idea what the problem actually is.  

Thanks for any help!

Edit: seems i left out some possibly important info.

Games resolution is 320x240.

I do however find its important that YOU know. It makes it easier to relate and give depth to characters.

Right, but its important for the player to understand the setting as well even if not by name but by characteristics.  In fact as far as I can see now, the only reason to give the actual name is if it is a famous location that can give the player information about the setting without too much actual work.

In some stories the setting can be a character in and of itself.

What do you mean by that?

However, it sounds like your plot is inspired by real events in a real place. If realism and socio-political commentary are your goals, why not be honest and do the research? If a broader social satire is your aim, then why not invent a city which reflects reality through parody?

This particular section of the plot is inspired by real world political trends, (The trend of people get elected who know how to get elected not necessarily who know how to govern.) neither of the politicians are main characters they are simply involved with one of the player characters.  And as far as inventing a city I essentially am, as the politicians, characters and events are all fictitious, I just won't give the city a name.  It's just a large city in America.   People can choose to guess what it is it if they wish but I don't think I'll choose a particular place.

Thanks Ali.

I don't believe it is important, as long as the fictional world feels real and detailed.

In this case the world isn't fictional just the characters.  Although I do agree in the case of a fictional world.  I suppose a better question is "Is it a good idea to tell the player the location, if possible."  I do think that it adds a certain quality to the story if you can have an idea of the outside world.  So its not necessarily important but in many cases I think it is beneficial, again as long as it is a real world location.

And just as you say you can run into troubles without doing research, so the question is whether the benefits of telling the player the location outweigh the effort you have to put into researching it. 

Thanks for the responses.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with not having a specific place but I think a time period is nice, otherwise the player has no idea what the world outside looks like in the game's setting.

I feel one of the current trends in popular fiction is to get rid of specific places and time periods, showcase globalization, and not even flesh out characters. More often than not we get heroes that are devoid of characteristics of individual beings and who live in dream-like worlds where they function as straight-forward symbols of teenage depression, love, anger or whatever.

That's true but then that's usually what sells. (I'm not saying I support it.) Little gems like the Blackwell games are easy to overlook.  That being said, I do think that storytelling is slowly getting better. (At least in the case of movies and T.V. shows the good stories are getting better and the bad stories are getting worse.)  Although, it definitely seems to be lagging behind in the case of video games.  Personally, I think this is because in a movie, t.v. show, etc,. the storytelling is a standalone element that makes or breaks the medium.  Whereas, in video games the storytelling can be terrible and the game can still be great. (Unless if its point click adventure it seems.)

And poltergeist I like what you said about atmosphere, it answered my question quite well.  Although I do think that you create some atmosphere by telling the player where you are.  For instance if a game starts in an office building and it says (Downtown New York) it gives the player an instant atmosphere depending on their view and knowledge of New York.  Although certainly it does nothing if for instance it said downtown Fort Wayne instead, as only a few people know what that is like. (Its not so great...)

In any case, as you said atmosphere is created first by what you show so I'll stick with that.

It seems telling the location of the game to the player is good for atmosphere but imposes some troublesome requirements on the creator

For instance:
In the Blackwell games the sense of being in New york is great and very atmospheric but it imposes on Dave the responsibility of being accurate with areas, how people behave, even important historical facts.  (Obviously because he lives there its not really much of an issue.)

I'm working on a game that takes place in a city but it doesn't really matter at all to the story where as long as it is big, but two politicians are involved at one point and the date the game takes place is set during an election. One of these politicians wins and there is a great deal of illegality on the side of one of them, (I won't say which.  ) so obviously I can't use a real name as that would be an accusation... 

Does my problem make sense?

What do you all think? Does the player have to know the location?

Great to hear this announcement. I'm looking forward to the release.

Hopefully this will motivate me to get my projects moving faster than a snail's pace. (That and this semester at college is over in a week.  )

Best of luck!

Calin, in your situation no one loses anything immediately.

However, this act of piracy contributes, however small, towards an overall disregard for the idea that piracy is wrong.  Now,  I'm not saying that if you go out and copy a song from a friend the world will become a cesspool of drugs and violence.   But just as with the issue of recycling, littering, or voting, a lot of people do these things.  A lot of people doing something creates a serious result.  

Now, whether you consider this small longitudinal harm as enough to deter you from pirating is something you would have to decide for yourself.  

Piracy is only good for small developers.  I know there's no way to eliminate piracy without controlling something.  But the subject at hand is whether the government should have a group of people who decide what is considered objectionable OR perhaps if the government should pass bills to change it's laws so places like limewire could be shut down.

Besides you don't have to illegally download a game or movie to decide whether it's worth buying.  You could always read reviews.  THAT is your quality control.  Right now we don't have a very conscious consumer population.  We buy what we are told to by COMMERCIALS rather than doing research on actual QUALITY.  If it was much more difficult to illegally download material then people would just have to learn about the product in different ways and then buy them or not.  (I would expect an increase in research would also increase overall developer innovation.)

Best way would be to deflate economy finally, balance out price vs. wage and rich vs. poor dilemma. Capitalism sucks!

What do you mean by price vs. wage?

There will always be rich and poor, the only way to get rid of it is communism which is not a possible system considering certain factors such as for instance, humans being human.  All societies have examples of communistic or socialistic functions in gov't. (Welfare for example)  But no country can have a total communism or socialism.

Capitalism is amazing and terrible all at once.  I was having an argument the other day about whether America was the greatest country.  Someone said it was,  I said it wasn't.  My reasoning was that while we are the greatest in producing things and achieving that is not what makes a great country.  A great country in my book is one that allows freedom, upward mobility and happiness for its citizens.  Capitalism in the short run has done great things but in the long run it has created a national mentality that we do not have enough.  The average American lives his or her life ALWAYS wanting more, never satisfied and hating their political opponents.  Most countries have aspects of this but America is divided on every issue in a state that is almost becoming violent.  The interesting thing is if we did not have this must have more mentality and a deep seeded hatred for fellow countrymen we would not have achieved the level of activity which we have.  So, the question is, is it more important for a country to have happy citizens or productive citizens?

Instead of mending holes, US Government, in it's holy wisdom, could develop more fair and workable civil system.

How?

Well, ProgZmax I totally agree with you that this bill presents the U.S. Gov't with the capability of censoring the internet of anything that they wish but at the same time we do have a very serious problem with piracy.  I am fairly sure that about 95% of America has downloaded or viewed something illegal at some point in their lives.  However, the main reason for this is because of our culture.  American culture on the broad spectrum believes that we should get what we want, regardless of whether it's legal.  People don't even really consider downloading music or watching a television show on a third party site as illegal anymore because of the vast number of people who do it. 

The problem presented to congress is that there are these sites that can quite legally get away with what they do.  For instance, Limewire (who's main source of business is illegal music downloads)  is a completely legal company.  Their plan is to offer only the capability to share materials and people jump on that and share music like crazy. (Which is illegal.)  The only people who use limewire who are at fault are the users and not the owners who make crazy money on the ads.  (Not to say that making money from ads is evil.)  My point is that this is a high volume market nowadays and it is not something that will go away by sitting back and watching.  The incentive right now is to do these illegal things, there is almost no deterrent.

Let me reiterate that I disagree with this bill on the principle of the level of control that it could give. 

However, (Assuming you agree that piracy is something to be taken seriously) what is your counter-proposal? 

Remember, piracy is not a right it is an infringement of a right.

You need to upload the image to a site where it hosts the picture and you don't have to download it. 

Doesn't seem that sites.google.com will work for this. 

Try hosting on imageshack.us

I've uploaded the picture for you:



As far as any artistic critique I don't know if I'm qualified but:

Something doesn't look quite right about the arm that is closest to us.  It seems out of proportion with the rest of the body.  Since he's standing at only a slight angle shouldn't both of his arms be ALMOST exact same size? (The closer one looks too much larger than the far one.) Other than that his hand is pointing the wrong direction. In general when people stand their hand's have the palms pointing in towards the body rather than away from themselves which currently is giving him a bit of a wimpy look as you said. 

Again, I don't think I can give great criticism but hopefully others will be able to help out greatly!

Cool, thanks! 

I should be able to figure it out from here.  (Though it seems every time I say that i run into another problem.)

Thanks again!

Is there any way to use the Drawstring command and change the size of the font? 

Would it maybe be best to create a new font and then I can use the DrawingColor command to change the color?

How can it choose from random letters if it's from a font rather than by using sprites?

Could you clarify how exactly the user is supposed to pick the colors?

After the user types in the letters and numbers as they remember them they will be presented with 8 buttons each of which is a certain color they then have to click on the colors from left to right, right to left or of specific letters depending on which task the program chooses. 

I got 496 because 26 lower case 26 capital letters 10 numbers

26+26+10 = 62 * 8 (colors) = 496 unique sprites chosen from

50 sprites is not a problem I was just giving further information. 

I don't understand what you mean by your first suggestion.

As far as your second suggestion, I don't think it would work.  The idea is to increase visual memory skills, although I do think it would be great for speed reading skills.

How would I display the random string? 

The program I am working on involves the user seeing a set of random letters and numbers of random color for about a 10th of a second and then trying to remember what they saw.  The goal of the program is to improve visual memory by increasing the difficulty of the task progressively.

In order to do this I have to have a check for whether the user can actually remember what they saw and I'm at a loss for how to do this.

I want the user to be able to just type in order what they saw and then pick the order of the colors from a set of 8 colors.  For instance if they saw "8bDIJHpH7vw"  and all but the last was white the last being yellow they would just type in "8bDIJHpH7vw" and click a button that is just white for the first letters and the yellow button for the last one.

I really have no clue how to do this that doesn't take in the 10s of thousands of lines to set up a check for each of the possible values for each of the images and then string together the values so it can be checked.

Including all numbers and letters in each color there are 496 possible sprites for each image drawn on the screen with a maximum of 50 on the screen. 

Sorry for the long-winded description but I don't have much of a direction for solving this problem.

Thanks for any help in advance everybody!

Wow, the last time it took 14 seconds to finish all the letters being printed on the screen this time it took nearly 3 seconds and they were evenly spread.  I still don't fully understand that line but I think I've got a pretty good idea now.

I'm still using the first method and it seems that it will work just fine.  The second method you showed me I couldn't get to work and I'm not sure why but the problem seems to be solved for now.

Thanks!

Ah, a miraculously simple cure.

Thanks Ryan and Steve!

I ran a check to see when it stops putting up letters and for some reason the number seems to vary even though difficulty is set to 50 and therefore it should write 50 letters, right?

I've also noticed that the letters seem to group together like in the one above quite often, leaving large spaces totally empty...  Any idea why that would happen?

I'm sorry, I seem to be having trouble understanding this script.

Heres the script that I have:

Code: ags

int number;
  int iteration = 0;


struct Letter
{
  int n, x, y;
};

Letter drawn[50];
int numDrawn = 0;

function room_RepExec()
{
if (iteration < Difficulty)
{
int n1 = Random(51); // generates 0-51, which is 52 unique numbers
int w1 = Game.SpriteWidth[n1];
int h1 = Game.SpriteHeight[n1];
int x1 = Random(640-w1);
int y1 = Random(480-h1);

int i = 0;
bool hit = false;
while (i < numDrawn && !hit)
{
  int n2 = drawn[i].n;
  int w2 = Game.SpriteWidth[n2];
  int h2 = Game.SpriteHeight[n2];
  int x2 = drawn[i].x;
  int y2 = drawn[i].y;

  //         x1       x1+w1
  //  x2     x2+w2

  if (x1 + w1 >= x2 && x1 <= x2 + w2 && y1 + h1 >= y2 && y2 <= y2 + h2)
  {
     hit = true;
  }
  i++;
}

if (!hit)
{
   drawn[numDrawn].x = x1;
   drawn[numDrawn].y = y1;
   drawn[numDrawn].n = n1;
   numDrawn++;
   DrawingSurface *surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
   surface.DrawImage(x1, y1, n1, 0, h1, w1);
   iteration ++;
}
}
}

and it gets me this.



I'm sure that I did something wrong but I don't know what.  Also, when it gets to around 25 letters it starts slowing down quite a bit.

Any ideas?

Here is the code I'm using to determine the number of letters that should appear on the screen.

Code: ags

  int number;
  int iteration;

function room_RepExec()
{
  if (iteration < Difficulty)
  {
  number = Random (52);
  DrawingSurface *surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
  surface.DrawImage(Random (640), Random (480), number, 0, Game.SpriteHeight[number],     Game.SpriteWidth[number]);
  iteration ++;
  }
}

It chooses from 52 letters half of which are capital and half are lowercase.

My problems are:
(1) The images appear like this:



The actual sprites of the letters are white but when drawn on they appear like above.

(2) I'm not sure how to check if the drawn images are off the edge of the screen or overlapping.  I said in a previous topic i knew how to do this but I was thinking of how characters and objects are checked as overlapping or non-overlapping.  Ryan Timothy mentioned that I should use a struct array to store information about where each one of these are but I'm not sure how to do that.

(3) I'm not sure what the problem is in my code but the images are not being sized at the right size for each of the sprites.

Sorry for all the questions.

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks Ryan Timothy!

I should be able to figure it out from here.

Thanks again!