Messages

Great initiative, CJ. The sound system definitely could use an overhaul, especially the volume settings. A few things I would like to see:

1) Ability to play speech files without using the Say command, as mentioned by SSH.
2) An analogue to Get/SeekMP3PosMillis() that works with any kind of sound file rather than just music. Possibly something like channel[1].GetAudioPosition.
3) And in extension of this, a GetAudioLength function that can either be called on a sound file or on the channel where it's played.

Buttons is probably the easiest way to go. Just make as many buttons as you want images displayed at the same time, make them non-clickable and change the button's Graphic property to display the image on it. You can use the Button.Visible property to hide the buttons that aren't currently used to display images.

If you go to the GUI editor and click on your inventory window, there are two properties called ItemHeight and ItemWidth. If you change these to the size of your item sprites, they should be fully clickable.

Oh yes, I forgot. Interact doesn't actually work in the inventory because it selects the inventory item (making it the cursor) rather than "interacting" with it. So the event doesn't actually run. If you need an interact function in your inventory, you have to code it yourself.

This would require you to set "Handle inventory clicks in script" to true and check for eMouseLeftInv returning "true" in the on_mouse_click (MouseButton button) function. I'm sure you can find previous posts about this by using the forum's search function. There's also a bit of info about this in the "Inventory item events" section of the manual.

Edit: An easier solution may actually be to manually change the mouse cursor of the Talk function when you open/close the inventory, and use the Talk interaction for "interact" instead.

Please check that the "Handle inventory clicks in script" option in the General Settings is set to false.

LOL, Vince. I forgot to add that there should also be a shoplifting mini game 

In response to beomoud, I agree with what your saying. But instead of the bottomless inventory (which will quite quickly get cluttered unless you allow the player to drop things), I prefer the implementation in Dreamweb where pretty much anything can be picked up - from ashtrays to guitar plectrums and old microwave dinners. BUT you have limited room in your inventory, so you must actually consider whether the items will be of any use to you before dragging them along.
This of course means that all puzzles must employ real world logic - a screwdriver is a reasonable useful item whereas a green pea is not. Despite the huge amounts of potential inventory items, I personally never found myself missing anything that was necessary to proceed in the game (though there is a pretty huge walking dead situation if you forget to pick up a certain item at the very beginning, its location is strongly hinted at in the game's intro).

I also agree with previous posters on the case of multiple items that would do the same job, but only one works - that's just lazy design. Allowing multiple items to be used for the same task (as well as multiple solution puzzles) was actually one of the strong points of Zak McKracken, which remains the only LucasArts title among my favorite adventure games. Though I must admit that Ben There, Dan That did make me laugh with its rationalization for why you couldn't melt the lamp post with the lava  .

If there's anything we can conclude from this discussion it must be this: Every non-alien, non-desert island adventure game should have at least one street corner with a dollar store. It would make things so much easier for us players.

As for workarounds, you could draw the text to a DynamicSprite (displayed as GUI background or as a button graphic) using DrawingSurface.DrawMessageWrapped. You might also try using a listbox instead, though that would require you to write your own linebreaking code to distribute the text across multiple listbox items.

I'm definitely interested if I can find a cheap flight to Helsinki - I have some friends there, so maybe I could stay with them and explore the city for a couple of days before coming to Lapaset. Any idea how much it would cost to get from Helsinki to Liljendal? I was trying to look up trains, but there wasn't any station listed for Liljendal.

Edit: OK, I found information on how to get there by bus. Takes about an hour and a half, so that seems manageable.

I don't really like scores, because it always makes me feel that I missed out on something unless I score every single point there is to score. I especially dislike games where you have to perform some arbitrary action, often in almost easter-egg like fashion, to gain those last elusive points. On the other hand, I don't think it's a bad thing to give the player a suggestion that he has missed out on something and may want to replay the game. I just prefer the way it was done at the end of The Colonel's Bequest, where you were given hints to what tasks you might have skipped.

What I do enjoy however, is games with more tangible "collectables", especially if they unlock some bonus feature in the game. As long as it doesn't feel like busywork, I certainly don't mind hunting for hidden items or taking photos of all the creatures. Sometimes it can even offer gameplay variety, if you're stuck at a specific puzzle, maybe you could take a break and go hunting for some of those comic books that are hidden throughout the game world?

I'm happy it worked out. You can buy me a beer if you ever visit the Roskilde Festival

Check the "Customized Text Windows" entry in the manual.

This program seems to do what you want:
http://www.aoamedia.com/audioextractor.htm

I take it you've already created a custom text-window GUI? If so, earlier versions of AGS used to have a GUI property called "Foreground color" which changed the text color. According to the change list this has now been renamed to "Border color" though, but I assume it still affects the text too.

Yup, now it works. But I swear, I tried downloading each file four times earlier, both through direct click and right-click-save-as, and I all I got was "download finished" with a 0 byte file.

Great work jerakeen! The demo is very convincing.

CJ, in relation to this, I was wondering: How much work would it take you to implement alpha channel support for DrawingSurface routines, so that using DrawImage on a cleared surface with transparency or an alpha channel sprite would actually result in a DynamicSprite with an alpha channel rather than the effect we see in this example? Personally I would find it a very useful feature.

Looks very nice. However, I get 0 byte files when trying to download the demo and the demo source files

Scan in grayscale rather than black and white. You can always adjust the contrast/brightness afterwards for a crisper look.

Getting a key from the other side of a locked door by using a small stick and a piece of paper. Way too obvious.

It seems that this is still considered quite clever outside of adventure gaming circles. I just saw it used in Neil Gaiman's recent novel 'The Graveyard Book' and groaned my way through the page or two of meticulous performance of the task.
I always wanted to make a locked door puzzle where the newspaper-pencil trick seemed the obvious solution but (of course) didn't work due to real-life obstacles such as, well, door sills. I mean, how big does the gap under a door have to be not only to fit an old-fashioned key but sometimes also a bloody newspaper like in 'Post Mortem'?

But the thing is, the only reason that most of us got into adventure games is that they were the "in thing" when we were kids. If I was 10 years younger, I'd have probably grown up playing games like Quake and Halo, and I wouldn't really be interested in some quaint "adventure game".

You've got a good point - I remember trading adventure games (often lending boxed copies) with other kids in the schoolyard. Gaming on the PC was pretty much adventure games, and maybe a few simulator games, because everything else was shoddy ports of arcade or Amiga games that never played well with keyboard controls.

But another important factor, at least for me, was that adventures were some of the most sophisticated games of their day. Not only did they offer a strong story element, usually in the most cinematic ways current technology would allow. They also gave you a full word to explore, and to interact with it in any way you could think of (thanks to the parser) instead of just shooting or punching your way through the levels. They offered arcade mini games, not because it was a requirement of the genre, but because the added gameplay variety and often fit quite well into an action-filled narrative. That those mini games sometimes were lacking was rather a result of the technology of the day, and they were rarely much worse than contemporary action games on the PC.
Keep in mind that Sierra was always at the technological forefront. They were quick to take advantage of EGA, Adlib sound cards and later Soundblaster, VGA, scanned hand drawn graphics, digitized photos and video, CD-ROM and Full Motion Video. Today's hardcore adventure players seem to be running them on 5 year old machines, and any game with high hardware requirements is immediately met with suspicion and resentment.

If Sierra had gone on producing their Quest series in their original spirit (not deviations such as KQ8) they would most likely be producing sandbox games and MMORPGs today. And you know what? I honestly believe that if this had been a fluid development, fans of the original series would most likely be loving those genres.
Think about Police Quest, a world in which you can drive around a whole city, explore selected interior locations, engage in car chases and shootouts, and even play a poker mini game. How is this any different from the recent GTA games? At least personally, I find that those games come much closer to realize the potential I saw in the adventure genre back in the late eighties, than today's guess-the-designer's-mind inventory clickfests.

Sadly, market realities of the industry meant that companies like Sierra and LucasArts stopped developing the always advancing adventure genre. A few years later, certain smaller game developers realized that there was money to be made in this niche genre without too large investments. So they started churning out pale replicas of what the adventure games these people so fondly remembered used to look like in the genre's heyday. And adventure fans, they keep buying these mediocre products out of spite that the rest of the world has moved on.

Edit: Also, can't we please get rid of this silly genre tag that keep us so isolated from the rest of the gaming world, on our own misty little island full of puzzles to bash our heads against? I mean, seriously, a body of widely disparate games rigidly defined by the name of a spelunking simulator from the mid-seventies? At least the term "Doom clone" only lasted until Quake came along. I hear that the term "story games" is being now used to describe a category of games deriving from the hidden-object genre. Sounds good to me, I honestly hope that this genre gradually takes on more adventure-like elements, perhaps bringing something new to refresh the stale conventions, and becomes a more widely known term for this type of game.