Messages

First of all, I must say that I really admire your dedication. I've followed the development blog for quite a while now, and you must certainly be one of the most efficient AGS developers. You also have amazing drawing style - and you've actually managed to transfer the characters into the game world without losing the hand drawn feel. I'm also very impressed with the coding of the crowd movement: it feels like a bustling city, not like traditional background characters walking around randomly without any sense of direction.

Unfortunately I don't have time to play through much of the game, but I've tried a couple of the betas, and the addition of a ghostly player character has helped immensely on the game's immersion. Such a simple change and yet the gameplay mechanics now make total sense and I feel that I have a mission to accomplish. Wonderful thinking outside the box.
However, I still find the interaction quite cumbersome. Without very good hints you risk the game ending up like one huge pixel hunt where you try making every character think about every object in every room of the game. It doesn't really help that you need to go to a different room (and navigate there - something I'm still having trouble with) to make a character think about objects elsewhere.

A couple of suggestions:

1) Please consider making the screen scroll automatically when the cursor nears the edge of the screen. Having to click to scroll the screen doesn't feel natural when you don't have a walking player character. If you don't agree, please at least consider making the cursor change when you get near the screen edge of a scrolling room. The "show exits" button is a great help, but it also interrupts gameplay.

2) I know this is a quite major change, but instead of the cursor "remembering" what person clicked on in another room and then combining this with another hotspot elsewhere, have you considered using an "idea inventory" similar to the Blackwell games or Resonance? If for instance I clicked on the Palace of Justice it would be stored in an inventory-like list, and I could then select it an click it on people in other rooms. This would save a lot of running back and forth, I think. And also feel more logical from a story perspective (if the ghost knows about an idea, she shouldn't have to return to its hotspot to make different people think about it at different times). This all depends on how the game is scripted of course, if the hotspots and object interactions are located in the room script I guess you still have to switch to that room temporarily to activate the event.

3) Consider reducing the amount of hotspots. I don't think I would even spend time making characters think about the railing around a grave. This should also eliminate some work as well as the number of repeating lines (I got the same response from quite a few characters when interacting with generic background elements).

And a bug report:
I ran into a pretty consistent problem where the game seems to hang for a moment when I make a character think about the hotspot. The game pauses for a second or two while the audio stutters before the character says anything. This happened when making the man in the library think about hotspots in the same room. It could be my hardware, because I'm playing on an old 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. But I just don't see what could be so CPU intensive that it would hold up the game like this - it's just text being displayed after all.

Good luck with the project. This will definitely be one of the AGS all-time greats.

Looking forward to playing it in 2026! 

It probably won't be finished anyways in the next 23 years

More like 2031, you'll have to hold out for five more years, LeChuck. Man, I can't wait to play this game on the holographic display in my flying car  . Apart from what others have already pointed out it's looking great, kaioshin. Good luck with the project!

You should be able to play the loop as an animated object easily. The game file would be somewhat larger due to using sprites instead of compressed video, but if you are able to reuse the same clouds for multiple rooms and the animation loop isn't too long it's definitely workable.

Yes, unfortunately plugins only work with Windows. If you tell us in more detail what you're trying to do, I'm sure we could suggest other solutions. Perhaps you can import the video frames as sprites and animate it as an object, or - in case you don't have anything going on while the video plays - you could just modify the video to include the background image around it?

I'd recommend using Wordpress (either hosted on wordpress.com or downloaded from wordpress.org and hosted on your own server). Although made for blogging it's a pretty powerful content management system, and there's tons of themes and plugins out there.  It takes a bit of work to set up, but once that's done adding new material is very easy.

Just google "wordpress portfolio" for examples and tutorials of how to use it for a portfolio site.

I believe you're thinking of Scorpiorus' Character Control System plugin. However, you may also want to look into strazer's CharacterControl module which does the same but will also work with non-Windows versions of your game.

It's not a feature of AGS, but check out the ags_theora Video Player plugin which allows you to do exactly that.

Stickam wouldn't be a bad idea aside from there being no way to prevent people from starting cam spots and interrupting the proceedings.

As far as I know that should not be a problem when using the debate mode - only the mods can allow participants to broadcast video. But yes, it should be password protected if possible not to have too many random people coming and going.

Edit: Can't find anything about password protection, but you can read more about how debate rooms work here: http://webmaster.stickam.com/2007/01/debate_room_beta.html

Since nobody else followed up on it, I must say that I think SSH's suggestion of running the awards on Stickam is an excellent idea. To me, it would feel more like watching a "real" awards ceremony. Of course the nominees and host would have to dress up - I want to see SSH in a kilt
There could be "red carpet interviews" with attendees before the actual awards begin and using ManyCam it would also be possible to show still frames or even broadcast (pre-recorded) footage from the nominated games. Since the debate function only offers video for the host and the winners, we wouldn't need a separate channel for comments like we had on IRC to avoid clutter. Of course a few winners won't have webcams, or may not want to appear on video, but I'm sure their responses won't be drowned out in the chat window.

The video feed could even be recorded using screen grabber software and offered as download/streaming video for those not able to participate, just like the old IRC logs.

Maybe add an optional bool as the last parameter (true by default) that indicates whether to add the border?

Or add an optional int (1 by default) to specify border thickness?

I often experience the problem in the sprite editor where alpha sprites have weird garbage around them in their supposedly transparent area (random line patterns that fill out the square, sometimes seems to be parts of the sprite stretched out). It can make it quite difficult to identify your animation frames.

The next step of course is AGS Guitar Hero...

I was actually working on this but had trouble finding a nice standardized script format for the songs that would allow you to use files from Frets of Fire and other PC Guitar Hero clones. It seems most of the games either store the gameplay relevant data inside their midi files or use compressed packages containing both the song script and audio files. I just don't think there would be much point to it, if my game only had one or two songs compared to all the free material available for those other games.
Perhaps if I finished the game module and the song editor (for syncing chord data with the music) I could make an AGS competition where people could contribute their own music to the game's song library.

CJ: Slightly off-topic, but this reminded me that Ghostlady experienced problems with certain formats of .mp3 files not playing. I recommended her to contact you, but I'm not sure if she did so. She did report the issue in my jigsaw module thread though. We eventually solved it by using .ogg instead, but I have the original .mp3 files that I can send to you if you want to check it out. Maybe it can't be fixed, but it would be nice if any incompatibility was mentioned in the manual so people didn't spend time troubleshooting their code instead.

Since there won't be a major overhaul of the translation feature any time soon, I have one small suggestion:

When I worked as a professional localization tester, we were constantly running into problems of strings not having unique IDs. For instance a simple adjective like "New" could be re-used multiple times in the English GUI text, but in French or Italian it would need different forms depending on what it's referring to (new game, new player profile etc.). Since AGS directly translates strings based on content, there's really no way of distinguishing between these. So, what I'd like to suggest would be a new - and fully documented - masking symbol that would allow you to insert comments/IDs into strings, which wouldn't be displayed in-game and would be ignored in String.Length and GetTextWidth calculations. For instance:

Code: ags

lblNewGame.Text = "New^MAINMENU^"

and

Code: ags

lblNewProfile.Text= "New^PLAYERPROFILE^"

would become two unique Strings in the translation source despite displaying the same text in-game.

But what will he do with the two-headed squirrel now that they no longer serve peanuts on airplanes? Remember to bring your golf club!

If you ever want to use it, here's some code:

Code: ags

Overlay* CreateCustomTextOverlay(int x,  int y,  int width, FontType font, String text, int color, int outlinecolor, Alignment alignment) {
  Overlay* customtextoverlay;
  int textwidth = width-2;
  int textheight = GetTextHeight(text, font, textwidth-1);  
  DynamicSprite* customtextsprite = DynamicSprite.Create(width, textheight + 2, false);
  DrawingSurface* customtextsurface = customtextsprite.GetDrawingSurface();
  SetGameOption(OPT_ANTIALIASFONTS, 0);
  customtextsurface.DrawingColor = outlinecolor;
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(0, 0, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(1, 0, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(2, 0, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(0, 1, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(2, 1, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(0, 2, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(1, 2, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(2, 2, textwidth, font, alignment, text);  
  SetGameOption(OPT_ANTIALIASFONTS, 1);
  customtextsurface.DrawingColor = color;
  customtextsurface.DrawStringWrapped(1, 1, textwidth, font, alignment, text);
  customtextsurface.Release();
  customtextoverlay = Overlay.CreateGraphical(x, y, customtextsprite.Graphic, true);
  return customtextoverlay;
  }

This should generate a custom text overlay with a 1-pixel outline (if you use high-res coordinates for the game, otherwise insert "customtextsurface.UseHighResCoordinates = true;" before the DrawStringWrapped calls).

You could always write your own Say function that renders text as a graphical overlay similar to what I did. Basically I'm drawing the text 8 times non-antialiased at 1 pixel offsets for the outline and then drawing the interior text anti-aliased. I find that it looks a lot smoother than the built-in rendering of TTF fonts over transparent background:

Above: Custom rendering of text as graphical overlay.
Below: Text on GUI label. Note especially the 'a' and the 's' as less readable and the jaggies on 'v', 'w' and 'y'.

LOL, Goldmund. This whole thread would make for an awesome Photoshop Phriday.

Girlfriend came back a few days ago, so I had to get rid of the 'stache. But not without documenting the process:



1) Was going for the Village People handlebar moustache but ended up looking like Morgan Spurlock.
2) I don't know, Mexican bandit or something?
3) Burt Reynolds style!
4) Horrible Vincent Price impression, but that pencil moustache was classy as hell. I'm gonna miss it.

You can use Game.GetLoopCountForView(int view) (and similar use Game.GetFrameCountForLoop to check that an existing loop doesn't have 0 frames).