Messages

Off-topic, does this mean that you're working on a speech pack for A Tale of Two Kingdoms? I haven't played it yet and just downloaded the new version, but if a speech pack is coming, I might wait to play it.

Sounds really cool, Dave. Looking forward to the video!

To make this kind of thing (object placement/area scaling factor) easier, you could also create a debug GUI that won't be available in the final game. This could tell you the coordinates and scale of the object and let you drag it around, as well as offer instant SetAreaScaling for experimenting.

I coded a similar interface to let me play around with the lighting and tint effects in-game.

Yeah, this would be a very convenient feature. In addition, could we perhaps get an Object.Scaling and Object.ManualScaling property, allowing them to scale independent of walkable areas, analogous to characters?

If you just mean where do you get the coordinates, they're in the manual. It's part of the game's copy protection. If you mean why you're going to Gingivitis to find the Goliath, I don't have a clue - it's been 12+ years since I played it.

What's so drastic about compiling your game with a more recent version of AGS? Unless you developed it on 2.62 or earlier, I don't think it would create many problems. And it streamlines the process of setting up the Vista specific features.

BTW, I'm not using XP, I use Win2k

Which is why I said "at least on Windows XP"

Blood runs better just using VDMSound than with DOSBox, at least on Windows XP. I worked on one of the biggest mods for the game, so I've had to get it running on different operating systems throughout the years. This site has some detailed information of how to get it working with sound.

Edit: Despite what the guy says on the site, I did get it running the highest resolution (at least 800x600, possibly even more - but maybe I'm thinking of the map editor).

Did you install .NET framework 2.0 on the computer?

I'm sorry, and I mean no offence, but where on earth do you find the logic in that suggestion?! Isn't that what publishers pressure the games media to do when they know they have a stinker on their hands? What would the point in protecting these games be? So people can blindly download them for a forthnight, with no idea of their quality?

So that people can download them without prejudice for a fortnight. Imagine that Trevor Daison had received the two cups stamp just a couple of days after its release. How many people would have played it? Enough to gain it the excellent user rating it has now? Besides, when was the last time you downloaded a game "blindly"? I'm pretty sure that most of us look at the screenshots, read the plot description, scan the user feedback in the promotion thread. If your time is too valuable to download games without the official stamp of approval, just wait a week or two before getting it.

If a developer doesn't want to have their game rated until fourteen days has passed, then don't release it. Use those fourteen days to find bugs, tighten up the scripting, proof-read the dialogue, etc. Then release your five cup opus.

Or hey, maybe you release the game, get loads more user feedback than your beta testers were able to supply, and then release a much improved version 1.1 within a week. In a perfect world, every game would we bug free on release, but even with professional QA that's nigh impossible. How would the original release of The Infinity String have scored compared to the patched version that came out a few days later?

While I do think the cup ratings are a good idea, I actually agree with bicilotti that there probably should be a week or two's embargo on rating games just after their release. If a section of "Recent additions" was added to the games list, the games would still be advertised even though they're unrated.

I also agree that the games list could use some more filters. What about, for instance, to have games rated first by number of cups, then by user rating. As I understood it, the ratings was one way of avoiding the alphabetic lists, so there's no reason why the sub-category lists should be alphabetic.

Well, it really depends, where are they displayed? As Sierra style speech (over the bacground), in a text area at the bottom of the screen or something else?

You could try to change the settings for the game and run it in 640x480, or in 1280x960 by using the 2x nearest-neighbour filter. Alternately, to avoid any TFT scaling, you could run it in a window with either of those settings.

Edit: The latter is only available for games compiled with AGS 2.72 and later.

The portraits themselves look great (I've seen the characters you posted earlier, and the style certainly fits). However, I dislike the framing. First of all, the heavy, dark frame makes it look like you're watching the characters on a TV. Secondly, I think you're leaving way too much space above the character's head - you really should try cropping it closer, even if it ruins the square aspect ratio. Alternately, move them up in the frame to show more of their body.

It'll show whatever you stick in the Save Games folder.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Thanks. The game_start thing can probably be worked around in some way (by adding some extra code to the on_event(eEventRestoreGame) script) - currently I write the RawTime to an external file in game_start to be able to monitor the time of the current play session across restores.

The help file (as always ) clarified things a great deal. I only have one last question - not necessarily to CJ but to any Vista users: Does Game Explorer display the entire content of the save game folder or only the actual save game files?

Thanks for the super quick reply and the elaborate description of the Vista features, CJ! The enhanced save game feature looks really, really neat. What will the sequence of savegames loaded through this feature be? Will game_start() be run before the savegame is actually loaded?
Also, just to understand how everything works - how does the game get registered in Game Explorer? Is this handled by the game's install program, or is it up to the user? Or does Vista register the game automatically the first time it runs?

What I could look into is adding some sort of $SAVEGAMEDIR$ tag to File.Open so that you could write your own files to the save game folder (which would always be writable).

Oh, that would be an excellent solution since it would also allow multiple users to each have their own game settings.

I also remembered, given that Vista doesn't like having programs writing into the Program Files, how will the AGS Game Settings utility work?

That's a good point. It will still work, but Vista does some "backwards compatibility" stuff involving creating a fake Program Files folder in your User directory and putting the files there instead, which is all rather messy. I'll have to think if there's an easy way to handle the game setup in this context -- perhaps I should move the settings to the registry.

I don't own Vista, and I don't really intend to get it until absolutely necessary. However compatibility is very important to me, as to anyone who wants their game distributed widely. I have been writing a module that stores additional settings in the acsetup.cfg file (such as sound volume and gamma setting as well as game-specific configurations). By reading them from the .cfg on game start as well as on restore, I avoid the problem of user settings being changed back when restoring an old savegame.
As I understand it from your discription, this method will still work due to the backwards compatibility, but is somehow less than optimal? Should I rethink the feature if I want to guarantee compatibility with Vista and/or future versions of AGS? Obviously it wouldn't be possible to read/write settings to the registry from within an AGS game without the use of a plugin.

Tearing is a known problem in scrolling rooms. If vsync doesn't help I don't have any other suggestions.

As for talking animations, you'll have to start and stop the head animating manually. The problem is that Say is blocking, so whenever that is used, the walk animation will freeze. You'd be best off scripting your own version of the Say command, that starts the head animating, displays the text (possibly by using SayBackground or your own overlay), then stops the head animating when the text disappears (handy to know, the text stays for ((StrLen(text) / game.text_speed) + 1) * GetGameSpeed() loops).

You can try to set System.VSync to true and see if it changes anything.