Messages

I agree with Tuomas, the linebreaking is important, and I'm a bit unhappy with the way I did it too - especially that it doesn't break after the comma. But I couldn't make it work otherwise with that font. With a bit of fudging, the ideal linebreaking would probably be:

In a city
so full of life,
it's easy to ignore
the dead.

(I like "the dead" being on a line of it's own, as it's sort of a punchline)

alternately:

In a city
so full of life,
it's easy to
ignore the dead.

For legibility these are probable best. On the other hand, unfinished lines makes you read on, which I think is also the case with the linebreaking in my edit. In addition, this way the less important words ends up at the end of the line, giving the start of the line more impact. (in a city, full of life, easy to ignore, the dead).

The left one, by far. But in fact, I find the lack of a proper background to be a bigger problem considering the height of the image. There's a lot of wasted space. Besides - what's with all this talk of a city without showing it? I photoshopped this based on the original cover art for the game. I also tried to distribute the text on four lines instead of three to use the vertical space better. (In my opinion it's also a good thing to show the plinth of the Statue of Liberty as it's part of the iconographic silhouette, and makes it look less like it's sticking out of Rosa's head).

        

Edit: Added second version with different linebreaking. Cheated the word spacing a bit, but it could probably be made to look slightly better by also fudging the spacing between the characters. I would make the font slightly bigger (wider mainly), like in the first example, but unfortunately I oversaved my layered image file by mistake and can't modify it further.

Check if any of these laugh tracks would work for you:
http://www.grsites.com/sounds/comic001.shtml

Why don't you just tape a couple of sitcoms from TV, find the cleanest possible laugh and sample it? Obviously it's not legal, but I doubt it's something that you can find in the public domain.

Well, imagine the car going at 10px per frame. It would look weird if the car crashed into a wall while still being 7 or 8 pixels away from it.

No, what I meant was that you handle the collision detection the frame before before, and the next frame, instead of moving the car into the wall you can stop it at the edge. But I miscalculated thinking that collision detection was handled purely geometrically and that the car was RawDrawn - I can now see from the previous posts that you're using a character for the car and regions for the collision areas. Still, it should be perfectly possible to bump the car out of the collision area within the same frame that it enters it, so the player never sees what's going on. Just add a while loop moving it backwards one pixel at a time until it no longer collides with the area.

I would be very careful with setting the game speed to 100 as a workaround - a lot of machines won't be able to handle framerates like this and the game will run horribly slow for them (like the original GTA on my 66MHz 486 machine).

What if you handle all the collision detection one frame early? Since you already know the position, the speed and direction it should be perfectly possible to calculate for the following frame (of course the player may change these, but I doubt that one frame's difference will make the steering feel sluggish).

Thanks for clearing that up, CJ (no worries, I didn't expect any fixes for 2.72).

Ah, finally able to finish it. Very entertaining and very original. A couple of comments though:

1) The dropdown list of IP-adresses is great (thank you very much for adding it), but it would be even more awesome if it was actually clickable. It won't be more than a few lines of code to parse the text of the selected listbox item to the textbox (after cropping everything after the space) and it would really add to the usability.

2) It would also be excellent, if the Telnet box could be closed by pressing ESC or just clicking OK without entering anything.

3)

Spoiler

I thought the final encryption puzzle was great, but please, please, please allow us to view the encrypted txt while inside the T++ editor. It really sucks to have to write down all those numbers on a piece of paper first (perhaps even getting it wrong).

[close]

I wish you the best of luck in the contest!

I just added a new module to my game, bringing the total number of modules up to 18. However, when I try to save the game, I now get the compile error message:

Runtime error: too many script headers.

I've tried re-ordering my modules, and the error is always located in the bottom module no matter which one it is. So now I wonder, have I reached the limit for the number of modules you can have in a game (at least for version 2.72)? It's no big deal, since I can easily combine a few of them into one, I'm just curious about the limit.

Just import a TTF font, then extended ASCII characters, including Norwegian letters should be supported without any replacements etc. Of course the TTF font must contain those letters for it to work, but all standard windows fonts (Arial, Verdana etc.) do that.

Looks and sounds excellent, Dave. I'm a bit surprised by the cheerful graphics (almost reminds me of Two of a Kind) considering what we know about aunt Lauren's fate. But I understand the need for working with multiple artists, and I'm sure the story will be as spooky as ever.

Regarding import/export, as previously discussed it would be very convenient to have a text dump/re-import function using a format more similar to the translation source (no code fragments whatsoever, pure String/strings, GUI texts and dialogs).

Would an option to import a translation file and replace the game texts with it solve this one?

Yes, that would be perfect - as long as it actually substitutes the strings in the code rather than only replacing them on compile.

This looks excellent. I only played the first three rooms, but I can already tell it's very high quality (loved that you even have picking up-animations where you see the item). You probably should have beta tested just a little bit though, since you start the game with an inventory item that you only find later

the other uses sequences of poses

Please tell me you're working on a Zoolander game! 

Import format of sprites makes no difference as AGS stores them in its own format anyway. The only thing that matters when it comes to sprites and backgrounds is size, complexity and number of colors.

The other settings are quite obvious. Just go for the lowest possible. 320x200 at 256 colors and use as few of these colors as possible in each sprite/background. Tick the "compress sprites" setting if a small game .exe is important to you. It won't change the rar/zip'ed distribution size much.

Strange, I've never had problems with this, neither in 32- or 16-bit games, pretty much since DynamicSprites were introduced.

Edit: Just to make sure, you did remember to set the transparent parameter for Overlay.CreateGraphical, right?

Well, I know how you feel. I was a localization tester on EA's Catwoman game, which is something I try to avoid mentioning on my CV (unfortunately it's still one of the games that I'm credited for on MobyGames). Hell, that game was so bad that they even gave us free copies afterwards, which I never received for any other project.

Nice addition, Elessar. The original purpose of the code was to play back full-screen transitions rather than animate parts of the background, so I didn't consider that a different offset for each screen might be useful. Thanks for the update.

AGS doesn't have any built-in parallax scrolling functionality. But it can be emulated in a number of ways - using RawDraw or objects for the different layers. As you say, there's a plugin, but you can also check out the Easy3D module. There was another module, but as far as I recall it only supported foreground objects.

Check the on_key_press section in your global script. You'll find the line:

Code: ags

if (keycode==363) SaveGameDialog();   // F5

Add a conditional to it, so it doesn't work in the startup screen room. If it's room 1, put:

Code: ags

if ((keycode==363) && (player.Room != 1)) SaveGameDialog();   // F5