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Great work, CJ. I came across a problem though. Probably related to the extended ASCII characters previously crashing the editor, they now seem to just get corrupted when importing an old game. In my script, the name "René Descartes" becomes "RenàÆ'© Descartes" when importing from 2.72 Final 2 to 2.8 Alpha 6.

Sure just look up unhandled_event in the manual. You see that you want to use type 3, but you may also want to distinguish at least between characters and objects/hotspots in the responses ("I see no reason to shoot at that.", "No, I'm not a killer!").

Check the player.ActiveInventory property to distinguish between different items.

Mmm... body of Christ

What about men who have gender reassignment surgery and become lesbian women then? Are they more or less gay?

You're confusing gay with transgendered, which in turn has less to do with sex than with gender identity.

Ali is right that there's a chane of a transparent object causing a slowdown. I do think a full background is a waste of file space though (even if nearly identical screens should compress pretty well).
As I said, it all depends on how the lightning itself is implemented. If it's just a square area on the wall lighting up to mimic lightnig through a window, then paint the shadow as a non-lit area of that square.

If this is a one-time event, and the scientist is always in the same position when the lightning strikes, the easiest solution would be to just create the shadow as a black silhouette, and assign the sprite to an object. The object would be 100% transparent (invisible) for most of the time, but while the lightning strikes you set the transparency to 50%.

It would be easier to tell you the best method if you show a screenshot of the scene. How do you animate the flash from the lightning itself? If you're already drawing that as an animation, just draw the shadow on top of it.

There's no proper record book without "the biggest", and the winner is: La Gran Castanya by Arnau Bernat, wih 160 MB!

Perhaps the biggest free game, but the installer for Blackwell Legacy is around 185 MB, and Al Emmo is the size of a CD-ROM (almost 700 MB). Force Majeure 2: The Zone is also huge I think, considering all the video (demo alone is 148 MB, couldn't find the size of full version).

There IS a roundabout way to do this through RawDraw, DynamicSprites and pixel perfect detection, but it's not really worth it as it generally looks crap and will cause a slowdown when you generate the DynamicSprite. The easiest solution by far is drawing two versions of every inventory item (one with, one without outline) and swapping the two on mouseovers.

Edit: In regards to Ionias' post, just to make things clear, there's no reason to waste a view per item unless they are actually animated

You can use the Character.Solid property, and set it to false for characters when they die.

[OpenURL("www.blah.com")]

There's nothing equivilent to an OpenURL("www.blah.com") command?

Once again a launcher program is probably your best bet, since AGS script can only run other AGS games. The launcher would start  the game, then remain resident until the game exits and open the URL in a web browser when the game closes. Try asking someone who codes Visual Basic or similar, this shouldn't be difficult stuff. I'm myself learning bits of VB Express to make my own laucher program, and just after half an hour playing around with it, I can do about half of what you would need - sadly not enough to help you out, yet.

I didn't test the game you link to, but I think you're talking about vector graphics, not mathematical vectors (which there is a module for), right?
Try looking up the RawDraw functions in the manual and see if they won't do the trick.

Sounds like the Alan Wake engine would be perfect for this idea. I'm not sure how interesting I would find it to play a whole game only about the weather (it's even more niche than those deer hunting games), but as a dynamic world, sandbox sort of game it would be lovely to play around with.

Yes, there is no anti-aliasing of DynamicSprites, and savegame sprites generally don't look great. However, unless you need to show a big version of the savegame screenshot anywhere, you may get a better result by saving it as 120x60 to start with instead of resizing later. Use game.screenshot_height and game.screenshot_width to preset that.

I get this all the time too, and it IS very annoying, but for me it only shows up in the editor. Does it actually appear like this in the game, or just in the editor?

Edit: Oh yeah, this is only for 32-bit sprites using alpha channels, right?

If you don't want to mess with the Windows registry, I think the program also allows you to do the same thing by dumping a .dat file to the directory.

Or just check for the speech.vox file in the game dir instead.

You could even make a autosave right before quitting and restore the game when the game restarts (but probably a good idea to ask the user whether they want to resume the game first).

Edit: If you follow scotch's method, it would probably be better if the downloader doesn't  access the internet until the game is definitely closed. Otherwise the user's firewall program might come up with a warning, minimizing the AGS window and thus preventing the script to proceed.

Everybody writes their design documents differently. Most of us working alone don't bother too much writing everything down beforehand (certainly not small things like room object descriptions, and incidental dialog may also be added while coding the game).  Even a lot of the old Sierra/LucasArts games were partly written by the programmers.

I recommend that you take a look at some professional design documents from the golden age of adventure games:

Christy Marx' outline for Conquest of the Longbow is a nice example of a step-outline for the puzzle design.

Al Lowe's design documents for Leisure Suit Larry 5-7, Freddy Pharkas and Torin's Passage are much more detailed.

Neither include dialogs, but for dialogs and cutscenes I would just recommend using standard screenplay format. If you're a professional screenwriter you probably have Final Draft, which should be perfect for the job.

Why not just:

Code: ags

rep_ex()
{
  GUI *theGui = GUI.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y);
  if (lotsa_stuff[theGui.ID].Hover) {
      // do hover stuff
    }
}

?

is there any way to repair a totally scratched cd

As long as the scratches are only in the plastic and the metal foil layer isn't damaged, you could try getting one of those scratch repair kits that work by grinding down the damaged part of the plastic. You can see a number of different products at: http://www.computercleanusa.com/products/getprod.asp?product_id=cd-335
Try asking around if any of your friends have a device similar to the Gamedoctor/Skipdoctor product on that page, that's the kind of device that dvd rental shops use to repair their discs, and it's probably the safest way to do it as they always peel off an even layer.