Messages

Spoiler

Yes, the name is what you're missing. I'm guessing that you haven't gotten to read JoAnn's Notebook yet. Perhaps Joey's ghostly powers could help you in that respect?

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Spoiler

I was stuck at this point (I think) for a long time. Did you take time to really talk with Joey yet?

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Neither Mixed Up Mother Goose nor Sierra's other kid's game The Black Cauldron had typing interfaces. The only freely available parser game that I can think of, which might be appropriate for children in the company of a parent, is Conquest of Camelot (http://www.christymarx.com/writing/camelot.htm). It's not made for children though, and it does feather action sequences and frequent player character deaths.

An excellent children's game, without typing though, is Pepper's Adventures in Time, which can be downloaded for free from: http://www.markseibert.com/the_full_game.htm.

Is it actually slow though? I order a very large array using that function and don't see any framerate drops.

Jesus christ SSH, you're the module master, and instead of showing off with yet another module, you actually ask CJ for improved functionality? What has the world come to?

I think this snippet of code does pretty much what you're requesting, it doesn't currently distringuish by upper- and lowercase though:

Code: ags

#sectionstart Alphabetize(String a, String b)// DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE
function Alphabetize(String a, String b) {
  int ordered;
  int charlength;
  if (a.Length >= b.Length) charlength = b.Length;
	else if (a.Length < b.Length) charlength = a.Length;
	int lettercount;
  while ((ordered == 0) && (lettercount <= charlength)) {
    if (a.Chars[lettercount] > b.Chars[lettercount]) ordered = -1;
    else if (a.Chars[lettercount] < b.Chars[lettercount]) ordered = 1;
    else lettercount++;
    }
	return ordered;
	}
#sectionend Alphabetize(String a, String b)// DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE

SSH, you're really becoming my arch nemesis. Every time I spend months and months on scripting something cool, someone pops up in the beginners forum asking for that particular functionality, and you whip something up in a day or two. Cursed be the day that CJ introduced modular scripting.

On a more upbeat note, cheers for another job well done.

Scanlines by GUI look fine in 640x480, I've been doing exactly this for my game and even text is easily readable as long as the scanlines are about 75% transparent.

For the localized speech, I think it would make sense to have a subdirectory to the editor folder called Speech. E.g. Speech\French, Speech\German etc. with the audio files using the same numbering as the original. On compiling, it could output french.vox, german.vox etc. which would then be used instead of speech.vox if french.tra or german.tra were selected from the setup.

Is that the way the game ends?   If so, I was disappointed there.

Spoiler

No, after the scene in the sewers, it cuts to the airport where Sonny's boss is seeing him and Marie off (with a jazz band playing in the background). Then there's a short scene of them on the airplane where Sonny asks Marie to marry him. THE END

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Basic HTML... Frames?  :o

Heh Frames only in the meaning of scrolling/non-scrolling parts of the webpage, sometimes common for all pages on the same site, sometimes unique. Not as in horrible things that keep opening pages within tiny little parts of the screen. In general I haven't bother implement functionality which I consider bad web design.
The only big thing - from a user perspective - which my system currently is missing is the ability to highlight and copy text (to paste into search boxes). I developed a concept for how it would work, but I don't know if I'll get it implemented before completing Shadowplay.

I have coded a system like this, which emulates basic html functionality (also inspired by SYDNEY). It's quite similar to what SSH describes, except it uses pure RawDraw instead of GUIs. It was rather complicated and I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner, even though most of the big problems were related to line-breaking, scrolling/non-scrolling frames and images inserted into the text - things you don't mention needing.

My system uses separate commands for text elements such as:
AddText(String htmltext) //formatting of main text is set in a style-sheet  beforehand
AddHeadline(String text, int color, int font, PicAlign alignment)
AddLink(String linktext, int linktopage, LinkStyle param, String description, int offset) //offset is used to link to specific sections of the text

This is mainly because of the 500 char line length limit when writing text directly in the script editor (and also when I started coding it, AGS still used 200 char limit strings). I do see some benefits in using formatting codes within the String itself, but since the script editor limits prevents me from cut-n-pasting large amounts of text from elsewhere, it doesn't seem worth the effort to me.

This seems like such a minor thing in a game that it's hardly worth the effort to implement in my opinion. But you might look into the AreThingsOverlapping(int thing1, int thing2) function for the clouds and sun, although it isn't pixel perfect. I'm not sure what kind of numbers it returns (the manual states they are arbitrary, so it doesn't seem to be percentages), but you should be able to re-calculate them as a value to feed into TintScreen, RawDrawFrameTransparent or whatever other method you want to use for making the screen darker.

I think at 320x240 you should be fine on most systems. I run in 640x480 (32 bit color) and there the framerate sometimes dips below 35. BTW, the slowdown doesn't come from the number of particles but rather from the fullscreen DynamicSprite, so there's not much you can do to optimize the process.

You are right, I'm sure there's a better way of doing it.

I don't remember if the armor had any other functions, but an easy solution would be to let it work slightly different from the other inventory items. Instead of getting a "Use armor on" interaction, clicking on it could just make Pib wear the armor if in the correct location or say "I don't need to wear it here" anywhere else.

My way of doing it, which is admittedly somewhat slow, is to clear the background to RGB(255,0,255), rawdraw all particles without translucency, creating a DynamicSprite from the background, restore the background and assigning the DynamicSprite to a near-fullscreen transparent GUI. Alternately you could RawDraw some of the drops directly to the background for a sense of depth (player walks in front of some and behind others).

If CJ would only allow tint/light manipulation of DynamicSprites a (CPU wise) faster solution would be to RawDraw everything to screen based on baselines, including characters and objects.

I think SSH would love to do a module for this

Kidding aside, it's not that hard to write a module to handle multiple inventory types. Just create a struct the size of all existing inventory items, have an enumerated int value to assign type, and an int to assign current owning character.
Every time the player opens the inventory window, have a function loop through the struct, checking for 1) if player character owns object and 2) if it's the right type, and add objects to the inventory accordingly.

For a module, the inventory function call could be something like FillInventory(InvWindow *invtofill, ItmType item). You would also add two small functions to add items to player inventory and to transfer items between two characters.

Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon had it as an (alternate?) solution to getting back into the hacker's apartment. Not sure how you'd do it if you forgot to pick up the pencil in the beginning.

What was the first adventure game to include speech?

Mean Streets?

Rui posted while I was writing, but nevertheless:

Broken Sword - combining an interesting true historical story as the subject of an adventure game.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)
Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (1995)
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (1996)

Conclusion: Derivative piece of crap

And my own contribution:

Gold Rush - Multilinear, three distinct paths through middle part of game. City of Boston as a "living world" where characters move around and events happen independent of the player character.

Rooms already have custom properties, why not just use one of those?