Messages

Mordalles, you can move the camera around a bit wit the WASD keys, but it seems to be a debug function rather than a feature, since the locations obviously aren't built to be seen from other angles.

Monkey, could you please elaborate on that? I never heard of this before, and I don't quite understand your example since all the fonts end with 0 (and don't have a file extension). How would I rename my ttf fonts (currently agsfntX.ttf) for this to work?

if setting the X and Y coordinates in the repeatedly_execute, make sure to also set the followcharacter's loop and frame accordingly, since he won't animate by himself.

First the 3D plugin, then the lake module, and now this amazing feat! Steve, you're the master of background manipulation. I quite honestly think that the background in the module looks just as good as those in Post Mortem.

Am I right in assuming that the effect would still look quite rough in 640x480 resolution since RawDraw only works with 320x200 coordinates? It would of course be possible to do it per horizontal pixel with a bit of resizing in-between the copying, deformation and drawing, but it would most probably be very slow and doubling the amount of dynamic sprites needed.
Instead I was wondering if you have any plans to add a Myst-mode to the 3D plugin, using the full 3D rendering to create a panorama textured SkyBox room with the player in the middle? As it is now, it's perfectly do-able by scripting with sprites as textures. But how much work do you think it would take to use a background for texture like here, and add hotspots through the editor? A six surface room does add the problem of floor/ceiling though, and how they would be placed on the background frame.

I should remark that I don't intend to use such a feature myself - I wouldn't even know how to make the background renders - I'm merely curious, since I'm doing a lot of RawDraw based scripting myself and know about the limitations and my own attempts to overcome them.

So many people have been asking about Myst-like panoramas (or later games in the series rather), and now you've come a very long way in fulfilling that wish. You're making a lot of people happy with this. Awesome work!

Edit:

I just read the manual and saw that the module was hardcoded to 320x240, so that answers part of the question I guess.

But why only music, why not sounds and fonts as well?

The problem with LimpingFish's suggestion is that the characters and objects won't be filtered. A solution would be to add different noise to every character frame and run an idle animation with noise the moment he stands still. It seems a lot of trouble instead of overlaying a filter on the whole scene (and three frames pr. background also adds considerably to the file size).

Is this supposed to be a guy in a chicken suit or a real chicken? Because real chickens don't have knees like that (their thighs are covered in feathers, so the knee is just above the yellow part of the legs, and the knee joint is backwards compared to humans. Even if it's a comic book chicken, it makes the walk animation look very strange.

I like the art style though, it looks almost like claymation.

Woohoo! I doubt I can come up with something as fun and original as this week's Quizzening, but I'll try to work something out during the weekend.

Have you set the NPC characters to be clickable?

I find it strange that RawDrawing bullets should be so slow. I have a module RawDrawing 200 particles every loop without problems. If you can display 50+ objects on screen at the same time, none of them can be very big, so I don't know where the slowdown comes from. What kind of system are you running it on (CPU and RAM in particular)?

No, all viewport settings are initialized at game start and can't be changed from in-game (except smooth character scaling and vsync). This is true for resolution, color depth (force 16-bit mode in a 32-bit game) and the new filters. In theory you CAN change these settings from in-game  - by reading/writing to the acsetup.cfg file - but the game would always have to be restarted anyway for the changes to take effect.

Why is it so important for you to change them from in-game?

Edit: One further problem in changing the resolution (though not the windowed/nonwindowed state) is that savegames saved at 320x200 won't work in 640x400 resolution and vice versa.

Edit 2: I just did some tests of one solution I could think of, but it seems that the RunAGSGame function does NOT re-initialize the viewport (my test was starting a game in full screen, ALT-TAB'ing to windows, editing the .cfg file by hand and setting "windowed=1", ALT-TAB'ing back to the game and triggering a RunAGSGame restarting the same game .exe). The restarted game was still full screen.

To the best of my knowledge, no it's not possible to toggle between screen modes from within the game. The properties that you mention are, as should also be stated in the manual, read only.

But your workaround should work fine if your change the resolution in the winsetup.exe menu. You can either set the resolution (for a 320x240) game to 640x480 - which would also make scaled characters look slightly better, OR in newer AGS versions you can use one of the graphics filters to run in double or triple resolution.

I would suggest the same solution as dkh. This is exactly how the post-effect filters in Shadowplay work. The only problem I've come across is that when you're using AGS dialog system and the choice of topics is displayed, all animation will halt even if handled in repeatedly_execute_always. I've asked CJ about this, and the cause is that no game loops run during topic selection.

So unless you plan on using your own dialog system (or the scrolling dialog topics module), be aware of this limitation.

You could just put something like this into your code:

Code: ags

mylabel.Text = GetTranslation(originalstring);

As the String is returned untranslated if there is no translation, you don't even need to check for that first.

Thanks for the reply, CJ. It sounds like this would solve the problem.

Perhaps when you change the RawDraw routines to support sprites,  you could think of adding a feature I've suggested before, of copying the alpha channel of one sprite to a DynamicSprite of the same size?

Edit by strazer:

Are you talking about this tracker entry?

Excellent news, Goldmund. Donna is a game I've been looking forward to pretty much since joining these forums, and it's great to hear that the game is nearing completion.

The new screens are beautiful. Did you take the background pictures yourself, or are they stuff you found on the internet? I remember the hallway picture that you posted in the critics lounge, where the stairway image could be googled, but I'm wondering if this is the case for all backgrounds? Either way, I'm impressed with the uniform and very distinct style you've managed to create.

The psyche level sounds like an intriguing gameplay feature, especially knowing how much effort you put into character development and the psychological/philosophical aspect of the vampire theme. Just be careful that it doesn't lead to walking deads (how appropriate for a vampire game...), if the psyche level gets too low, there's no alternate solution to the puzzle and no way to raise it again until you proceed.

Keep up the good work. I'm happy to hear that it won't be too long now. I so much want to play this game.

Edit: Is that Donna wearing a wig on the first two pictures?

Since the DynamicSprite commands were introduced, I've been using them for pretty much any special effect in my games.  Certain effects, that required manipulation of the full screen were very slow though (due to repeatedly creating a sprite from a screenshot, duplicating it and cropping it within the same loop). For the same reason, I previously suggested adding the option of specifying coordinates in CreateFromScreenshot as in CreateFromBackground.
That is, until I saw the workaround used in SteveMcCrea's lake module of using ANOTHER background frame as a buffer. I.e. pasting the image onto that frame and using CreateFromBackground to manipulate parts of it. This was an ingenious solution and also helps greatly in a lot of other cases. This got me thinking about other uses for such a frame, and the problems it currently creates.

Therefore, I would like to propose the implementation of a 6th background frame. It would always be present, always the same size as the first frame, filled with the color (255, 0, 255) and not usable as an animating background frame. It would purely be used as a buffer for RawDraw routines.

1) This would make life easier for module makers, because the end user didn't have to be instructed to create an additional background frame for every room using their effects.

2) In addition, it could safely be used without messing up an animating background.

3) I assume a RawClearScreen is much quicker than RawRestoreScreen, speeding up pretty much any effect RawDrawing and creating DynamicSprites from the screen. (such as text deformation, colored text and other modules). It would also get rid of the issue - common when using multiple modules by different authors - of the screen being unnecessarily RawRestored several times each loop.

Thanks for reading this. I think this suggestion could be helpful to lots of people.

Sinsin, jpg is a bad format for pixel art because the compression routine adds noise to the image. That's what Zanna was saying. If you compare the image that you posted with Ben's paintover, you will see that your version has lots of noise (i.e. pixels that should be, but aren't entirely the same color) in the sweater and the face. That's what he meant by confused, I think.

.png and .gif are the preferred formats when posting in the critics lounge (gif only supports up to 256 colors though)

There's a magnificent political simulator called "Democracy", it's an indie game, and you can download a demo version from http://democracygame.com/ - but I assure you, at a price of 23 dollars, it's worth every penny. You'll find a good review at http://www.gametunnel.com/gamespace.php?id=74ab=3.

This is an awesome idea for a quiz! Great work, Strange Visitor. I'm having lots of fun with it.