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Some types of strings (i.e. ones that are modified or created by the engine, typically used in linebreaking code etc.) don't work with translations. In that case, you must ask the author to hardcode the translated text into the game code and use the Game.TranslationFilename property to check when it should be displayed.

I'm having big problems with this in my own game, so much that I'm almost giving up the idea of having it translated since every damn webpage in the game would need its own version for every language .

Edit by strazer: it's -> its

Ok, the problem in this case is the capitalization of the X I think. You've written FollowCharacterEX instead of FollowCharacterEx. There may be other problems, but since I'm using a later version of AGS, I'm only familiar with the new object-oriented versions of the commands.

The 'Set Trasparency' line should be SetCharacterTransparency though, I think. Be very careful with correct spelling, spaces and capitalization.

You said something about FollowCharacter not working, which I don't really understand. But anyway, just create another character (not 3D), create a black blob sprite for it's view, set it's transparency to 50 or so and place it at (player.x, player.y) every loop through the repeatedly_execute_always.

(Or rather at (player.x, player.y - (shadowheight/2)) to make it seem beneath the character - but then I would suggest resizing it manually to avoid it being a different scale than the character).

Are you using any kind of plugin or module for your credits? If so, which one? If not, could you please post your credits code?

Parser seemed to work well in Trilby's Note, as you say, but also the AGI horror game Enclosure. I'm a big fan of text parsers, because usually the puzzles make much more sense than in point-n-click games (since you need to type the right words and can't just click wildly). Of course this requires the designer to take that fact into consideration and create reasonably obvious solutions!

If you do go for the text parser, make sure to beta test the game intensely. And make your testers keep lists of all the words and commands they tried, which made sense in the situation but didn't work. There's nothing more frustrating than knowing exactly what you want to do but not knowing how to tell it to the game (i.e. the final puzzle in LSL2).

dkh, the floating in air situation should be quite simple since the shadow coordinates would still be (character.x, character.y) if you use the  the character.z to make the character float. Most AGS users only use shadows for making the character seem "grounded", or in the floating situation, do define his depth position in the room.

The problem with combining the character module with AGS3D for shadow rendering is that the basic geometry of the room has to be mapped on in a 3D space. For most users this would be way too much work just for shadows and would be quite impossible with some art styles that don't rely on realistic perspective.

I wrote a shadow rendering module for 2D characters which uses geometry and basic rules of drawing to project a dynamic shadow of a character onto the floor, walls and ceiling of a basic room. The light source is defined using x, y and a height coordinate, and if it is possible to grab a DynamicSprite of the character rendered from this point in the room, the module would work just as fine with 3D characters. I'm sure it could be speeded up greatly if the rendering was done in a plugin instead, but I would suggest an approach similar to this instead of one that requires full modelling of the room (one of the main reasons I gave up on the WinterMute engine).

But wouldn't it be possible to just project it directly below the character, as if he was standing under a lamp? Then you would have the equivalent of a blob shadow but matching the character's movement and have no problems with it projecting onto objects or walls.

It's bad enough that voice packs are often bigger than the game itself but please don't make us download speech packs for languages we don't even understand. It WOULD be nice if AGS supported multiple speech packs, sure but I worry that it would lead to bloated distribution files where you download three times more data than you need.

If you distribute the game on cd-rom or other format that doesn't need download, most install makers such as InnoSetup should make it quite easy to let the player choose his language on install and copy the correct speech.vox file to the game directory. For any web based distribution, separate downloadable speech files is the only sensible thing.

Christy Marx have her games Conquest of Camelot and Conquest of the Longbow available for download on her website

Leisure Suit Larry-creator Al Lowe also put some of his lesser known games up on allowe.com

Gogol Bordello was probably the best act I saw at the Roskilde Festival. It's gypsy punk and in fact not too far from the klezmer music of Golem, that MrColossal linked to or DeVotchKa, which MashPotato posted about. They're currently touring Europe so keep an eye out for them. I'm going to see them again in Bologna next month.

My other favorite band from Roskilde was the indie rock band The Editors who aren't quite as good on cd as they were live.

Awesome news, I've been missing the PodQuests. In fact, didn't Grundislav mention a new PodQuest on his website recently?

Using the method I mentioned above, you could at least position the waypoints in-game and export the coordinates to an external text file for cut-n-pasting into code. Depending on how your cutscenes are set up I would even think it possible to watch the cutscene, edit the positions without quitting the game and the restart the cutscene.

CJ explained the limits like this:

The reason for limits is to speed up data loading and saving, since the data structures are a fixed size. It would be possible to remove most of the limits, but this would probably make save game and game loading times slower.

But do you really need objects to specify waypoints? If you set up a large struct containing x and y coordinates, you could have a virtually infinite number of waypoints, and they could be displayed for debug purposes using RawDraw functions.

This sounds very interesting. Especially the "Current thought" caption intrigues me, I can't start to imagine what the gameplay will be like. Other Worlds is one of my favorite AGS games of all time. It had such innovative puzzles so I'm looking very much forward to this one.

I know this isn't the critics lounge, and I don't know if it's too late for changes. But here goes: I honestly think you should change the clothes textures into something more photorealistic and possibly add bump mapping. The T-shirt in particular stands out as very CGI, and the shoes look much too clean. I would probably change the jeans texture too, but it doesn't call attention to itself like the shoes and T-shirt do. You've managed to avoid the dreaded Poser look on his face, so it would really be a shame to ruin it with the clothes. In addition, his standing pose seems a bit too symmetrical - making it look stiff - and you should also be careful with the position of the feet. Right now it looks like his toes are pointing inward on the front view. That said, the backgrounds look very nice, and I'm particularly impressed with the trees and other vegetation in the screenshot on the site.

Good luck, and keep us updated!

Edit: I couldn't really figure out, will this also be freeware or is it a commercial game?

I like it. My only complaint in the modelling would be that the drawers to the right of the door seem huge. Perhaps they're intended to be, but I think the handles are still very big. For large drawers you usually have one handle at each end or one long handle going from one end of the drawer to the other. Not a single big one in the middle.
More importantly I'm wondering if you wouldn't be better off reducing the game resolution to 320x240. As it is now, the hi-res backgrounds and lo-res character and interface really clash. If done properly, you could end up with a much more consistent style as nice as the late Sierra games (PQ4, Gabriel Knight). You'd have to put less detail work into the 3D modelling, and depending on the file size of the game it could also make distribution much easier.

The tech archive is pretty much nothing but modules as it is.

The only good reason for a module-only forum would be if people also could announce modules they are working on, so that 1) multiple people don't waste time on working on similar modules at the same time, 2) users can come with feature requests during development.

It's fun that the posts complaining about the price in this thread don't ever consider is the $15 shipping overseas cost. That brings the price up to $45! But I've been that Himilaya Studios are working on a better shipping deal and that there possible also will be a downloadable version. Aside from saving the shipping costs, I would hope that the price is also a bit lower to reflect that you don't get a physical product to put on your shelf.
I think something like $20 for a downloadable version would be reasonable and would sell a lot of copies. This seems to be the standard for indie games you buy online, and it's pretty much what modern adventures like Nibiru and And Then Tere Were None retail for (at least from what I saw in Canada).

iii. If the game sucks the reviews will give it a 2/10 and the game will be over. The price does not make a difference. No one will come and say 'If the game was 10$ the review would be 5/10 and not 2/10".

I'm reviewing Al Emmo this month, and I can assure you that the price will affect the final grade. If it's priced like a standard commercial game, it must be compared to commercial games despite being an indie title. Let's just say that Himalaya are fortunate that 95% of recent adventure games suck . Another example of this is Dark Fall 2: Lights Out which was a nice game for the 20 Canadian dollars I paid for it. Sadly, the Danish distributor insisted it was a full price game at more than double that amount, and at that price I just couldn't recommend it to our readers.

This is bad news. I intended to put all my dialogs in a separate module to make the global script less cluttered. I guess I'll either move it back to the global script or give up on translating the game.

It looks good, but I'm a bit sceptic about the sequel idea. I can't really imagine a Darkseed game without H.R. Giger artwork, so unless you plan on intergrating that I would suggest not mentioning Darkseed - besides, it's not like they were the only stories about parallel dimensions.

Also, when you knock on the door, the text says "KNOCK KOCK"

Good luck with the project!

But isn't the first inventory item numbered 0 so if you have 9 items there's only indexes from 0 to 8?