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I must admit that I prefer the untextured version of the scene. The moment you slap on those textures (and the signs in particular, at least the writing should be as distorted as the architecture) it suddenly starts looking very fake and cheap. I haven't seen other art for this project and don't know how much you've completed, so it may be too late to change the texturing style for consistency reasons. Ali's take on the background improved it immensely, but I think handdrawn, more organic textures would also add much to the atmosphere.
It doesn't have to be very detailed, just take a piece of paper and some pastel crayons (I'm thinking bluish/grayish colors), do a quick crosshatching with some random suggestion of bricks here and there for the walls. Get another paper and draw a stylized roof tile pattern. Oh, and please whatever you choose to do, try to draw those signs by hand and scan them.

The start reminds me of the Miami Vice theme, but otherwise it sounds like something from a John Carpenter movie. If the game takes place in the 80's I think this would be near perfect. It seems more like cutscene music that background music though, so it depends on what you're using it for.

Excellent idea to use an alternate background frame as a buffer for the screenshot. I hadn't thought about that myself, which made me suggest to CJ to add optional coordinates to the CreateFromScreenShot function. But this is a great workaround. Thanks for that ingenious solution - I had actually given up on ever getting my full screen postprocessing to run at decent speed.

Too bad. I hope you'll at least supply the cover in PDF or other printer-friendly format along with BJ1 Deluxe so we can create our own boxes. And what's "Ben Jordan: The Movie" that's mentioned on the back of the box?

Edit: An alternate solution could be to reformat it slightly so it would fit as a one-sheet cover for a dvd case? I'm sure more people would happily print out a single sheet than go through the trouble of printing on cardboard, fold and glue it.

Wow, awesome artwork. When you finish the last episode of Ben Jordan you should compile all the games on one cd-/dvd-rom and sell them in a box like this (along with a nice paranormal investigator handbook on all the topics from the games, including the witch code from BJ3). I think a lot of people would buy that, especially with some special features added. You could call it "The Ben Jordan Case Files" or something like that.

I must agree with TheYak that you should change the ESRB logos into your own designs (and make it clear it's a recommendation, not an official rating). At least if you plan on putting the box anywhere but on your own bookshelf.

Why not just add an event for clicking X/pressing Alt+F4 and then let people do whatever they feel like within that function? If they want to open a GUI, fine (though I personally dislike games that don't quit instantly when Alt+F4 is pressed) - if they just want to run clean-up functions such as deleting DynamicSprites or saving data to an external file, let them do so.

Anyone else notice Norrington looks exactly like Guybrush in MI2?

Funny, I thought the same thing about Will Turner. And what's up with the coffins as rowboats and voodoo ladies in swamps? Someone in the screenplay department has surely played MI2. I really hope the third movie will feature more of that creepy prison place that Jack Sparrow escapes from in the beginning of the movie - it looked amazing (and reminded me quite a bit of Simon the Sorcerer 2).

Why not just add a struct with scaling multipliers for each character? If the main character is 400 pixels tall, a 300 pixel character would then have the multiplier 1.33 to be the same height at the same scaling area. That way you wouldn't need room specific variables. Of course this only saves work if the NPCs move between a number of rooms.

In fact, www.screenplayer.com could be a good reference to any adventure game plot creator.

I believe you mean www.wordplayer.com. More specific, the "Columns" section is pure gold for storytellers in any media. Too bad Ted & Terry seem to have stopped writing them.

Try putting a Wait(1) after each SetBackgroundFrame command and see if that helps. It could be that the frame is only changed at the end of each game loop.

But the font on the GUI is obviously not Verdana!

Is this your own Say function? If so, you should set the SetLabelFont for the GUI label to use font 4. If it's the internal speech on custom GUI function, you need to SetSpeechFont(4) as well (or Game.Speechfont = 4 if you use new scripting).

Edit: Strangely enough the GUI font doesn't look like a SCI font either. It has obvious antialiasing, so it must be TTF.

For me it shows up exactly as it should when using Verdana on the latest AGS beta, RC2a. I'm just using the Display function, so apparently it's not necessary to use translation for basic accents like these (however it would be for other foreign characters).

Edit: Looking at your error message, are you sure you've set the NormalFont/SpeechFont to Verdana? From the error message it seems that it's trying to use a SCI font.

Thanks monkey, I still haven't gotten entirely used to the new concept of Strings.

Which accents do you need specifically? é, è, ê and even ç showed up fine for me using the Verdana font.

This would be way easier if you were using a monowidth font, but what you actually need to do is to create your own linebreaking code. You may even want to do all the linebreaking in code to make sure there isn't any inaccuracy.

To count the number of characters in the first line, you can do this (it is possibly to optimize it for speed, but that shouldn't be necessary with just one String):

Code: ags

String tempstring = originalstring; //making a temp string so we don't mess up the original
while (GetTextWidth(tempstring, fontnumber) > lblMyLabel.Width) {
  tempstring.Truncate(tempstring.Length - 1);
  }
originalstring.Substring(0, tempstring.Length); //removing the number of characters that was in the first line

It does sound an awful lot like you triggered a keyboard shortcut to change the resolution to something that the monitor doesn't support. When you boot in Safe Mode, do you see anything on the screen? If so, try to set the resolution to something like 640x480 at 16bit color and the refresh speed (important) to something low like 60Hz and restart.
Alternately, you could try uninstalling the video card drivers. That usually forces the resolution to default settings.

I should probably follow up on this, since I was the one who brought up the topic before Radiant actually used the word "bullshit" - which I must admit I was thinking as well.

Whats wrong with anything that's been said there. You copy KQ3 AGI to a computer running XP and nothing will happen. It won't work. Unless you use emulation. I just confirmed this again myself, and I'm running XP on a PIII 1.0Ghz.

As far as I know, King's Quest III doesn't have any floppy based copy protection (hence the spellbook in the manual), which made the original versions of KQ1 and 2 impossible to run from a harddrive without cracking them. When Tierra/AGD claimed a few years back that KQ1 and KQ2 wouldn't run on new machines, I assumed this was what they meant - even though the majority of people trying the game today never owned the original but just downloaded a cracked version. However, this shouldn't be an issue for KQ3, so any failure to run must be due to incompatability between your machine/OS and the game code.

I just tried running my copy of KQ3 from the 1994 King's Quest collection, and it works fine under XP (1.6 GHz centrino, 1GB RAM) even running straight from the CD. Even the game speed works correctly as long as you don't choose "fastest". Based on this, and never having had problems running AGI games on XP, even without using NAGI and other updated interpreters, I wanted to know if it was actually an issue for anyone. And apparently it is for you, case solved.

The string based linebreaking instructions sounds like a pain in the ass for the end user, and I personally have a hard time seeing a use for them without a secondary program to provide the line length values automatically (to linebreak around an image or similar).

It's a good solution to your problem, but as a stand-alone module without rendering features it's difficult to imagine the purpose.

I actually added a checkbox in the options menu in my game to switch the direction. I felt it more natural that up meant forward, but as KrishMUC says, down is commonly used to advance to next page (sensible since that makes left-right page flipping analogous to scrolling a webpage). It's VERY easy to add this as a user option, so I suggest you do that if at all in doubt. At the beginning of the mouseclick function, just put:

Code: ags

if ((button == eMouseWheelNorth) && (reversescroll == 1)) button = eMouseWheelSouth;
else if ((button == eMouseWheelSount) && (reversescroll == 1)) button = eMouseWheelNorth;

This assumes a global int called reversescroll

Wow Ildu, you gave me a great idea for a game: "Snuff Porn Tycoon"

I think CJ once said that the limit for a game being on the AGS games page is the British legal definition of hardcore porn, which is showing an erect penis (I took this as meaning that the full frontal lesbian scenes in my game are ok). I guess he'd get in trouble with his ISP otherwise. But unless you want the game on the AGS site games page, and can find a place that allows hosting of pornographic material, there's really no limit beyond those of the law in your own country and in the countries of the people you expect to download the game.

Edit: That doesn't just cover sexually explicit material by the way. For example, if you display a swastika in your game, it's illegal to download it in Germany. So make sure to do your research.