Messages

There are ways to get around this through coding. I would think the problem isn't in the textbox or the labels, but rather in the string format. It can only hold 200 characters, so you can't assign any more to the text box/label. Changing that limit probably wouldn't be easy.

What you can do however, is use a listbox with hidden borders. And then do the text entry/linebreaking in code. I did pretty much this for my conversation log and it works fine.

Edit: As an alternative you could put 6 or 8 labels together to form a page. But the coding wouldn't be much different from when using a listbox.

Yeah, I thought Puzzle of Flesh had a lot of good ideas, and I admire it for going beyond the clichéd haunted house plot of the first game. I found the sci-fi-like resolution (including it's ludicrous puzzles) disappointing - but up till then the story reminded me a lot of Jacob's Ladder, which is one of my favorite horror movies.

Especially the scenes with the psychiatrist were innovative. And I also enjoyed working with in-game computers that actually felt like real operating systems and programs - with the added bonus of supernatural interference.

A couple of movies/tv series that I used to be really into as a 10-12 year old:

Big - Ok, so not exactly unknown. But this movie is one of my strongest movie memories from my childhood, along with Back to the Future.

Gotcha! - with Anthony Edwards playing paintball assassin games around the college campus and getting dragged into cold war espionage during a trip to Europe.

F/X Murder By Illusion - I think I watched this movie more that 10 times, and for years after my biggest ambition was to work with special effects.

Automan - Does anyone else remember this tv show? About some guy who was actually a computer program and looked like something out of TRON. He had a sidekick called Cursor, which was this little shimmering thing flying around drawing stuff in the air. If I remember correctly it even drew his car (Autocar) out of thin air. I don't remember it as a very good show, just weird. It was on at around the same period as Knight Rider I think.

http://www.chuckwagner.com/automan.html

Also, there are other - possibly better - ways of achieving the same effect. If you're using a uniformly colored sprite you might as well use a full-screen GUI. That would also allow you to change it's color on-the-fly, not only changing between different levels of transparency but also between different tints.

Secondly, to put the Character[TINT].ChangeRoom code in repeatedly_execute is unnecessary. It would be less messy to call it in on_event for eEventEnterRoomBeforeFadein.

otherwise it is a simple matter of leaving detect on and moving up or down until they match perfectly.

Actually this was what I enjoyed about the whole thing. That made it seem less like a puzzle and more like how a real gadget would most probably work.

To be honest I had no recollection at all of how I could possibly have inspired this, so I had to dig up the By the Sword thread to find the answer. But I'm glad to have been of service

I think it's a fine puzzle, and the difficulty level matches my ideal that interactivity shouldn't be there to hold up the player but to give him a hands-on experience and allow him to perform all the cool tasks of the story himself. You should realize though, that most people will probably solve it using the "sounds merging" effect rather than actually matching the tones. But to be honest that seems to be a more interesting and realistic solution than the usual "match the musical notes" puzzles you see in so many games.

Thumbs up!

Just a hint of his eyes perhaps? Check out Loom for how they added character to hooded figures.
Also, his waistline is very low.

Can't you just check for GetGameParameter(GP_NUMCHARACTERS, 0, 0, 0)?

Look at movies set in the time and environment of the game. And don't necessarily focus on the main character - notice what characters in the background are wearing. If your game is set in modern times, just take a look around you. I usually do a quick sketch if I like a combination of colors someone is wearing or just an unusual neckline of somebody's sweater. It could be anyone - last time I jotted something down it was the outfit of the checkout girl at the supermarket.

Also, think practical. Unless you want the character to change clothes during the game, find something that would work for both outdoors and indoors and for all the different climates the player might encounter (think Temple of Doom, from snowy mountains to humid jungle).

Most Ã, importantly, give her outfit some unique feature. Without his hat, Indy would just be a guy in a leather jacket. I mean, without his clothes, Leisure Suit Larry would be, well... Larry. A good example is DanClarke's recent decision to remove the sailor's cap from his Lost Lagoon main character. It took a way a lot of character as well.

Don't worry too much about klichés, just mix them up a bit. What does it tell about a person if he wears Converse sneakers along with a business suit?

Check ShakeScreenBackground in the manual.

It also works properly when you change the resolution, although it's very expensive to do so.

Alright, so I played it in 640x480. What do I owe you?

Seriously though, I didn't experience any frame rate hits after raising the resolution.
This is awesome. I'll play around with the import mode soon, but for now I have stuff to do on Shadowplay.

Where in the script are you running this? In the Repeatedly_Execute? If so, you must realize that it's running 40 times per second (depending on game speed), and IsKeyPressed is checked every time, thus going past 10 within 1/4 second if the key is held down.

You should rather use the on_key_press event function if you only want it to update every time a key is pressed.

Edit: No, wait, if the script looks like what you have here, the int drink is defined within the function itself. Thus resetting to zero every time and never getting beyond 1. You should define the variable either at the top of the room script or the global script depending on where you want the function to run.

Still Life was 2.5D as you put it, it uses 3D characters on 2D backgrounds. What I meant was 2D sprites on 2D backgrounds. To the best of my knowledge, this is a first.

The first thing that I notice is the line:

  drink += 1;

What you want is either:

  drink = drink + 1;

or just:

  drink++;

which adds 1 to the value.

GlobalInts are basically unnecessary as you could write a function to get/set normal int's defined in the global script. You'd be better off creating a few structs of your own and then writing a function to access it from room scripts.

In that case, what about the Fountain of Youth team? Eeek!

Well, the issue is that LEC speech use overlays rather than GUIs as far as I know. But I agree, I would like to see the whole dialog interface being more customizable.

Sorry for the lack of updates, guys. I won't come up with bad excuses, just try to explain what's going on in my life and why I haven't fulfilled my promises of releasing a tech demo yet.

As some of you know, I'm currently in Canada working as a language tester at EA's Black Box studios.  Not surprisingly, the project end date was postponed, which has meant a 2½ month stay for me in glorious Vancouver. I knew this would happen, which is why I bought a laptop computer for the trip, so that I could work on Shadowplay in my spare time. Then something very unexpected happened: I met the coolest, most amazing person I've ever known, and for a wonderful period of five weeks, I had the time of my life. Little time was left over for Shadowplay, but we all have our priorities.
However, this person's reponse as I told her the story of Shadowplay made me even more motivated to finish the game, and after she left for her own country, I was dedicated to devote the rest of my time here to coding a rough version of the full game, using temp art for the backgrounds that hadn't yet been finished. This is still the plan. But remember that I'm also here to work, and for the last three weeks we've beein doing serious overtime to make sure that the product is shipped on time. After this weekend though, it seems that the workload will lighten up a bit, so we might get off at 6pm instead of past midnight, and I'll get some more evenings back at the hotel room, which I can spend on Shadowplay.

Another reason for delaying the tech demo is that CJ has been implementing quite a lot of my feature requests in the latest betas of AGS (thanks CJ!). This means that many of the effects I wanted for the game now actually are possible. The most interesting one (for the sole reason that I've never seen it done in a 2D adventure game before) is probably the dynamic shadows. The ShadowBox script module will allow a character (currently only the player character, but that's a trivial matter to change) to cast a realistic shadow from a light source positioned anywhere in the room. I've attached a few screenshots below, to show you what they currently look like in my test room. As soon as I get a few glitches ironed out, I'll release a tech demo showing the effect in action.

(and yes, the light source was moved between those two screenshots were taken, as someone else pointed out)

I'm surprised Vivendi hasn't approached AGDI yet, especially considering the publicity they got for the KQ remakes. Maybe they're next on the hit list.

Perhaps if you read the legal statement on AGDI's website:
"King's Quest, Quest for Glory and all related material are copyrighted by Sierra Entertainment, Inc. and are used with permission."

Actually this shouldn't be too difficult. I won't try to write any code here, because then other people will spend most of the day trying to fix my mistakes. But the main concept would be to add a sub-routine to "read ahead" a whole word (until a space is found), pass it to a string andÃ,  decide if the word fits or should be on the next line, then print the single-word string character by character instead of the whole line as you are currently doing.

Basically just GetCharAt and if char is not a space, StrCat it into a single word string. If on the other hand it's space, start typing that string out.

Am I making any sense?

Edit: Um, sorry, I just now realize that you're using overlays. I've been working with RawPrint for too long I suppose. Well, the theory should work anyway.