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Restricting to subdirectories is actually more tricky because there are various sneaky tricks that people can use to get around path checking. I'm sure you've heard of security holes in software like IIS where you can specify the path as "subdir\..\..\..\windows\system32\driver.sys" and so forth.The present method of simply disallowing / and \ characters in the path is the safest way of doing things.

Why not just disallow multiple periods? I see little need for more full stops in a file name than the one preceeding the file extension.

Yes, I've been wishing for these functions for a while now (I thought the file plugin might do the trick, but I'd rather do without plugins). Remember CJ, if you wanted to mess up the player's files, you could just RawWrite to them to corrupt them anyway, so as long as it's restricted to the game directory and subdirectories, there should be no problem.

Remedy haven't released much info about their upcoming game, Alan Wake (http://alanwake.com/), but for what it's worth, this game looks like it could easily be 'the next big thing'. According to colleagues who saw the game at E3, it will be an open GTA-like world where you will perform adventure-like investigation and character interaction during the day and survival horror-like action at night. I'm not too happy about the latter aspect, but from what little I see in the videos and screenshots, the beautiful design and technology of the game world seems very much like what I imagined adventure games would look like some day. The Twin Peaks-like town and the gameplay style makes me hope that Remedy might succeed where the Blair Witch games failed. And the scene with the lighthouse brought back fond memories of Shadow of the Comet.

What are your impressions of the game?

Edit: If you want to download one of the movies from the site, make sure to get the full video, not the teaser. It includes the same content, and so much more.

Well, designwise the Fatal Frame (known as Project Zero in Europe) camera is just gun in disguise. "Shooting" the ghosts with your camera was just as repititious as blowing away zombies in any other survival horror game imho. The games' main achivements are that they have so FEW enemies compared to other games. You spend most of the time waiting for something to happen, but it doesn't, and then, just as you thought you were safe...

I liked the technology of the F.E.A.R demo, and the AI seemed pretty good. Still, it's nothing you haven't seen in Half-Life 2 and other "elite soldiers invading a secret reseach installation" games. The "boss soldier" with the armor just felt plain wrong in a game like this. The horror scenes worked well, but they are very Max Payne dream sequence-like. Nothing new there. As for the story, can we assume that the little girl is the madman's sister and they were both taken in as test subject as children? The girl died from the experiments and the boy eventually went mad. Now she's a ghost helping him to take revenge on those resposible?

First, make sure that the game is set to the proper resolution:
Game --> Change Game Resolution --> 800x600

Second (from the manual): NOTE: For hotspots and walkable areas, the mask must be the same size as the background, but at 320x200 resolution. So, if you had a normal sized 640x400 room, the mask should be 320x200. For walk-behind areas, the mask is the exact same size as the background image.

(I take it that "same size" here means "same dimensions")

Oh god.. Heart of China.. possibly the worst game ever.

I must defend a game that brings nothing but fond memories. In my opinion Heart of China was quite enjoyable, far surpassing modern, so called adventures like Still Life and Syberia. The plot and characters were nice, very much in the Indiana Jones, high adventure vein. The interface was innovative and simple to use (the same one was used in Rise of the Dragon). It had multiple paths/puzzle solutions, beautiful graphics (using modified digital imagery on painted backgrounds) and several decent (and SKIPPABLE!) arcade sequences including driving a tank in vector graphics and fighting on top of a moving train.

First of all, I must say that the intro part is the most stylish AGS scene I've seen in a while. Did you make that music yourself or was it borrowed from somewhere else? Either way it is lovely.

Re: The bottom bar. Is the gui set to "clickable" on the gui editor screen? Could there possibly be another (invisible) gui covering it?

Publishing. It's developed by Monolith.

Re: F.E.A.R. - If it's only brighter than Doom 3 it's infinitely better.

Re: Sierra - Well it's probably difficult to sell a company if you tell the buyers that they can't use the old name.

I agree, people working with AGS uses the forum instead of the website anyway. It's mostly for people new to AGS, and for them downloading the newest game is likely to mean a bad first experience. And blogs... I suppose they would mostly consist of new beta info, which should be kept far away from new users.

Well Nico's ridiculous hairdo is pretty much identical (did she really have that in the first two BS games?). It's eerie how similar those characters are. But perhaps that's a pretty good indication of why I never was crazy about Broken Sword - the characters are kinda generic.

I've had this too in the editor, but haven't seen it in-game. I think the problem is in PhotoShop's saving format. Try to cut-n-paste the sprite into AGS instead.

I would probably use structs, but you might even use an inventories for the dead monster and add random items to it. Each character in the game can have it's own inventory, so you could have 5 or 10 dead monsters on the screen, each with their own posessions. This would allow you to select which items to loot from an inventory window.

Or, if you wantÃ,  a less complicated solution, just use Random() to select which items are added to the player's inventory when clicking on the monster, and write a small display-script to tell him which items have been added.

Try putting something like this to your click-on-corpse interaction:

Code: ags

int item1 = Random(10); //assuming you want to use the 10 first inventory items, else + the (starting item num - 1) (and change zero to that later on)
if (item1 == 0) {
 Display("You didn't find anything of use on the corpse");
 return; //stops running the script
 }
player.AddInventory(InventoryItem[item1]);
int item2 = Random(10);
while (item2 == item1) item2 = Random(10); //to ensure that you get two different items
if (item2 != 0) player.AddInventory(InventoryItem[item2]);
string displaypickup;
StrCopy(displaypickup, "You looted ");
string item1name;
InventoryItem[item1].GetName(item1name);
StrCat(displaypickup, item1name);
if (item2 != 0) {
Ã,  StrCat(displaypickup, " and ");
Ã,  string item2name;
Ã,  InventoryItem[item2].GetName(item2name);
Ã,  StrCat(displaypickup, item2name);
}
StrCat(displaypickup, " from the corpse.");
Display(displaypickup);

I'm not sure if the add inventory item code is right, because I haven't done any work with them since they were changed to pointers. But try messing around with it.

Edit: Your inventory item names would need to be "an apple", "a sword", "12 copper coins" or similar for the grammar to make sense. Of course you could always refine this and also have a radomized int for amount, so you could add a random number of coins, foodstuff etc.

Thanks Gilbot!

I have yet to track down the problem, but it lies somewhere else entirely. Turns out that the strings I'm reading from are utter garbage (lots of squares and other non-standard symbols), but I'm not sure where they come from.

Edit: By the way Gilbot, where did you find the ASCII codes for CR/LF? Are there other special codes like this?

No, actually strings should only support characters from the 0-255 range.

Curious, I'll have to look into this and see exactly which char is causing the problem. The content of the string was generated by the 200-char-unit tool, but when I run that code through my linebreaker tool for that specific html page, it fails. I don't see how any "bad chars" could have been added along the way. I'll add a Display(StrFormat("%d", char)) to the code to trigger when the char is outside the 0-255 range.

I remember in my post which I posted my example "game", I mentioned about that, and I had an updated version where the codes were in repeatedly_execute(), and didn't use while, so it shouldn't crash.
You can grab that for reference.

Crap, I see that now. Thanks. For some reason I thought the edit referred to another part of the code. Ok so at least this isn't an issue.

EDIT: Whoa, I discovered that the problem was entirely different from what I thought. Displaying the ASCII codes, it turns out that I get calls for negative chars like -56 and -103. I must try to locate the cause for this now.  Thanks for the help guys, sorry for bothering you with the wrong problem.

Ok, so if I put some code in to update the screen (change gui text or similar) once in a while, it would work?

Edit: Nope, it didn't help. But I confirmed that it was a length issue as it worked fine when I split the file into two. It's not a terribly big problem as I could easily do this if I need to break a very long text - I just don't like error messages in my scripts. Thanks for the reply.

EDIT 2: OK, it turned out that the problem was elsewhere. But still, it could be a useful function.

On a suggestion by Gilbot I wrote my own functions to break text files into strings, generate code for them and output them to an external txt file for cut-n-paste. However, using the WriteRawChar function, I'm limited to ASCII values 0-255 even though strings support chars beyond this array (for some reason I don't get the same error messages when reading the chars from the text file).

WriteRawLine currently isn't an alternative as it would add a linebreak after each part of the code, like this:

AddText("
This is the text that we've broken into 200 char units.
");

So I was wondering if it would be possible to add a eFileAppendNoBreak parameter to File.Open (or perhaps an optional parameter for the WriteRawLine command would work better)?


Edit: Also I have a question that isn't part of the suggestion, but related to the same piece of code. When I apply my string breaking tool to very long text files, the game crashes and tells me that the while loop has been repeating 15,000 times or something like that. Is this a real error, or is it just triggered because my while-loop repeats throughout a very long file? If so, is there any way to turn the error message off and allow the code to finish on it's own?

Ok, let's see if there's as many skeptics this time around. I bring you Pierre Chareau's 'Bibliothèque' in the 'Ambassade Francaise' at the Paris 1925 Exhibition, and the museum office from The Dagger of Amon Ra:

*cough*paintover*cough* 

I must admit that I'm very happy with the Medion A4 tablet which I got for something like 45 US$. Obviously it's not the quality of a Wacom, but it gets the job done - and frankly I'd felt rather foolish if I'd paid several times that for a tiny brand name tablet.

I don't know if they sell them outside Europe though.