Messages

Don't worry Queen Kara. The game will be finished. Only in a somewhat different shape. I've had a talk with Modgeulator who is doing the music, and I'm happy to report that he's still part of the project, despite the changes. And he's been very supportive in making these difficult decisions.

Expect a proper update in a few days' time, including some new screenshots.

Um, it turns out it didn't quite work as I expected. Apparently there's no such thing as luminance for region tinting. However, you can cheat and use another command called SetAmbientTint (or similar, I don't have AGS here). You could either have a "stand on region" trigger for it, or better yet, check the regions in the room's repeatedly_execute_always, so it would also work during blocking events.

Of course this applies to all characters and objects on the screen, so you'd have to check "ignore room lighting" on them, and they wouldn't be able to move through the "tinted" regions.

Good idea, thanks!

Doh! Of course it can be done like that. For some reason I had gotten it into my mind that FPS was some strange internal engine thing and not something you could easily calcute yourself   Well, at least someone else also thought that GetFPS was a good name for the function

Seeing as the debug function does display the FPS count, would it be possible to add a command to get this as an int (for detecting performance issues and turning on/off visual effects accordingly)?

Um, posting without knowing eactly what you're trying to do - couldn't you just tint him a darker shade of the same color? And set all three RGB values to the same number to tint him different shades of gray, thus darkening him without actually changing the color?

Oh crap, I have to ask CJ to raise that number 

Thanks for confirming that there aren't any abitrary limits. I'm always watching the system limits, and for some reason I get suspicious whenever a feature seemingly doesn't have one (I still don't quite believe that there isn't any max. number of fonts).

Knowing this, I can safely number them by character (i.e. 1XXX = COP, 4XXX = BARTENDER etc.).

Actually, I've been wondering -- is there a limit for the max. number of dialog requests?

Can't wait to beta test it

Nice to hear that my article had some effect.  I've actually been wondering if it inspired anyone else to try their hand at game making.  Good to hear that it did.

When Shadowplay is released (somtime in the distant future), we'll probably run a follow-up article.

I actually came across something interesting on the Murray brothers' website, evryware.com a while back. In the products section (http://evryware.com/products.htm), there's a dead link titled "Manhunter 3: Ultimate Online Adventure"  :o

Imagine what could have been...

Great game. I really enjoyed it. Not quite as much as BJ3, which imho had a better story, but it was very atmospheric. Perhaps a bit more background for the Horror would have made it even scarier. Overall the artwork and animation was lovely. And the characters were well written and sympathetic.

Now, a couple of bugs I came across:

Spoiler

1. Right before the blood in the shower, if you talk to Otto before talking to Alice, the English guy screaming will never be triggered. This seems to be a dead end.

2. Minor graphical glitch. When entering the full phone number, the 8th digit will disappear off the display.

3. As somebody else mentioned, it's possible to call Miggs and tell him that you can't open the basement door, even after visiting the basement.

[close]

The locking was fair enough, it was a long time since I updated this thread. There was a lot of reason to think the project dead - I know a lot of people in other forums do. And as soon as I asked Darth to unlock it, he did. Thanks Darth!

There has been quite a bit of progress made on Shadowplay, but not in an entirely positive direction. I've had to make some big decisions on the future of the project, and I'm sure that some people will be disappointed. I can't say too much about it right now, but expect another update in a week or two.

You might also want to use the SetRestartPoint () command at the beginning of the actual game, so the player won't have to see your logos and whatnot all over again when restarting.

Thanks!

monkey, I've now reported the bug in the scrolling dialog thread.

As for my statement that it wasn't worth recoding the dialog system for a bit of animation, I just meant in my own case. I wasn't trying to diminish your script, which I think is absolutely great.
The thing is that I'm using so many workarounds for my dialog system to do what it does now (a perfect replica of GK1 text display style), that I'd rather not do it all over again just for a little animation, which nobody will pay attention to anyway. Actually your scripting might be a lot easier to use than what I'm doing now (using a lot of dialog_request calls in the dialog script).

Ok, this is the error message I get when using both 640 and 320 versions of the template on the AGS 2.7 RC1. I haven't been able to use it on any versions of 2.7:

An internal error has occured. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, contact Chris Jones.
(ACI version 2.70.849)

Error: run_text_script1: error -6 running function 'repeatedly_execute':
Error: Array index out of bounds (index: -30, bounds: 0..8999)
in Global script (line 19)
from Global script (line 258)
from Global script (line 286)

If it worked properly (could use walkbehinds, region scaling, tinting etc.) it would be awesome. To be able to make something similar to Cruise for a Corpse  could be a very attractive option. Animation smooth as shit from a duck's ass and with today's computers it could probably be much more detailed.

On the other hand, would it be much easier to program 2D vector graphics than full 3D characters, which apparently has been deemed impossible?

Yes, thank you, there is a workaround. But it is pretty massive. Is it really worth rescripting your whole dialog system and making conversation scripting much more complicated, just for a little animation? I don't think so. There doesn't seem to be any real reason for the game not just pausing the game normally, like popup GUIs, in the first place.

Besides, I've been trying to test the scrolling dialog template for the last few weeks, downloading the files several times even, always getting an error when running the game (on the latest beta).

Thanks for clearing that up CJ, it explains a lot of things. I hope it'll be changed eventually, so we can keep background and idle animations etc. going even while choosing topics.