Messages

Regardless of who wins, thank you all for leaving your thoughts/comments on the entries. It's really nice & helpful to read your thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

I have to honestly admit I voted for Breakfast since I really enjoyed the story in that one.

Kastchey, the Fhaldirs being a mixture of Jedi & Elves is absolutely the blend I was going for! Nice to hear it was recognised! (I do plan on continuing this one but rather not commit to that and disappoint, but yes, I'm trying out some stuff. The important thing is to keep it small otherwise I'll get overwhelmed I feel! Episodic is the way to go with this one probably)

Heltenjon, I like how you caught the details with the sister. Also

Spoiler

Did you try to go into her room after making the potion? It's a minor detail again, but it felt important to me.

[close]

Selmiak, this is amazing! Thank you so much for doing this!

And as I posted on your YouTube video, I'm not committing to anything at this point, but I'm definitely toying with the idea of expanding this. I'm just VERY aware I said exactly the same thing with Buccaneer and we all know how that went.

AGA, thank you yet again! I sent a brief PM with some additional small requests.

In the meantime, I've added a new page to the AGS Community area, indicating ways for people to help out. It's available here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Ways_to_contribute

Please everyone, have a read and feel free to edit where appropriate (I'm not 100% how helping development is handled, for example).

Weird! It could be an Apple thing perhaps? My devices just heat up A LOT on the AGS Forums (doesn't happen anywhere else on the internet) and regularly "crash to desktop". Odd!

Just tried to add a graphic to the front page (the nice AGS cup) to bring some graphical interest to the whole thing. But either I don't have permission to upload things into the Wiki, or there's a bug still lingering around somewhere...

Wow!!!

The new design looks so good. I'm trying to gather some thoughts that haven't already been shared before, but perhaps to reiterate / process for myself:

• I would be more than happy to help write text / rewrite things. Since I'm slowly plodding my way through the Wiki, it'd be easy to help shift things over at the same time.
• The six main menu items as I mentioned them earlier in this thread would still be my main recommendation. Though I also like the mockup setup quite a bit.... ugh, I don't know anymore.
• I love the colour scheme... I thought we already had orange in the current colour scheme and love how much it pops in the new one.

I'm keeping an overview of what I'm doing in the Wiki in this thread. And whilst it'll take quite a while I think to refresh most everything in there, it'll help with SEO and draw more people in.

I agree 100% with tampie85, good enough to ship = perfect at this stage. We can always update/change/tweak/add more graphics/etc later on. To go live with a fresh design as soon as we can, that would be great.

On the topic of Modules/Plugins, I was wondering... if we're building a Games Database, should we also build a Modules/Plugins/Template database where people can upload, categorise etc? It would be almost 100% the same kind of setup. It could hold that "Last Updated On..." bit as well as a "Last Tested On AGS Version..." bit. Could be a good way to start to "modernise" these awesome additions to AGS and present them in a more popular fashion. I think a voting system would help here immensely. Not so much from a popularity contest place, but to rate those that work really well and add a lot.

Again, I'm not a native speaker but have written plenty of formal/official/not-so-official English documents in my life. So if you'd like me to help out, let me know! Covid-19 is making sure I'm facing 7 weeks of summer holiday with nowhere to go, so, well, yeah, I'll have a significant chunk of time coming up! (Which I'll also use to actually design games, of course, but writing text is always fun!)

Oh, and updating SMF to the latest version would be most appreciated. I don't know what it is, but it manages to overheat my iPhone and iPad. And regularly crashes Safari. Which is very weird!

New site design looks great on iPhone, iPad & Mac by the way - all in Safari. But can test in any browser on MacOS / iOS / iPadOS where required.

Yup - it's working perfectly now, thanks for fixing it!

Did you also manage to install the FontAwesome extension? (I'm not sure how to check this myself )

That makes a lot of sense. Apologies for not sharing that earlier, I was erroneously thinking it *had* to be a TextWindow.

It's working like a dream now, thank you!

I wanted to ask whether it would be possible to play the KQ4Retold under ScummVM?

... Is there any particular reason why you would want to run the game under ScummVM in the first place? ... To answer your question, from what I understand, only the ScummVM team themselves can help you with this issue, ...

Hello. I simply had been using ScummVM a lot lately and Iove to have one program to run all my King's Quest games. I have read that ScummVM supports AGS, so it seemed to me that it would be easy to run KQ3Retold. I guess I was wrong.

It's working fine for me over here. Just be sure you're using the daily build of ScummVM (link on their download page). The game isn't recognised (yet) but you can just click "Add Anyway". Works like a charm! (And the easiest way for me on my Macbook)

And back again. Just tried to update a page, but I get:

"Server returned error: HTTP 500." whilst the Editing interface is loading. So I can't edit any of the pages anymore at the moment.

When I finally click "Cancel" on the Editing interface, I get:

[4cdfdf16b272a0eba70ff04a] 2021-06-01 22:19:45: Fatal exception of type "Error"

or

[d06e65e8d1ae1e2f55010249] 2021-06-01 22:24:55: Fatal exception of type "Error"

Similarly, whilst logged in, clicking on Preferences at the top of the screen gives this:

[4c6121973a8d5605822a1ce1] 2021-06-01 22:23:34: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError"

Thanks for doing that AGA!

Can I request the following extension is installed:

https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FontAwesome

It'll help to provide some simple GUI styling to certain areas which should help with legibility.

Thank you!

Further tidied up the AGS Community / History thing and actually split it into two categories: AGS Community & AGS History. Should help newbies understand what's recent and what isn't. Then if people want to, they can dive into the History part.

I'll work on some more paragraphs and stuff to clarify this as we move forward.

I've created a new Wiki Category called "Archived-Broken". People can fix these and then we can move them back into the Main Wiki. Or we can mark them for deletion and clear up the Wiki.

Instructions: If you add this to the bottom of a Wiki page, it will automatically be moved into this Category (be sure to remove the other categories to avoid confusion):

Code: ags

[[Category:Archived-Broken]]

First things first: Sorry for yet another thread about the website.

The reason being is that I've started going through the Wiki. It'll probably be at a glacial pace, however, I think it's worth having one thread to collect all Wiki things. Then if I do something people don't think should happen, we can discuss that here instead of littering the "Broken Links" thread.

I'll add more posts as I update things.

I've taken the contents from the Community page on the AGS website and created a Communities Wiki page instead. This will enable the new site to just have a "Forums" link instead. The wiki Category "AGS Community and history" already existed anyway with quite a few pages, so it'll be easy to build from there and also link some more stuff in. I've added the Reddit link there now as well, since that wasn't on the main website. Snarky wanted a Discord link, but after checking the Community page, it already had a link to it, so I've just copied that across.

Since it's a wiki and anyone can edit, please, add more communities that you're aware of!

The AGS games database is a must I think,It's useful for the AGS Awards and to help the community follow up the released games. It's useful for me to find games to test with ports too. Where does the Games DB goes in this?

You are so right! I have no idea how I managed to forget that... so a whole-site menubar with 6 main items would be my proposal. 

I'm wondering if I've gone about things the wrong way here. I seem to remember (possibly from older versions of AGS?) that a Dialog GUI had to be a TextWindow GUI. Which is how I've created the Dialog Options GUI. That GUI doesn't hold any options to set X or Y coordinates in the Editor:



This is what I've put in Room_Load on Room 1:

Code: ags

function room_Load()
{
gGui1.Visible = true;
gGui4.Visible = true;
gDialog.SetPosition(0, 100);
gDialog.SetSize(320, 50);
}

Should it perhaps not be a TextWindow GUI? Is that the way to do this?

Thank you again all for engaging with this thread. Unless other people offer alternative suggestions, I think consensus is to shelve the "steering group" idea.

Continuing on with the website, I've sent AGA a few private messages + began a collection of broken/outdated links in the Site Report area on the forum.

As a future suggestion for the website in functionality, I think the menubar at the top should be adapted to have 5 main areas:

1. Home page: The current landing page
2. Download: The AGS page, but renamed
3. Wiki: A direct link to the AGS Wiki
4. Manual: A direct link to the Github manual (the most up-to-date one)
5. Forums: The other communities can be given a place of prominence on a wiki page, so in that way the "Community" page becomes "Forums" and immediately links here.

If this menubar is consistently "there" across all 5, then that would improve basic navigation from the start, I feel.

[The main menubar AGS page]

As an initial clean-up, I thought it might help to collect all broken links on the AGS website as they've been reported by Babar, with perhaps some more added in as we browse through together. This could be step 1 in cleaning up the site before exploring a potential redesign as discussed here.

Some of my suggestions might be quite brutal, but I really think from a new-person perspective, if the first "Help and Support" links you find after downloading the editor don't work/are broken/are outdated, then that's a massive barrier to entry.

The main menubar AGS page (here)

Help and Support
The menubar on the right, under Getting Started, Help/FAQs, Art Tutorials & For Developers:

• Video Tutorials - Don't exist. Let's delete this.
• Getting Started with AGS - These are now static webpages and outdated (AGS3.0). Could we please transfer these into the Wiki so they can be collectively maintained?
• Scripting Tutorial - Same as above. Last updated in 2007. Probably quite outdated but good to have. If it lives in the Wiki, we can make it a community effort.
• GUI Scripting - Same thing again. This tutorial is rather outdated. But by transferring into the Wiki, we can modify.
• Online manual - Please update the link to the current Github-one. This manual is for version 3.4.3
• AGS Wiki - This should perhaps be the only link here. Help and Support required? Check out the Wiki!
• Bug and Suggestion Tracker - This just takes you to the Forum? Should probably go to the Github Issues page
• Beginners FAQ - This just takes you to the main page of the Wiki. Delete this link, the Beginners FAQ is on the Wiki, but let people just go to the Wiki through the link above and they'll find more resources there anyway.
• Unofficial AGS blog - It's been quiet there for 7 years. Time to be removed from the website. I'm sorry SSH!! (All my love to the Scots, being married to one myself!)
• AGS FAQ (non-technical) - Nice! But again, let's remove from here and stick it in the Wiki instead.
• Kafka's Koffee - Delete. None of the links on that page work. Sorry!
• AGS Engine Plugin API - Last updated 2009. Move to Wiki where it can be updated.
• AGS Editor Plugin API - Can't see when this was updated... but again, let's move to the Wiki.

Now as cat said in the other thread I mentioned, AGS is a do-ology. I am MORE than willing to do these "move to Wiki" suggestions made above. I just want to make sure with AGA (or whoever needs to agree with this) that this will then mean the links on that page get edited/removed. Otherwise, it'll be a couple of hours wasted. So if whoever's in charge can give me the green light, I'll get the Wiki pages setup. And we can take it from there, update tutorials, etc.

Screenshots and Features on the same page
Simple suggestion, but could we add a Lightbox module? Right now, clicking on the screenshots opens them as bare pictures in a separate window.

Develop AGS
The only link there (the readme) takes you to Github. Perhaps just best to direct to Github anyway and make it clear that AGS is hosted there. I would "advertise" here as well that AGS falls under the Artistic License 2.0.

Resources
I question the need for this whole section on this page. It should live in the Wiki in its entirety. But not all of it, probably...

• AGS Resources - I would... get rid. This is from 2006 and seems to be last updated September 2006. These things also live on the forum (in a more updated version) and can live in the Wiki. This is old and confusing.
• Insta-Game - Whilst last updated in 2006, it's a collection of PNG files that people can use if they want to. Not confusing, I feel. But probably better linked to from the Wiki instead, on the Beginner / Getting Started Guide.
• AGS Font Editor - Does this program still function? Perhaps this Resources sub-section would be a good place for community-designed software. But again, Wiki is probably better for this.
• SCI Fonts - Again. Wiki, I feel.

The reason I keep saying Wiki-wiki-wiki should probably be clear by now. Community do-ology, it enables people who want to help out to help out. And we can easily take things further there together without it being a one-man responsibility when for all of us, time is precious.

I've been playing with this a bit more. My custom dialog GUI is dialog number 7 and I've uploaded all sprites required to draw a simple green box behind my dialog options.

As said before, I would just very much like this box to be drawn towards the lower half of the screen. I've tried GUI.Y & GUI.SetSize. My question, where do I set these? Every time I start a dialog? Or is there a more global way to set this?

I've added this to the first room of my game:

Code: ags

gDialog.SetPosition(0, 100);
gDialog.SetSize(320, 50);

My thinking is that should move the GUI (which is called gDialog) to the second half of the screen and make it full-width.

However, I get this:



Note that this is the 6th room (in that order) the player enters. So whatever I've set in Room 1 might be well and truly forgotten perhaps? I'm just not sure of where to "play" with these GUI settings to see impact. And whether the Dialog GUI option even allows such tinkering, since it dynamically changes size according to the dialog options / length of sentence?

I would be happy with keeping it to its auto-size ability, but just further down the screen... having dialog options superimposed over my characters isn't really what I'm going for. 

Again, I just wanted to say: Thank you all! I moved Khris' suggestion into the room script (the less I touch the GlobalScript the better I feel, since then the map-exclusive behaviour is only loaded for the map, which makes sense) and it works a treat. And here's me thinking that Wait(0) was clever.