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Okay. Present time is fucked up, It's pretty clear. Drugs, popculture (risking being called a racist, I say it: Black culture, which pop really means today), diseases that didn't exist 100 years ago and all this crap, you name it. Now, I was thinking about what comes next.

I am currently 20 years old. If I had a grandfather and asked him to tell how things were in his youth, he'd tell something like that:

Times were quite difficult. WWII has just begun, nazis drove around in our village, demanding butter, milk and meat. We were very poor, our father was taken away by soliders and we never saw him again.
There wasn't any grown-up men left in village, so nobody did the farming. Winter came along with hunger.
My mother didn't have any money to send me to school - or even buy me shoes. There wasn't any food left. So we, me and some boys from village, sneaked to a house where nazis had set up their camp, and stole some solider bread from their supply shack. Thanks to god and bits of food we managed to get, we survived this winter...

Heroic and serious. Now, I was thinking, what would be story I'M telling to my grandchildren after 45 years?

Times were quite difficult. I couldn't afford a faster video card or load my cellphone with credit every month.  America invaded Iraq. Terrorists blew theselves up around the world. Drugs and popculture invaded youngest part of humankind. Gas became super-expensive. People became fat. Millions of retarded, perverted, sick people found themselves a stage to act on in Internet. Success of Doom and Tomb Raider killed the last good of computer games, making all games to be third or first person shooters.
Adventure games genre was dying, or already dead despite a group of people who still knew and loved it.
Oh yeah, It was a difficult time...

Stupid? Oh yeah.
I think that after that story, my grandchildren rush away to bring me my pills.

I think It would be useful to add a feature to make mouse cursors animate with *specific* loop. So far, I must create different views for every cursor. It would be more useful to have one view and different loops for different cursors.

edit: another nice addition would be "only when over walkable area"-checkbox to cursor animation properties. But that's not very important.

How about
1) simply RawDrawArea and/or RawDrawAreaScaled which draw defined area of current game screen...  to make zoom windows, sniper scopes, magnifying glasses, etc?

2) AddInventoryEx(int ITEM,CHARID)? character(x).inv(x) does that, but seems somewhat complicated.

3) A simpler way to disable/enable all cursor modes but one? Like, in main menus as such, only pointer is needed.

4) Some built-in menu in debug mode? Like, keypress opens debug menu?

Whoa! Until now, hackers, for me, were connected only to trojans and low budget sci-fi movies. Today, I decided to investigate.
And now, equipped my cpu with NMap TCP port scanner and SubSeven for bad jokes, I feel quite powerful. Muahaha... ha, whatever.

Actually, this scares shit out of me.  :o

[edit:]

Well, third room of my game is ready now. At least, I hope It's ready.

I decided to stick to my weird style, and try to make everything as I can, but take advice on bigger mistakes on bg. Mountains at the background, sky and trees at left side, were drawn by valzebnik, my co-artist, who's learning the stuff, everything else by myself.



Now take a look at this, along with another room and tell me would you like to play something like this.

One or two rooms like that and at least half of a storyline, and I'm confident enough to put some screenies up to "Games in Production" forum. If you like what you see, of course.

edit: I replaced gif with png.

I have Windows Millennium.
It's full of bugs (surprise!).
It gives random errors everytime I start it.

Most common are error in KRNL386.EXE, which halts everything and gives unavoidable by anything else but power off -- blue screen, Sometimes when I start it, just plays startup sound, gives error in COMCTL32.DLL and stays with absolutely empty desktop, without quicklaunch/system tray bars/icons.

Most common is freezing when I close something, and appears to happen in same programs all the time.

It halts when I click on a shortcut on quicklaunch bar which links to my games folder.

I have a somewhat old 16MB NVidia RIVA TNT2 card. Every newest set of drivers I download, makes thing always worse (read: inventing More Errors(TM)). And yet, everyone is always suggesting "get latest video drivers!" Latest drivers my ass.

128 MB RAM on 1,3 GHz system can't be below WinME system requirements any way. DirectX 9.1b is installed and reporting no problems. 40GB HDD, at least 3-4 GB always free.

Defragmenting, Virusscans, scandisk, nothing helps.

What the heck should I do?
And don't say "Get Win XP", because I would never ever give up on playing my HUGE set of arcade emulator ROMs, such as NeoGeo games and Capcom CPS 1 ones. And some good oldies I find myself enjoying whenever I'm filled with this stupid 3D no game is made without, nowadays.

Anyway, if some terrorist group around decides to burn microsoft factories down and ransack mr. Gates' manor, I'm in. Any time.  

Well, I'm making a game with my friend now, and things are going pretty well.
Here is the bg I did yesterday, for about 5 hours... this is a record for me working on a single picture that long.

I posted gif here, but 8-bit version looks REALLY lame, so if you happen to have something better than dial-up connection,
see BMP (900 KB, same link/filename, but .bmp extension instead of .gif)

Okay.
I have two switchable players.
This is done from a GUI button, which has really simple script:

if (GetGlobalInt(100) == 1)
{
SetPlayerCharacter(INC);
SetGlobalInt(100,2);
}
else
{
SetPlayerCharacter(VAZ);
SetGlobalInt(100,1);
}

Simple. Now, problem is that when I make one character walk to a non-walkable area (non-directly)
And while he's walking, switch to another character, he (previous one) walks excactly (directly) to the point he was commanded to walk to, ignoring the fact that it was a non-walkable area. When switched back to character assigned to move, I was surprised that he was standing on a non-walkable area. Characters were in separate rooms.

So, my guess is that problem is in AGS part, where it commands charaters to move, while they're not active player characters and not in current room.

I provided my simple code to ensure that *I* didn't do anything wrong and problem is in AGS itsself.

Movement command was made with walk cursor, so It couldn't be direct (ignore walkables) any way.

Ayeegh! I browsed through beginners forum and ended up with complete confusion. What's going on there? Some questions are absolutely un-understandable and some others won't match with word 'beginner' at all. Really, difficult problems.
Or in most cases, beginners want to do something, that can be done with sh*tloads of advanced scripting and are demanding/expecting really easy and understandable solution to this. The things we usually don't do, because it's too painful to do. Huh.

** InCreator congratulates himself in making another note, zero conclusions and useless thread **

When using custom GUI for inventory, speech text appears to be behind (or under?) GUI, only way to work around is to use DisplayAt to pull text somewhere else, so GUI won't cover it. Weird?
Suggestion here, too - "Inventory uses GUI <number>" option to general settings, which atomatically solves the problem then, or will just assign custom GUI to InventoryScreen function.

I'm sure that...
Insomnia, caffeine posioning and too much computer could instead of fresh air and physical excercise lead 20-years old male to an insanity. Here's the proof, which I can call just "a mp3-track", because I'm not sure does *music* like that exists or can I call this "music". I'm a lousy tracker, too. Okay.
It has a bass, beat and melody, just the theme is something, that makes this thing weird.

How weird things actually happen...
I sat by my machine, and ate sandwhich with sausage on it, desperately trying to make something music-like with SoundClub. I do it often.
I started to think about sandwhich I was eating, then about humans eating meat and vegetarians.
I was tired, as I usually am. And I was weirdly sensitive, a hurricane of emotions attacked me, which usually lead me to creating something stupid.

So...
I tried to make some kind of a melody, and actually succeeded, then, led by my thoughts about animals that people eat, felt sorry about them. Then I came to an idea (negative maybe), to make song for them. For dying for of human race. So, hour later, I stopped myself and asked "what the hell am I doing?!".

It...
Is a song which is made thinking about poor innocent cows waiting to be killed in meat factory. As seen on TV once, they ride on conveyor belt to a metal plate which kills them with electric shock. Yes, cruel.

I called it "Death Dance of Electricity" and well, I'm not even sure why I did put this up here. Maybe to share my insanity. Anyway, I don't suggest you to listen it.
Unless you happen to be extremely optimistic person, who just gets a good laugh. Then it's absolutely okay. But I'm afraid of much more serious reactions, too...  Then again, there was an AGS game which made me feel same way that this song does. I don't remember its name or creator, though, but it was about a suicide and something else like that. Agony. Right. I should been named this song to "Agony". Or "Sick".

I used...
Soundclub, Audiocatalyst (for mp3 conversion), my large bank of *stolen*samples, plus some WAVs from SimFarm.

Anyway, you've been warned.
And I suggest to tune treble down in your mp3 player.

http://www.hot.ee/increatorgamez/Deathdance.mp3

Problem is - AGS is not able to recognize my soundcard. It's that card that's mounted onto Athlon motherboard and has stupid and useless echo thingy. My friend has Athlon board too, a bit newer and he's experiencing same problem. I imagine that it may be connected with fact that IRQ is 11, instead of usual 5, 7 or 10. Some games won't let you have a sound if IRQ is above 10. Or am I wrong?

Anyone else has Athlon/built-in soundcard/problem?

What should I do? I'm getting those "Failed to init Digital driver"  error messages.

Following text isn't excact suggestions list, just ideas when looking at AGS today and in the future... Like - what could be there, when version 4.0 comes out or smthng... they could be just neat plugins, too.

1) NPC AI system

With definable paths for NPC characters, from room to room, with places where NPC stops, says something, maybe some other NPC says something too (NPC with NPC conversation), picks up things, performs some animations and so. There was something pretty close to that in a game "Lure of the Temptress". But full system to do that, instead sinking into millions of lines of scripts, would be cool. AGS character plugin did some of that...

2) Emotions in animations

This should mean first, that animations are separated into directions, not loops (up walking anim, not just loop, up talking anim, and so on), so we can make
several animations of character *easily*, like when characters walks right, he can be happy, woulded, crawling, sneaking and so on, which affects his animation then. And of course, fast script functions for that. Like "SetCharacterWalkHappy(CHAR);"
Talking gives even more us to this, angry speech, happy, bored, etc. "SetCharacterTalkBored(CHAR);"

But this can be done now, through lot of scripting and I think when such thing would be in AGS, whole program could be in two modes, Advanced and simple or something, because lot's of people see no use for this, or have to work enough to make even primary animations.

3) 3D-rooms with lights > Shadows.

This sounds really difficult. Only way I imagine such thing could be done is:

* Room itself is a plane at the center of a 3D-box
* Another two regions are included, which define "walls" and "ground", to which shadow is projected to
* Inside this 3D box (world), there's a directional light, which can be moved on 3 axis with definable light casting spot (target)
* Depending on angle light lightens the room plane, shadow will be drawn, which will be a character's sprite, streched to needed angle, all colors replaced with black and drawn with opacity that can be defined according this rooms light setting
overall picture would be something like that:



But then again, I may be terribly wrong and such thing could not work at all, since my knowledge of 3D is really non-existing.

4) View Manager... like there's a sprite manager

5) There were some other dreams about future AGS, but I forgot already... Oh yeah, animated inventory items, like there were some in some game, I can't remember... Kronolog?

Okay, this one is hard.
I have a *****. A really intelligent one.

What I have learned so far:

It controls the computer all the time.
It appears to be memory-resident.
It is extremely aware of words "anti-*****", "*****" and so.

Behavior of this is really strange. It controls Internet explorer, that's for sure. Whenever I search for something named "*****" or something close to that, it automatically closes the window. immediately.

Same thing with Norton anti***** setups (2002 and 2003) - as soon setup wizard window opens, some *dark force* closes it so fast that all i can notice, is just a flicker of a yellow window... So - I think my opinions are right. It should be memory-resident.

Another conclusion - It attacks all files which include word "*****". like - ALL files, not just executables or archives.

Here's the strangest proof of this! I have some mp3-s of Russian pop band "*****". Things went strange when Winamp immediately closed just when I tried to play *these* songs...  :o All others play fine. *****'s not. And I have 650 songs. Why only *****?!

I tried trendmicro's online ***** scan. Guess what? Window closes after clicking "free online scan" link...

So - I'm desperate and have no idea what's going on.

P.S. I'm running Windows ME. Recently I had problems with resolution - It automatically changed to 102x768 and I cound't make it SMALLER! Like, I moved the slider to 800x600 and pressed "Ok", "Apply" and so on - and screen flickered, but resolution remained the same!!! Tried it several times, reinstalled video/monitor drivers and got rid of this. But strange enough. Maybe It's connected. Maybe just of mr. Gates' jokes.

So - Has anyone seen this? Can give me any idea what to do or at least how is this ***** called!
I really-really don't want to format my HD, because I have no place to store 37GB of various stuff...

Thanks in advance...

And you probably know the word I'm talking about - DON'T USE IT IN YOUR POSTS or I'm not avalaible to read the replies! (Yes, ***** closes this thread window then, too!)

[You]

Here, I was trying to make a negative-type character. This was supposed to be a teenager, lazy, cowardly and maybe even cruel. Maybe a big brother no one wants to have. I made really fast, in about 20 minutes (which means fast for me), then started to repaint it to correct errors and give final look and... didn't know where to start! Here it is.


(Yes, he IS wearing slippers)



What would You do next? I'm really out of ideas.

P.S - If image happens to be invisible/broken linked, or you cannot see it for some other reason, let me know and I will move it to another server.

Hm. I've been out of ideas lately and still suffering under fact that I still haven't donated anything that may called a "game" to this community. My computer is waaaay over "Best before" date, too, so I can't do any 3D and my "A DreamWalker" project is on hold.

So I'm selling myself now. Actually, giving myself away for free. Idea is following:

I'd like to team up with someone on game making.
I don't have to put up an idea right now, so I want just join some project. Anyone needs a BG artist? Animator? Humanoid idea generator? Or a lousy tracker? I'm here. And offers are welcome. My drawing (I think), compared to this community, is average/mediocre/etc.

If anyone needs a hand, and I like the offer/idea/whole thing, I'm glad to join. Post something here, send me private messages or an e-mail.

Is it very stupid to ask for a possibility to have  translation text file for AGS itsself?
Like, some helpful people could translate AGS into their language, which encourages program use and amateur gamemaking?

Well, I'd like to get any info on playing old games over internet, such as shadow warrior, duke nukem 3d and so on. there's no TCP/IP play supported with those, but i guess people are playing. Patches? spec. progs? I'd like to play, but since i don't use dial-up modem, there's no way i could play them. and this TEN-internet play-thing with 3drealms games COSTS MONEY, so, yeah.
any help or hints would be appreciated.

I tried to make my room for a 640x480 game.
I know that perpsective went a little out of reality, but I'm still not sure should I keep it as it is, or make changes.
Any comments?

*edit:* I moved picture to a freewebs account. Possibly the problems between hot.ee server and people from other countries, people under estonian ISP-s claim they see everything right. This has bever happened before - because I'm a member for a long time and taken part of MsPaint game and so... no problems reported yet!
Still, a bit embarrasing and stupid case. My apologies and link *should* work now.

http://www.freewebs.com/increator/bground.gif

Well, It's a bit difficult explain, but I played Monkey Island 2 and notified another great thing in SCUMM engine. To understand what I'm talking about, this game and a sound card is needed.

The game has midi-like music (I'm not really sure, what).

When entering into Largo's hotel room, music continues, but with extra instruments and a bit weird style! Leaving room music goes back to "normal", but it never stops playing! Extra instruments just "fade" away. How did they do that, and is something, that can be added to AGS,too?