Messages

Thanks! I'll promise I'm going to give ya' some credit when releasing my game.

Hm. I think I'm not first one to mention this, but using RunDialog(x) while cutscene is playing makes skipping cutscene impossible. ESC key just skips whole cutscene until it reaches the point where dialog is. Is it a bug?

In case you don't understand, just: make a cutscene, put rundialog into somewhere in the cutscene and now, try to skip the cutscene.

I don't know. Does he? I searched thru Zak2 page but found nothing. Is there LucasFan's homepage up somewhere? And IS the font up or were you just guessing? I believe there is, because Zak2 was translated into many languages so he needed to make multiple foreign characters... or have them made and so he distributed the font. But I have no idea where it could be. Links?

Gee, thanks. Now my spare time is filled with finding my favorite font among these thousands... , anyway, I'm not sure that it's allowed, but I'm planning to post a screenshot here from some game -- to show what I'm really looking for....

http://www.hot.ee/increator/LAhasit.jpg

...done. Now that's the one and the best, in my opinion...

[bold]

Yeah, thank you. Fixedsys looks VERY much like the one I need, but as I said, It's bold and bolded fixedsys isn't quite the same. Anyone get what I really want? I need it for my game!

[bold]

Does ANYONE know from where or how can I get almost (what almost? historical!) traditional font used in many-many games for speech, such as "Chewy:ESC from F5", "KGB a.k.a Konspiracy" and many other games, especially ones by LucasArts (Indiana Jones was one of them, if I'm not mistaken and games released under Virgin Interactive).

Hardcore adventure gamers should be already guessed for now which one I'm talking about - at least someone could.

I don't know its name (if it has any name) but its bold, outlined and big. And it looks very much like BIOS font in screen mode 13h, 320x200 8-bit... BASIC and Pascal programmers maybe get their hint from here...

Well, I'ts hard to ask for something you cannot really describe.  

And other thing: Is there any good tools/programs available for making fonts by my own (for AGS, of course) except that superbuggy SCI-studio?

There could be multiple sprite import!
-- I'm using 3ds max for my gfx and when I save my 3d-animation, it gives me files like:

image001.bmp
image002.bmp
image003.bmp
image...

So, If AGS could detect them by itsself, It could take alot less time when importing sprites for animation!

I think some others will find that useful, too.

Aha! So variable counter is used and counter++ means it has relative value of +1 every step.
Well, thanks! Sound very logical and -- simple.
I messed with timers till I was even more confused and so easy piece of script did it all! (this is what separates programmers from other crowd - finding easiest solutions - I think )

  How do I *ANIMATE* regions to make their RGB values to change after every - let's say - 30 steps?
(Point is to simulate disco lights, regions for AGS itself and animated 3-d background for overall beauty).

I know there's a deal with SetRegionTint (or some thing like that) and timers(I guess).

Anyone care to give me a simple code?  

Maybe i shouldn't complain. but snow/rain plugin doesn't work with ags 2.56!

Rain is essential component of some rooms in my game so i think i won't ugrade my game to new ags.

is plugin modification and recompiling stopped or will creators rewrite them for newer versions of AGS?

Okay, I'll try to be more specific.

Player character starts in new room at the place where he is covered by walk-behind area
(he is behind it).

So, to avoid confusion "where am I?", I added a
little script, MoveCharacterBlocking, to make him walk
out from behind the corner, as soon as player enter room ("after fadein").

So what happens -- player enters this room and
his character steps out behind corner, then game gives control back to player. (A damn simple thing, but hard to explain)

When "Adjust Speed with Scaling" is turned on,
my character won't start the room at right co-ordinates, so there will be no walking. In matter fact,
he starts from a non-walkable area.
The command which sends him into the room is NewRoomEx (caused by stepping onto region in previous room), so i think speed-scaling manages to mess with this command. Just try it yourself.

And don't think that I'm a newbie and doing something wrong by myself. There IS a bug.

Okay, nice, but...
'Adjust Speed with Scaling' seems to be buggy.
I have a room where player character, when entering a room,  will automatically make a short walk "after fadein", to avoid standing behind walk-behind and confusing real player.

With scale-speed-adjusting turned on, he just happens to land to a non-walkable area.

Without it, evereything seems to be okay.
Is it a bug?

1. What's the priorities in advancing AGS? I mean, what comes next? There's many suggestions and you're telling that most things won't be added yet. What are the most important things you want to add right now or are working with, CJ?

2. Is AGS Demo game project now stopped forever,
or is it just waiting for volunteers to make it even better?

3. I imagine that it's very difficult to do, but will AGS ever see *crossfading* room-change style?

Okay, I think these questions ain't worth their place in this forum. But still, crossfading sounds good to me.

2 MHawk: Yeah, i figured this script thing out by myself just as soon i encountered a problem, just didn't try it.
But what about AGS-s "easy to use" interface?
Newbies?

I'm not sure that everyone uses scripts or knows this activeinv thing, It's eally good that AGS shows proper script command for every interaction, at least.

It wasn't really MY problem which casued this topic. I don't think that CJ makes AGS updates just because you or me doesn't like something in it. There's lots of creative, yet unexperienced people out there.

1. Interaction editor

I wanted to make AGS to display text for every inventory item when used on character.
It looked like this:

Use item on charecter
 Conditional - If inventory item was used (number)
   Run Script
 ....

For 30 inv items i have to search for this "Conditional - If ..." condition 30 times from interaction list!
And the list is long. And a bit messy.

So here it is --
All the interactions could be selectable with mouse,
maybe even multiple (more than 1) with dragging,
and then copyable when -- lets say, when shift key is held and mouse is dragged, so i could copy this condition and just change the inventory item number from its properties. This goes with other interactions too. So I -- for example -- could drag(copy) same Run-Script interaction for different events, like:
(a long example here  )

I have Run-Script command with proper script, that says Roger to play some animation or display some speech when he's being "Interacted".

I just copy-drag same Run-Script (with its contents, of course) to event when he's being "Looked At", without
need to make new Run-Script interaction under "Look at character" event and copying all the script text from previous one there. Makes things alot easier, right?

I hope i made myself clear, english isn't my mother language. Anyway, it's just a suggestion. We can manipulate sprites and script text using clipboard. Why not Interactions?

2. Mask editor

Although mask editor seems to be left with no special attention, It's maybe most important thing about AGS.

The tools there are very basic. Too basic.
Circle? Rectangle? Multiple Undo levels? Selector tool plus area's-copy & paste? Someone already asked for that.
I think a bit helpful could be ability to do really STRAIGHT line. Like holding down some key when dragging. (example: MS Paint -- shift key for straight line in 8 directions).

Of course, mask can be made outside AGS. But this goes for simpler backgrounds, mostly made with painting programs. It's not the quality thing but color count! Let me explain.

Bckgrnds with HIGH different color count such as photos
and 3D-rendered pics have *many* colors. Antialiasing makes often things even worse. Easiest way to reduce color count -- to make 256-color mask file -- is to lower color levels. Colors with similar contrast (or hue? Don't know right word for that) will be set into same single color. But it can't be always done, no matter how good paint program is. For example dark red and dark gray are considered both as as black. If I rise levels enough to separate them, other things are affected too, so i have to make few hundred clicks with "Wipe colour" tool in mask editor to get rid of other walk-behinds, which were caused by high level color separation.

I thought that it could be cool to see all my sounds and music in AGS, separated into slots and folders like sprites or in a list with *descriptions*, like dialog topics.

sound99.wav doesn't say much. If I really had 99 sounds, I bet I couldn't remeber any of them. This is where my idea could be useful.

Same thing about music.

And maybe in this... lets call it "sound resources" thing were basic play/stop buttons so developers could listen to their sound resources right at the time when making the game.

I know that this is lots of work and could be major improvement, so -- this is an idea far away from reality, but how about it?

You can just rememeber this until you run out of  ideas, Chris. (Although I don't believe THAT could ever happen  )

Hm. Maybe it's a stupid question, but as I understood, MP3-player isn't excactly part of AGS, so it has its own copyright rules and terms. But module music, like XM, S3M and MOD? Are they played also by this MP3 player module or is their player an AGS's freeware part? And what about MIDI?

Thank you guys. Well, I'm not that angry guy as I seemed at my first website update. Look at my avatar image - that's me! Do I look like a public enemy?  

Okay. But I don't want to lose potential fans before anything playable will be complete, just because some text I typed when stupid HTML coding and InC-omnia made me upset and aggressive.

After all, what do you think, which english word is usually the first that non-english europeans learn?  

And scandals DO sell, right?
I'm doing this game and I'm going to finish it.
Why?
Too much abandoned AGS games in my lifetime...  

I think I found a "cure" for getting out of ideas --
when doing Dreamwalker, at the same time I have a project named "Freakster Brothers", which is handdrawn adventure about two dogs. They work in a company that deals with computer game world problems. Like when Luigi makes Mario get stuck into toilet pipe to have a date with Princess at the same time, or when Jake McUrk (hope I spelled it right) from Pleurghburg orders Roger Wilco's death to get free Sprite Folders in AGS for his new animation... and so on...

It's going to be a funny one. And whenever 3D-modelling for Dreamwalker freezes my willpower and brains, I draw a room or two for Freakster Bros.

Athough midi and painting progs still look/sound good when used by professional, I think 3D and XM sound/look alot better (again, when done by pro, actually, I'm not a one).

But why want something else than something better? I didn't say that those things are bad or something. Just I want to give more quality. Is THAT bad?

So - thanks for positive feedback. I'll need it.

Anyone using "ArtGem!"? It's a simple, 2MB drawing program, extremely easy to use, yet almost as powerful as Photoshop!   It just doesn't have all of those filters. I do all my painting with that.

It is 30-day trial shareware (but nothing is disabled until trial ends (in versions 1.2 and lower)) and well --
As piracy is not the thing to talk about, only hint I can tell you that 30 days are set by Windows' calendar/clock, during installation and first run.  

Avaible everywhere in internet, I got it from www.tucows.com .

  Can't believe that some words caused this mess.
Anyway, did you guys read text "About Me"?
I have slept 15 hours during last 96 hours. I guess I was a little bit too angry and sleepy. Okay, page is fixed now. . And forget what was there before.
After all, the GAME itself matters, not the way i described it, right?
And about comparing 3D -- I didn't say that I'm a pro or something. I started learning 3D in 3ds Max only 4 months ago. Better example of 3D in AGS is certainly "The Case Demo", which is also in progress and somewhere in this forum.
Maybe I get that far when making final rooms.

There's no 3D animation, except some animated objects, such as signs and some other. Characters ARE made (partially) with MS Paint and that simply
because Paint has fastest and simplest selector tool I've ever met. And it also imports pics from AGS
(for repairing or improving) with right palette. My main drawing prog, ArtGem! messes colors up when using Copy & Paste (some 16-bit/24-bit problem I think),  so I use 2 programs to do 2D sprites.