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We live in some really sad times... mainly because of the loss of faith and the denial of the one true God.

You're kidding right? Last time I checked, muslim extremists blowing themselves up for their one true God and christian fundamentalists banning evolution textbooks weren't exactly making the world a better place...

The blowback is unfortunately starting to affect the artists who had this copy protection put on their CDs. Take a look at the latest customer reviews for The Dead 60s record:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009I7NO4/qid=1131766102/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-0433652-8153548?v=glance&s=music&n=507846

It's a really good music, it's just too bad for the band to have to be the victim of this little experiment.

Yeah, House is a great show, definitely my favorite show of the current TV season. I find House (the character) just hilarious!

Regarding the cursor issue...you're saying the icon bar doesn't turn on when you bring the mouse cursor to the top of the screen?  I haven't heard that one before...

It has happened to me - I think that to reproduce this, you need to open the Load Game dialog (I pressed F7) and then Cancel. Afterwards the icon bar no longer shows up (even after closing and re-loading the same game, if you save that game). I presume that you hide the icon bar when the load dialog shows up but do not un-hide it when cancel is pressed.

I ended up doing as you suggested, with a property for the walk-to coordinates. It fixes the problem I was talking about, and it allowed me to make the move to the walk-to point non-blocking. If the player clicks somewhere else while the character is still going towards the point, then the action does not occur.

Looks nice! How much is the downloadable version going to cost?

I had to copy alleg40.dll to the \Compiled\ folder to get it to run.

Impressive, very impressive!

One question though: I activated the frames per second display, and SetGameSpeed(999) to see how fast it could go - but the frame rate I got was consistently 64 fps, no matter what color depth or how zoomed in I was on the character. Is this somehow coded in the plugin to run at 64 fps max?

Just a note, you may be aware of this, but the wintermute engine has some 3d character capability (see their demo at http://www.dead-code.org/). Just thought you might be interested in seeing how they did it, handling walkable areas and such.

I'm assuming that your Walkingwait() function blocks the script from running until MAN has stopped - but there is a simpler way:

MoveCharacterBlocking(MAN,130,160);

or in the new version 2.71 (highly recommended:) )

cMan.Walk(130,160, eBlock);


That would only help if your Walkingwait() function did not work as intended. Other than that, are you sure that there is a path with sufficient width between the start and end position? About 4 pixels are needed for the path-finding to work.

This was a game???

Hmm, how about having a chunk of script code right there in the dialog script? Perhaps just have curly brackets indicate the start/end of it.

For example:

Code: ags

@1
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
{
cOtherman.Walk(220, 330, eBlock);
cOtherman.LockView(12);
cOtherman.Animate(0,0, eOnce, eBlock, eForwards);
cOtherman.UnlockView;
}
otherman: ...
otherman: "I'm fine."
return

I'm not sure how that would work behind the scenes - perhaps each code block would have a function automatically created for them - sort of like an on-the-fly dialog_request().
But it would be very neat, keeping all the related conversations and code together.

I've scripted a customized "walking" cursor using the Usermode1 cursor - this allows me to have an interaction when clicking "Walk" (my own walk) on a door, for example. It works well, I can have the cursor change into an arrow, and I have it so double-clicking instantly changes room.

Now, the problem is that if I click "Walk" on something that happens to be a hotspot with a walk-to point set, then the character first automatically walks to the walk-to point, and then walks to where you actually clicked.

So I would like to know if there is a way to disable the automatic walking-to function for a specific cursor mode (other than just look). Or, failing that, disabling it for all cursors, in which case I could take it over with scripting.

I like the animation:


But what's he doing with his hands right there? It looks a little suspicious ... 

In some cases choosing the resolution could have an impact on game design - not so much when pondering 640x480 vs 800x600, but comparing, say, 320x200 or less (like the 160x100 of the first sierra games) to the higher resolutions. At low resolution you need the narrator to fill in a lot of the gaps where the graphics can't show clearly what something is supposed to be. It would affect puzzles, etc.

You mentioned photographs? How about designing model landscapes with clay and odds'n'sods (a la Wallace and Gromit) and taking photographs of them.

Very interesting idea! It still requires some artistic ability, this time for sculpting rather than drawing. But I would love to see a game with clay characters and sets, that would be something! The figurines could be sculpted and photographed behind a green-screen, and then used as sprites in the game. You could place them on some kind of turn table to get all 4 (or 8) angles of rotation.

He simply means, that the signup test is there for a reason. We get very little lamers here in general.

I don't remember filling out a signup test when I signed up - is this a recent change?

Great voice acting is hard to come by. It does add tremendously to a game if done well, but it can also hurt a game incredibly if it's not done well. I think text games allow people to interject their own style in a character, which has a potential to make them enjoy the game even more.

True. That's why it's nice to provide an option to turn speech off - cycling between speech only, speech and text, and text only. With the commercial games I've played, I don't think I've ever disliked the voice acting. Except maybe Tim Curry's odd accent when he played Gabriel Knight in the 3rd game.

Sorry if I'm being dim, but what is the advantage of a frame rate that high? Film is only 24fps and TV 50 or 60. Is a super-high frame rate particularly desirably for an adventure game?

Well, that frame rate is on my computer, which I bought a couple of months ago. My reasoning is that if it runs really fast on my computer, then it will still run ok on an older computer. For AGS you'll need about 40 frames per second if you keep the standard game speed; which I do get on my computer even at 800x600, but it's a bit closer than I'd like.

I'm not sure that plugins can go and change sprites assigned to views anyway.

I believe it is possible, using:

AGSViewFrame* GetViewFrame (int view, int loop, int frame);

which returns a pointer to the AGSViewFrame object, which contains info such as the sprite slot #, the delay, the associated sound, etc. I think modifying data in the object will change the animation - I'm not sure though.

Yes, it's a reasonable work around. Though the optional parameters to dialog_request would make it less clogged-up, definitely not more.

And if you were to download the album you would not get this trouble. It's not a smart move to actually penalize paying customers. Plus, you can't put it in your MP3 player, etc.

Take for instance DVDs - first you have the unskippable (and pointless) FBI warning, and then often you get some ads in there too. Some even have unskippable ads (none of mine, thankfully)! Isn't paying for the product once enough? Why annoy your customers?

Hi,

I would like to suggest allowing several parameters to the run-script command in dialogs, say, four or five integers. The way I would use it would be, for example:

run-script 101, 2, 5

where 101 is a command ID, say that here this is to change the expression used in the speech view;
2 would be the character ID;
5 would be the loop to use.

an other parameter might allow for a delay before changing the expression, etc. All the parameters (other than the first) would be optional. With many parameters, it makes it possible to do a lot from within a dialog script with much less code, and in a much more maintanable way.

Thanks!