Messages

Here's the situation:

I have a hotspot for a door. The "Interact" event makes the player go inside the building. That's fine.

I want it to work so that clicking the "Walk" cursor on the door also makes the player go inside, without having to switch cursors. This just makes the interface nicer in my opinion. So, in the "Any Click" interaction I have:

Code: ags

if (game.used_mode == 0) //walk
{
  hotspot[5].RunInteraction(eModeInteract); //same as open
}

But, "Any Click" doesn't trigger for walk clicks according to the manual. What am I to do? Any help would be appreciated!

I ran into an issue: If you sent a "Move" command to the object before it has completed the slow move, this causes an error ("SetPosition can't be set on a moving object").

So perhaps a check to Object.Moving is in order?

I just found an interesting work-around: if I type the view name I want elsewhere (notepad), and then copy/paste into the text box, it works. So I tried doing that and making a view "DAVY_WALK", and it works fine when I refer to that in a script.

Note that it's possible to create invalid view names that way (putting punctuation or spaces in there) and those may or may not cause problems with other stuff. Certainly the underscore worked fine.

It looks like it works with GUI names too. The same warning applies there.

[Edit by strazer:]

This is a pretty minor point, but ...

Is there any particular reason that view names can't have any characters other than capital letters and numbers? I would like to name a view "Davy_Walk" for instance, because "DAVYWALK" is harder to read.

Like I said, this is really minor, but if it's easy to change then it would be great.

Thanks!

Edit by strazer:

AGS v2.71 RC1:
* Underscores can now be used in GUI and view names, and invalid names pasted into the box are now rejected.

It should therefore be always possible to sweep the COMPILED folder and then successfully recreate its contents (ctrl-s) from the game resource files (that's located in the GAME folder). Having any resource files (eg. sounds in that case) in the COMPILED folder breaks the rule and one may occasionally lose the original resources upon cleaning the COMPILED folder.

[...] There were occasions when people having sound/music files in the COMPILED folder eventually distributed their games with both the original sound/music files and their bundled versions (music.vox, speech.vox and those embedded into exe module itself) which results in unnecessary increased (sometimes even doubled!) filesize of the game distribution package.

As for cluttering the GAME folder, as Rui pointed out, AGS will be storing speech and music resources in their own folders -- so it should reduce the number of files in the GAME folder.

All good points - I agree that it's better to put the sound files in a separate folder (presumably Game\Sounds). The SoundList.dat file still needs to be in \Compiled; so the solution is just to have two paths, one for Compiled and the other can be anywhere else (as long as AGS can find it). As far as the Sound Manager is concerned, it does not cause any problem.

Thank you for your input! I will try to implement those changes in the next few days.

Yes, I'm aware of that; but you can put the files in the compiled folder and AGS will find them just as well. I like to do that because it makes the game folder itself less cluttered. If you don't use the provided code module, it doesn't matter what the path is; if you do, there is a file called SoundList.dat that is created; it is loaded by the module and that needs to be in the path of the compiled EXE.

Out of curiosity, have you considered making this as a COM plugin for AGS? It doesn't look like it would be that hard to conver it, and that way folks could use it directly in AGS instead of opening it as a seperate program. Not sure which way more people would prefer.

I think that could be done relatively easily since it's already in VB (I don't know how I'd put the menus, though), but it was faster to develop as a stand-alone application.

Does anybody else think they would like it better as a COM plugin?

INdeed. Will you create an installer?

Sorry, I hadn't realized that the grid control was not commonly installed. I will make an installer, it's not very difficult - I use Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php).

Thank you YakSpit for providing the download link to the control in the mean time!


Edit: I've made a quick installer program here:
http://www.dmgenie.com/ags/AGSSM_Setup.exe

This should fix the missing control error message.

Hello everybody!

I'd like to announce that I have completed a program called the AGS Sound Manager. It is a small program designed to simplify the use of sound effects file in AGS. It manages large number of files and makes it easier to play the sounds from the AGS script language.

Basically it takes care of copying your original sound effects files to the game directory and renaming them SOUND1.WAV, SOUND2.MP3, etc. There is also a script module to make the PlaySound() calls more friendly.

Also, I've integrated an OGG encoder to compress WAV files automatically, to reduce the game size. It can be turned on and off, and you can choose the encoding quality.





The full description and help file is available here:
http://www.dmgenie.com/ags/SMHelp.html

The AGS Sound Manager is freeware, you can download the installer program here:
http://www.dmgenie.com/ags/AGSSM_Setup.exe
(The installer includes the VB6 source code).


I hope this will come in handy to some of you. I welcome any comments, bug reports or suggestions - please post them here. I hope this was the most appropriate board.

Also, I wouldn't mind having the program listed in the AGS website, in the Resources or Downloads section. Can this be done?


Thank you!

Janik

Edit: Made an installer program that includes the MSFLXGRID.OCX file that was missing from the original source. Please download and run the setup file instead of the ZIP files.

Hi,

I've been playing with the AGS Editor plugin thing (in VB6), and I've been able to add a new pane to the editor (very cool!) but I can't find any docs beyond   http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/accomplug.htm

From the auto-complete entries in VB I see functions to edit Characters, and Dialog, but it looks like that's all. I was interested in accessing the sprites and views, things like that, but I can't see how. Is it even possible?

Thanks!

Hi,

I'd like to see a shortcut key to open the room script editor quickly, from the Areas and Objects part of the editor. I know Ctrl+E is the shortcut from the Settings (though you have to click the picture, if the tree still has focus the shortcut doesn't work), but since most of your time is spent in areas/objects, it makes sense to have a keyboard shortcut (and maybe a menu item) for opening the room script.

Additionally it might be nice to access the Interaction editor and the Message editor from either pane. Adding a "Room" menu with those submenus and associated shortcuts would do the job nicely.

Thanks CJ for such a great program!

You were probably referring to the fact that scaled alpha sprites aren't anti-aliased (by which I mean the interior pixels, not the edge pixels).

My favorite part is the music satan calls "hard rockin" - that's hilarious!

Comments:

- Your Satan character could use a left/right walkcycle
- There are no descriptions for any look events - I assume that's because it's still a demo.
- Nice effect with the lights off / on.

Looks promising! Will Saddam Hussein show up for dinner (South Park reference  )

Simplicity is not always bad.Ã,  The only problem you open yourself up to is that key items will be easier to spot and hence puzzles easier to solve.

That's true - but if a puzzle is made difficult only/mostly because an item is hard to spot, then that's not a very satisfying puzzle.

Your game sounds confusing to me: it's racing/dancing/stealth/fighting all at the same time? That's something I'd like to see!

The arms aren't in a very natural resting position, you might put one closer to the body, asymetrically or something.

I really like it! But since this is the critics corner, allow me to nit-pick: I think the edges of the door and the wall corners are too well defined. The floor/fountain have a fuzzier look to them, and I think it kind of makes the door stand out as 'too clean' 

Newer monitors should have settings in the menu to help, or older ones would have a vertical size knob (maybe).

Is your homeless character the bum in Reality-on-the-Norm? That would be cool! 

One thing I have been wanting to do is create a wiki-manual on the website, where people can add comments to manual pages. These sorts of little additions could be best added that way, although of course any larger errors/omissions in the manual should be corrected properly.

Brilliant! But would there be a way for you to easily convert the website manual to the .CHM file used with the program? If not, it would be painful to maintain both versions of the manual...