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Could just be my paranoid mind at work but I'm wondering if there are any negative features or just plain reasons to show restraint when using Game.DoOnceOnly(). It's an incredibly useful function and I think I've put at the very least a dozen of them in my game so far.

I'm guessing from the way it's set out that it creates a set of booleans at run-time named from the value in the method, and these booleans become more Global Ints that get stored in the memory in run-time - I can't remember exactly but ISTR booleans equal around 1 byte of memory each as one of the most primitive types. I thought I'd check if maybe it was a little more complicated than that.

I've gotten into the habit of using this code so often that I felt a need to check if it had any sort of limitation at all other than memory use. Just to be on the safe side.

Was just double-checking the system limitations in AGS and I saw the '3000  dialog-script messages' - I was confused because I couldn't find the term elsewhere in the helpfile. Is this a redundant term from around AGS 2.0+ when you manually entered messages into the game and then called them from the script instead of just writing Strings?

To clarify I'm working on a game with a lot of dialogue and so was wondering if this could be a factor.

The game I'm working on meant I needed to override the main characters baseline for a cutscene - for some reason I figured that this effect would be temporary and was bewildered by a number of walkbehind problems that followed, which now make perfect sense.

Is there anyway that I haven't been able to find in the help files to revert the character's baseline to its default behaviour, other than putting cEgo.Baseline = cEgo.y in the room_repeated execute method? (My current workaround)

I'm getting a weird crash extremely occassionally in a game that uses pretty much the standard Sierra GUI (inventory screen has an extra button but that's it, really) that closes the game when I press the inventory button on the main GUI bar. It seems to happen about only one in a hundred times when I click on the inventory, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to events prior to the crash to make it occurr.

The message gave me this:

An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00502BCB ; program pointer is +379, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (3,22)


This is the first time I've had to report one of these so I'm not sure if I'm doing it right..

Deleted post.

Working on some fairly lengthy in-game cutscenes at the moment and I've been having a bit of trouble - first I was thinking that covering it in a global script would make the most sense, but then I remembered all the object animations that would need to be set and called within the room and dropped that idea. What I'm currently doing is using the AfterFadeIn() function of the rooms to script the action of the cutscene, which goes between 3 different rooms.  It looks a little like this:


RoomZAfterFadeIn(){

If(cEgo.PreviousRoom==x){
  if(cutsceneState==1){
     //dialogue
     cEgo.ChangeRoom(y);
     }
  }

}

This causes problems, and in hindsight I can see why, to do with the new room code still running. So then I figured the best way would be to use a placeholder to store the change room number and call the changeRoom function at the end of the afterFadeIn() function, but due to the odd error messages I was getting I'm getting the feeling that passing a value into changeRoom() that way isn't meant to be done.

(I tried this both with a global and a local int as a placeholder - in both cases the game crashed telling me that I was missing 'Intro.crm', which is a file I don't have nor have ever used - I filed that under 'weird')


I get the distinct feeling I'm missing a trick here and making things too complicated.. surely there are easier ways to do these cutscenes given how many people use? I was thinking then of calling individual functions for each scene of the cutscene within the room script, but I'm not sure if that would work..

Okay, I've recently got into MAME and I'm greatly enjoying the world of ye olde arcade games - but I've hit an odd speedbump. Because MAME is one of those odd little things online that is spruiked all over the net but doesn't seem to have much decent documentation anywhere I've found myself a bit stuck and having to go Google crazy trying to find what I'm looking for, and failing horribly.

Basically, I'm trying to run Street Fighter III in MAME through the command-line version and it doesn't even seem to recognize it as a game in its library. Interestingly, the windows version DOES recognize it as a game.. but refuses to play it. It also refuses to play any of the other games in my collection, which play fine in the other version. Not sure what to make of that.

Everything I've read online when looking for help goes on about something called .CHD - no idea what this is, if I have it (it isn't an extension on any of the files) or where it fits into the equation. If anyone could give me some straightforward answers or a link to a good site where I can find them that would be great.

I've been a bit frustrated working with different sized sprites that others in a project have made - to make a scene work sprites need to jump across a scene in a literal instant, and I briefly thought that this was what Character.Move() does and I've been a bit disappointed (though it has cleared up one part of the scene..) I know that characters generally aren't meant to jump all over the screen but it will be REALLY USEFUL if it's possible in this context.

Thanks for your help in advance, because it's always good stuff.

Okay, I've read up on what exactly the acsprset.spr file is and what it does... and the issues with uncompressed sprites all taking up the same amount of HDD space, fine I get it... but I'm working on a 800x600 game that's got more animations than most AGS titles (I see this will effect it, obviously..) and currently acsprset.spr is 474mb. Bear in mind I have not finished the intro sequence. This strikes me as very big - or is this just in the ballpark for games of this resolution?

I haven't actually finished a game before so I'm not sure if the size goes down once it's compiled or anything like that. If anyone could shed some light on whether this is even a potential problem, that'd be great (because I figure trying to fix it later on could only be more difficult)

Hey, I'm carrying on with a script that somebody else has made that's entirely different to my style - he uses lockview and animate functions for everything, including speech. Because this is cumbersome and would make conversations nearly impossible I've changed the characters to have speech views... but now when I set characters to say something a duplicate version of that character appears on the screen in a different position (leaving the normal view on screen and idle) and sometimes with the completely wrong loop.

I've looked through all the settings and have been scrounging through the scripts but I'm a bit clueless - what on earth could cause this error? I was wondering if it could have something to do with the amount of lockview commands, but the function doesn't seem to have anything to do with fixing the character's place and then that doesn't explain why a duplicate wouldn't be in the same position...

Any ideas at all?

This is something that's been on my mind a little bit, since seeing a few posts on the Critic's Lounge of people wanting to hone their 'FOA' style but is something I've been thinking for a while.. is it just me or is Indiana Jones the most popular target of fan games out there? I mean, I could be wrong, but I seem to have come across about eight different Indy projects in varying stages of development (usually toward the lower end of the scale as it goes...) in AGS alone, just browsing this site, and then a few loose ones out there elsewhere on the intaweb that stuck in my mind like the Java-based game-maker named 'Indiana Java'.

It isn't that weird in itself that there are Indy fan-games, but I thought it would be logical for there to be an equal amount of fangames for Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Discworld et al but they seem to be rarer, especially here.

So... is it just that Indy has a broader appeal beyond adventure gamers? Is it that AGSers feel that his franchise was under-served by Lucas Arts? Or is it the fact that Indy has such a set style of look and storyline that everyone, as gamers and game-makers, know what should be in an Indiana Jones game?

OR - maybe I've got no idea, which is kind of why I started this thread. Any Indy fans who'd like to shed light on this one?

Hmm, I had a look at AGI Studio the other day and, well, it really doesn't seem very user friendly - a lot of internal programs and strange glitches that were generally screwy. I was looking because I was a little interested in the idea of an old-school Sierra tribue with a parser and the basic graphics, but the experience got me thinking - how difficult would it be to make in AGS?

In a roundabout way, how hard is it to implement a limited palette and a text parser into an AGS game?

I know everyone says that you should make your first game as simple as possible, but of course you know rookies are going to ignore that advice - so my first idea for a game was essentially full-length, but I decided I'd make it easy by having a limited setting and 13 characters (which I consider a very small number). I've basically made the graphics but, during the course of that game I decided that I really should make sure my programming was good by taking on a simpler project first.

So then I tried to think of a one-room game to make that would actually have a fun idea behind it that I'd like to make. I came up with Secret Agent on Rollerskates (Because the main character's on remote-controlled rollerskates I don't need a walkcycle...) which would be set in one room... but then to compensate I decided to make the one room very large. And then added two more rooms anyway.

So then I've done almost all the graphics for that , started programming it with the LECScumm Interface, gotten to a third of the way through... and realised I'm dirt poor when Valentine's Day is coming up. Luckily it's a long-distance kind of thing so I thought I'd make a relatively simple game for my girlfriend with some stuff she'd like and give it to her as a late present...

Feels a bit weird to me because I've got two fully-planned and partially complete games on my computer that I have every intention of finishing and releasing in a few months' time, so I was wondering how many half-finished games there are on peoples' harddrives..

I've been programming in Java for 2 years at TAFE and have got the hang of the language pretty well, along with the Object-Oriented principles. (Not gotten the hang of handing in assignments in time but that's neither here nor there..) I've noticed that the AGS scripting language is quite similar, but then I think I read it was based on C so that makes sense.

Anyway, firstly I've been taught that encapsulation is the key to good programming, and that 100+ line code so should be avoided outside of driver classes, so when I read that "All character interaction must be handled in the Global Script" a warning light goes off in my head. For some context I'm making a LECScumm gui game at the moment so my Global Script is already 400+ lines just with click handling. Here's something I know would work in Java and that's creating a Characters script where all the code goes, so that the GlobalScript bits would look like this:

cGinny_mode8(){
    cGinny_click();
}

And the code would then be really easy to use. Any reason why that wouldn't work?

Also, I was wondering about the scope of variables. I'm assuming at the moment that an int is only accessible within it's native class (as in Java), but does the AGS language support Getters to make this job easier? Do they look any different from

int getDoorLocked(){
    return doorLocked;
}

Sorry if these questions are stupid, but I've found that looking at the Scripting tutorials that they're all geared for newbies to scripting. If there was an overview of the language's traits made for experienced programmers I didn't see it, and it could be an idea for any updates. Thanks in advance for your help.

I can't find hide nor hair of the game, nor even a hint of its existence on the current AGDI page and the links in the Games page are broken. Did anybody make a mirror? I've been Googling for it but I've only found old links to the AGDI page. I'd be grateful for any info.

Hey. This is an image I knocked up over the last couple of days in MS Paint, as a sort of a break from 320x200 graphics which get a big tiresome - this is also the first time I've used shading extensively (but not THAT extensively as I'm sure you'll point out, mostly on the tent walls and the grass)



I'm quite happy with the results, but also keen to hear what I need to know before attempting a game in the resolution for real. (This isn't for a game - just my own tinkering)

It's also an attempt at mimicking the style of Monkey Island that I loved, with the incredibly crowded and detailed backdrops that scenes would always have. By far my biggest surprise was discovering how little paraphernalia is actually required to make a room look 'crowded'...

Oh, and I should add that it was done entirely in MS Paint. Be sure to tell me how foolish I am for using it.