Messages

My main concern would be with clipping - I have no idea how to perform those calculations in AGS nor how to "limit" the drawing action itself.

AGS does the clipping for you, so if you just call RawDrawTriangle it'll automatically clip.

I see you've already started toying so I'm going to assume you're using floats in 2.7 and you've already projected lines into screen space.

You may have a problem with sorting however - drawing the close triangles on top of the far triangles. Is that what you mean by "limiting" the drawing action? There are several ways to approach this.
1) Sort by the average z value of the triangles (you can get that from the screen space projection).
2) A more sophisticated approach would check if all the vertices of triangle A are on the opposite side (relative to the camera) of triangle B, and if so draw A first.
A combination would be to first check if *all* the z values of A are larger than *all* of A's z values, then if not, try (2). If you have intersecting triangles, there's nothing you can do, short of a z buffer.

For the above approaches, you'll want to make a "display list" of triangle indices, then sort that list, then draw the triangles in the list order.

Another approach is to store the polygons in a BSP, like Doom did with its walls. There's loads of source code on the internet. If you can do matrix maths you can easily understand BSPs.

Hmm, since you can't copy structs in one operation and you can't get a pointer to a struct in an array, using AGS for this is going to be difficult...

Albeit, they still don't move exactly in similar ways (and they have the same speed and animation speed). Could be something about the character turning setting, I have to check this out..

It could also be because you have anti-glide mode on?

I'd say that thread from the tech archive doesn't really solve the problem, just hacks around it somewhat.
If the pathfinding takes the player character in the opposite direction to the mouse click then it fails.

A possible solution would be to use blank sprite loops (the same number of frames as the walk cycles you have) for the four walk directions, then when EGO is walking, keep track (in repeatedly_execute_always) of which direction EGO moved last and move and animate an object to match. Probably not a beginner's solution though.

Here's some code for 2.62.

Code: ags

// GLOBAL STUFF

#define LEFT 0
#define RIGHT 1
int faceDir = RIGHT;
int lastX = 0;

// assumes a four frame walk
int walkLeftSprites[4];
int walkRightSprites[4];

// IN GAME START

walkLeftSprite[0] = xx;
walkLeftSprite[1] = xx;
walkLeftSprite[2] = xx;
walkLeftSprite[3] = xx;
walkRightSprite[0] = xx;
walkRightSprite[1] = xx;
walkRightSprite[2] = xx;
walkRightSprite[3] = xx;
lastX = character[EGO].x;

// IN REPEATEDLY EXECUTE ALWAYS

if (character[EGO].walking)
{
   ObjectOn(OBJECT_PLAYERWALK);
   if (character[EGO].x > lastX)
   {
       faceDir = RIGHT;
   }
   else
   if (character[EGO].x < lastX)
   {
       faceDir = LEFT;
   }
   int sprite = 0;
   if (faceDir == RIGHT)
   {
      sprite = walkRightSprites[character[EGO].frame];
   }
   else
   {
      sprite = walkLeftSprites[character[EGO].frame]; // FIXED ERROR
   }
   SetObjectGraphic(OBJECT_PLAYERWALK, sprite);
   int width = GetGameParameter(GP_SPRITEWIDTH, sprite);
   SetObjectPosition(OBJECT_PLAYERWALK, character[EGO].x - width/2, character[EGO].y);
}
else
{
   ObectOff(OBJECT_PLAYERWALK);
}
lastX = character[EGO].x;

Completely untested and you may need to do something when changing rooms...

Cheers,
Steve

Just got around to playing this.
Excellent game. Very entertaining, and a clever idea.
I think it could have been maybe twice as long... but great stuff!

Staines is home of Ali G - I don't think that accent will get you too far.

He wants to show you it at Full Throttle.
Wait, wrong thread.

I'm talking out my arse here, but my understanding is that Microsoft funded about 2/3 of the development of Psychonauts, so it will be relatively easy for Majesco to make a profit on it. And I mean relatively easy in the literal sense of relative to a project that they've had to fully fund, not absolutely easy.

It's been, what, 18 months since Microsoft dropped it? And there are 25 or so developers. That's about $3,000,000. Add $500,000 for the PS2 version and $500,000 for marketing. Let's say Majesco make $8 a unit, then they need to sell about 500,000 to break even. Oh dear. [EDIT - for sane figures]

As for your comment (Limping Fish) that EA dominates the PS2, that's no reason to not release a game for it. The fact is that the PS2 is by far the biggest market, so you'd be foolish (or Nintendo or Microsoft) not to put your game on it.

I have NEVER bought that "can't make book into movie" line. That's always the first excuse trotted out when some perfectly good plot and dialog is replaced with rubbish. Not that I'm saying that happened here...

I don't see what the fuss is with Zooey Whateverhernameis. Ho hum.
The film was good, and I enjoyed it, but I agree with Paul - the tv show was much better.
In the film, Arthur's whining annoyed me, the "relationship" annoyed me, Zaphod annoyed me - he seemed more freaky than froody.
Things I thought were better
- Vogons were better developed
- Stephen Fry as the book was perfect, although only marginally better than Peter Jones
- some of the infinite improbability effects
Is that it?

But he'll never make any money. Double Fine will surely go under eventually, and that will be a dismal day.

Nice positive attitude!
We'll see what the Psychonauts sales figures are like soon enough... if the PC and XBox sales are good, it'll be good for the PS2 version's advertising budget.

Here's a tutorial on Actions.
http://user.fundy.net/morris/redirect.html?photoshop21.shtml

You play Lemmiwinks.

The world's gone mad.

Excellent! I'll be using this...

The easy way to address a timing issue is to change the timing of the individual frames.

That post mortem, like most others, is on gamasutra.
www.gamasutra.com then search for "gabriel knight post mortem".
You need to register to read it.

Gilbert,
The reason your stairs look so low is that you haven't taken account of the drop in height going from stair to stair. The top of each stair should have a separate perspective line.

Nice banner! It's "IndependEnt" though

I thought the book was good to get more hight guess not 

Thanks for your comments!
As for standing on the book, I meant to put in a message, something like:
"It may be a damaged book but mama would kill me if I got footprints on it."
Guess I forgot?

I think you found a style.
I like them.
I'd probably change the colour of the ceilings.

#1:
White (styrofoam tile) ceiling.
The desk doesn't look rectangular. It looks like you followed perspective rules for the top, but then had to make it much deeper so you could get some surface area. The bottoms of the right-hand legs are not on a perspective line, which is why it looks wonky.
I'd remove the double pixels on the far blinds by moving the bottom four blinds up one pixel.

#2:
Don't know what to do with the ceiling.
It's a bit empty, but that's inevitable given the time put in.

Look forward to seeing more!