Messages

Radiant,
Your solution will very likely give the same card to more than one person.

The best way to do this in AGS is I think to make a list of the cards, shuffle it, and deal the cards out.

With the assumptions: cards are inv 10-37, characters 1-7:

Code: ags

// make a list
int cardList[28];
int card = 0;
while (card < 28)
{
Ã,  cardList[card] = 10 + card;Ã,  // inv 10-37
Ã,  card++;
}

// shuffle it
int shuffleSteps = 50;
while (shuffleSteps > 0)
{
Ã,  // swap two random cards
Ã,  int firstCardIndex = Random(27);
Ã,  int secondCardIndex = Random(27);
Ã,  int temp = cardList[firstCardIndex];
Ã,  cardList[firstCardIndex] = cardList[secondCardIndex];
Ã,  cardList[secondCardIndex] = temp;
Ã,  shuffleSteps--;
}

// now deal out to characters
int charIndex = 1;
int cardIndex = 0;
while (charIndex < 8)
{
Ã,  int cardCount = 0;
Ã,  while (cardCount < 4)
Ã,  {
Ã,  Ã,  AddInventoryToCharacter(charIndex, cardIndex);
Ã,  Ã,  cardIndex++;
Ã,  Ã,  cardCount++;
Ã,  }
Ã,  charIndex++;
}

Cheers,
Steve

Nice character!
Three things bother me (after I used google image search)
- his arms seem too short. I'd lengthen them two or three pixels
- his mouth seems too low on his jaw. I'd move it up a pixel
- his name's O'Neill
- it looks like he's out in his socks. Maybe some detail to the boots?
Ok, that was four things.

Paul, that's a strange attitude to post on an adventure game forum!

Would you prefer BG&E was never made?

People should be doing whatever they want to do. If Tim Schafer wants to "move on", fine. Double fine even. If the other ex-LucasArts employees want to keep making adventure games, hooray I say!

As for the claim that the graphic adventure is a "limited genre" - that's like saying the novel or the film is a limited genre.

In 1993, there were also platform games, FPS, etc.

A bit of a stream of thought response, but really, do you live under a bridge or is trolling just your day job?

If you're happy converting C code to AGS script, then you can just search for "decimal to roman numerals c code" on google. There are plenty of examples. It's not trivial but it's not difficult either.
Perhaps someone has done it already...?

Fabulous game so far.
I love the solidity of the graphics. Great colour choices too.
If you can do this in a month, I can't wait for a full-size game!

Just finished - can't say enough good things about the animations in this game!

Spoiler

I particularly liked the powered fish tank!

[close]

From browsing google and visiting the homepage, it looks like telltale are working on significantly smaller games than those we know and love.
Eight employees, and they've already recorded voice for a project...
I'll be surprised if Sam and Max are involved.
It's probably something more like the CSI games - a TV property.

I'm going to blame Phil Nihilist.

My 2p.
The characters seem very small - especially compared with the door on the left.
The tiles seem very big.
The wall cross section is too black.
The bricks are a bit blurry.
The graffitti fits the screenshot better than it fits the wall - seems a bit too regular.

Nice style!

Mmmm, proving that the first images aren't flukes 

I disagree with Xadhoom that it's a shame these are VGA. I think they add to the realism. Increase the resolution and we'll see the sharp edges, blurred textures, etc. Please keep the low res!

About the latest images, it's a bit odd that there's neon sign above the back door (it is a back door isn't it?); the wall on the left is a clearly tiled; and the black right hand side is a bit empty. Otherwise, awesome!

The two cutscene images are contrasting hues - the first looks like a 1940s colour, the second seems futuristic. No doubt you're on top of that though.

I was just thinking how great this technique will be for objects you can pick up - just render the scene with and without the object, and it fits in perfectly... looking forward to it!

Cheers,
Steve

Yup, looks superb!
Could easily be shots from a professional product!
I agree with Mr Frisby that the character looks a bit small in the first shot - windowsills aren't often at shoulder level
I'd recommend also rendering the inventory items - the stack of cash looks a bit rough compared to everything else.
Looking forward to an English translation!

Awesome pictures!
Beautiful country you've got there...

I love the work on the diner, the hovertruck, and the skyline.

I think what is "missing" is an interesting layout of the image elements.
Everything is too zoomed out, with big empty areas. It looks more like a map screen. I think you should try to make the diner and truck take up much more of the image, and overlap them somewhat.

Unless of course that doesn't fit the style of the game.

It's a British magazine.
It styles itself as sophisticated - which means low sales. For some reason it's quite well respected in the games industry.

In the latest issue (with the Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, GTA: San Andreas reviews) there's an article about the revival of the adventure game.

A sidebar is devoted to AGS - with a screenshot from Grrrr! Bearly Sane. Way to go Duzz!

The article is pretty lame - it talks about the new BASS, the new TLJ, and TellTale games, but omits Autumn Moon.

Good to see AGS in another magazine, even one as wanky as Edge.

About blocking in Move commands, coordinates in ChangeRoom, etc.

I think the clearest thing is that ChangeRoom takes one parameter, the room number. Then SetPosition moves the character. Shoehorning multiple functionality, however related, into a function call is ugly, and unreadable.

Similarly, moving blocking out into a separate function means that you don't need multiple versions of every possible action. So I'm for it.

As for direct, I think that should be in the function name, so you've got Walk() and WalkDirect(). Much more readable than Walk(x, y, 1);

Looks like some great changes for AGS. It may make it more confusing for newbies, but they'll be learning...

Cheers,
Steve

I think it depends where you are or when you registered.
I checked when I saw this and it's *just* upgraded.

Here are my thoughts on the future of the forums.
Any contribution towards the cost of hosting should be voluntary. Otherwise the forums will die.
I was worried that there might be an initial surge of donations, allowing the forums to grow larger, followed by a slow drop off in donations, causing a downtime. Boom and bust.
I was also worried that making paying more for the forums now could lead to problems later if the popularity of AGS dropped off a bit, but since it's a usage overload, that means less board visits makes the boards cheaper.
Someone other than CJ volunteering to host the forums for free is dangerous, as it leaves the safety of the forums in their hands. It may come from great intentions but who knows what might happen in that person's personal life.

So I guess what I'm saying is that as a contingency several people should be able to collect donations, pay for the webhosting, and maintain the site.

Some of the naming convention is to match Fuzzpilz' earlier math plugin.

I agree that it's a bit cumbersome, but on the other hand it's absolutely clear what the functions do (I hope).
I guess I could add short forms for the longer function names.
int(x) is out as a cast, since int is a keyword in AGS already. But perhaps toint and tofloat are better.

AGS' order of evaluation is irrelevant for floating point operations because all operations need to be explicitly bracketed as function calls.

For 'e' you can just write exp(1). A bit ugly I admit. But I didn't want to make 'e' a function - it seemed a bit too likely to cause problems.
You're right about log and ln. I can't remember what I was thinking.
I didn't want to add log_base(a, b) because it's not clear what the order of parameters is. You can of course write fdiv(log(a), log(b)); but that's ugly too.

I really don't want to complicate things by having a whole new set of functions taking degrees and returning degrees. Perhaps I could make it a global setting, like a calculator.

I can definitely put in round, round_down and round_up functions.

So, in conclusion, I agree with pretty much everything you said. When I have a compiler going on this machine again I'll add the suggested functionality.

Cheers,
Steve

Yup!
It's not perfect though because you have to use functions to convert from int to float, multiply, divide, convert from float to int, etc.
It's available from the download AGS/user written plugins page.
Let me know if the documentation isn't clear enough.
Cheers,
Steve

It seems to be quite accurate now, just that when it's close to pi/2 (x=15708) the result is 10083 (as opposed to correct value 10000), I think this just a small accuracy problem that is not easy to avoid.

That's why I use taylor_cos around pi/2 and 3*pi/2.

BTW, for cosine, you can just do:

Code: ags

function cos(x){
Ã,  return sin(15708-x);
}

Ah, but then it's not accurate for sin in the range -pi/4 to pi/4.