Messages

You do not have to click on them, you may select them for editing in the list on top of the properties panel. Same for GUI, rooms etc, there's a list of all the objects of the current editor / mode.

By the way, since we're talking about this, would it be possible, if it's not too much work at this stage, to implement a small quality of life improvement and give more explicit names to the different objects in the text window GUI? Right now, when you bring up the drop down, they're called simply TextWindowEdge; ID 0, TextWindowEdge; ID 1, and so on. It would be SO much more convenient if they were called something like TextWindowEdge (top left); ID 0, TextWindowEdge (bottom left); ID 1, etc.

I do know that AGS 3.6.0 is pretty much ready to ship though, so I'm only suggesting this in case it's straightforward to implement and doesn't risk breaking other stuff, of course.

This is petty, but it grinds my gears when people literally write "something-slash-something" or "quote unquote". Those expressions are meant for spoken communication, but it makes zero sense to write all that when the keyboard you're typing on already has slash and quote symbols. "She's a developer-slash-game designer", no, you mean "developer/game designer". "He's a quote-unquote genius", no, you mean "He's a 'genius'". 

[Text Window GUI]

3 and 4 basically have the same answer (if by "regular text box" you mean the box that is used for Display commands). There is a special kind of GUI called Text Window GUI that you can create by right clicking on the GUIs project tree and selecting "New Text Window GUI". These GUIs allow you to provide graphics for the four corners and the four sides of the box (up, down, top and bottom) and the GUI will resize itself automatically to fit its content.

Once you've created this GUI you can assign it to Display commands (General Settings -> Text Output -> Custom text window GUI) or to characters' Think commands (Custom thought bubble GUI). In the former case, the GUI will always appear centered on the screen, and in the latter, it will appear over characters' heads. Text Window GUIs' fonts can't be customized though, so they will always use whatever font you set as Game.NormalFont.

You can also use Text Window GUIs to display dialog options, but since the GUI in this case will always appear centered on the screen, it's better to use a regular GUI for that and assign it with General Settings -> Dialog -> Use GUI for dialog options. (this also answers part of #2: if you want to change the background colour of the dialog bar, just create a regular GUI, customize it to your heart's content, and assign it to dialogs).

Unfortunately, I'm not using custom dialog options because our dialogs are very simple, so creating a custom system would be overkill for what we want (not to mention that it's always felt extremely intimidating to me).

If there are no other ways to achieve what I want, then I'll simply not implement this feature. It's not really vital, just a "nice to have", so it wouldn't be a huge loss.

Is this normal?

Yes. Only one room mask can be displayed at a time (hotspots, walkable areas, regions or walkbehinds).

[Edit]

I would like to implement a timer such that, if the player doesn't choose one of the options in a dialog in a certain amount of time, one of them will be triggered at random.

The idea I've been working on is to launch a timer right before the dialog starts, and to check it in repeatedly_execute_always like this:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{

  if (IsTimerExpired(1) && !dExampleDialog.HasOptionBeenChosen(1) && !dExampleDialog.HasOptionBeenChosen(2) && !dExampleDialog.HasOptionBeenChosen(3)) {
    int rnd = Random(2);
    for (int i = 0; i<3; i++) {
      if (i != rnd) dExampleDialog.SetOptionState(rnd+1, eOptionOffForever);
    }
    dExampleDialog.Start();    
  }
}

The idea is to check if the player has not chosen any options, and then switch all other options to Off so that when I re-trigger the dialogue, there will only be one left and it will run automatically.

The logic seems sound, but there is an issue: I cannot trigger dExampleDialog.Start() from inside rep exec always. So now I'm stuck and maybe it's because I've spent too much time in front of this, but I can't find an alternative way to do it. Any suggestions?

Edit: actually, it seems like I can't trigger a new dialogue (or the same one) while one is running, so this makes it even harder now... Is there a way to exit/stop a dialogue from outside the dialogue itself?

[The Thursday Murder Club]

Within the past few months, I've read three books by Kazuo Ishiguro: The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go. I enjoyed The Buried Giant the most.

I really enjoyed The Buried Giant, although for me, the inclusion of whole chapters from other characters' POVs towards the middle of the book made the narrative sag a bit. I personally would have preferred a tighter, more focused experience, but I liked it a lot in any case. That ending <3

Funnily enough, my favourite Ishiguro is The Unconsoled, a 500-page plotless fever dream that is the absolute opposite of "tight" or "focused" But what can I say, these kind of experiments always seem to resonate with me somehow.

Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which could be described as a mystery novel that, intriguingly, doesn't really present itself as such until well into its second half.

This has been on my reading list for a long time. I should get to it.

You should! I did not quite love the ending because, without getting into spoiler territory, it's basically a huge info-dump that leaves nothing to the imagination, but that is par for the course for the mystery/whodunnit genre, so it's more of a trope than an actual problem with the author or her style, which I found fascinating. I plan on reading Flights next before tackling The Books of Jacob, so I'm taking it little by little.

I also just remembered another book I read recently, The Thursday Murder Club by (TV host) Richard Osman. A group of senior citizens living in an upscale retirement village investigate two murders that happen nearby. This is an old-school whodunnit in the cozy tradition: it's unrelentingly nice. (Even as it touches on some dark subject matters. Both drug dealers and murderers are portrayed as fundamentally decent people; only the murder victims are painted unsympathetically.) The mysteries and twists are quite solid, though, and having it solved by a team of not-quite-amateurs each bringing their own experience and expertise to bear (rather than a single brilliant detective) is a cool approach that avoids some of the common plot problems of the genre. I can quite understand how it became a bestseller, and expect a TV adaption in the near future.

Sounds like a nice read for whenever I need something that doesn't demand too much emotional investment or brainpower. Noted.

The story is about the relationships between two upper-middle-class couples ("quite good people," as the narrator puts it) â€" one American, one English â€" around the turn of the century. They meet at a spa in Europe, and become friends in a sedate, boring way for many years; always behaving strictly conventionally, their conversations consisting solely of small talk. Except, that's not the real truth.

Hey, that sounds a lot like Kaz...

(he's an obvious influence on Kazuo Ishiguro, e.g. The Remains of the Day)

...right

To follow up on my previous comment, I just finished Baricco's Lands of Glass, and for some reason it left me a bit cold. It has all those magical-realism elements that make you feel like you're reading García Márquez at times, and his prose is as poetic as always, but it didn't feel as perfectly balanced and well-rounded as his (imo) masterpiece Ocean Sea, and it can't beat either Novecento's whimsicality or the masterful intertwined narratives of Three Times at Dawn, both of which are much shorter and all the better for it. Not a bad book by any means, but not the one I would recommend to someone looking to get into his work.

[Earthworms]

Since it doesn't look like anybody has a clue, it's Earthworms.

Whoever feels like it, feel free to grab the next round.

I just finished The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville; I'm not a huge fan of his work, but I needed a quick, entertaining read after the heaviness of Kenji Nakagami's The Cape and Oher Stories from the Japanese Ghetto.

Apart from that, I've really enjoyed Mariana Enríquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a collection of short contemporary horror stories, and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, which could be described as a mystery novel that, intriguingly, doesn't really present itself as such until well into its second half.

Now I think I'll probably grab Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry from my to-read pile, although Alessandro Baricco's Lands of Glass is also tempting me. But maybe, why not both?

What you describe seems to me like the desired behavior for most cases. Certainly it's how I would expect it to work with Sierra-style animated speech, and I don't really see a reason why LucasArts-style speech should be different, when it's set to not advance automatically. I think it would look bizarre if the line is, for example, "Hi, Bob!" and the speech animation just keeps running and running indefinitely.

Might be a question of personal taste, but it looks fine to me! As long as the line is on screen, even if it's really short, it makes sense to see the character animating. What looks weird is when the animation stops on a frame in which the character's mouth is open, for example, so you have the line there waiting for you to press a key, and the character is just frozen there with its mouth like : O It would probably make more sense if it switched to its idle animation automatically at least, but there are workarounds in any case (custom speech function, using Think instead, etc)

(Or, by analogy, if you had voice acting, I would expect it to play once, and then wait for you to dismiss the line. I wouldn't expect the voiced line to keep playing over and over until you advanced.)

Ah sure, if you have voice acting it definitely makes sense.

What happens if you set Game.TextReadingSpeed to 0?

0 is not a valid value, but 1 kind of works. Eventually the animation ends up stopping, but in most cases players will have moved on to the next line before that. But I think I'll end up using a custom speech function just in case

I'm not sure if this is a bug, a feature, or if there's something really obvious I'm missing.

I'm using AGS 3.6.0.30, and I have set Speech.SkipStyle to eSkipKeyMouse. I'm using "Lucasarts" speech style (above the characters' heads) and I don't have any voice clips/voiceover.

What I expect to happen is that when my character says something (cTestChar.Say("Hi! I am a test character.");), the text will stay on screen and his talking animation will loop until I click the mouse or press a key.

However, what happens is that his talking animation only plays up until a certain point and then it freezes until I press a key or click the mouse and a new line plays.

My guess is that this animation only plays for as long as it would usually take for the text to be dismissed at the current TextReadingSpeed, and then it simply stops. Is this intended? Am I missing anything?

If your game is in ASCII/ANSI (the way it is in the beta by default)

Please note that 3.6.0 is Unicode by default.

I thought that the beta versions were still ANSI by default and that this would only be changed with the official release, once appropriate fonts had been found and implemented. Was this not the intention?

I'm not really sure how this is achieved, but there are a lot of fonts that seem to be compatible both with Windows-1252 encoding and with Unicode. Take for example this one: https://www.dafont.com/press-start.font

If your game is in ASCII/ANSI (the way it is in the beta by default) and you import this font to slot 1, for example, "extended" latin characters will display properly (Spanish accents like á or Á, or German umlauts like ö or Ü).

Now switch your game to Unicode, and these characters will be garbled. But if you import the same font to a different slot (e.g., font 2) and reassign SpeechFont and NormalFont to this one, the characters will once again display properly.

(Note: import size is 8, and for some reason, some fonts like this one need to have the TTF font adjustment property set to "Resize ascender to nominal font height", otherwise they will be cut off at the top.)

This seems to be quite random, since some of the fonts in that page are only ANSI compatible, some are only Unicode, and others can even tolerate the conversion from ASCII/ANSI to Unicode without issues (setting the engine back to ASCII again will garble everything, though). But it might be worth checking the "bitmap" section of the page for fonts that are unicode compatible, a reasonable size for low-res pixel games (8 to 10px) and GPL / public domain or have a "100% free" license.

I think I have seen this before. Was it made with AGS?

Nope. Unity, if I'm not mistaken.

I think this is going to be one of those "if you know, you know" games that you either recognize from a single screenshot or not at all.

This is one of the Project Zero / Fatal Frame games. Possibly the third one, The Tormented?

Happy to help! And welcome to the community

[compare]

1. You haven't closed your if statement. You need another "}" symbol.
2. The "=" operator assigns values, but you need to use "==" to compare values.

Code: ags

function oObject1_Interact()
{
   if (oObject1.Visible == true) {
      player.Say("the door is closed");
   }
}

Also, it is advisable to indent your code, since it makes it easier to see issues like this one, and to give clearer names to your objects, so you know exactly what they are. For example, in this case, instead of oObject1, you could call it oDoorClosed.