Messages

[EDIT:]

Maybe...

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Have you tried the group of nobles on the right, on the lower floor?

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.

Yes, they always say "can't you see you're bothering us here"
EDIT: So... Another thing that needs to be addressed in the game!
It seems like every time I've clicked on those people I have randomly always clicked either on the left-hand noble or the right-hand noble? The response is the same either way, and the "you're bothering us" line of dialogue is said by the MIDDLE one. So I naturally assumed that those three characters were just a single clickable area
.... Except, it's not! And clicking on the middle guy gives me a different response now!

[EDIT:]

Biggest problem was (pixel hunting)

Yes, there is quite a lot of pixel hunting in the early rooms of the game. It gets better after. I've already suggested to the dev team to reduce and enlarge the clickable areas.
For example, did you notice that after picking up a thing hanging on the wall you can still click on the tiny 3-pixels hook?   I don't know if it's on purpose or if it's just the devs forgetting to make the hook sprite "unclickable"

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I am now stuck in part II, during the marquis' reception.
I think I'll manage by myself though, by insisting. EDIT: I give up, I can't find a solution.

Just to share my experience, here is what I've done so far :

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Finding the marquise...

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I've managed to locate her and talk to her. Now she wants me to...

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Identify the paintings behind me. I've found out SOME information by talking to the two noblewomen. I'm still missing some. I'm guessing I'll get more info in another room, as the marquis refuses to talk about his paintings and no one else has this conversation topic.

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Getting access to the forbidden corridor...

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I have half of the solution, in the shape of the written note. I still don't know how to get...

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...the stamp or signature. I strongly hope it's not in the room with the marquise, because if so then I don't know where to begin solving things.

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Overall my biggest problem is that I'm not sure if puzzles line A lets me progress in puzzles line B (e.g. unlocking a new room will get me more info about some other things), or if puzzles line B lets me progress in puzzles line A (e.g. if getting more info will let me unlock a new room), or if they are entirely independent from one another.

I suspect some inventories is missing, what do you have so far?

Oh come on that is NOT okay!    (read spoiler below)
About Saint Cove's bedroom and his sentence "I have a letter somewhere but I don't remember where":

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It's hidden in an obvious place for any point n click lover, EXCEPT...

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It doesn't work if you PULL the painting. Only if you OPEN the painting.
That doesn't make any sense. It's just sloppy. It makes me paranoid for the rest of the game (for example: from now on I will always click "give" AND "use" when I want to try an object on characters, just in case! Now I will always "use object 1 on object 2" AND "use object 2 on object 1", just in case! And so on and so on)

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I suspect some inventories is missing, what do you have so far?

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Cut lemon
Yellow dye
Sword
Scissors
Corkscrew
Black hawk clothes
Fancy clothes
Rag
Crowbar
String ("rope")

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About the lemon...

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I thought I could use it to reveal a secret message written in invisible ink, but I didn't find any piece of paper anywhere

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About potential search places...

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Saint Cove says the invite to the party (or some important letter, I can't remember) is somewhere in his room but I have haven't found it.

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[(More)]

New issue :
It's about Violette, or the priest, or both.

About Violette:

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Violette has disappeared. Someone has seen her:
(More)

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My chamber maid has told me that she has come earlier but I wasn't there. I guess she went looking for me or she was kidnapped, no idea. I spoke to every other NPC but no one has her as a topic of conversation.
I don't know what to do from there. My only other line of puzzles currently open are: the priest, and the grog recipe.

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About the priest:

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I've managed to find him and he has asked for...

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He wants a large donation to breach confession secrets AND 5,000 francs for the wedding.  No idea what to do from there.
My personal theory:

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That will be for later. Maybe there will be some charity thing at the palace, or maybe I'll find some treasure, whatever. The thing that preoccupies me is that I wonder if the confession bit is the key to finding Violette.

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Well there IS some leftovers in the tavern (right-most customer) but when I try to take it, the character says "Hmm... Tempting but no."

EDIT: OK found it. Here's a clue:

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In the tavern's main room...

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there is specifically a plate that you think you can't take but if you insist you can take. I'm not sure what triggers the possibility of taking it.

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Hurray!

I'm stuck when

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Saint Cove needs to find some food to give to Olivier's dog

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I don't know what to do because

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there's food laying around literally EVERYWHERE in the game, there's even a dining room and so on, but Saint Cove adamantly refuses to pick up any of it, in pure point-n-click fashion.

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I think that the solution might be that

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I'd need to enter the tavern's kitchen, and to do so I need to distract the owner by recovering the grog's recipe. He mentioned that a woman stole it but I can't remember any other clue about it or where to go to find that woman, and unfortunately the dialogs can't be repeated.

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That seems like a great idea, because there's a lot of old FMV games which could have achieved greatness but were carrying some obnoxious/obsolete game mechanics, broken puzzles and unclear hints.
They all need a good "repair". Not just this one, but Phantasmagoria and the others too!

We have a whole series of videos for trying to master Godot specifically for point n click games.
Believe it or not, this is still all experimental and we're still not sure if we want to abandon AGS.
Something as simple as playing an animation in a specific way took we 2 days to understand, with systematically false tips from the Godot Discord.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYzHFzDpRQE&list=PL773FMqtyjdt_YdoP0nxZdgFmPL_t1_yp&index=12

[capabilities]

Godot drives me insane.

I can see that it has all the capabilities to achieve amazing things.
The issue is... No one has the knowledge.


Allow me to rephrase that : There are a TON of people who have Godot knowledge. The issue is... Unless you know someone who's willing to be fully involved in your project then it seems impossible to receive consistent and proper help with Godot.

There used to be some sort of Godot forum, similar to the AGS one, which has now shut down (every time you click on a google result you get a 404). Not a good move, I would say!

Then there's Discord. Have you ever visited the Godot Discord? Let me tell you, it's nothing like AGS. There's a gazillion posts per minute. And since it's a continuous flow of chat messages, there's zero consistency. Messages about several topics are mixed together, and you never know what will be the quality of answers. It's like a Russian roulette. The people helping have either no time to try to understand what you're doing, or give crude answers without explaining why the solution is the solution. When the answer is not plain wrong!

I remembered fondly my early days in the AGS forums, when there were people like Ashen, monkey0506, Khris etc. who knew what the hell they were talking about. The information was clear, correct, and there was room for follow-up questions.

Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT about Godot. The quality of the answer was amazing.... I had a brief moment of euphoria, thinking I had finally found my solution... Until I realized it was ChatGPT3 and its knowledge stops in 2021. It was giving answers incompatible with Godot 4.1.1 (deprecated classes)! And of course, the Godot help page doesn't clearly state that the lass is deprecated (well, it does, but... at the end of the page!)

I'm literally banging my head against the walls. AGS is awesome. Godot is even more awesome (because it's a heavyweight) but all that awesomeness goes to shit instantly, every time.


I was tempted by an upgrade from AGS to Godot. But now I'm seriously considering reverting my experimentations and throwing away those last 2 years of experiments with Godot.

Outstanding work as always!

[AGS_PLATFORM_TEST]

If it's included into the project that you are trying to build, then it should be compiled automatically, along with the rest of the project's files.

Thanks.

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New problem: In order to compile, Common.Lib.Test needs to have AGS_PLATFORM_TEST defined. am I supposed to set that manually (and if yes, how? Is it part of a larger configuration process), or am I missing something? (e.g. I'm not supposed to run that project myself but instead let the CI environment run it).

I see that this variable is mentioned in CMakeLists.txt but until now I didn't have to worry about CMake in Visual Studio. I don't even know how they integrate together, to be honest. I'm going to read this : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/cmake-projects-in-visual-studio?view=msvc-170&viewFallbackFrom=vs-2019

This problem has disappeared, I don't even know how.

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Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. You're saying I need to use allegro.h from libsrc\allegro\include


But I don't need to build Allegro, right? Not even that stripped Allegro? Right?

[ags4]

Trying to build the unit tests (Common.Lib.Test and Engine.app.Test, in solution Tests) of branch ags4
On windows 10 with Visual Studio 2022

Is there a help page? (I don't think so).
I think I need third-party libraries Allegro (4?)  and gtest. Anything else?


PS: Please tell me I can use a prebuilt version of Allegro and that I won't have to rebuild it myself.

EDIT: Created separate theread

Speaking of which;  these 2,3,4 argument sets caught my eye.

Me too; it does not satisfy the dev in me; but right now I'm trying to get rid of the "old" implementation (greedy parser). That, and the fact that the discovered options were applied on the spot using global variables.

When everything works I can factor together the code for 2, 3, 4 params; this was a quick copy-paste fix after realizing that the feature was missing from the new CmdLineOpts

But the default command line options of AGS engine itself requires a lot more flexibility

I simply has options that take more than one argument, I've added 2, 3 and 4 arguments to your mini library.

I've started working on that specific thing : https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/pull/1749/commits

[what do I need to toggle]

I see in main.cpp that there's this main_process_cmdline function to parse command line arguments.
But I also see in cmdlineopts.cpp that the same code has been rewritten in modern c++.

Is the new code supposed to be part of AGS4, and, if yes, what do I need to toggle to enable the new code? Nothing seems to be using CmdLineOpts::Parse.

My bad. It's used by the new compiler. The Engine's startup simply hasn't been updated to use this too.