Messages

Doing what you say with Undo sounds like a wrong thing to me anyway.

OK guys, you win, I'll stop being stubborn and switch to 3.3.0. I'm very attracted to source control and re-importing sprites from original source.

Hi!

Is it possible to pause some tweens?
I've seen StopAllTweens(ePauseTween) (I suppose using ePauseTween pauses them) but I can't seem to find the reverse function to unpause everything.

Great technical achievement. Turn that into an exciting gameplay and your game could be excellent.

You could test your code by doing this:

Nope. It's not a matter of replacing an entire section of code with another one. It's a matter of modifying a bunch of small parameters inside the code, and continualy testing what the changes did.
Anyway, just sayin'.  For me it would be disastrous not to be able to revert after I inadvertently broke something at some unknown point. It's only an inconvenience for me, others will do great.

Have anyone tried to use source control with AGS? There's even a plugin api for that.

I can't wait for that to fully mature. I'm very excited.

But pretty pretty please consider fixing the Undo-History

To be honest this is driving me nuts, because at some points I can't remember what I did to break the game. Only that now I can't undo my way out of this mess

Yes, for me this is a no-go for upgrading to 3.3.0. I tend to do tests by changing parts of the code, then undo the changes. If the undo history is gone, I'm done for.

More importantly, this is obviously inspired by 2001:A space Odyssey.
And for that you put me in a transe. I want this game I want this game I want this game.

For more details on how to start off a TTF font, but then convert it to a 256-chars WFN font in order to edit it: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

If you have the proper TTF font (for example, go to the "pixels" section of dafont.com), it should be a matter of minutes. I suppose all you have to do is to remove some of those grey/transparent pixels and you're done.

[pro-tip] AGS fonts are monochromatic, except for the black outline. But since your font background is always white, and the font is always black, you could actually:
- define the black part as being the custom outline,
- set the font's color to grey.
This way, you can re-introduce some anti-aliasing, in the form of grey pixels. Unfortunately that would allow you to only use one shade of grey. It's limited for anti-alisaing, but it's better than only black and white.

[MAN SPENDS 3 YEARS MAKING A FULL-LENGTH POINT-N-CLICK, THEN GETS FAMOUS FOR RELEASING A MINUTE-MADE ONE-ROOM GAME.]

Hey! Selmiak's in the newspapers!


=========================

MAN SPENDS 3 YEARS MAKING A FULL-LENGTH POINT-N-CLICK, THEN GETS FAMOUS FOR RELEASING A MINUTE-MADE ONE-ROOM GAME.
A man was arrested yesterday while he was wandering naked on the streets in a state of extreme confusion. Later during questioning he said to the policemen: "... and to believe that all I had to do was releasing Don't Push The Button!".

Well that pauses your game. From your original post you never mentioned you wanted the game to pause, I assumed you wanted to use a GUI while the game was playing. :p

Agreed. It can or can not pause the game, the difficulty was to make sure not to interfere with cutscenes, especially while managing keyboard or mouse.

[When you make the debug gui appear:]

I just tested the following and it works like a charm :

When you make the debug gui appear:
- pause game
- hide mouse (if needed)
- set the speech skip to "nothing'
- same thing for cutscene skip: "nothing'
- if you use "tweens" or timers : suspend all the timers currently going on (keep postponing them)
- set a boolean variable to flag that a complete game pause is currently happening (to be used by other modules relying on yours)

Then in the gui use repeatedly_execute_always to make it work (with keyboard and mouse)

When you close the debug gui :
- do all the opposite from above

I haven't found a caveat yet. Surely there is a catch, but this does the job well enough -- that is: without having to worry about anything else, especially third-party scripts. The only graphical glitch is that the current dialog line appears on top of the debug gui.

By the way, that addresses the absence of "complete pause" in AGS that someone raised a few days ago.

What you want to do is script your 'cutscene' in a non-blocking fashion and then code in your GUI interactivity as you would if the game was running normally.

Yes, but I have constraints. The people who will be scripting the cutscenes might be undertrained with AGS, and introduce a lot of human mistakes while trying to figure out non-blokcing cutscene instructions. My goal is to let them script cutscenes as easily as possible.
I could argue philosophical approaches of what is a cutscene, but in this case, the GUI is not part of the game, but part of the debuging interface, therefore it is out of the game. The game must run normally, and the debug GUI work around it -- not the opposite.

Yet, you suggestion of using non-blocking cutscene instructions will be plan B in case I don't achieve that goal.
@CW: thanks for pointing out the difference between speechskip and cutscene skip. I think it's the second time I fall for that, and I forgot the trick inbetween.

[How would you do?]

I'd like the user to be able to use a GUI during cutscenes (with buttons that he could click on)
How would you do?

Even if it's not possible using built-in AGS functions, there could be plenty of workarounds (e.g. creating a fake mouse cursor using a moving label, updating its position using mouse.x/y, intercepting clicks using mouse.IsButtonDown, etc.) ... but I'd rather use the simplest solution!

Do you have anything to recommend?

=========

Side question : In the game settings, you have some options to skip the cutscenes (mouse only, keyboard only, etc... AND those options can be combined with "timer"). But when I look at the help of StartCutscene(...), the enumerated "skip" options don't correspond. There is no mention of the timer. Do they match the general options at all?

EDIT: solved.

Loominous doesn't count, he came from a different planet.

i didn't comment at the time, but i liked that game for what it is : a very short game with simple puzzles, but an immersive set.

It's verypuzzling that none of the point n click specialists here can guess the game. Usually it's a matter of seconds.
gaarias, do you remember on what machine you were playing that? Was it a PC, or something older like an Amstrad or Amiga or something.?

I'm really impressed by Darth Mandarb's shading. With Photoshop?!? Teach me, master.

[- missing an interaction in a room?]

I don't know how they do it in Forge.
Here is how I see it:

During beta test phase
- missing an interaction in a room? If you're the beta tester, then click on a special beta-tester button on the side of the screen, and a bug report will be automatically filled with the room you're currently in, and the last interaction you tried. A small text box allows you to type the dialog you'd expect to happen. I expect that to greatly speed up the development process.
- bad translation? Translations can be very difficult to do when all the sentences ar eout of context. With this, you just play the game, and correct them "live".
- graphical glitch? Same thing: the room number is automatically filled in, alongside with the player's settings: resolution, hardware acceleration, etc.
- Hundreds of bug reports? All the bugs get numbered automatically and compiled inside one big text file -- therefore, when you have tons of them, you can sort them easily "by beta tester", "by room", etc.
- game-blocking bug? All the player's actions history get dumped alongside with global variables. This way you can trace in what order he completed the quests and find out how it differs from the working scenario.

After game release :
- game-blocking bug? All major puzzles/quest trigger a named global variable when completed. Suppose some players can't complete one of them because of a bug (think "Heroine's quest"). Then they must wait for us to compile a new version of the game, and they have to start the game over because a new version breaks the saved game. Fear not! 1) They just keep playing with the broken game version. 2) We ship a small "autorun" script file that the player places in the game's directory, and it sets all the wanted variables automatically when he/she runs the game (for example: placing them in the right room, or giving them the missing object, or unlocking the missing dialog option). 3) They load their saved game: it gets loaded perfectly normally, except the broken quest gets unlocked automatically and they can continue playing the game seemlessly.

cool.
Thanks very much for your answers, you guys.

We show only a handful of static backgrounds or unfinished cutscenes. That's close to nothing -- That's only the tip of the iceberg.