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You might be able to do it by coding a custom walking function for the NPC. Imagine your island viewed from above then divide it into angles, so for example the very Northern point would by 0 degrees, the East 90, South 180, West 270 etc. Now you can translate the x position of the player on your 2D map into a certain number of degrees. If you also give your NPC an angle in degrees you can work out where they should be drawn on the screen in respect to your player. Obviously you'd have to handle the NPC's walking pattern, animation and possibly scaling in code, but I don't think that'd be too hard. When your player interacts with the NPC you'd then convert the NPC's position in degrees to an X coordinate (of if the player's going to have to walk off an edge then they'd have to walk to that edge, be repositioned on the other side of the screen then walk to the new position).

I don't know how well all that would work in practice, but that's how I'd approach it.

Of course it all becomes much simpler if you don't want to be able to interact with objects in the background. In that case you'd have two NPC characters - a foreground "real" NPC and a background one. Then the foreground NPC could move about on the 2D map as he liked, while the background NPC is positioned in the background according to the foreground NPC's x coordinate translated to an angle. Because you never see a corner of the island you don't have to worry about the background character needing to come into the foreground.

My 2 cents

I did Day Of The Tentacle, Toonstruck and Loom without any hints, but I played DOTT and Toonstruck at the same time as my brother so we did a lot of working together. I try not to read walkthroughs for games I've paid for, but I think everything else I've played I've had to look up one or two clues. When it comes to free games I have much less patience.

One game I can't beat without or even WITH a walkthrough though is Feeble Files, because it's a damn hard game that was designed to be damn hard.

As far as I remember my brother and I did that with maybe one or two hints - I think there's a bit where you have to put the current date on a passcard and you're supposed to work out the date from a star map, a view of the night sky and some vauge hints about how time is calculated. It translates into some insanely complicated sum that made no sense at all. Then there was a bit where you have to mix up some chemicals to put in the water supply of this planet to make all the natives rebel. After hours of trying to figure out the sequence we hit on the answer by trying random combinations. You know its bad puzzle design when you have to work back from the answer to try and figure out what you were supposed to be doing. Yeah, that was a tough game.

Happy Christmas all! Thanks to everyone who's ever done anything in these forums!

I'm getting the missing pixel row and column when changing the height and width of buttons as well (no dynamic sprites). I've got another button that I'm setting the height and width to 2, but when its drawn I only see 1 pixel. You can click on all 4 pixels, so it seems like there's an invisible border being added.

By the way, I should have mentioned earlier that I've got the Clip Image setting on true.

Brand new AGS project in 1024x768 resolution. I'm trying to use a DynamicSprite to load a bitmap and draw it on a button, but when I run

Code: ags

function LoadTilesBtn_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)
{
  TilesSprite = DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile("Edges.bmp");
  TilesBtn.NormalGraphic = TilesSprite.Graphic;
}

I don't get the right-hand column or the bottom row of pixels drawn.

However if I do...

Code: ags

function LoadTilesBtn_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)
{
  TilesSprite = DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile("Edges.bmp");
  TilesBtn.NormalGraphic = TilesSprite.Graphic;
  TilesBtn.Height += 1;
  TilesBtn.Width += 1;
}

I get the whole picture drawn on the button. Looks like when the button's resized to the imported bitmap is 1 pixel out on both the width and the height.

Other than that everything's all fine and dandy. Thanks for all the hard work!

How about different poses to convey different expressions? E.g. you could have a question indicated by the character spreading their arms, or them considering by placing their hand on their chin etc. Once you've got them in that position you can just animate their mouths, but I think that'd lose the 'cheap' look. Also helps convey the meaning of your sentences.

But yeah, an example of what you've already got would be helpful

Multi-dimensional arrays?

Maybe because you've got spaces in the path? Sorry, don't really know

I played Half-life 2 on a computer with worse specs than you have, and if you toned everything right down it ran fine. The source engine has changed a bit, and HL2 didn't have portal effects, but you'll probably be alright. Anyway, as nihilyst says demo it

It'll always look for a file called hosts (which is why you can't rename it) so the DataBasePath will need to point to a folder with the hosts file in it. As to whether you need the whole folder.... not sure to be honest, I've never done it myself. I'd guess that you do need a copy of all the files in your new folder. Test it: if you managed to compress and encrypt the etc folder before (effectively the same as removing it) then restart the computer without it dying then you shouldn't do too much irrepairable damage by making a copy of the files and changing the pointer to them.

...famous last words

Speaking personally I'd be much more likely to start looking at a well-made Flash tutorial than opening a .pdf - there's just something committing about clicking a link to a .pdf, but then I don't really know what you're trying to achieve here. Are you trying to write something that people will stumble across and think "Oh, that looks interesting, I'll read that", or are you trying to come up with the best way to deliver information to people who are already wanting to learn from you?

I. I've never seen embedded stuff in .pdf files, and you're pretty much the only person I know who uses them. Are your target audience familiar with the idea that a .pdf tutorial will be more than just text and graphics?

II. HTML can get messy, and its hard to keep everything consistent, but then again its easier to edit individual parts without replacing the entire file.

III. I like Flash, and I reckon you can make really effective tutorials in it if you play towards Flash's strengths. It does depend on how well you know Flash though. The disadvantage is that people can't save a local copy (as easily) to read later, or save out individual pieces of music (unless you make specific links to them). Flash tutorials imply reading online. Of course you could upload an .exe'd version as well.

My personal thoughts.

As an alternative you could move the hosts file somewhere that it won't be found, replace it with a dummy then change the registry key that points to it (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters then set the DataBasePath key to point to the new one).

Are you sure that a zipped, password protected hosts file works? I would have thought it was more likely that IE can't find it so just doesn't use it. Unfortunately I can't think of anything better than the above (and a search for hosts would still find it) unless you have multiple users and change the permissions on the folder so that only the administrator can edit the contents.

Maybe we're going to go back to the early nineties?

And I don't think it was getting very good reception

Thanks for taking part guys, and congratulations Cheerios! A very promising first game

I looked out my window early last winter and saw this unhappy little chap...
1x3x

Later that day he was still there, but evidently the temperature had dropped a few more degrees...
1x3x

Its going to be quite a balancing act writing for it. You've got a thin line between being interesting and being *too* controversial so you don't get slated by either angry atheists or angry Christians. Also I have a feeling (which may be disproved) that if the game gets well known then you're going to attract a lot of criticism, not necessarily from AGS users but from any wider audience. Anyway, I'm sure you know all that.

I'm all for a well made, high quality and serious game covering Christian attitudes, especially as I've yet to encounter one (though I've only played a handful). I would offer to help but unfortunately I've just got too much on at the moment to commit to anything. Good luck though.

interestingly enough my motherboard (ASUS K8V-SE Deluxe) supposedly actually has voice recordings for errors aswell as beeps, although i'm guessing it's probably for more common errors.

The system battery went on my parents computer and after I replaced it the computer started coming out with things like "Now booting operating system" in some low quality female voice whenever you turned it on. It got annoying very quickly...

There's a mirrored version here, for anyone who didn't grab a copy. Couldn't find anything about why the original was removed though, so lets innocently assume we're still allowed to read it.

At least I will read it, once I get around to actually playing Grim Fandango...