Messages

It's a reasonable suggestion for a future version; would anyone else find it useful?

Maybe. What I'd find more useful would be if disabled buttons (if grayed out as per that option) were grayened with alpha blending (or maybe just 30% transparency or 30% luminescence, you get the general idea) rather than pixel shading. The latter looks a bit weird in 320x200.

I believe I've run into the same problem. The trick is that characters take 'steps' that aren't one pixel size, but rather depend on the character's speed (usually three or four pixels per animation loop). So, a character could always stop two or three pixels before the end of a walkable area.
This also means that if you use regions to trigger something, they must be wide enough to accomodate this.

iirc using a duration of zero or -1 would make it stop. It's in the manual.

Star Wars: the Fandom Menace.

As a workaround,

Code: ags

function DisableButton (int gui, int button, int graphic) {
  SetButtonDisabled (gui, button);
  SetButtonGraphic (gui, button, graphic);
}

or something like that, anyway.

Well, what about if the Crop feature always cropped the same amount off the left and right sides, thus leaving the centre intact? Would that solve the problem?

What would be great is an option to add a one-pixel-wide transparent column to the left (or right) of a sprite. That way you can align the sprites within AGS if they somehow aren't.
(of course you can export the sprite to do the same, but this is faster and you can see the results).

AJA -> yes, but for some reason it refuses to open my AVI files. That's probably a missing codec error, I suppose.

Pumaman -> Oh, I didn't know that. That's a good point... in that case I'll just have to find some software to convert AVI to another codec.

JetXL -> exactly. I find it surprising that a seemingly trivial operation like converting video formats would be so hard to find. Especially since the codecs ARE usually freely available...

Eggie -> which mag? It normally costs $100+ according to their webpage.

Candle -> thanks for the offer, it is several megabytes though, would that be a problem?

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but it is for an AGS cutscene...

Does anyone know a good tool that can convert AVI files to MPEG, to save space?
I've downloaded half a dozen tools I found with Google, but all of them had problems (didn't work, could only input MPG but not output it, could only output 10 seconds until you paid them money, etc).

...we make POINT and CLICK adventures. It's not possible to make games that won't induce RSI in the long run...

No, but it IS possible to make games that won't induce RSI in the short run. Just because you can't entirely prevent something doesn't mean you shouldn't take it into account. I'm just saying people should take fifteen minutes to add keyboard support to the main GUI in their AGS game. I can't think of any good reason why so many people don't.

RSI = repetetive strain injury, commonly known as mouse-arm even though it is a much broader field.

also, i don't find that dragging the mouse a little is less ergonomic than having to travel half the screen to select an action.. the verb coin becomes quite fun to use when it's immersive, like in full throttle or curse of m.i.

You are absolutely right that a classic LucasArts GUI is also ergonomically unsound... UNLESS it has keyboard support, which all classic LucasArts games do. However, many AGS games don't, even if it would only take fifteen minutes to implement it. I have given up on several otherwise good AGS games (including No-Action Jackson) because of precisely this issue.

I'm not kidding, either. RSI is a far too often overlooked problem, and user-friendliness of controls is a subtle thing that will turn gamers away if done improperly (read any gaming magazine and check for entries like 'it would have been a great game if not for the fact that the controls are unworkable').

I second Snarky's notions.
Also the motion 'click-hold-drag-release' that is required for most verb coin GUIs is extremely annoying imo, not to mention an ergonomical hazard.

Yes. Two ways, actually.

If you get two characters in prison,

Spoiler

one can let the other out by pushing the lose brick under the right window

[close]

and of course there is a key,

Spoiler

which is hanging in the chandelier

Spoiler

which you take down using the tentacle mating call music

[close]

[close]

Okay, BMF-Inc wins. Congrats!

Magician -> no, I'm a psychic

Google for reviews or walkthroughs of the games Operation Wolf and Operation Thunderbolt, two arcade classics that may give you some ideas.

Code: ags

int cnum=1;
while (cnum < 8) {
  int itm=0;
  while (itm<4) {
    AddInventoryToCharacter (cnum, Random (20) + 10);
    itm++;
  }
  cnum ++;
}

will give characters 1 - 7 four cards each, given that the cards are inventory items 10 through 30 inclusive.

If, in a dialog, only a single option is enabled, AGS will automatically trigger that option without user interaction.
By contrast, LucasFilm games still display the dialog menu, even if only a single option is possible.
It would be nice to have a SetGameParameter or something similar that switches between these two behaviors.

A workaround may be to disable sound and music for your game while testing (using the game's config panel). This has something to do with an application (e.g. the game) 'locking' the music card and not always releasing the lock, and then windows would start a long timeout to see if the card becomes available.
Or maybe not, the problem could be something entirely different.

Sounds very good.
The only quibble I have is that cycling mouse cursors (right mouse button, or mouse wheel) gets annoying if you have more than, say, five cursor modes. IMHO Gabriel Knight suffers from this, and so would your game if you add the four 'special' modes later on. Especially as by that point the player will be used to the earlier number of commands, and for instance would know to right-click three times to get from 'hand' to 'eye'. And now it would be seven instead.
If the commands are rarerly used, you shouldn't put them in the right-click sequence, just under the hotkeys and in the GUI.
(it could be argued that SQ's nose icon doesn't belong in the right click sequence either)

Okay, is this too difficult? Or should it be postponed until after the team challenge? Or what?