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Specifically, down.

I seem to recall that negative numbers are also rounded down in AGS (as in, rounded to further negative numbers) as opposed to in C where they are rounded towards zero - but that's not particularly important I suppose.

Have you tried using CreateTextOverlay instead?

Or, simply add a timer to your display... function, then put code in RepEx(Always) to remove the relevant overlay.

Probably this: every time you call SetBackgroundFrame (-1), the bg animation starts over, from frame one. Since you call SBF every single frame, the bg never reaches frame 2.

It is also possible that he is transparent (see SetCharTransparency), or has a view attached that is simply an empty image. Or has a baseline that is set wrongly.

One could make a timed puzzle based on something different than physical (real-world) time, e.g. the amount of screens the player enters, the amount of mouse commands given, something like that.

Hi there,

I'm sure all of you are familiar with the excellent Maniac Mansion Deluxe...
Now I've found some differences with the original game, aka easter eggs, and would like to ask people if they've found others...

* old record now plays the Loom soundtrack
* poster in Green's room reads "Tierra sucks"

I think the easiest would be to assume the pivot is the center of the image. If the user wants it in a different position, he can always go modifying the object's x and y. I can see some use for this functionality, but you could also export your image to a paint program, rotate there, and import back. Photo Editor for instance.

Look
  You are in a stinky, darkened room, watched over by a large, unpleasant-looking
  alien wearing a lab coat and glasses, and carrying with an equally large and
  unpleasant-looking gun. A cabinet stands in the corner, and a doorway leads
  south.
Open cabinet
  As you move to the cabinet, the alien steps forward and screams something
  unintellegible, and you quickly back off.
Talk alien
  "fshdjkfshdklfsdndshflhf!"
Look bag
  The perilously thin plastic bag has been sealed shut to keep its contents
  fresh, a new service offered to you by Eight Twelve. Inside are the
  things you bought while shopping.
Open bag
  The bag is sealed shut; you cannot open it. It goes to show how useful
  new technologies are to keep you from being productive.
Throw bag on ground
  As you throw the bag to the ground, the bottle of vodka breaks.
Inventory
  A perilously thin plastic bag
  (in the bag) vodka
  (in the bag) shards of glass
  (in the bag) a stick of butter
  (in the bag) two litres of diet cola
Cut bag with shards
  Carefully, you manipulate the shards to cut open the bag from the inside.
  You decide to leave the vodka in the bag for now since you cannot put it
  in the broken bottle, and you take the other items out.
Put butter on ground
Open cabinet
  As you move to the cabinet, the alien steps forward and slips on the butter.
  With a backwards flip, it falls to the ground. As it does so, its glasses
  fall from its face to the ground, and shatter. The alien starts to search
  around for its glasses.
  You open the cabinet and find a contact lens case.
Get case
  Ok.
Get gun
  The alien still holds on to its gun, and is frantically searching for its
  glasses.
Open door
  The door is closed. There is a touch sensor in the middle, but it doesn't
  respond to your hand.
Give case to alien
  The alien takes the contact lens case and quickly puts in its contact
  lenses. It calms down and looks around. Then it remembers that you were
  the one who caused him to fall. It angrily raises the gun to point straight
  at you. ZAP! You are now dead.
Undo  (or restore game, or whatever)
  Undone.
Look case
  It's a small case containing two contact lenses and some cleaning fluid.
Put vodka in case
  You open the case and replace the cleaning fluid with vodka.
Give case to alien
  The alien takes the contact lens case and quickly puts in its contact
  lenses. Then it screams! The vodka is burning in its eyes! It throws down
  the gun and rushes out the door.
Get gun
  The gun has broken into several pieces, most of them unrecognizable and
  useless. One of them appears to be an alien kind of battery or charging
  device. For some reason it bears a green recycling logo.
Get battery
  Ok.
South
  As you step out of the cell, you are intercepted by a patrol of aliens.
  Bad move! You are now dead.
Undo
  Ok.
Listen
  You hear aliens walking around outside the cell.
Wait
  Time passes.
Listen
  You hear aliens walking around outside the cell.
Wait
  Time passes.
Listen
  All is quiet.
South
  You are in the hallway of the alien ship. A weird kind of machine stands in a
  corner, and a strange kind of apparatus stands in another corner. The hallway
  leads east and west, and cells line the north wall.
Look apparatus
  Judging from all those Star Trek episodes you watched, this is some kind of
  beam transportation device. It is very old and looks rather rickety. It seems
  to be coin-operated, except that the coin slot is rusted shut.
West
  You'd better not stray that far, someone might notice you.
Use cola on rust
  You pour some cola on the rust, and it eats the rust away, revealing the
  coin slot.
Look machine
  It looks like a candy machine, except that it contains weird pieces of
  alien technology rather than candy. Most of them bear a green recycling logo.
  There are several slots in the machine, apparently meant for coins or for
  pieces of technology.
Put battery in machine
  You put the battery in a large slot and it falls through. A voice speaks,
  "fthjkfhdsjkn vcxjk", followed by "Thank you for recycling", which is then
  repeated in French, German and a bunch of other languages you don't recognize.
  A couple of coins fall into the tray, apparently return on deposit.
Get coins
  Ok.
Insert coins in apparatus
  You throw the coins in the apparatus, and watch it come to live. It starts to
  hum and buzz, and lights begin to blink in unrecognizable patterns.
Use apparatus
  You step on the disc and are transported off the alien ship!
  To be continued...

Most impressive!

While it seems possible to just use every inventory item on a puzzle in order to solve it, people still tend to get stuck in Lucasarts games. Well, not in Monkey Island or Loom, because those games are just made to be easy, but Monkey Island II is very difficult without resorting to pixelhunting. I find myself that whenever I get stuck in a Sierra game (or even a Tierra game), it is due to a detail I've failed to spot, such as the spellbook in KQVI or the fact that your own sword has a crystal in KQII+. Frankly that's annoying. In nearly all parser games that I know of, you can always find the relevant information by 'look'ing at stuff, and I think that's fair.

I agree with the Thrill mentioned before that you have to do everything right, but I can't remember this ever happening in a Sierra classic. I do recall it with several text adventures, such as Spellcasting 201 and Enchanter and Bureaucracy.

Good idea.

Or, if that's too annoying to code, what would work is a variable like game.queue_length, that indicates the amount of tunes that can be stored in the queue. By default it is ten (as it is now), but if I were to set it to one, it would solve my problem since then I could use PlayMusicQueued to set the next tune in every occasion.

Actually, AGS will automatically 'pad out' imported room graphics. But not masks for walkbehinds/walkables/hotspots/regions.

Ich spriche Deutsch, das ist kein Problem. Bitte senden sie mir den Laufdurch. Danke schon.

Does the character's view have walking loops for all four (or eight) directions?

Problem:
I want to set up the following:
  1.Play music A
  2.Once it's done, check if player did a certain action
  3.If not, return to 1
  4.Play music B

This seems not actually possible in AGS. The best I can come up with is checking IfMusicPlaying() in rep_ex_always, but that doesn't get called if the game is, for instance, blocked by a display() function, so that would cause the music to halt. PlayQueued(B) won't work either since if A repeats, B never gets played.

Not sure if this is a bug, but if you Animate an object and then turn it off, it still classifies as animating (for IsObjectAnimating).

Minor detail: when importing a character, its sprites appear in a folder somewhere in the middle of the sprite manager; one would expect to find them at the end.

Maybe you should make 16-bit mode the default for new games? 256 color tends to confuse the n00bs.

You have a point about the 'all files' option, but I just want to point out that every other Windows application does it differently. Anyway, maybe that save-menu could remember the user's previous selection for file type? That's not particularly difficult to code, iirc.

The color probably screws up because you're running in 256-color mode. Click the 'palette' button to change to 16-bit.

CJ -> How about if you make it that DisplayTopBar with a null-string for the top bar text, displays a regular message box in a non-blocking fashion? Would be useful for intro sequences, and actually this trick is used in some older Sierra games.

Hi there,

I was playing this German MM clone (called Manick Mansion, also the entire game is in German and it has a very different house than MM does, even if the mad scientist premiss is the same).
Anyway how do I get past the cactus?