Messages

string buffer
StrFormat (buffer, "%s %s %s @OVERHOTSPOT@", verb, object, verb);
SetLabelText (Statusline, 0, buffer);

The common method is, SetMusicRepeat (1) then PlayMusic (42).
I tend to put it in enter_room (before fadein), or possibly in game_start.
Some commands only are scheduled by the script, and are executed either when you Wait(1) or when the script finishes (the latter category mostly includes NewRoom and CallRoomScript)

Putting this in rep_ex(_al) also works:
if (IsMusicPlaying () == 0) PlayMusic (42)

My guess is that your midi file is invalid? Or maybe the crash is caused by something else, or your directsound is setup improperly.

I got the fishing rod but cannot go outside.   

Later in the plot, the snowstorm is finished and you get to go outside.

I saw the oil spots but don't want to get me hands dirty 
I can't take anything in any of the rooms (it's not mine to take)

That means the stuff you're attempting to take isn't important. There are some objects in the rooms but most aren't accessible at the start.

How can you 'use' whatever you can collect in your inventory

Try typing 'use <item>', of course

Also, we can enter all the shower/bathrooms, but can we do anything in there?  I could only 'use' my shower.  There must be a reason why we can enter these rooms

No, it's just a nice detail.

What you're missing is an explanation of what you're trying to do and what actually happens.

At a guess, making a variable (GlobInt #3) refer to both a character and an inventory item may get you confused as they don't necessarily line up.
Also, where exactly are you putting this? Because the correct place would be on_key_press and then you'd be checking for keycode, not IsKP.

Okay, update time!

In our fourth installment, it is finally possible to cast spells! Okay, you can't use the magical items you create yet, but at least you can make them. Plus, an old acquaintance drops by for a visit, and some of the Llewdorians are fleshed out. Finally, the cat and the innkeeper make their appearance.
You can reclaim your robbed goods, defeat Medusa legit, and play up to plot point seventeen, at which point you get to roam the country for free without Manny bothering you.
I've tried to make several events less strictly ordered. For instance entering the bears' house now involves a puzzle that you can do before or after a number of other things.
Enjoy!

If you're working on some puzzle (e.g. the cat, or the stuck drawer), I would appreciate hearing what you thought would work only it didn't, because I can add sensible responses there. The new version has a bunch of cat-related responses, for instance.

Fluxmaster -> while it would be fun to redraw all Llewdor screens from a different angle, I'm afraid it would be more effort than it's worth. Also I wouldn't be able to duplicate what you did since I'm a terrible artist. Thanks for the effort, though.
However, do you think you could help out with a bit of screen hacking? Because there's one screen that I'd love to use that doesn't exist in the original. I would like Gwydion to leave the pirate ship by rowboat, so if it would be possible to hack together a screen that shows the side of the ship at water height, with a small skiff and a rope (or ladder) leading up, that would be really great! All those elements do exist already, I can send you the relevant screenshots if you want.

Regarding your bandits problem,

Spoiler

It's ironic that in the same post you state you are unable to have Gwydion find the bandit lair, and then discuss the telescope at length...

[close]

* (in room 75): Warning: ChangeCharacterView was used while the view was fixed - call ReleaseCharView first
Should be fixed now; it's actually a bug in AGS but I'm evading it. If it ever occurs again let me know, the room number should suffice.

Regarding the salt puzzle,

Spoiler

Well found! Except that you should try it in the laboratory in this demo. I'll add possibilities in a number of other places as it only makes sense.

[close]

Google ScummVM.

Like I said, accented e and stuff like that.

If I place 'addinventory' and 'newroom' one after the other in a script, then on_event only gets called for the newroom event. A warning might be in order.
Same thing with two consecutive 'addinventory's.

Feature request: RestrictCharacterToRegion(charnum, region)
Means said character will treat all other regions as non-walkable. (or, walkable areas if you prefer)
Useful for instance for a duck that is restricted to water, whereas EGO can both walk on land and enter the water. Sierra uses it a lot (obj.on.water)
(it isn't really important since I've written a workaround that continually checks GetRegionAt() but I figured it might be a nice idea)

If a textbox GUI is visible, then all letter keys pressed will be passed onto that textbox - it doesn't matter if the textbox GUI is set to non-clickable, if the textbox itself is set to disabled, or if another modal GUI is placed on top of the textbox.

Character A set to ignore walkbehinds, and set to baseline 170.
Half of him is over a walkbehind with baseline 190 (which is thus ignored).
The other half is not over any walkbehind.
EGO will appear behind the walkbehind, but in front of character A. Why?

Finally, this came up in another thread, I thought it was my slowish computer but more people are having this problem...
If I do a SetObjectPosition (0, 10, 10), then MoveObject (0, 200, 10),
what happens is that the object moves visually to about 150,10, then instantly snaps to its destination. Or sometimes it snaps to 50,10 and then starts moving visually.
Ditto for characters. Only it doesn't always happen, which made me think it was a frameskip caused by my slowish computer. But since it also happens on 2 GHz boxen, I may well be wrong about that.

Characters will only follow when they're idle - this is by design so that you don't have to turn off follow whenever you want to move or animate the character.

That makes sense, but how about adding a warning if the character is animating loopedly, because in that case it will never stop to go for the chase.

What if you restart the game by clicking on a button (so that no keypresses are involved)? Does the same problem happen?

Not sure, I'll check on that.

SSH -> Yup, that's roughly what I'm doing, except that I don't do it in the editor; I've created a small program that reads an AGS game and encrypts all the strings it finds there.

Yay! Thanx!

Fluxmaster -> Medusa has the same solution, yes. The treehouse is still there, only the trick is that while you know where it is, Gwydion does not. That's a hint
(you don't polish the piece of glass; if you take a broken bottle and polish it, it won't become reflective. But it's a good idea, I'll add some text indicating that. What you should do is find the mirror, only you can't get it yet in B3, so you must 'stuff pockets' to get it. This will be better implemented in B4).

As to the cat puzzle, I took the list of things you tried and added a number of texts for those to nudge the player in the right direction. That should help.

In general, if you try something (in particular, use <item> on <hotspot>) and you think it needs a response, let me know! (other than basic responses, such as 'you cannot do that')

Dream -> Now that you mention it I'm not fully sure that you can legit kill Medusa in B3 (I'm at beta 3.75 here and I'm not fully sure which parts I added in B3). So don't spend too much time on it yet

Good point both on the look-at-shelf and put-hand-in-hole stuff.



> There are also times when Alexander encounters the wizard, the wizard has
> nothing to say to him, yet, when Alexander leaves the screen, the wizard
> punishes him for leaving his presence.  I assume that this is intended.

Yes, it is. After all, walking out on someone is impolite. And Manny
is just one mean bastard


The wizard sometimes appears and says nothing relevant (i.e. 'its him again'
or 'his stare is annoying')... he should of course disappear afterwards.
If he doesn't, please tell me /when/ exactly this happened (i.e. morning,
night, etc, and what your last order from the wiz was)


> When Manannan is sleeping in his bed, there's a brief flash of yellow that
> keeps happening. I wonder if this is a graphic glitch or it's meant to indicate
> another item?

Assuming you mean the brief flash on top of the right-hand closet, then yes
that's meant to indicate another item (to wit, the brass key). If not, please
tell me what and where.

At a guess, the message number is invalid? Or the message might contain high ASCII characters (i.e. accented e, stuff like that)

This is likely a problem with DirectX, or other windows drivers. I had a similar problem a while ago, where I couldn't use my mouse in AGS games... the solution was to reinstall mouse drivers. So try running DXDIAG.

As I understand it:

When the character stands still (not moving or when it stops moving) it uses the first frame in the loop (of the direction it's facing).  If where the character stops moving happens to be on the middle frames of the loop it skips back to the first frame.  This leads to that 'skip' that you're seeing.

No, that's not what I mean. If I do a SetObjectPosition (0, 10, 10), then MoveObject (0, 200, 10),
what happens is that the object moves visually to about 150,10, then instantly snaps to its destination. Or sometimes it snaps to 50,10 and then starts moving visually.
Ditto for characters. Only it's a heisenbug.
it feels like a frameskip, anyway.

Try this: In the on_mouse_click () function, put something like
if (GetHotspotAt (mouse.x, mouse.y) == 3 && GetCursorMode() == MODE_WALK) NewRoom (17);

Hit F2 to find out if you're anywhere near the limits. You're probably not even close

Is there any other way I can mask the AVI files? If I simply rename them to something other than an AVI, will AGS still be able to play them?

I'm reasonably sure KQ2+ does this. Try it!

As for my second suggestion (transparent characters), the reason I was suggesting it, is because I use it to hide a character completely. Maybe instead you could implement a "HideCharacter" and "ShowCharacter"? But I could probably accomplish that by making a function that would change the character's view to a blank image. The "HideCharacter" and

yes, that is easiest, or simply move the character to coordinates that are way off-screen.

Code: ags

function ToggleCharacter (int ch) {
  character[ch].x = character[ch].x ^ 1024;
}

Would it be a lot of work for you to also have the strings in scripts encrypted?

We've covered this before ... basically, I could, but I don't really want to start messing with the scripting system like that. I may do it at some point though.

Oh yes, we did. Sorry to bother you. I'll code something that works some other way.

Small feature request: ResetMusicVolumeToTheValueInitiallySpecifiedInTheEditor().

Do you mean the Room Music Volume option? In this case, would a better solution be a GetMusicVolume to complement SetMusicVolume?

Yes, that would also work. Or maybe SetMusicVolume (BASE_VOL) as a special parameter. Or whatever. I'm currently hard-coding it in the rooms (i.e. in enter_room, simply set a variable).

I would appreciate it if, after RestartGame(), the keyboard buffers are automatically cleared. It is possible if the RestartPoint() is at some menu, that a key that was apparently pressed earlier immediately removes the menu when yuo Restart.

I can certainly do that. I'm surprised it's a problem though, the keyboard buffer should never normally get the opportunity to fill up.

It's kind of weird. I'm not sure that is actually what is happening, but in most cases RestartGame doesn't do what I would assume it does (even if I don't put in a SetRestartPoint() ) anywhere. Specifically, my game starts with three cutscenes followed by the first room. If I hit restart, the game may end up anywhere within those cutscenes, or in the first room, or in the first room after the initial Display ("You are here"). I figured it was a keyboard problem but I may be wrong.




If you do this:

Code: ags

ChangeCharView (EGO, 3)
SetCharIdle    (EGO, 4, 0)
ChangeCharView (EGO, 5)

you get a warning that you shouldn't use ChangeCharView after SetCharView (that it requires ReleaseCV first).

This is a weird thing with string length... the second string gets split in two, and put in two textboxes. Maybe a compiler warning would be in order.

Code: ags

    string buf;
    Display            ("This is a rather long string that can be displayed in a variety of ways, some of which will cause it to be broken off right in the middle, as is about to be demonstrated in the following word: intersection. Strange, isn't it?");
    SetGlobalString (0, "This is a rather long string that can be displayed in a variety of ways, some of which will cause it to be broken off right in the middle, as is about to be demonstrated in the following word: intersection. Strange, isn't it?");
    GetGlobalString (0, buf);
    Display         (buf);

FollowCharacter() doesn't seem to work if the sheep character is in an animation loop (you'd have to do a MoveChar first)
e.g. AnimateCharacter (GUY, 4, 5, 1);
and some time later FollowChar (GUY, EGO)

the ^D debug info - if there's more than six or so objects, the text window won't fit on the screen. Maybe it should give one pop-up box per five objects or so?

If you restore the game, music continues playing from where it left off. Which is good. However it does not take into account the 'music volume adjustment' for the room you are in after restoring.

One of my beta-testers (for KQ3+) suggested this:
I notice that scrolling arows have been added to the save/load dialogs (regular list box, by the way). Could  you add a repetitive scrolling if the user holds the mouse down on one of them?

Thanks for the feedback!

Maybe QfG4.5 could be hosted on the main AGS games server along with all the other games in the index? At least, I thought there was such a thing, sorry if I'm confused there.
Because I have trouble downloading it as well (windows or dos version, I don't care). I've seen numerous other sites that say thay host QfG4.5, but they actually just link to the original site.

Oh and by the way, can someone tell me where do I find QfO please?

Dying, mainly.
(in the original, you didn't get a character's stuff back when he died)
Also, wasting dimes so you can't use the telescope.
Calling the MP too often so he won't come again.
Messing up the deal with Mark (either Green's or the Meteor's).
Messing up Ed's film.
Tearing open the envelope, or forgetting the stamp.
(the above four only apply if you have no other way into the Seckrit Lab)

And you can drag objects in the editor. A door should be an object, and you may want to set it to non-clickable and draw a hotspot around it (because otherwise, you may not be able to close it if the door-opened graphic is mostly transparent)

Yes, you can kill the medusa. But if you look at the glass shard, you'll notice it's not particularly reflective. You can also get in the treehouse but you can't take your stuff yet (not implemented yet in B3).

You have an interesting point about the original vs the remake.
Might I state that most people found the original difficult, because the first time they played it they didn't have the documentation? (true in my case, plus I was eight at the time and didn't know much english then, I didn't get the legal version of the game much later). With the manual, it becomes rather easy to find all the ingredients since they're just there, and make the spells as described. That accounts for about 140 of the 210 points.
I believe what you're saying is that KQ3+ is too easy because you just have to do what the wizard tells you. That's a good point. But bear in mind that several parts of the game are as yet missing, and of course the point in defeating the wizard is doing what he does not tell you. For instance, did you get the fish yet? What about the salt? Needle? (I'd add snakeskin and fly wings, but they aren't available yet in your version; plus there will be the question of how you're going to get out of your room at night again, since Manny will be locking it in the future)
That said, suggestions are welcome. For instance I haven't been able to think of a good solution to the spider puzzle, because the original solution is found by most players as they just start flying around the countryside for fun, and then suddenly the puzzle is solved.
Of course they shuold be able to fly around just for fun, but solving puzzles should at least require some conscious thought.
Another question - is the cat puzzle unfair? It seems to stump a lot of people, whereas I intended it to be simply solvable by looking around in the lab. Or is it that people just assume the puzzle isn't solvable yet because it's a beta?

Thoughts welcome!