Messages

Been there, done that

I have a really exciting short game coming up. It plays on a grid and you have to place good circles in there and compete with an evil bad guy who places evil bad cross-shaped gadgets on the grid. And you have to correctly align three of your instances before the evil bad guy does, or he'll use his evil bad cross-shaped gadgets to destroy the world!!!!! Phear my leet coding skillz!!!!!

1) AMD K6-2 350 MHz
2) oldish 3-d card, I forget the name
3) 256 Mb
4) Win2000 and/or Linux, and sometimes DOS too.
5/6) Possibly. If so I'll buy an entire new machine.

It would help on any sprite with significant areas of transparency.
Certainly it would help on the hotspot/region/walkable bitmaps that I assume are stored in room data files.

Actually you could import all tiles in the sprite manager, then use RawDrawImage to put them on a black screen according to the layout specified in an array. A bit impractical but possible. I'm confident it's possible to write Pacman or Boulderdash in AGS if necessary.

I suppose I could add my site here for a bit of blatant promotion. It doesn't have AGS games as of yet but does have a number of other homebrew games.

http://crystalshard.binary-people.com

- when importing multiple sprites simultaneously, I cannot specify the resolution for which to import them, or the transparent color; instead I have to manually input all of them if I want non-default values.

- in the sprite manager, when no sprite is selected and you press delete, the 'are you sure' box pops up and AGS seems to delete something if I click on 'yes', I'm just not sure what.

- a search and replace option in editor would be nice

- when importing a font fails ('not a SCI font file'), a temporary file remains in the directory

- when a string contains characters not printable in a certain font, it would be nicer to just ignore those characters rather than crashing the game. Or print blanks. Along the same line, if I do 'Display ("error %s")', apparently the '%s' gets replaced by a null-character since there is no string specified, so it crashes the game. It would be nicer to display a blank or question mark.

- when using a SCI font, character 127 remains unusable even if it is present

1) you put the talking face sprites in a different View, and select that as 'talking view' for the appropriate character. Then use DisplaySpeech ().

3) you can make them transparent when importing the relevant sprites.

- nasty trick with operator precedence...
in C and C++, 6 - 3 - 2 = (6 - 3) - 2 = 3 - 2 = 1
In AGS, however, 6 - 3 - 2 = 6 - (3 - 2) = 6 - 1 = 5

Yeah, this has been reported quite a few times. I really need to add a note to a prominent place in the manual, I'm just not really sure where the best place would be.

Maybe an error is the best place. People tend not to use this syntax much anyway, but if they do it might not be what they expect either way.

You can make sure there's no walkable area there. And simply move the room's south horizon line up a bunch of pixels.

And, is there any reason why the forum generates 'strength, defence and knowledge' skills when I try to sign up?

Hm, let's see, the forum RPG. For every member we'd need stats for helpfulness, intelligence, patience, flameability and general cluefulness. Plus sense of humor, probably, and a number of HP (hunger points) before he has to go AFK to get some snacks. Now I don't want to make this game by myself but if somebody else does I'd be happy to take the credit...

Or, you could draw hotspots at random and then click on the interaction window at random. Should make for an interesting game

SSH -> thanks!!

Gilbot -> I've never had problems myself so far. Maybe windows has implemented a safer sprintf?

Pumaman -> as to the obscure music / escape key thingy, it was only the escape key. But since it doesn't seem to reproduce, I'll wager it's actually a windows problem.
As to the middle mouse button, in my experience several windows versions simply don't send the WM_MIDDLEBUTTONDOWN and -UP messages to applications. I've hacked this in the past by setting the middle button to 'double left click' in windows setup, then making double left click behave like middle button in my app. Obviously this is a really ugly hack so I wouldn't recommend it.
By the way kudos on the lovely new webpage design that appeared yesterday!

If you want a good one-room game, download Enlightenment from either HOTU or the IF archive. Okay, so it's IF and it has no graphics. But it's well over 400 kb and it contains only a single room with a troll bridge. It's really weird in a funny way.

Wow! I don't use the ROFL acronym often, but, well, ROFL.

And if people actually fell for it, well, even more ROFL.

Okay, more small bugs with varying (but generally low) degrees of importance. Thanks for your support!

- while it is true that two characters cannot directly walk through one another, this collision check doesn't seem to take the width of the characters into account. I.e. if both characters are 20 pixels wide, and they pass within ten pixels of each other, they will still appear to be walking through each other.

- nasty trick with operator precedence...
 in C and C++,    6 - 3 - 2 = (6 - 3) - 2  = 3 - 2 = 1
 In AGS, however, 6 - 3 - 2 =  6 - (3 - 2) = 6 - 1 = 5
And the same principle applies to division. You probably don't want to change this because of backwards compatibility, but maybe a compiler warning is in order.

- why isn't there a setinvproperty() function? I wanted to give each item a score_when_picked_up property, which is set to zero after being used the first time. [note to SSH, I'm using an array now so it's not a problem]

- I'm not sure what the #sectionstart/end lines do, but when selecting a script subsection from the Script menu, the editor still opens the entire script and goes to the first line of that function (rather than the line after #sectionstart); was that your intention?

- when inside a comment, the word completion for function names no longer pops up. However, the function parameter information does still pop up (i.e. if you type 'NewRoom (' a box with 'int' appears)

- would it be possible to keep the (global) script editor window open while testing the game? This would make script debugging a lot easier (as long as the user remembers to save before he tests).

- My middle mouse button is not detected as such by AGS, it instead triggers a left click. This may be a windows problem, however, I recall having the same problem with a game I wrote in Visual Studio.

- on_key_press and most other functions on that function's help page do not appear in the manual's index

- it isn't stated in the manual, but am I correct to assume that StrFormat (buf, format_string, buf, var1, var2) works correctly? (the point is using the same string 'buf' in both input and output)

- the debug box for 'teleport' should list the current room number, and should be cancelled if the user presses escape.

- question: if I put 'if (game.debug_mode)' around a block of code, will this code still be included in the non-debug version of the game? In theory this would allow a simple memory or exe patch to give access to the debug mode.

- if Display() is called with a single argument, the argument should be printed as it is, rather than treated as a format string. Reason I'm saying it is that if the string happens to contain a %s or %d, the game will crash with an unclear error message about unprintable characters.

- this is kind of obscure, but sometimes an active gui text box prevents the escape key from reaching on_key_press; it seems to occur when music initialization fails at the game startup

For the batch files, try

ECHO 1 > TEXTFILE

And AGS can do FileReadRawChar () to check what's in the file.

And as to displaying your health, the easiest way to do it is add a textbox on a GUI (like the title bar at top of the screen).
Then, in repeatedly_execute, add

Code: ags

string buf;
StrFormat (buf, "Your health is %d of %d", health, max_health);
SetLabelText (TITLEBAR_GUI, NUMBER_OF_TEXTBOX, buf);

I beg to differ.
In the last stable release (2.60) and subsequent betas, you can do SetGUIPosition (GUI, 20, -10) without trouble. For instance you can make a GUI slide onto the screen. Try it and see.

You may want to try the on_event function, which is called with parameter GUI_MDOWN whenever you click on a GUI, and GUI_MUP whenever you release the button.