Messages

[MyModule.ash]

BUG: When I declare a fixed array in module, using a #define constant as show below I get the following compile error:  MyModule.asc(46): Error (line 46): expected ']'   

MyModule.ash
#define BugReport_MAXCATLISTSIZE 50;

MyModule.asc  (line #46)
String Catlist[BugReport_MAXCATLISTSIZE];

t isn't taking anything away from the engine; on the contrary, it's making the overall presentation more professional and eliminating possible extraction woes for people who don't happen to have this or that extractor program (yeah, people like that are still around!).

Except that the people who are presumably being helped are in fact being led down the garden path of  "just let it install in the default "Program Files" folder which is not really appropriate since AGS does not behave in a manner consistent with what people have come to expect from "installed" windows apps.  Yes the intelligentsia among us will know better and direct the installer to deposit the new files in a "..\Ags.Vx.xx" directory rather than "C:\Program FIles" but what will the uninformed minions do,  who are so clueless that they would attempt to execute a zip file?  What do you suppose they would do? 

All I'm saying is that if it has an installer and it installs just like any other windows app then people are going to have certain expectations, meritorious or not.    And if peoples' expectations are not met then, justified or not, they will have a  negative  opinion about it.  I suppose just as many people would disagree with me about this as those who would agree.   As they, say time will tell... Just my $0.02

Rick

P.S. I had a heck of a time getting sprites with  a transparent color.  I suspect that it is operator error on my part o I am not asserting a bug thing here.  I mention it just in case and ask for someone to confirm this behavior has always been the case,

I had a newly created eight bit game.  I was importing sprites that were created for another 8-bit game.  I had used graphics gale to create the sprites and had used the "eliminate unused colors" feature of gale to delete any colors not used in the spite.  When I imported the sprites and selected "use upper eft hand pixel?" as transparent color then there was no transparent color.  I eventually got it to work by selecting the "map colors to game pallette".  It also seemed that I had to do this even with sprites that had been  converted to the game pallette.

I have figured out what to do to get my work done.  But it seems like it is now harder than it used to be.  Has anyone had similar experience or can anyone clarify/confirm any of this.  I myself, am not sure if I have unwittingly ventured down a new process path or if the new editor has some slightly different behavior in  this respect.  Please comment...

I also prefer the zip version for a number of reasons.   

[edit] same points more concise and clear, hopefully?

If you install an application in windows you expect that the "Program Files" folder is an appropriate location.  However,  AGS doesn't support the concept of having one path for the AGS executable and another path for the data it creates.   It also doesn't support the concept allowing the user to specify different default paths for different resources.  Also support for the simultaneous installation of multiple-versions of AGS has been done manually by maintaining separate directories for each version of AGS and the games supported by the respective version. 

IMHO, when some one installs a windows program he expects that he will be able to configure that application's paths so that he can specify the default locations where documents, data, ect are created and where templates and other resources are  located.  He doesn't expect that user created content will stored in the installation directory of the application.

In my opinion it would be better to use the zip distribution until the issues such as the ones above are discussed, addressed, or dismissed. 

@dasjoe

Thank you, I am still laughing  ...    , etc, etc

... Basicly, moon haven't atmosphere ...

Since nobody was ever there how can you be so sure?     *** suddenly a feeling of deja vu rushes over RickJ ***

Meanwhile hundred of thousend people died from starvation.

Yes, please feel free to enlighten us about the vaillant effort the good people of Serbia/Yugoslavia made to save these poor starving people.  Or did they just sit on their fat asses watching the moon landing on tv and just not give a shit about those starving fools?

It most certainly wasn't the best use of resources... wonderful observation.

How do you know this to be true?   What facts do you have to back this up?  How much human suffering was avoided because of the research and other sociological benefits?    You really can't make a conclusion here without answering that question.  There were plenty of other countries not spending on space, what were they spending their money on and what did they accomplish by it?

How much could this money NASA spent fight those problems and many others I didn't mention? How much it could really make difference?

The answer to this question lies beyond the naive and overly simplistic understanding of economics that presumes "all that money" was wasted and had no beneficial economic or social effect.  Also the choice of the language "fight those problems" rather than "solve those problems" is also curious as it seems to elevate process/intentions over results.  Are you really saying that you would have preferred that the money be spent on income redistribution and/or other socialist programs that are, in your view, a good unto themselves regardless of the results produced?

I truly believe if we don't get off this planet in vast numbers SOON, Earth is toast.

I agree, the sooner we launch the B Ark the better! 

Like I said there is no wind on moon! Scientific fact!

Since nobody was ever there how can you be so sure?


Well, I have to go now, Elvis is picking me up for lunch .. 

When you have a GUI tab open the Delete key will delete the selected control, makes sense so far.  However, if an editable field in the property or event pane has focus it is easy to get the idea that the delete key will delete whatever is selected in that field, rather than deleting controls from the GUI itself.   I suppose it's something everyone will eventually get used to but I can also see this as being an endless source of "How come stuff keeps disappearing from my GUI?" type questions in the Beginners Tech forum.

I don't really follow what you mean here. If you're editing a field in the property grid and press delete, it will delete the field and not the control. Even if the control was selected, you get an "Are you sure" confirmation message so I think it's unlikely anybody would have any mysteriously disappearing controls.

I don't believe it!  The other day this happened repeatedly and reliably.  I was editing the name of event function to be called.  I selected a couple characters and pressed the delete key.  Nothing happened to the field but the control was gone and the properties grid was then tied to another component.  Now I can't duplicate it either.   

The only two things I can think of that may have changed between now and then are:

1.  I am now using RC2.  It's possible that I was using RC1 when this happened and so it's not a problem anymore.

2.  The game in which this was happening was recently upgraded from AGS 2.72,  when I tried just now to replicate this problem I created a new game from a template of the game that originally gave the problem. 

I suppose I should go back and check what happens on the original just to be sure.  I'll let you know if I find  a way to duplicate this.

I still can't believe it!! ** pounds head on table **

There also is a problem importing non-standard room names such as  _blank.crm.  This used to work and was a workaround for "new room" not having  the ability to select a template to create the new with.   A couple of times the editor hungup and I had to kill it from the task manager.  It also locked up when trying to import a room that had no room.asc file (actually it was mis-named by accident).

I haven't been able to replicate this, do you have any more information about when this problem occurs?

The room is created but the asc file is overwritten.  It's kind of similar to renaming problem but there doesn't seem to be a warning message about it.

Btw, instead of (or in addition to) bringing back that _blank feature, would it be reasonable in a future version to add an ImportAs feature that would make a copy of the room or module, get the new name from a popup dialog, and then import the copy?  Perhaps the existing "New" command could be enhanced to provide this functionality.  The only other thing one could ask is that files from both the game directory and the editor director be listed as possible imports or templates.

[Document Editor]

Document Editor
Since the new editor can now supports multiple files via tabs and since SSH has asked for a future ability to have side by side panes, how about having the ability to edit text document files.

The document files could be kept in a "Document" sub-directory.  In the project tree there could be a document node that when expanded would list all the document files in that directory.  The same editor component used for the script editor could be used for this.   I believe the ediitor component has the ability to highlight HTML and XML syntax.  If so HTML files could also appear in the Document directory as an added bonus. 

Paths Configuration
Currently there is only one import path.  It doesn't matter what is being imported the same default path is used.   This was also true in previous versions but they at least remembered from where the most recent import was made and use that as the default the next time.  The new version just switches you back to the same directory no matter what.   

I would like to have different default paths for different things;  one for sprites, one for fonts, one for modules, etc.  I would also like to have an option for each of these paths to use the most recently used path as the default which would override the one set by the user.   It would also be nice if these could be set on a per game basis.   I don't think there are many people left in the world who put every file they own in one big directory anymore.  :

[edit]
corrected spelling

No, Rui, this is completely different from the BluGui, which I hope to bring back some day in module form.  This is adapted from a little thing called ModTest, which I did way back before there were modules in AGS.  I got tired of having to create a GUI everytime I wanted to test somethng out  so I made ModTest and now improved/adapted it to AGS 3.0 in the form of BluBox. 

This is just a handy little GUI useful for testing modules and code snippets. The test GUI consists of an event log, test title and status message, 9 digital meters and their captions, 9 test buttons, and 6 led status indicators.  The Select button allows the user to select different test configurations. 

Each test configuration is implemented in a room script.   When the room loads all of the test controls are disabled (i.e. hidden) by the global script.  Each of the desired controls is enabled or initialized with a single lineof code in the room_Load() event handler.   Test button events are forwarded to the test room's script where they are handled via the on_call() handler.  The Leds and Meters are updated in the room_RepEx() event handler.  Again just a single line of code for each is all it takes.  Items are time tagged and recorded in the event log with a single line of code similar to a display statement. 

The black area above the control panel is the test room's  background image.  This area can be used to work with room objects and areas.  Just create a background image 800x600 where the important elements are in the top half of the screen and import it into the desired test room. 

This can be used to test modules, try out ideas, learn scripting, or to make tutorial packages.  Anyway, give it a try a let me know what you think. 


BluBox-T0100-B02.zip

1.  Drag-drop to move sprites and views from one folder to another.

2.  New Room and New Script create from user selectable template files.

3.  In the GUI editor, when editing properties have ability to move focus from field to field and from control to control using hot keys.   Some functionality is already there but not quite enought to accomplish this.

4.  In the GUI editor hav the ability to lock the position of the controls via a check box or other means.

=========

I think the ability to load alternative sprite and vox files at runtime is probably a good idea at some point.  The method Joseph speaks of is not really scalable and is not realistic for  games that are large or that are translated to many languages.   I wouldn't reject it out of hand but rather just give it the appropriate priority.  There are likely many other things that ought to come first, so let the cards fall where they may.

There seems to be a bug when renumbering rooms where a message pops up saying that the room.asc file can't be found and then it copies in a blank one.  The original is completely gone, so I would imagine that it probably got overwritten with the blank.

There also is a problem importing non-standard room names such as  _blank.crm.  This used to work and was a workaround for "new room" not having  the ability to select a template to create the new with.   A couple of times the editor hungup and I had to kill it from the task manager.  It also locked up when trying to import a room that had no room.asc file (actually it was mis-named by accident). 

The _blank.crm templating feature seems to be missing so all the above were attempts to find a work around.  Perhaps in the next version we supplement "new room" and "new script"  with a simple template selection scheme. 

1) Is there a way to access room local variables from another room?

Nope! 

2) What do I have to click to bring up the script for defining room or global variables? I defined them via the interface for events, but the code shows up nowhere I looked for it.

I don't know what you have done with events but it sounds like you have defined the event handler function to have a parameter.   You have to type a declaration statement into the script file just like in Pascal and basic.  Ok, so where should you type? 

Defining Variables - variables are defined by a declaration statement appearing a script and having the form of "type  name;".  So to declare an integer called MyVar one  would enter:

int MyVar;   // Static variable delaration

Dynamic Variables - Variables defined within the bounds of a function are defined only whil;e the function is executing.  When the script within the function completes the variable is no longer defined.  Consequently it is only accessable from within the function.  Further, since it is not defined between executions of the function it's value is not retained from one execution of the function to the next.   

Typically dynamic variables such as "int i;" are used for things like looping.  Since it is only defined within the function it is possible to define the sane variable inside other functions.  They are all separate variables even though they have the same names.

By convention, dynamic variables are defined at the beginning of a function.  I have seen examples of people defining dynamic variables all over the place, even inside of conditional statements, and from the compiler's point of view it's not a problem as long as it's defined before it's used.  IMHO, this practice is horribly error prone and naieve.

function MyFunction() {
   int i;   // Dynamic variable declaration
}

Static Variables - Variables defined outside the bounds of a function retain their values through out the duration of the game.  They can be accessed from anywhere within the script file in which they are defined.  By convention static variables are defined nar the beginning of a script file before any functions are defined.  However, if a static variable is meant to be accessed by only one function then it is acceptable to define it just before the function is defined. 

int MyVar;   // Static variable delaration

function MyFunction() {
   int i;   // Dynamic variable declaration

}

Global Variables - Static variables defined in the global script or in a module script can be accessed from any room script  if there definitions are first "imported" into the room script where they are to be used.   The best way of doing this is to put the import statement in the script header rather than in each and every room script. 

// Script Header
import int MyVar;

3) Where in the manual is the usage of variables explained? I have some experience with TurboPascal and Basic, but anything C is relatively new to me.

Type "Script language keywords" into the help index

I would also suggest checking out DemoQuest for some actual examples and also reading the documentation that comes with it, especially the one on Programming Conventions.

Can someone help me?

Maybe but you'll probably have to give more information.   

[Win98/ME]

Win98/ME
In previous betas AGS 3.0 took a long time to load and was barely useable.  I'm not sure when it happened but now with RC1 it works great, no performance issues as far as I can tell.   Just so you know...nce work.

Sprite Manager
I miss being able to reorganize sprites by selecting and dragging them to other folders.  I hope this feature makes a come back in a future release.

GUI Editor Delete
When you have a GUI tab open the Delete key will delete the selected control, makes sense so far.  However, if an editable field in the property or event pane has focus it is easy to get the idea that the delete key will delete whatever is selected in that field, rather than deleting controls from the GUI itself.   I suppose it's something everyone will eventually get used to but I can also see this as being an endless source of "How come stuff keeps disappearing from my GUI?" type questions in the Beginners Tech forum.

GUI Editor Lock Control Position
Being able to keep controls from accidentally being moved around (usually from just selecting them) is another lost feature that I hope finds it's way back home soon.

GUI Editor Ctrl-Up/Dn
Being able to index to the next or previous control is very useful.  However, I haven't been able to figure out how to use this feature while editing properties.  For example, if you are editing a control's script name, it would be nice to hit a hot key that increments to the next/previous control and keep focus in the same field.   It's a small point and perhaps I just haven't figured out how to do it yet

Anyway, these are the only comments I have so far, other than to say great work and thanks.

[edit]
Sorry about that I didn't mean to shout, just forgot the "/" in the closing bold tag 

[may]

Perhaps this tid-bit may be of interest  here, although you may have passed the point where it could have been  useful...

If you knew before hand that you had to have 140 rooms with some of the script being exactly the same of signicantly so, then you could create a template room and save it as _blank.crm.  Then whenever you create a new room it will be created with all the interactions, code, etc that is in the template.

If I understand you correctly the main problem is creating the interaction events and then having to enter the same script into them that occur in other rooms.    May I suggest that you edit one room to you liking and collect all of those things that are to be repeated into a contigous region of the file and then copy that section into the clipboard.  Now, open the next room, click on the events button, then go into the script select the newly added events, and then paste over them with the code in your clipboard.  Of course this requires that the names of any involved objects, hotspots, etc are named the same across rooms.  This applies to AGS 3.0 only.

Since there has been a huge change interaction events are created./handled in AGS 3.0  it may be possible that the event button only creates the appropriately named function and that just having a function with the right name is the only think needed to create the event?  I'm not at all sure about this, the odds are probably against it, but in your case it would be worth giving it a try.

Hi Babar,

I used to do that.  It worked  really well for me in High School, especially social studies and things like that.  But it didn't work so well for me with math in high school.   

When I was studying engineering at university what worked for me was to immediately go home and work the assigned problems.  I still paid attention in class and tried to gain an understanding of the concepts instead of taking detailed notes. 

The other thing that worked really well is that I transferred in to university after finishing a 2 year degree.   They didn't want to transfer a lot of stuff.  They said that they were on a semester system and that my former school was on quarters so when they did transfer credit they only transferred 2/3 assuming that quarters are shorter than semesters. In practice they are about the same.  At university they wasted time on mid-terms and finals, like they gave you a week with out home work for mid-terms and for finals they did the review 2 weeks before, and didn't do anyting the week before, and then the week of finals you were done in a couple of days.  In the quarter system they had unit tests every couple weeks.  The mid-term was just another unit test where 50% of it covered all topics from beginning of class.  You had regular classes the whole week, even in the one where there was a test.   The same was true for finals, except the class period before they did a review of the whole year. 

Anyway because of the way the stuff transferred I ended doing things like taking differential calculus and integral calculus in the same semester.   I already had "2/3" of differential calculus so that class was just like review.  But the interesting thing is that the differential calculus class helped me in the other calss and vice versa.  I did this with a number of classes and it was like taking almost the same class twice,.

Anyway, I hope you find something here that is helpful.

Cheers
Rick

Also, since new sprites will get assigned the first available number, there can be huge jumps because of deleted sprites. So to make the sorting practical, it would help if the numbers started over in each folder.

This is not possible, as others have pointed out if you had a line in the script like:
object.Graphic = 46;

there'd be no way to distingiush between which folder you wanted to grab sprite 46 from

There have been discussions about similar features to achieve these same results before.   Personally I liked the idea of associating sprite numbers with enums possibly generated from the file name the sprite was imported from.   Anyway. I think it's a little late for anything like that to make it in this verson.  Maybe next time.

What is the most portable backend, I wonder? Perhaps Java?

Perhaps Java is a bit more portable, but isn't it much easier to encapsulate C/C++ within Python?  If so maybe Python would be a better choice.

And with regard to the open and closed runtime?  This doesn't really need to be two separate programs.   It could be one program that knows how to read two different file formats.  The code that reads the proprietary format could be linked into the open source runtime via a binary library which would not be distributed.   Put in a #define and a couple of #ifdefs so it can compile without the binary lib and Bob's you uncle.. 

I agree with a lot of what Electroshokker says.  The real goal is to give developers the choice of releasing their games to other platforms.  I would think that it's not too difficult to do as Electroshokker suggests and be able to target either a proprietary or an open version of the runtime engine.   The only things that would necessarily be different are the data structures used to read and write the game file(s).   Isn't that all we're really talking about, just having two different file formats?

Just my 2 cents ...