Messages

[Script Header]

Variables declared withing a function like that are only accesable from within the function.  Ass the error message implies, such variables aren created on the stack area when the function is called and lost when the function returns.  It sounds like wehat you really want are global variables. To do this you need to add a couple lines in the global script and script header files as follows:

Script Header
#define SIZE 3000
import int Health[SIZE];    // Check manual for exact syntax of the import statement

Global Script
int Health[SIZE];              // Placed outside the bounds of any function, usually at top of script

Room Script
function room_a() {
   int i;

   // Example initializes members of Health array to 100
   i = 0;
   while (i<SIZE) {
      Health = 100;
      i++;
   }
}

KhrisMUC replied while I was typing .  so there is  some redundancy.

One of my favorite's is "Allo! Allo!".  It's just plain funny..

[google "Great Britan Crime Rate"]

They do not deserve it, but like I said before, guns invite violence more often than they deter it. That is, of course, my not so humble opinion, so I'm not even going to try and state that as fact. I feel that they're more of a negative addition to a civilized country than positive. ...

So Voh, wg\hat you are saying is that you hold this opinion because it some how makes you feel good, regardless of the facts?

You just need yojgoogle "Great Britan Crime Rate" to see what happend since 1997 when guns were outlawed there.   According to this article  , dated July 23, 2001, the BBC reported that:

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Britain's rate of assault, robbery, and burglary now exceed those in the United States.? Murder and rape are edging up very near the American rates, too.

BBC News reported "a dramatic rise in violent crime from 1998 to the present."? Relying on statistics from the British Office of Home Affairs, crime in England and Wales this year is at epidemic levels, 60% higher, per capita, than in the U.S.

...

n contrast, the U.S. has among the world's lowest "hot" burglary rates -- defined as burglaries committed while people are in the building -- at 13%.? Compare that rate with gun-free Great Britain's rate, which is now up to 59%.

It's logical.? An American study showed that the #1 explanation from would-be burglars not to enter an occupied building was:

    "I might get shot."

Criminals may be strolling down the road to Hell, but they're not crazy enough to hurry the trip.


And for anyone who would care to read here is another article datae 2000 http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/7/10/203335.   

If you are wondering way the articles are so old, it's because it's old news.  But just to lay to rest the notion that perhaps things have gotten better here is a more recent article dated 2007.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21902

Facts are inconvenient when they contradict one's world view and are best avoided, if one is to maintain one's feelings,  I suppose?

No Gun?

1.  How someone so incliened be prevented from getting one?
2.  Is a gun the only way to achieve the desired result?

["It's better to be King for a day than to be a schmuck for life!".]

I lived near VA Tech during the 80's for about 10 years so my heart goes out to the families of those who were killed.    Several of my friend's children who used ride on my shoulders and call me uncle attend university there.  Fortunately none of them are on the victim list.   

The campus is located in the very western end of the state of Virginia and is on the southern side the Appliachian mountains.  This part opf Virginia has borders with the southern part West Virginia (West Virginia is another state) and the eastern borders of Kentucky and Tennesee.  This part of the country is very rural and the nearst city is Roanoke and is fairly small.(pop.~300k).  Large cities are 5+ hours away driving time.   

From the news reports I've heard the so called delay occured because everyone believed that the first two killings were athe result of a domestic dispute and that the perp had fled the area.  In all fairness if classes had been cancelled there would have been crouds of students gatherinig at cafeterias etc wondering wtf was going on and perhaps would have presented an even better opportunity for a masacre.   It should also be noted that of  VT's ~ 20,000 students only about 8000 live in droms on campus. The rest live in private owned housing off campus.  Given the time frames involved I don't see how they could have reliably kept 1000's of people from showing up on campus.and congregating in public places.

In the state of Virginia people can obtain a license to carry firearms but guns were banned from the VT campus several years ago.  I heard an interview with a student who was barricaded in a classroom in the building where the shootings occured.  He said that he was a member of the gun club and likely would have been carrying if it was not forbidden.  He said that if so he would not felt as helpless and would have been able to defend himself.

Frankly I find many of the comments relating to gun control and the US lame and insulting.  Our country was born because an armed citizenry grew tired of being ruled by a royal family and successfully fought for their freedom.   That's our history, our heritage, and the legacy that has been let to us.   There is as much chance of the US repealing the 2nd amendment as there is of the UK beheading the queen .  (...again).   

While it may be true that folks in your home coutry aren't mentally stable, mature, or whatever enough to own a firearm, it isn't necessarily true for some other couthry with which you have little or no direct knowledge of.    It smacks of bigotry to judge a group of people without any factual basis or knwoledge doesn't it?   

If anyone is interested in knowing any facts about crime and gun ownw\ership in the US I would suggest the book
"More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott.  He presents data collected by the FBI over the past 30 or so years andconclusion drawn from his analysis.

There are a number of critiques of his conclusions and his responses, etc which can be found here: http://polyticks.com/polyticks/beararms/liars/moreguns.htmThe data is pretty much undisputed from what I can tell but you can judge for yourself. 

[edit]
Ask yourself "What did this guy get out of shooting all those people?"  He got to feel powerful, very very powerful for an hour.  For that brief period of time he had more power than anyone else.  Now consider what factors, had they been present, would have diminished this power?   

This reminds me of an early Robert DeNiro film "The King of Comedy".  DeNiro plays the part of a failed stand-up comic who kidnaps Jerry Lewis who plays the part of  hugely successful and famous comic known as the King of Comedy.  The whole thing predictably plays out where DeNiro get 15 minutes of air time and 30 years of hard time.  At the end when the police are taking him away Jerry Lewis asks why he did it.  DeNiro replys:

"It's better to be King for a day than to be a schmuck for life!".

I think that's what this kind of crap is all about.


P.S.
The perp was Asian.  Maybe we should consider passing Asian control laws?    Oh,well maybe it would make a funny bit on Mad TV or something.

RickJ? Are you enjoying the news? I bet you are mate

Hehe, I saw this on Groklaw the other day. I knew this would happen sooner or later but thought it would probably be later.  The same thing happened in the software industry in the mid 80's when the market soundly rejected what was then termed "copy protection". 

In a number of RIAA law suits they (RIAA) are going to have to pay the opposing side's legal fees and expenses.   There has yet to be a case that has actually come to trial.  It would be hard to imagine a jury being more sympathetic to monster multi-national corporations than for grandmas, single mothers, and cancer patients. 

Perhaps they have come to realize the folly of suing their customers, that the traditional means of manufacturing and distributing audio products is rapidly becoming obsolete and that they need to solve their problems through innovation rather than through coercion and intimidation. 

I also saw where MS is loosening some of it's Vista restrictions.  Didn't read the details because I don't intend to ever use Vista if I can avoid it.   

Regarding running on Linux/Mono ...

From: http://www.mono-project.com/Guidelines:Application_Portability

Important Visual Studio can produce "incremental" executables, these are executables that do not have some of their tables compressed, and they are used by Visual Studio during development.

These assemblies do not work with Mono, as Mono does not support them, you must turn off "incremental" builds.

The incremental option can be set from the Project's Configuration/Advanced properties.

When I tried running alpha 5 with mono on Open Suse 10.2 it crashed complaining about unknown WinForm methods.  No susrpise since this is what others have already reported. 

But I noticed that the error message also had something vague to say about assemblies as well.   So I was wondering if the the above mentioned "incremental builds" are turned off for alpha 5 and if not could they be turned off for the next alpha?  If so I would gladly give it another try and report the results.

Keep up the good work.

I highly ecommend 7-zip.  It handles pretty much everything and integrates nicely into windows the same as WINZIP.   Just highlight the file(s), right click, and 7-zip.   

www.7-zip.org/

Ownership does not necessarily restrict accessability.  Perhaps I should have said that views should be properties of Characters, Objects, Cursors, or other entitoies that can be animated.  It seems to me that a lot of the Get/Set Loop/Frame stuff would be greatly simplified.   For those few situatuions where this is absolutely unacceptable could we not also allow "Game" to own a collection of views that would be just as globally accessable as they are now.   

If you were to do this it wouldn't be necessary to have folders to organize views.  They would already be organized.  However if you wanted to have something like a view manager then you would have one folder for each Character, Object, Cursor, or whatever that are auto-generated by ags.  I suppose there could also be user created folders as well.  Perhaps the auto-generated folder could have a different color or icon to differentiate them from the user created ones.   There could also be a Global or Game folder that could also contain views. 

From the character edit pane you would be able to edit the views that belong to that specific character.  You wouldn't be bothered by all the other irrelevant views.  You would still be able to assign whichever view to what ever purpose as is done now.  If you ewanted to use a global view for the character's walk animation then you would just  assign it like we do now.  It's just that most of the time you would only be interested in the ones owned by the character.   

Objects would work much the same way except that it would be desireable if the views were stored in the room file along with the rest of the object stuff.   This is important for group projects. 

For example, suppose Bob is working on a big group project and volunteers to work on room 42.   Bob jumps right in and before long he has a rich interactive environment with cooly animated gadgets.  He has drawn all of the sprites, imported them into sprite manager, created views, loops, etc and assigned them to objects, and wrote the supporting script code.   So Bob emails the Jim, project coordinator (i.e. the guy who maintains the main game file), and says that he is done with room 42 and attaches a zip of his version of the game.   So now Jim will have to unzip the game to a different folder, ropy the crm file to his game directory, re-import all the sprites, re-create and reassign all the views, and possibly modify Bobs source code to use the right sprite/view/loop/frame numbers.  Now suppose Bob gets 10, 15, 20 zip files at once.  Imagine all the duplicate work (and ensuing errors) in a 100 room game.   

Now ask yourself wouldn't it be much better if all Bob had to do was copy the crm file to the game directoy and compile?  The way it is now there is a negative impact on people who are working on group projects.  If something like I suggest were undertaken sprites and views would be better organized, it would much be easier to implement frame fiddling functions as oo properties and methods, and it would make group projects more productive and more likely to succeed.   

Perhaps in the past AGS's internal structure made implementing this kind of thing a hellish task, however, if the sprite and view stuff are going to be re-done from scratch then maybe what I suggest is worth considering.

Merry Christmass

RickJ

P.S.  I'll be on a plane in a few hours to vist my parents.  I'll be back on Feb 3rd, and will perhaps check in before that if I find internet access somewhere.

Well we have seen a proliferation of useful public modules. Good work everyone.

I would like to have a discussion about private modules and how we may incorporate them into the "Module Programming Guidelines" published in the technical archive.   You are probably wondering why we should bother if it's a private module.  A naming convention would eliminate the possibility of name conflicts between public and private modules and more importantly if would allow the publication of private modules.

Huh??? ... What?   Publish private modules?    WTF Rick???    You #$%@! Idiot!!!!

Hehe, I know it sounds mad but it makes sense in the case of game templates that include private modules and in the case of modules that are actually templates for private modules.  I guess the  kind of private module I am talking about would have the following characteristics. 

• Unique contents for each instance/game in which it appears.  Modifications are allowed and encouraged.
  
  
• Unpublished, except in the case of private module templates or game templates.  Such a module template would be a guide, tutorial, and would contain some basic functionality and examples.
  
  
• Less strict adhearence to Module Programming Guidelines.  Deviations would be allowed if necessary or desired. 
  
  So what I would like to propose is that all private module names, or at least the ones that are published,  begin with a unique character such as an underscore.   I know it's a modest proposal but I think it's worth doing something.  For example private modules would be named somethin like:  _Math,  _Lib, _Misc, etc.
  
  Chers
  Rick

Hi Doc,

The answer to your last question is No., I do not believe global strings are carried over from one game to the next.  However the MiniGame module does pass strings and int from game to game.   I just released a new version and you can get it here:

MiniGame Module


I have also released a new version of DemoQuest and its mini games.  You can get them here:

DemoQuest Examples

If you need any other help just shout.  Cheers

Just wanted to bump the thread and announce a new version.  It requires AGS V2.72 so if you are using an earluer version of the module with an earlier version of AGS just stay with what you got. Cheers.

hehe, so Joseph you are also suffering mightily for the same affliction as I.      You of course know that you can now dump a whole folder of sprites in one go. 

Also, if in the future the sprite manager were to retain the file names then then it would be even so much easier to recover from your current situation.   I would also add that the export of room backgrounds could also be improved.  I don't think you can only export the first frame if there is a room animation; perhaps I have missed something.

[a, c, d, e, f]

monkey,

Hehe, I enjoyed your post.   I didn't mean to ridicule Joseph but I really do wonder why he isn't keeping his sprite source.   I've suffered mightyily in recovering the sprites and background images used in DemoQuest an so have a strong opinion.  As for your take on this monkey I'll say this:

a, c, d, e, f - No comment 
b                - CD backup

The external sprites are deleted.

Do you mean that you delete them?   If so, why in the world would you do such a thing?   Why not just keep your source files and then modify and re-import as needed.   Then you wouldn't need to export-edit-import.  If the suggested new featue were implemented this would be a simple operation.   Even now you would at least eliminate the export step.   You would also preserve layers and other objects in the source file that are lost in a pixel file (png, bmp, etc).  You really can't be that disk space challenged.

What I suggested about opening text files in a document folder would work just fine for this.  The script editor is locked-down when it is launced to edit scripts because the script file can also be modified by other parts of AGS.   The easiest way to avoid conflicts is to allow only one or the other to edit at a time.  If you were editing a text file the script editor component doesn't need to be locked down and could be so launced without any consequences.   I suggest this beacuse you waould have a consistent text editor interface and if a document contained example script code it would have the same look and format as if it were in the global or room script. 

[Views]

There are a number of ideas presented in this thread that have the same or a similar to some of the suggestions I would like to make.   

Views

• Objectized Views - Rui, this is a great suggestion and I would like to second it and perhaps elaborate a bit more.   I have always thought a view should be owned by the character or object to which it applies.   I don't think the ability to reuse views acorss multiple characters/objects is of much benefit or even a sound practice.  I think we would derrive much more benefit from the OO-tization of views as well as eliminating the need for some of the other suggestions. 
  
  
• Enumerated View Names - If view OO-tization is not implemented then I would like to see enumerated names generated for each view instead of the view number.  This would make views portable and eliminated hardcoded numbers from the script.  So I guess we would endup with something like eView_CharacterViewname or eViewCharacterViewname (e.g. eViewRogerWalk).   
  
  
• View Numbering - If view OO-tization is implemented then I would like to see views uniquely numbered within each character or object starting at 0 (or 1 ) rather than each view having a globally unique number as is done now.  This would work somethin like the character's inventory does now. 
  
  
• View Storage - If view OO-tization is implemented then I would like to see object views stored in the room file where the object is defined.  This way each person in a group project could work on a different room and then the only thing they would need to do to merge all their work would be to collect the room files in to the master game.  Also see below for sprite storage.
  
  
• Export - I would like to be able to export anything that uses a view the same as we do characters now.  I guess what I am asking is that the character export mechanism be made more general sao that anything that can be animated could be exported/imported the same as characters are now.    As a side note it would also be nice if the export mechanism could also pickup the script code associated with the character or whatever and dump that as well.
  
  Sprites   
  
• File Linkeage - I think it is a great idea to retain the filename of the sprite.  This would help identify what the sprite is and could also be used as the default file name whensprites are exported.   
  
  
• Sprite Update - If the filename was retained then it would be possible to have an update function.  In this way if someone made changes to one or more sprites then one would only need do an update.  I guess you would also need to retain some other info about how the import was made.  I think this would be very useful, especially for group projects. 
  
  
• Enumerated Names - I would like to be able to access sprites in the script via an enumerated name rather than a number.   If the import filename was retained these names could be generated automatically so you would have something like eSprite_Filename or eSpriteFilename
  
  
• Storage - I would like to have the ability to store sprites in the room files where they are used.  Most of the time object sprites are drawn for a specific room and do not match the perspective or scaling of any other room in the game.     Perhaps this could be done by having the ability to assign a sprite folder sub-tree to a room.  One way this could work,  for example, would be to have a right click on the folder bring up a property dialog.  There could be a drop down list that includes each room and the main game/sprite.  This would make it much easier for group projects and would allow the possibility of some really interesting contests or activities.   
  
  
• Ownership - There is an argument to made that sprites should be owned by the game elements that use them.   The counter argument is, I suppose, that in the interest of minimizing game size it is desired to reuse sprites as much as possible.  Well if we think this thru a little we can come to realize that one doesn't necessarily preclude the other.    Onership can imply many things so lets think about them individually. 
  
  Navigation & Organization - This has to do with what the designer sees when using AGS edit.  So if a character owned a collection of sprites presummably you would want to be able view that collection from that character's edit pane.  Likewise if you were using the sprite manager you would also want to see these sprites presumably in some kind of a grouping such as a folder. You would also want to identify which character that grouping belonged to.   
  
  Storage - Ownership would also imply that sprites would or should be stored in the same place/manner as the owning entity.  This perhaps doen't have much impact on the current version of AGS but if some future version were to address difficutiles realized by group projects this would perhaps become important.
  
  Import/Export - When you import or export something such as a character, object or whatever, you would want to grab everything that it owns.  The character import/export kind oif does this now, except it doesn't grab the sacript code.
  
  Scope/Naming - Using the enumerated naming scheme described above or the current numbering scheme would keep access to sprites global, allowing them to be shared throughout the game. 
  
  ===============================
  In reponse to CJ's second question:  These days I only import the whole file.  I quit using the other stuff a long time ago..  Just out of curiosity,  how do those of you who are using "tiled sprite import" prepare your sprit sheet?  You have to do that manually, don't you?   I have been using Gale and it let's you automatically export each frame to individual files.  Aren't most drawing programs able to automate output of individual files right out of the box or with a simple macro? 
  
  I would be interested in what CJ has in mind when he asked.   Perhaps we should ask him what we would we get in return for giving up the ability?  Maybe some kick-ass feature that we can't live without, althoiugh we apparently are.
  
  

Why not just add an "Edit Document" function to AGS.  All you need to do is have the script editor open one of any number of text files in a "Document" folder? 

SSH, sounds like a good idea. 

• How about adding the ability to modify and/or force values.   I guess the "modify" function is self explanatory.  The "force" function is similar to modify except that a forced value would not be overwritten.  So if you had a value being calculated in the script and written to a global int and then you forced it to a particular value, the script would no longer be able to overwrite and the forced value. The forced value would be retained until the force was removed.
  
  
• How about adding the ability to add or remove individual variables from an on-screen display.  Possibly implemented using an overlay or gui.   
  
  
• How about an on-screen display of mouse coordinates.  Perhaps if the mosue button was held down and the cursor moved then the display could show delta-x and delta-y.
  
  
• How about a debug mouse mode where a right or center click would popup a display of the properties of the item under the cursor.  And wouldn't it be sweet if you could be able to select and modify said properties? 
  
  
  That's all I can think of now!   

[depending on it]

Certainly if I was selling my music, and found out that people (lots of them) were listening to my tracks without having paid a dime to me, I would be annoyed, wouldn't you? (Imagine the companies... :p)

Hehe, yeah but I bet you would be more annoyed if nobody was listening to it and a whole lot poorer as well.

I disagree with the notion that maxium economic benefit (for the artist or publishing company) is achieved when there is 100% copyright compliance.  Although this is somewhat counter intuitive at first glance it  is logical and demonstratably true. 

There is no business, organization, machine, or technology that is 100% efficient.   It just doesn't exist.  Further, the cost of improving efficiency increases exponentionaly as you approach 100%.  So eventually a point is reached where the cost of making an incremental increase in effiency exceeds the benefit gained.

Does anybody know of or remember "Lotus 123"?   That was the first spreadsheet program and they owned the market.  Everything was going along swimmingly for them and others in the infant PC software industry.   Then copy protection became all the rage and required that the original floppy disk be inserted into the drive before starting the program.  Those who went in heavily for copy protection were cruely punished in the marketplace. 

Have you heard of Borland International?  As I understand it a young fellow named Philip Khan (not sure of the spelling) wrote a Pascal (Pascal is a programming language) compiler as a school project while at University.   It featured the first incarnation of an IDE, intergrated development environment, that allowed people to rapidly write, debug, and test code.   Whilest looking for employment he spent his spare time polishing up his school project.  At one point he started selling Turbo Pascal for $50 bucks.  It came with a couple of floppy disks and a nice professionally bound softcover manual.   At that point in time it was impossible to purchase a compiler for under $5000 and then you only got shitty little three ring binder for a manual.

Supposedly Philip was told that he couldn't sell his compiler for only $50 bucks because everyone would make illegal copies of it and so he would have to sell it for $5000 to make up for his losses.  He said that he still intended to sell it for $50.  When  asked if he was concerned that people would make illegal copies of it he supposedly replied that he was depending on it. 

He did and they did.  But a funny thing happened, people copied it illegally,  tried it out,  and liked it.  After a short period of time they got tired of standing in front of the zerox machine and would decide that the nicely bound softcover manual alone was worth 50 bucks and so they sent in $50 to get  their official version.  Since people pervieved that $50 was a fair asking price and since they could afford/justify it they did what comes natural to most people, they just bought the damn thing.  On the other hand when people percieve they are being cheated they will also do what comes natural; take steps to achieve a just result.

There were probably a good number of people who never got around to writing a check, but so what.  Philip didnn't have to supply the floppy disks or pay for the photo copies of his manual.  Sure these seem to be lost sales but are they really?   If he had a bullet proof copy protection scheme how many of these people would have made the purchase?  How many sales, he would have otherwise made,  would be lost due to copy protection?  Would people have found out about it as quickly if there were copy protection? Multiply $50 times the number of people who didn't pay and you get an amount that is dwarfed in comparison to the cost of traditional marketing and advertising.    The fact that it was easy to get a copy actually made the market for it.  Well anyway Turbo Pascal & Philip went on to become Borland International and the rest is history.

Ok, I've said enough and I'll let someone else have a say.  Cheers all.