Messages

Hmm... #4 is obviously designed simply to match the forums, which aren't that great themselves.

#3 and #5 look suspiciously like the AGAST website.

#2 looks like a site I would buy webhosting from, not where I'd download a freeware video game engine.

So I vote for #1, even though it too looks somehow familiar.  Can't think where I might have seen one like it, though.

Also, to join the mix'n'match crowd, I like the top banners from #3 and #5 better than the others.

Guess I should check the C&A forum once in awhile, I would have entered this myself if I knew it was going on.

I wonder why memories pertaining to dreams are the most fleeting?

It's because of the way the brain stores memories.  Each memory physically alters the brain, creating a "wrinkle" as it were.  At first the wrinkle is very shallow, but the more times you think about that memory the deeper the wrinkle becomes.  If the wrinkle doesn't get deep enough fast enough, it smooths out and the memory vanishes.

Besides how many times you think about something, it also has to do with the number of different ways you access the memory.  Remembering is one way; writing it down creates a secondary access pathway.  Telling someone about it creates a third way of accessing the memory -- the more ways there are to access the memory the longer it takes to fade.  If you're a programmer, think of it like reference counting and automatic garbage collection.



On the topic of lucid dreams... I almost always have some degree of conscious control, and always have.  I've never had a flying dream, lucid or otherwise -- though I have occassionally had dreams where I jumped off something and just sorta hung in the air.  For me, dreams are kinda like being on the holodeck in Star Trek, or in the Matrix.  I can freeze the program, rewind it, alter it, change to a different program; but at the same time the program still has its rules which cannot be broken even when I try.  I don't really need "reality checks" or any other special technique because dream objects are never as "solid" as real objects to me -- again, it's like a holographic environment: all fascade, no substance.  I also look rather different in my dreams than I do IRL; probably a result of my personality being much more heroic than my physique.

Download SCI Graphics Studio, not SCI studio (The Graphics Studio was in fact an older version of SCI Studio, also available in the same site), it's been said that the "Graphics" one was much stabler than the newer versions while editing fonts.

I've tried both; it didn't make much difference for me.  They crashed in different ways, but equally often.  Actually, I've had more luck with the newer one; I can't edit existing fonts, but I can create new ones, which is more than I was ever able to do with the old version.

Although, I'm a guy... and, yes, by nature, men are pigs so...

Not all of us.

Look closer, Sully. Watch it, without getting sucked in. There are nipples. It's utterly indecent.

There's nothing wrong with a little nudity.

It shouldn't be on a forum where young children can be corrupted.

Studies show that exposing children to nudity is actually beneficial to their psychological development.

I vote for the sig to stay!

I get the impression, although I've never tried, that making your own font or editting an existing one is a difficult and long process so I was hoping to avoid that.

The length and difficulty lies in the fact that the only program anyone seems to know of that edits SCI fonts is REALLY REALLY BUGGY.  As long as the program doesn't crash on you, everything goes pretty fast and smooth.

SCI Studio is the program, there should be a link to it around here somewhere, either on the board or the AGS site.

I also recall reading somewhere that AGS can import Windows format bitmap fonts if you change the extention to "ttf", for which there are a variety of editors available on the internet.  I like Softy myself.  Now True Type fonts... those are buggers to make.

Hmm.  My playlist is a mixture of Fey (Vertigo album), Paulina Rubio (Border Girl album), and random stuff from anime and video games (including Gundam Wing, Shadow Skill, Wild ARMS 3, Terranigma, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross).

I sometimes wonder if I'd like Fey and Paulina more or less if I understood Spanish...

I've got this wierd thing... I've got a truetype font imported which doesn't use outlining and I have the Alias fonts switch on on the global options page... but it doesn't get antialiased in the game! But I have had anti-aliased stuff work in the past.

Some possible buggy reasons:
I have the same font imported at a different size with outlining on
I have used the font on a GUI (although it doesnt AA as Speech either)
I have sprite AA turned off

I've not had such a problem (nor have I gotten around to trying SP1), but as for the reasons you came up with:

If I understand the way AGS imports TTFs correctly, it shouldn't matter that you have the same font imported in another slot.  I think AGS extracts a copy of just the one desired point size, rather than importing the whole TTF file, so it has no concept of two font slots being the same font.

Antialiasing ONLY works when the font is used on a GUI.  It doesn't matter whether it's auto-outlined or not; antialiasing is done on GUI text and only GUI text, otherwise you'd get a pink outline around it.  Also, it's done only when the GUI has an opaque or alpha-channeled background, if the GUI is totally transparent the font is not AAed (again, pink outline issues).

Sprite AA should have no effect on font AA, and CJ would have to be spectacularly daft to have created such a bug accidentally, I believe.  Sprite AA and font AA are done by two totally unrelated third-party modules, so the chances of them interacting are slim to none.

Unfortunately, while I can tell you what probably isn't the problem, I have no idea what is the problem.

I think I might have found a bug...

Now, when you use SetMouseCursor() to set the mouse cursor mode 8 or 9, you will only get an interaction if you place the script for the interaction under AnyClick in the interaction editor, correct?

I have a feature in my project, when the mouse cursor moves over a certain character, it switches to mode 8, so that you can only use that interaction on that character alone.

When you start the game, the mouse cursor is always Walk by default, right?  Here my problem:  if the mouse cursor is at walk, and I move the mouse cursor over the character, it will switch to cursor mode 8, like it's supposed to.  BUT, if I then click on the character, the game responds as if the mouse cursor is still at Walk (I click on the character and my character walks to those coordinates).  If the previous mouse cursor was Talk, Ineract, or Look, the script for AnyClick will run just fine.

Any thoughts?

SetMouseCursor() only changes the sprite used for the cursor, the actual mode remains the same as it was before.  It's intended for temporarily displaying the wait or pointer cursors without losing track of what the cursor mode is (the cursor can be returned to the normal appearance using SetDefaultCursor() ).  If you want to actually change the cursor mode so that the player can click on things in that mode, you need to use SetCursorMode().

Also, the comment in the manual stating that modes 8 and 9 only fire AnyClick events is out of date.  When CJ added the Interaction Editor, he also added special events for modes 8 and 9, though for some reason they're not available on everything.  Inventory, for example, is missing quite a few cursor modes from its Interaction Editor for some reason.  So you only need to use AnyClick to catch those if the special nodes are missing.  I think AnyClick fires even if the special handler has already dealt with the click, so it always needs to test the cursor mode before doing anything.  The only time AnyClick does not fire is with Walk Mode, because that's handled internally by the engine unless you check the "No special walk mode handling" box.

RPGMaker 2000 and 2003 are technically illegal, unless you buy them in Japan.  I heard that the company that makes it says they might release and English version of 2003, but only if the pirate translations don't get too heavily distributed (which is probably already a lost cause).

There's dozens of freeware RPG Makers, very few of them are anywhere near AGS's usability level.

Verge has been mentioned, I wasn't very impressed with it.

RPG Toolkit is popular, but I personally don't like it much.  It has some features that indicate the author doesn't really know anything about how real RPG games work internally, and it uses regular Windows buttons for menus and stuff.

My personal pick at the moment would be Sphere (www.aegisknight.org).  It seems to be the best of the legal freeware RPG engine crop, IMO.

3. Unified scipt language (so everything makes more sense).

FYI, the technical term for that is "consistent naming conventions".  "Unified script language" kinda makes it sound like you want to combine dialog scripts, text scripts, and the interaction editor into one single script language.  Not that it make any difference, just thought I'd mention that.

I've tried to use lip sync, but it somehow does not seem right. What assignments for letters and sounds do you suggest?

I found this to work more or less:

0: M/B/E /E,/E?/E./E!/P
1: A
2: C/G/H/J/K/N/Q/R/S/T/X/Z/Ch/eR/ghT/Gh
3: O/Uh/Ugh/I
4: F/V
5: E/Y/Ea
6: L/Th/D
7: U/W/Oo

Of course, nothing's going to be totally perfect due to the inane spelling rules found in most languages.

Here's an image showing the mouth positions for the above eight frames:


With less detailed sprites, such as LEC-style speech, you can probably consolodate down to just three or four frames instead of eight.

Also, I believe it's the US that has a law stating that if you don't actively protect your copyrights, you lose them. Don't quote me on that though.

You're thinking of trademarks, that's a whole different story.  Copyrights are permanent until 70 years after the death of the last legal holder, or until explicitly given up (by declaring your work to be "public domain").  Trademarks, on the other hand, are lost if they become widely used as generic terms, but only if they aren't registered.  (A "TM" is an unregistered trademark, a circled "R" is a registered trademark.)

Of course, as with any other law, the government's not going to enforce it unless someone presses charges.

Also, it doesn't matter what copyright laws may be on the US books, or Japan's, or any other countries.  Copyrights have been standardized as International Law, individual country's laws are obsolete.

Even if the storyline might be a little exploited, I´m still under the impression, people like clicheés... well, at least I do.  

Cool cliches are good, stupid cliches are not.

I agree with the suggestion of having the four characters cross paths a few times before reaching the wise man, either by directly meeting and then going their separate ways, or by passing through the same location at different times.

Having four people from totally different cultures go to a distant land and have to work together for a common goal also provides great potential for characterization and interpersonal dynamics, do try to do it justice.

Having some other force actively trying to inhibit the quest will definitely make things more interesting.  And if that force is some kind of secret society, it provides potential for many surprising plot twists along the way: betrayals, people not being who they appear to be, etc.

With regards to tying things together, maybe the four characters should already have gotten some inkling of the problem before they reach the wise man, so that they already know they have a job to do and aren't just going on this quest because some crazy old nut told them to.  In fact, instead of (or in addition to) being called by the wise man in a dream, maybe they could set out for unrelated reasons of their own that end up leading them to the bigger problem.

1) NPC AI system

With definable paths for NPC characters, from room to room, with places where NPC stops, says something, maybe some other NPC says something too (NPC with NPC conversation), picks up things, performs some animations and so. There was something pretty close to that in a game "Lure of the Temptress". But full system to do that, instead sinking into millions of lines of scripts, would be cool. AGS character plugin did some of that...

I think what you're really talking about here is a Finite State Machine plugin.  I know one already exists, but it isn't really worth much; you have to create each state in using script functions, and then change states from the script -- really, you could acheive the same effect just using globalints.

A proper FSM plugin would work more like the script engine used by MUGEN.  You'd write a file containing states, and each state would have a number of control blocks.  Each control block had a conditional statement to activate it, and a function to perform when activated.  Instead of the game script having to drive the state machine, the state machine would drive the game script.

I've been thinking about programming such a plugin myself, but to really be useful there'd need to be a feature in the plugin interface for calling user-defined script functions from the plugin.  There doesn't seem to be any such feature at the moment, so I haven't been very motivated to work on a plugin.

4) View Manager... like there's a sprite manager

And a sound manager, and a FLIC manager, and a music manager, and...

5) There were some other dreams about future AGS, but I forgot already... Oh yeah, animated inventory items, like there were some in some game, I can't remember... Kronolog?

While we're at it, how about mouseover effects for inventory items as well.  Possible to do it in script, but only if you do not use the "show multiple times" option.  It would also be cool if you could use animations for GUI button mouseover effects, instead of just replacing the whole button with the animation, so that buttons could pulsate or something when the mouse hovers over them.

Although, from what I've heard CJ say, Microsoft has asked him to do some alterations to the program (implementing 3D components, etc), so optimizing the compiler output may actually already be on his to-do list (but I have not heard all the details from the big guy himself, so I really can't say for sure).

Don't forget they also want him to turn it into spyware so that it tells Microsoft's marketing department exactly what games we play and how long it takes us so solve each puzzle, as well as how often we save our games and how much time we spend playing games each day.  Of course that sort of thing goes without saying when talking about Microsoft.

Lots of good advice has already been given; I'll just add that you should get rid of that little sliver of ceiling and extend the walls up through the top of the image.  Based on the angle between the walls and floor, the horizon is well above the top of the image, and therefore the ceiling should not be visible at all.

I agree that death can be really unfair when handled improperly, but a game in which I know I cannot fail doesn't produce enough tension to make me care whether I solve the puzzles or not.

This is especially important in survival, horror, detective, and other types of games where the main character is ostensibly putting his or her life on the line.  If the player isn't afraid of being killed or trapped, the plot looses its teeth.

So, in my opinion, even if a game is crafted such that you cannot lose, that fact should generally not be made evident to the players; in fact, the players should be led to believe that death and failure *are* ever-present possibilities, so that they continue to care about the consequences of their actions.

I haven't tried the Service Pack releases so I don't know if the freezing problem affects me, but here's my computer info anyway since I had the taskbar problem:

Win XP Home SP1 (and all critical updates since)

P4 2gHz

ATI Radeon (don't remember specifics right now)

256 megs

GG and I seem to think along the same lines when it comes to game speech.  I was just thinking that this would be a good idea.

The earlier suggestions about controlling the position of text boxes would be useful to be as well.  (Assuming I ever actually get a game off the ground.)

A couple related suggestions:

It seem to me that auto-outlined text could be anti-aliased at all times, since the outline provides a background to blend with.  The outline itself could be left aliased, but it should be possible to anti-alias the inner colored text. Unless I misunderstand why overlay text is not anti-aliased.

An option to put speech text on top of the GUI layer instead of underneath it, so that the speech text doesn't get hidden behind menus, frames, status lines, etc.

You seem to think that once you master something, you can easily shrug off thew rules and do your own thing.

No, what I'm saying is that for example a master writer doesn't need to have the Chicago Manual of Style open on their lap for constant reference, nor do they even need to consciously think about the rules, they can simply trust their skill and instinct and write.

I'm saying that's not true -- masters still need the basics as much as a novice.

A master needs the rules when they are both a master and novice.

They just use the rules in different ways.

It's essentially a small difference in our argument, but it's still a difference.

Yes, the master needs the basics, but the rules are not the basics.  Understanding the rules leads to an understanding of the basics, but the rules are not themselves the basics.

There are savants who can become masters with no formal training at all; they have an intuitive notion of how to work their medium, and produce results that have the appearance of following the rules even though the creator never even knew what the rules were.

That's what I'm saying, that the novice consciously follows every rule to the letter, the intermediate consciously decides where to follow rules and where not to, and the master puts the rulebook away and works from their intuitive understanding of the deeper truths that the rules were derived from to begin with.  The master needs the deeper truths that underlie the rules, the true basics; but they don't need the rules themselves, which are actually a complication.

Besides, would you can Ed Wood a true master, as he ignored most rules of filmmaking even though he made essentially crap movies?

Well, I have no idea who he is, but based on your descriptions I'm guessing he's one of those people who took off the training wheels off before he was ready.

I'm not saying that throwing the rules away makes someone a master; I'm saying that developing an intuitive understanding of why the rules exist makes someone a master.  Once you understand what's behind the rules, the rules themselves are no longer needed.

In grade school arithmetic, they teach us to always subtract the smaller number from the larger number.  That's a rule.  A rule that becomes obsolete and needlessly restrictive once you understand the concept of negative numbers (which in my case was about five minutes after being told to always subtract the smaller from the larger).  A very similar effect occurs with the rules for good art: once you understand why a rule was given, the rule itself becomes obsolete and even needlessly restrictive.  But that understanding can't be taught, so they teach the rules and hope the students can come to true understanding on their own.