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OK, you can add one through the interaction editor, but since you can code a repeatedly_execute_always in to the room script directly, why can't we code in a repeatedly_execute?

Yours faithfully,

An interaction editor hater

Here's an idea. At the moment in the field I work in there is a language being developed as an IEEE standard called SystemVerilog  (P1800). Now, already there is an early version of the standard but no-one has actually yet implemented the whol langauge.

The point of all this is, maybe there should be a committe/discussion/etc. of where AGS scripting shoudl go in the future, and set a far-off goal to aim for. This could then be the "standard" and CJ can decide to implement as much or as little of the standard or other stuff  as he likes, but there would be a fixed reference point. This would allow code writers to write their code as future-proof as possible.

Does this seem like a good idea to anyone? Or am I speaking sloblock (anagram) ?

Despite the title, Pixel Hunt should not feature any pixel hunting. The game is set in a land of pixels, and puns on graphics terminology are at saturation level (see, there's one already!)

Pixel Hunt is a point-and-click adventure created with the AGS Adventure Game Studio for the Monthly AGS game creation competition, February 2005.

Pixel Hunt is a Crime game with 9 rooms, 8 characters, optional voice pack and various possible endings. The "optimal" ending scores 100 points. Other endings score according to number of deaths and number of bad guys caught.

Uncompress the ZIP file in a directory, and then double-click the Setup program before playing the game for the first time. Here you can set the usual AGS options: resolution, window/fullscreen and sound settings. If you want to hear the voice acting, unzip the voice pack into the same directory as the game, and it will be used automatically.

The game uses a Sierra-style interface: left-clicking the mouse on something will perform an action on it, right-clicking changes the action. You may also click on the buttons on the bottom of the screen to change the action, or interact with an inventory item to use it on another thing.

The source code of the game is also available at http://www.ssh.me.uk/phsource.zip This game was produced with the new Object-Oriented Style scripting in AGS 2.7 beta 17 (I'll probably update the version and tidy up the code a bit when the full 2.7 comes out). I hope that this source code will be helpful to someone else trying to write a game with the new scripting style.

If you like my game, please vote for it in MAGS Feb 2005! Or post a comment on its game page

Credits

 
• Pixel Hunt was designed, drawn and programmed by Andrew 'SSH' MacCormack
• AGS Engine by Chris Jones
• MAGS administered by Klaus (http://www.mags-competition.tk)
• February 2005 MAGS rules by Neil Dnuma
• Beta testing by Tommi 'Ishmael' Kivisto, Gal 'Al_Ninio' Macover, Zooty, Dart (and Pumaman)
• Voice acting by SSH, Erik 'EldKatt' Igelstrom, Nataly 'Ginny' Eliyahu and Bell Labs

.

Mirrors:
Source: http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/phsource.zip

History:
v1.01: fixed "better find tess" bug
v1.02: fixed "better find tess" bug MORE

Well, its about due for another silly "what's your favourite" thread, so...

What's your favourite beverage? If I want something warm, I love ruch, black coffee. For cold, I'd probably do with Fanta lemon, or Irn Bru, or maybe Rubicon Exotic Guava, but I dunno if they still do that.

I'm sure someone suggested this before, but i couldnt find it in the forums or tracker...

It would be nice when doing voice recording if you could dump a file like the translation file, but with the character doing the talking prefixing each line: or even if you could dump one file for each character. It would make voice recording much easier.

Currently savegames with screenshots dont work in 256-clour hgames unles you have the same palette for every room. Is there some way that in 256-colour mode, the palettes of the screenshots are converted to neraest neighbour or dithered or something when loaded?

See Tiki's post here...

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=10802.msg234175#msg234175

Sometimes, I'd liek to ask the user a Yes/No or OK/Cancel kind of question, and I don't thin there's an easy way to script this. What I mean is, it woul dbe nice to have a function (builtin or user-defined) like:

if (AskYesNo("Overwrite savegame")) {
  // Do Yes
} else {
  // Do No
}

As it is , I can write a function that brings up a popup modal GUI and sets the label in it, but using the same function to wait for a reply from that GUI is not possible. Even using rep_ex_always, I can't get it to work. If you have a solution, please tell me, but if it means CJ needs to add something to AGS, then please coutn this as a  SUGGESTION!

Edit:

I've answered my own question: For a customisable confirm box, try my new DialogBox module.

Well, last night I thoguht of a terrible bilingual pun, my second Spanish pun:

Pitta Pan, the bread that never grew up... (pan is Spanish for bread, btw)

I loved it, almost as good as the classic:

Inafamy, Infamy, they've all got it in for me (from Carry on Caesar or something...)

or from a Dilbert cartoon:

My uncle, the marine biologist, never got on well socially, but with Anenomes like that, who needs friends?

So, what are YOUR favourite terrible puns?

Third-party preprocessor: before AGS runs its compiler, it could run an arbitrary 3rd party tool on a temporary text file containing all the scripts to allow full preprocessing

Parametrisable #define macros

When a sprite is imported, make part of its property box the name of the original import file (or "Clipboard"): this is becuase it is sometime hard to tell sprites apart!

Well, due to the lack of interest when I mentioned them before, and also getting very busy at work, I don't think I'll have time to runthe FOREGO awards this year. I'd be more than happy to support someone else to pick them up and do with them as they will, though, so any volunteers...

Happy birthday to meee
I am now thirty
I'm old and decrepit
Ooooh my back, oooh my knee


Cakes are available to all if you come to my office. For those of you who can't make it, please have a virtual cake:

OK, so here's some suggestions for AGS:

It would be nice if each of the inbuilt arrays like character, object, etc all had one or two extra members per item that were read/writeable and available for the use to use as they wished. Ideally, the user could control the number/type and names of these, but even if there were 1, called userdef1, then that would be great. I suppose these are like read/writeable propertty schemas, so it could be doen through that. Or through a way of getting OO extends to work on those builtins

As well as having inventory items, it would be nice if AGS had (at least one) another general purpose item list, which could be used for spells, icon-based dialog options, etc. It would be in the editor like the inv item list where you could set a sprite, cursor hotspot and property schema for each item. Ideally, there would be a generalised tree system where "Item lists" was the top level, with Inv items being a special case and default on the list, but the user could add other lists themselves.

If the user could define their own things to go on the "General settings" page, someone could write a super-template that the  let the user change a combo box on the front page from "SCUMM FOA" to "Sierra classic" to "Broken Sword" to get various default game styles.

OO stuff makes include files or some kind of script module import/export easier to organise and more obviously a gap. At least the single-GUI import/export that I already mentioned.

Character editor should show view NAMES when choosing default, idle, talking views, etc.

Also be nice if characters, like GUIs, could have a named handler function

Be good if you could specify whether the dialog GUI goes away after an option is selected, or if it stays. Alternativley, specify a function to be called before and after any dialog

A GUI could have its own on_key_press and repeatedly execute handlers, and it would be nice if a GUI could have a click handler rather than just GUI controls, because lots of GUIs have a regularity to them that means that individual handlers would mean lots of cut-and-paste

It would be good if AGS defined some builtin #defines for some of the hard limits, especially iif someone is making a template and wants it to be future-proof:

e.g.

#define _AGS_MAX_OBJECTS_PER_ROOM 20

Many will be surprised by this news, but the Fountain of Youth team have made some big changes in the way the game is heading. To avoid  the biggest legal problems, the main character has been changed from Indiana Jones to another well-know character who has featured in a series of games already. This was made possible by myself being already on the team of both developments. Secondly, to fit in more with the mood of Princess Marian as the main character, the McGuffin has been changed from the Fountain of Youth to the Fountain of Unicorns.

You may hear m0ds making some sour grapes comments, but unfortunately that is because he has been dropped from both the music and the project management. Our new musical director has shown herself to be a talented musician for her age and we expect big things in the future.

I hope that you can enjoy the new game, and that it will bring you some Christmas cheer. 



Download link, 1.27M zip

For more games in the Princess Marian series, please go here

OK, I know it breaks the rules, but there's a betahere:

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games/p12v10.zip

To quote the ramblomatic one himself:

"Basically, it's a life simulator set on a spaceship, like a hybrid of The Sims, 7 Days [a stranger], and the genre of Japanese dating/life sims."

OK, well, it shows how out of touch I am but I recently came across this board game going cheap in Tk Maxx, but aparently its been around long enough to be out of print now. Haws anyone got into this game: it looks really cool!

I am very proud to announce the birth of

Sara Andrea Iona MacCormack-Montequin

weighing 6lbs 11oz (3.04 kg)

at 1501 GMT on 10 November 2004

Mum, Sara, big sister and your truly are all doing great!

Well, you may have noticed the new avatar, and I'm trying to work out how to make the full-size version look like its flying rather than just falling or maybe floating while farting...

I know the idea might be to have some clouds whizzing past, but how best to do that? Any reference pics welcome, as I couldn't find any....



Please ignore the atrefacts in the blue, that was just a bad conversion...

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but:

http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/jpeg.zip

shows that AGS can show a jpeg, and if you put your own jpeg in place of test.jpg, the prog will display that instead....

Here's the room script code.

function room_a() {
  // script for room: First time player enters screen
PlayVideo("test.jpg", 1, 0);
WaitKey(500);
QuitGame(0);
  
}

Well, our little family went away for a long weekend to the isle of Iona. Sounds romantic, doesn't it.

Well, we set off for the four hour journey with spirits high. The scenery was great and the rain in Glencoe was mitigated by the rainbow. OK, we realised that my wife had forgotten to pack any waterproofs, but hey, the weather was going to get better, wasn't it?

So we crossed the very short ferry to the Ardnamurchan peninsula and I drove down the single-track road to the Loch Aline ferry to Mull.

BANG!

What that, I wondered? Probably just a pothole. However, after a bit more driving, it became obvious that it was somethign more. Stopped, examined wheels. Front left totally flat. Started to rain heavily. Changed tyre for spare. Now realised that could only just make the ferry had planned to get... next one 1.5 hours later. Lochaline doesn't exactly have much to occupy a toddler for 90 minutes, so pressed on as quickly as possible.

Just made the ferry and crossed to Mull. Thought I'd check at local garage we passed to see if they could fix tyre, but no-one was there. "Closed on Saturdays" said the guy in the nearby shop. Oh well.

Went round Torosay castle and gardens. Rained intermittently (i.e. stopped while you were inside and rained while outside). Rode on minature railway. Went back to car. Back left tyre flat too. Bugger.

Called Green Flag assistance, who I'd had free with car insurance and  had only just got around to putting their contact info in the car that morning! They said that no-one could fix the tyre but they could tow us up to 25 miles. Well, that was neither far enough to get us to our B&B nor back to the mainland. Fortunately, the great people in the castle shop helped a lot, phoned round the people they knew and found a guy who would come and repair it and was covered by green flag. So we got to our B&B that night. However, it was just a temporary fix and he would get us two new tyres on the Monday. Fine, we weren't planning on using the car on the next two days anyway.

Next day, got ferry to Iona, where you need a special permit to take a car, so we left car parked in Mull at Fionnphort. Struggled on foot with luggage to our B&B through mild wind and rain.

Rain and wind got worse from there on. Couldn't do much on Iona, which is geared up for people looking for contemplative silence, not full-of-beans toddlers. Spent night sleeping, but with drips in our room and tiles rattling on roof, not to mention constant winds howling round teh bed and breakfast.

Morning weather was slightly better, looked round island quickly and decided to head home. Caught very stormy 11am ferry back to Mull. This truned out to be the last one that day. Tried to put temporary spare tyre from garage on car: locking nut would not budge with my pathetic Ford wheel-nut spanner. Eventually mamanged to inflate the slow puncture and get hold of mechanic's mate to arraneg to meet him as he got (late) off the ferry from Oban to Mull, 35 miles away. Drove 35 miles through poruing rain with half-flat tyre on single-track roads. Met guy, got tyres, found another guy to fit tyres. Just made 5pm ferry to mainland. Thought troublers were over.

Then had to drive 4 hours back again through what turned out to be partially-flooded roads in many places.

AAAARRRRGGGGH!

On the other hand, I've never been so happy to be back from a holiday. And the people we met were all great and helpful (except the people on the phone at Green Flag). And our duaghter behaved very well considering what we went through. And its kinda funny lookign back, but it was hell at the time. Oh, and those tyres that burst were both quite new.