Topics

The Beeb are redoing the old infocom HHGTTG game with graphics for invetory items and rooms.... and they are looking for help from Joe Public.

I should mention: winning images are included in the game, and an overall winner  will be invited to take part in a recording for the next series and receive a script signed by the cast

If you want to submit your own artwork to them for submission, look here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/pictures.shtml

If you want to play the new game version so far..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

They're lloking for drawing of the follwoing rooms (756x448)

#  Marvin's Pantry

#  An expensive speedboat heading to an island on an alien planet

#  Engine Room of the Heart of Gold

#  A skeleton in a cave, holding a computer circuit board

#  The Captain's Quarters on a Vogon Ship

#  A Presidental Dais, surrounded by a crowd on an alien planet

#  Inside the Lair of the Bugblatter Beast of Traal

#  A Spongy Grey Maze of twisty little synapses
#  A cave surrounded by small stones and a large memorial tablet

#  Galley of the Heart of Gold

#  The War Chamber of a star battle cruiser, with views towards the local star system

and the following inv items (240x240):

# Number Twelve Asteroid Paint Chipper

# Ionic Diffusion Rasp

# Molecular Hyperwave Pincer

# Pair of Hypersonic Pliers

# Ultra-plasmic Vacuum Awl

# Thermo-fusion Chisel

# Laser-assisted Monkey Wrench

# Seat Cushion Fluff

# Jacket Fluff

# Common Sense Particle

# Nutrimat Computer Interface

# Santraginean Mineral Water

# Satchel Fluff

# Pocket Fluff

# Thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it does

# Atomic Vector Plotter

# Strange Gun

# Shipping Carton

# Alien Fruit

but I recommend looking at the pages above first, to read the full rules and to get an idea of style...

And let us know here  if you enter, and if you win!

You see, we can waste money on websites as well as buildings!

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm

I heard Trevor "Inventor of the Clockwork radio" Bayliss on the radio the other day and he mentioned in passing about copyright theft insurance. It seems to me that this might be good for AGS: if we paid for some for CJ, he could then make AGS open source without having to worry about someone stealing it and claiming it was theirs. Well, maybe there's other reasons he doesn't want to do the open-source thing, but I just thought it was an idea...

Any thoughts, folks? A quick google on my part didn't seem to find any info on where such a thign could be obtained.

Actually, I was more looking for anyone with diabetes who could tell me that they get by fine despite it, becuase my wife unfortunately had to go into hospital last week with hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and hyperketosis (toomuch fat being metabolised). These are particulalrly worrisome due to the pregnancy, although it is the pregnancy that has caused them. She's worried thoguh that she could have diabetes permamnantley (of which there is a small but tangible risk) although her (much milder) case did go away after our first child.

So, if you've got diabetes and you get by fine, then please post here, or PM if you prefer to keep it private. But also, I thought it might help some people if they could share their experience with other chronic illness. Of course, no doubt there will be a few jokes about some VD or whatever, but I think there can be some support on this forum, and not just on the best way to use SetCharacterTransparency...

Just so you know, the PSP9 beta version is now available for download from http://www.jasc.com or for a direct download link:
http://www3.jasc.com/pub/en/psp900enba.exe

Where is scotch, I haven't seen him for , ooooh, five months

On Sunday, I found a message in a bottle on the beach. Excitied, I opened the message and read to my chagrin that the message had travelled about all of 2 meters, given that it was written on the menu of the resteraunt that was right next to where we found it. However, there were two addresses written on it. One was:

Eustie Wallabie
73 Didgeridoo Road
Sydney
Australia

and claimed to have been sent 17 December 1924. Funnily enough, the menu had prices in pounds using decimals, too (UK went decimal in 1971) so I was a bit skeptical about the authenticity of this part of the message 

Anyway, I'd like to play a wee joke on the senders of this message (the other address was from a village not far from the beach) so are there any volunteers in Australias willing to contribute the cost of a stamp and a postcard to reply to te other address? If so, please PM me and I'll PM back the address to send the postcard to.

Thanks!

Oh, for the first time in ages I've done some AOTS work, so please some help with:



It looks very jerky for a 10-frame anim to me. I know that the edges need cleaning up, but why is it so jerky?

EDIT: fixed version!

Firstly,

Extra interactions for characters (or alternately, on_event calls or somesuch):

Before Speaking and
After Speaking

this would make it easy to run a little animation, etc. before (or after) a character spoke. FOr example, if you're talking to a wheezy old man, he might (randomly) have a coughing fit or spit before he speaks. Obviously, you can do this in scripting OK, but not during dialogs, without lots of run-scripts...

Secondly:

on_event global function to be called separately for Enter_Room_Before_Fadein and Enter_Room_After_FadeIn. Currently, it only gets called once, and I'm not entirely sure if it is before or after fadein.


Next, to make the old Unhandled Event stuff a bit more sophisticated, how about a function like:

int GetHotspotHeight(int hotsspotnum)... returns the height in pixels of the hotspot. That way, your unhandled event can give a different message depending on how big the hotspot is. Ditto for objects, characters, etc.

If I remove an interaction from a room (i.e. I had a hotspot that was set to RunScript on each interaction) and then I change the interactions so they no longer run script, what is the situation with the hotspotX_a, hotspotX_b functions in the room script: can I delete them? What about the corresponding #sectionstart lines? Ditto with room_* and object_* functions?

Since, often in a game, you don't know someone's name when you first meet them  and then discover it suring a conversation tree, it would be nice to change a character's name at runtime. Less importantly, the same with objects (and hostpots) too. It would be reasonable enough to have the restriction that the new name must be shorter than the old name...

So "Old man at souvenier stand" can become "Mr McGonagal" once his name is discovered in conversation and "Mysterious-looking object" can become "Flux Recombobulator" once the scientist explains its use...

OK you can script around it, but adding lots of exceptions to you status bar/action bar/tooltip script is a pain and a half...

In the manual it says that MoveObject speeds use the "same scale" as that for characters, but if you try it, the objects move quite a lot faster than an equivalent character... why is this, and can we stop it, please?

I had an idea for a way to slow down the objects, though... have an invisible object "leading the way", stop it every (few?) rep_ex and take note of it's position. Wait the required extra delay, set the Real Object ^TM to that position and then re-start it moving again. Saves writing you rown pathfinder...

EDIT:

As Scorp suggested... how about a SetTextBoxFocus(int GUI, int object) to solve this problem, CJ? Or at least make it clear that you're only (effectively) allowed one...

ORIGINAL:

Can you have multiple text boxes on a GUI? The manual doesn't really say one way or another. I assumed no...

I'm writing a "savegames with screenshots" tutorial for Vel's ezine and I JUST KNOW that even though I've used pretty much the same code in my own game demo, I'll get soemthing wrong, so I'd like to have 2 or 3 beta-testers, please. PM me or reply here and I'll send you the draft article. You can criticise my spelling, too, if you like.

The tutorial should work, even if you have no scripting knowledge, so please anyone volunteer. Ideally, I'd like at least one really inexperiencd tester and one fellow scripting geek...

Advantages: you can have a better save/load dialog. Disadvantages: none.

Scuthbert recently pointed me at Moho which looks like a really great tool for animating. Does anyone know of any Moho forums, reosources, free objects, etc?

For those not in the moho know, look at http://www.lostmarble.com

I bet that at least one thread with "What" as its first word will be locked in the next 24 hours...

OK, so here's another "getting to know you"... what is your most favourites food evah?

FOr me, it's Chinese Crispy Duck with pancakes and hoi sin sauce.... MMMMMMMMM   had it last night and had all kinds of weird MSG-induced dreams about James Bond joining the Chinese military to help fight a Russian with a computer implant in his brain...

EDIT: one thread for these two veyr different suggestions

StrCatChar would be handy to have, becuase currently if you want to add a keycode (for example) to a string, you need to do:

      StrCopy(temp, " ");
      StrSetCharAt(temp, 0, keycode);
      StrCat(mystring, temp);

which is a pain!

SUGGESTION 2:

One thing that would be incredibly useful for team development of games would be if there was a merge feature for joining games togetehr. It would also be handy for people who had already started a game but wanted to add in a "saved games with screenshots" template or something.

The principles of merging are: you have three versions: Base, A and B. Base is the common game that both A and B were based on. If there is something changed in A versus Base and nothign has changed in the same place in B versus base then the merged version should have that change added. And vice versa. Finally, if both A and B have changed versus base then there is a conflict that the user needs to resolve manually somehow.

If you've ever used CVS or a more advanced version control system you've probably come across merges. At the moment you could dump out scripts and even use CVS to merge them and re-import, but there are so many objects in AGS that this would exclude: Sprites, GUIS, etc.

It would be a pretty big task to implement, though, I guess. And then there's the CVS / Sourceforge integration to back it up...  

Photoshopping isn't drawing a completely new image -- It's editing images to create a new image, such as editing one image or combining several images.

Also, you don't have to specifically use Photoshop -- Paint Shop Pro, MSPaint, or any other programs can be used.

-------------------------------------

This week's challenge is:

Excuses!

Why has your game not been released yet? Were you beset by floods, kidnapped by beautiful aliens who wanted you to help perpetuate their species or just too darn lazy? Produce photographic evidence of your excuse (or, if you are not behind schedule on a game (yeah, right) ) then you coudl try doing someone else's excuse (not thinking of anyone in particular, Mark)

I might get round to doing an example myself at some point...

Yes, it's been 6 months since the last Princess Marian game, as my spare time has been taken up on the Sphinx game, but this Mother's Day, Alba wanted to do something special for her mummy, so with her Art and Voice Acting, I helped her make this game...

For those who haven't experienced a Princess Marian game before: they are short, cute and made with the objective of making my wife smile, so if you think the GFX and/or animation ain't good then tough!Click the screenshot do download the (smaller at 1.2M) RAR file, or follow the zip link below.



or the bigger (1.4M) zip file:
http://www.freeweb.telco4u.net/superscottishhero/albaexplorer.zip

It's 320x200, 16-bit colour with unnecessarily high sample rate sound. And the whole thing was done in less than a week. You can't tell.