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a) I think I'll post some of the PM  I sent you to help you get going with my savegames tutorial... bwuahahah!
b) Have you looked at what we get in Beginners Help here?
c) I've just noticed the "Insert quote" link on the post reply screen: was that there in the old forum version?

I thought it was to wean her off her obsession with moving to the West Coast!

Happy birthday. Here's my present to you:



That's right, a picture of a digital camera Way-com

My mother-in-law does the same thing for my daughter. We have a mountain of really ugly but expensive clothes in out attic that she bought for her. Most of the would fit her just about now, but we've had them since she was born, 18 months ago. And one time we went to visit her in Spain, she had just bought a new hi-fi. For us to use in the guest bedroom while we were staying there. Like we had brought any CDs. Or that we came to Spain to play CDs. Or that we were sending her money at the time to help her buy a new house and she spends it on a hi-fi.

But then, don't get me started on the subject of my mother-in-law. Just thank goodness that she doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Spanish (or at least I don't understand it at the rate SHE speaks it).

Did she keep the receipt?

When I did this in the intro for Awakening of the Sphinx, I used a totally black GUI to do this. Becuase I was only scrolling vertically, I only needed it at top and bottom of screen, but you can easily do left/right as well/instead. The only difficulty you may have is importing a sprite that is totally black: make sure that it isn't interpreted as a totally transparent sprite: I just cut one pixel out of the top left corner and put it in a different colour.

Oh, just to remind peopel of this, and also to ask Sir Radiant of Helpfullville if his "maybe adding Truetype support " might become reality in the near future? I'm using TTFs in my game now but would like to edit them a bit and change them to SCI. Does anyone know of a TTF->SCI renderer? Anyway... I live in hope!

I hate Yufster because of the number of inactive Hotspots in Beyond Reality

I would say that you should leave the bit you enjoy most to last. FOr me that is scripting. I did do all the graphics before the scripting (excpet for a few I found were missing as I went along... these things are never hard and fast). But writing dialogues... I only wrote the into beforehand, and it took me ages to get motivated to fill in all the dialogs (and other descriptive texts).

Does anyone use mind-maps?

Oh, and I orgnaise my folders similarly to Yufster

Me too... and my bum is really sore. Must have been the intergalactic anal survey again...

Farlander doesn't seem to understand how this thread is supposed to work

How about both, like Micheal Crichton's Timeline book (not the film!)

Why not flesh out both possibilities a bit and see which one you can get more inspired with. At the moment, a four word description of the game doens't give me enough info to decide, as I like both SF and Medival...

I'm waiting on feedback from my other betatesters, and anyway, the final result will be going in the Ezine. After a suitable period, I'll post it up in the Tech Archive, too.

I don't want to release something that doesn't work, as ther whole thing is pretty complicated and a bad tutorial could do more harm than good for the unwary! Scuthbert's feedback threw up some big holes in the tutorial that I hadn't spotted becuase of the assumptions I'd made by using it in my own game. And some typos, too!

It was so good that TK got hX to post it for him...  :

I've met Adrian (not Adrain!) a few times and the beard indicates that he might be a man. But I guess that this is some in-joke between you two.

Alien is great! ANd I seem to remember there was a lady in it who wasn't sure that her husband was a Christian when he died  and was anxious about it... simiilar situation to MInimi's plot.

And as Vel says, the dialogs will be hard with this emotionometer. The single most difficult wthing with AOTS was doing all those responses to things/dialogs. It's REALLY easy to come up with witrty responses to hotspots in a joke game, but in a serious game it's easy to be dull and uninformative "It's a chair" or fall into jokeyness "Believe it or not, this contraption that looks very similar to a chair, is in fact, a buttock support device".

Minimi, I'd recommend that you read the books of Adrian Plass, especially Ghosts and Alien at St Wilfreds, becuase he deals with a lot of the issues your game might have (and he is a Christian author, btw).

I'd really like to see this game. My grandfather died in a similar way: one morning he just didn't wake up.

Zor, I'd recommend getting a white fluffy cat. This has two advantages:

1) You can look very evil stroking it on your lap, with a black leather glove
2) My own white fluffy cat is the personification of evil, so you can maybe get some tips from the cat, too

Also, I find that designing new uniforms for my minions that will hide the face nearly completely so that a hero can steal them and use them to infiltrate my lair, and devising over-elaborate ways to kill of secret agents is  a great way to entertain yourself.

Blane: two people just answered that question.  Maybe you could read their replies before asking the same question again?

Well, nobody has posted about this, but I wondered if anyone had tried translating some of the heiroglyhpics in the game. It's quite easy to find a heiroglyphics alphabet on the web. The game is serious, but some of the heiroglyphics are not. And some give hints...

For example, in the opening, when Tuthmosis falls asleep by the Sphinx, the hieroglyphics say "Zzzz" and when he is amazed by the SPhinx talking,  it says.... well, I'll leave that up to you to discover.

Who said there's no replayability? 

HP5 is the worst of the series and gives away that the series will fade into obscurity in 50 years, unlike LOTR. Why? Becuase in books 1-4 JKR had a slow (sometime too slow, especially during Quidditch matches) build up to a cracking twisty ending. In book 5 it was like "Voldemort and Harry were so deperate to get the McGuffin, but WHY? We knew all of it already" . Although I must say that the rest of the book was better paced than usual. SO, the whole premise of HP is that book 7 will have a really cracking ending. Book 5 undermined my confidence in JKR to produce that.  I also thought that it would be a complete closure of the series as JKR used to say there would only ever be 7 books. Now, she said that Harry doesn't die so the only other closure I could think of would be that Harry has to cause the magical world to stop existing or become entierly separate from the normal world, in order to save all the Muggles. She has also said thatther emight be an epilogue book of what happend in Harry's adulthood. Which throws out the whole closure thing. In fact it turns the series from a potential LOTR to a potential Star Wars... good at the start but ruined by stretching the franchise too far.

Anyway, recently read Dreamcaather by Stephen King: OK, I suppose. And now on Ludlum's Scorpion Deception. Also OK, but remarkably predicting some 9/11-type things  back in 1993...

Yeah, reorganising should be nice, this topic has gotten carried away...
I guess I kinda made it more difficult by adding a reply for dikla (I always see this hebrew sounding names here! ) in the off-topic post.

Indeed. Maybe this is best in the Technical Archive, renamed to "Data types in AGS" or something!

Ah, so creating a struct creates a new variable type, in a way? Thus declaring a variable of this type means it can have the properties in the struct?
Is this the same as declaring each variable seperately, only faster? Such as:

int hero_fighting;
int hero_magic;
int villain_fighting;
int villain_magic;

faster in the sense of less typing for you maybe, if the struct is quite big. Structs are also the onyl way to get mutli-dimensional arrays in AGS.

You have probably already used a struct.... character is one. In fact character is an array of structs, which is why you say:

character[arrayindex].room  or character[arrayindex].x

Does the engine react negatively to an int called hero_skills.magic when it's not part of the struct? just wondering.

I think so, although I can't actually recall seeing an error message myself. But then, I am perfect

So, if strings cannot be declared in structs, is there a way to include one anyway?

You missed that bit in my previous post: yes, you have to say char[200] instead of string.

For example:

struct char {

but you can't call a struct type the same as an existing type, so you would have to say struct mychar {

int alive;
//can a value such as 1 be assigned by default here?

When you start getting into advanced stuff like this, don't count on anything being initialised. Set it manually in the game start function.

Structs, when reffered to in the script, are similar to text script global variables in the manual, right?

No.
First, once you have declared a struct type, you haven't yet created any variables, so to take Scorp's example:

//defining our own type SKILLS:
struct SKILLS {

    int agility;
    int magic;
    int fighting;
};

//declaring a variable of type SKILLS

SKILLS hero_skills;

// declare anothe one

SKILLS badguy_skills;

//or even an array of them

SKILLS char_skills[6];

I also noticed char can store 1 letter character or a number 0-256, so it's usually used for pallette
what about this: char num[100]; does this limit characters to be 0-99/ 0-100? can letters still be used?

No, this means you're declaring an array of 100 chars, from num[0] (which can hold 0-255) to num[99] which can also hold 0-255.

With structs you can have arrays of arrays:

struct mystruct {
   char sub[200];
}

mystruct twod[10];

You can then refer to:

twod[0].sub[0]  // first row, first column
twod[9].sub[199] // last row, last column

or anythign in between. Also, as I said before, an array fo 200 chars can be treated like a string.

Finally, you can have arrays of ints or shorts as well.



EDIT FOR GINNY'S EDIT:

OK, don't worry about the #define function int thing. But if you really want to know, it means in syntactical terms that functions are functions because they have brackets afetr their declaration, NOT because there is a function keyword there. It's a bit esoteric and is maybe interesting to COmputer Science students only (and maybe not even then )

as for char[200] being equivalent to strings, then thsi reall comes down to what a string is. A string is simply one character after another in memory. C , and AGS, tell where a string ends by the last character being '0'. However this behaviour is nearly entirely transparent in AGS. In fact, it doesn't actually work liek this, I believe, but CJ could have implemented AGS strings by putting

#define string char[200]

in the script header.