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Well, with Steve's comments, and also showing the game to my wife yesterday night I found a bunch of bugs... so this new 1.1 version has those fixed and less spelling mistakes too.

The interface is very well done, but you probably don't need me to tell you that. The only problem I had was when looking at the pyramids in the map screen, when the character changes to the full size talk view.

Ooops. I already made the idle view change for that screen, but forgot the speech view...

I'd also make the floating text fade in much quicker. It's a bit frustrating having to wait two seconds to see the description.

Well, a right click can describe it if you're impatient

Are there just five locations in the demo? And is there nothing to do except talk to people and look at stuff?

No, there are more. It is possible to discover the secret chamber that the Sphinx describes in the intro, although that's as far as it goes for now. This is about 5% of the game story...

Looking good!
I loved the characters ducking to get into the tent, and the "amazed" animation of the main character. Interesting script - seems nicely paced, with not too much exposition.

Thanks. There are probably a few more places I could do some extra animations, but graphics aren't my strong point and I wanted to get this out as it's been hanging around at 95% done since early February. I moved some of the huge intro expostition into the dialog choices, and I think the balance is OK.... but please ANYONE let me know if soemthing doesn't make sense or it looks like I've missed something out of the story in the game. Its sometimes difficult to remember if everything in your head or notebook is in there!

Oh, I also noticed the Sphinx says "msy" and not "may" at one point.

I also spelled Pharaoh wrong every time, had "destory" instead or "destroy" and various others which are fixed now. I dumped out a translation file and spellchecked it.

[EDIT]  The only sound effect I noticed was the footsteps going down the steps into the pyramid, and they seemed out of sync with the animation - way too late.

I noticed that too... there ARE other SFX but a lot of them were too quiet to hear (especially if the music is on). There was also one broken sound. So now I've fixed the length and volue of the SFX so it should be better now. I may also add some general footstep sounds later on.

Thanks for the great feedback Steve. If you are still stuck having been to all the starting 5 locations, ask me and I may be able to throw some light on things  

Don't forget that you can talk about any item in the background during dialogs

And lastly does anyone have any tips for synchronising talking frames to the text being said? (tutorials, which letters should be grouped...etc.)

Just checking that you knwo that lipsync is for Sierra-style speech only

EDIT: Oh yes, is there any function for disabling and enabling walkbehinds?

SetWalkbehindBaseline... if you set the baseline to 0, everything will be in front of it.

EDITEDIT: Why oh why does it not preserve my indentation? oh well...

use [ pre ] ...code... [ / pre ], which CJ should really add to the yabbse help page

I'm afraid I know nothing about the parser stuff, though  

Actually, since the runtime engine knows whether to execute the "First time player eneters room" interaction or not, it must keep track of whether the player has been to each room. It would be handy if there was a built-in function to access this data!

if ( HasBeenInRoom(int roomno) ) {
}

veal from deer

Ignoramus! Venison is from deer. Veal is from tortured, anaemic calves.

I hear that Shrek the sheep gets sheared today. What an exciting life those New Zealanders live, when this is their first international news story since the RotK premiere.

Spoiler

Try the window

[close]

Bump, and also to say that all any any constructive crits are welcome. Not just bugs, but any gameplay, gfx, sound, etc. things that bug you. I can't promise to do anyhting about all of them, but I will read and consider them all.

LATEST (28 April 04):

Yes, the DEMO IS HERE! The moment that you've all been waiting for!

You can download it as 4.1M Zip or 3.7M RAR

or check out the blurb on the website website

Here's a screenshot to whet your appetite:

Also, people say" let's not have two forums to avoid elitism", but if you then go and impose stricter rules on the forum then you have made it elitist AND there is no appropriate forum for people who have had a basic go at their art and would like some help.

And a character limit will just cause people to have gobbledegook at the end of their one-liner posts... human nature! I suppose it might cut down on the number of ":o replies" but I doubt it will make much difference to the number fo new  threads.

If you want your GUI to operate like a normal right-click menu, I suggest setting your repeatedly execute to check if IsButtonPressed(RIGHT) and if so set your GUI pos, set a global variable and turn gui on, else turn gui off.

Then, in on_event, check if the global variable is set and if the event is GUI_MUP (and the GUI is the right one). Then use GetGUIObjectAt(mouse.x, mouse.y) to find which button in the GUI was activated. Then do your stuff...


Clear?

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

Well, the demo is very nearly ready. I've got a few descriptions left to add for some hotspots, which are already written but not typed in yet (and I left that bit of paper somewhere else :  )  but we have music, SFX, savegames with screenshots and lots more all ready.

so, hopefully... DEMO release tomorrow (Tuesday!)... its only 2 months later than I told Vel in the ezine!

just hoping that I can build some anticipation here with a bump...

well, you coudl stick the code in a function to make it more readable in the on_mouse_click.

Unless you create some kind of undo-ability to the single-click function, or the double-click function is complementary to the single-click (e.g. increase the walking speed) then you have to block until you know  if it is a single or double click. In my game, that doesn't seem to onerous.

Well, if you look at what happened to the Linux distributor "Lindows", they ended up changing their name because MS were suing them in aboiut a hundred different countries. Some countries said "don't be silly"  to MS, but others said OK...

No-one seems to have noticed the editor plug=in new feature! This looks great. Finally we can do all those things that CJ is too lazy busy to implement...!

EDIT:

"Next, still with the class selected, look down the properties list for "Instancing". This is initially set to "2 - PublicNotCreatable", which means that other applications can't create the object. We need to change it to "5 - MultiUse", so that the AGS Editor can load the plugin."

This step of the tutorial is impossible with the free VB5 download... any ideas anyone?

Also, any plans to add more than the dialog system to this API, CJ?

Ummm... does this actually work? Surely this code means that you will first run the single-click code and then later run the double-click code?

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

- if in the GUI editor, the first word of a label's text is too wide for the label (easily possible with @TOTALSCORE@), the label appears entirely blank (one would expect '@TOTA' or a similar fraction) (maybe in the GUI editor, @SCORE@ and @TOTALSCORE@ should be replaced by numbers so you can see what they actually look like; then in the
 pop-up window that edits individual controls, they should still show as the @SCORE@ string)

A general "preview  GUI" button would be great, as it would also show if you'd forgotten to position it correctly (which I often do) and how the fonts would actually be displayed with AA and colours.

- how about having the cursor arrows nudge the GUI object that is currently selected one pixel to the left/right/etc

And ditto for objects in the room editor

I guess that most games with LucasArts style text have GUIs top or bottom and not to the side like this. Maybe there could be some SetSpeechArea(top, bottom, left, right) style thing to set up the area in whioch LucasArts speech wraps around. Calculating the stuff for DisplaySpeechAt would be a pain.

CJ, do you have a handy formula to describe where the speech goes for Lucasarts style text?

ie. DisplaySpeech(charid, text)  is equiavlent to...
DisplaySpeechAt(character[charid].x-SOMETHING, character[charid].y-SOMETHING, GetTextWidth(font, string) > LHS-xpos ? max_width, textwidth, string);

or something like that...

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...

in your rep_ex...

if (GetGUIAt(mouse.x, mouse.y)==DARTHSGUI) {
  button = GetGUIObjectAt(mouse.x, mouse.y);
  set_info_graphic(button);
}

Strazer's code is a bit shorter (now why didn't I think of that?), but you still have to declare a temp string and it just feels inefficient to me to do that. Oh well, what's another 200 bytes when the whole thing is already 7Meg  just for the demo...

It just struck me that it would probably be pretty easy for our beloved Puma to implement...