Messages

That's Discworld, specifically the broom closet before you turn on the light.

1. (4 letter word)
You can count on them, though
Some would rather curse them.
You can speak dear to them,
Though we all know 'tis just in vain.

Self.

You can count on yourself. Some people curse themselves, and speaking dearly of oneself is vain. And in vain, too, since you already know what you're going to say.

I'm afraid I have a lot of work to do on my own game to do! I'll be working on that from now until Doomsday.

You can do the sprites for your own game. I believe in you.

Okay, I did a little paintover. It ain't that great, but it shows some things I want to bring up.
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/NhBJZSc.png[/imgzoom]

Firstly, pixelling eyes is incredibly hard. You must get the right amount of life in them without making them look uncanny. One way to combat the uncanny is to remember that the pupils must always touch at least one side of the eye, or you'll get a shocked or glassy, doll like eye. And when you're dealing on the pixel level, you sometimes must sacrifice accuracy for style. In order to get that look, I merely used the darker pupil colour and the iris colour to create a general "eye", instead of an eye with an iris. I added a little shadow at the top to give the eye a little more depth. Her hair was simple, just a pixel's more width seperated it from the head and gave it some volume.

For the body, I evened out her proportions to make her a little more feminine. Slimmed down her breasts and lowered them (remember - real breasts are further down than you think - they begin around armpit level, not shoulderblade level! If they do that, they're probably fake), and gave her a bit more of a curve in the waist and hip. The strap flows around her chest, and I just gave her cape a little more depth by darkening the inside and putting her hands inside it.

The base sprite wasn't changed all that much, I just tweaked it a bit. Keep it up, you got some potential

It is indeed a Windows 3.x game. It's very crudely drawn and independant, and it's art really resonates with me.

And here's another clue - my favorite track from the game: Midi!

Yes, there is a way. I believe you can use region[ ].LightLevel to set the light level of the characters on the region. Put this in your room script.

Code: AGS

function repeatedly_execute_always ()
{
    if (GetBackgroundFrame () == 0) //Check the manual to see if this is the right function.
    {
        region[CANDLE_REGION].LightLevel = 50;
        region[OTHER_REGION].LightLevel = 20;
        //...
    }
    else if (GetBackgroundFrame () == 1) //Check the manual to see if this is the right function.
    {
        region[CANDLE_REGION].LightLevel = 70;
        region[OTHER_REGION].LightLevel = 50;
        //...
    }
    else if (GetBackgroundFrame () == 2) //Check the manual to see if this is the right function.
    {
        //... and so on.
    }
}

Obviously, you have to change the _REGION text to the numbers of your regions, but this should work.

Well, time to share something obscure for y'all.

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/namethatgame.PNG[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/HnmmT8B.jpg[/imgzoom]

Wait, is that... Sixth Sense Investigations? I vaguely remember the main character sounding like an extra from Simon the Sorcerer.

@Scavenger: I should stop reading your technical questions or I know how death wore endless feathers plays before even playing it...

Unless you count "Scavenger is a very poor programmer" as a spoiler, I'm not sure what exclusive gameplay leaks I'm going to have in my tech threads. x3

And I'm currently reading snow crash, any chance you did read that too?

Snow Crash is my favorite cyberpunk novel!

So, is this a game inside a game or a separate game? I got little confused.

It's a game within a game. You'll be seeing a lot of these. After all, it IS cyberpunk.

Here's a new update! Rev up your Voodoo2s and prepare your processors, your 486 ain't good enough for this baby!

Introducing:
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Promotional/Metaverse_title.PNG[/imgzoom]
The METAVERSE. It's a place where worlds collide, where all your dreams can become a reality.

[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Promotional/Metaverse_WIP1.PNG[/imgzoom]
Walk around a full 16 colour three dimensional landscape, populated by a groundbreaking number of your online buddies!

[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Promotional/Metaverse_WIP2.PNG[/imgzoom]
Meet exotic people from another country in a friendly and cordial manner!

[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Promotional/Metaverse_WIP3.PNG[/imgzoom]
(Translation software sold seperately)

Innumerable thanks to Austauber for his incredible help with the tile engine. I literally would not have been able to make this part of the game without him.

Ah, thankyou! I was trying to write it out in AGSScript before you edited in the code, yours looks a lot more efficient! I will implement it immediately!

I'm trying to do another interface for my game, as switching to the keyboard becomes a bit cumbersome even when you are switching playstyles and I want to throw the player a bit of a bone.

I know how to get the mouse cursor if it's in one of four segments around the screen (it's easy - you just check whether the player's screen coords are above or below the mouse.x and y.) but I'm at a loss as to how to do 8 segments.


Here's a crude depiction of what I'm trying to achieve. Is there a math-only way to do this? The player will be walking across the screen and could be at any arbitrary point on it, and I'm just not sure how to find this. I was thinking I could make an image and reference a pixel on that (by transposing it to an array - not using GetPixel, which is slow as hell) to see which segment the player is in, but that seems really wasteful, memory wise.

Any ideas?

786432 pixels, which is just under a megabyte is you're working in 8bit, 1.4MB if 16, and 2.8mb if you're working 32bit.

I've been thinking about the kinds of compression AGS uses in it's sprites and backgrounds, and potentially the other data it creates to pack into it's EXE and it got me to thinking - is it really necessary to change the compression from the old RLE algorithm to something better?

Now, don't get me wrong, I love tiny filesizes, it's one of the greatest things to be able to be efficient in saving space. As time goes on, the more people are going to use high resolution, high bit depth graphics, and RLE just won't cut it for that kind of thing, resulting in games that are almost a gigabyte just through inefficient storage alone. I know people have posted on the forum saying "Is it bad to use the higher resolutions? Will my game be too big?".

Well, hard drives are huge now - and the place we need efficient compression the most is downloading the files. And we can just ZIP or RAR or 7Z or ARC or ARJ them up, and all that inefficiency will drop as it's being compressed into an archive, and people can then download the most efficient archive, saving on bandwidth and online filespace, but not their hard drive space, as it will uncompress into a huge behemoth again.

But still, something about it rubs me the wrong way. When AGS first implemented compression, I believe LZW was still patented, and PNG compression was new and relatively unheard of. Couple that with the low resolution, low colour nature of the graphics being produced for AGS games, and there really was no need for better compression. But now that we might well be targetting mobile devices, maybe better compression could help the Android/iPhone/Weird Gizmo market? They, unlike PCs, have limited storage space, orders of magnitude less. (Like maybe 2-32GB instead of terabytes.)

One thing that concerns me when thinking about compression is speed - if we, for example, implemented PNG (or any DEFLATE based compression algorithm) instead of RLE, how much slower would AGS load resources? Would we be able to compress the compiled script resources AGS uses so that it's script data doesn't take up massive amounts of space - without hindering the performance of the game engine as a whole? What could we compress without sacrificing speed, and how?

This, compared to more pressing issues, I felt quite low priority (bordering on pipe dream), but it's still interesting to discuss, looking forward.

How do you feel about the file sizes of AGS games?

The last two parameters are Right and Bottom coordinates, while you are sending Width and Height there.

Oh man, I why didn't I see that before? Thankyou! It was something stupid!

I'm trying to make a way of rendering indiscriminate error messages onto the screen, like this: Example here, but typed over the top of the game's screen, with a black background. If you've ever played a DOS game and it's suddenly booted you to the DOS prompt at 320x200 and printed a whole load of bytecodes at you written directly over the top of the video buffer, that's exactly what I'm going for.

So far I've tried:

Code: AGS

  function Print_ErrorText (String text, int x, int y)
{
  DrawingSurface *surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground(); // I'm just testing here, obviously it won't work with characters over the top or with scrolling rooms. Probably should go with making one from a Screenshot and putting it on an Overlay.
  surface.DrawingColor = 255;  // True Black
  surface.DrawRectangle (x, y, GetTextWidth (text, eFontMetaverseText) + 1,  GetTextHeight (text,eFontMetaverseText, GetTextWidth (text,eFontMetaverseText) + 1));
  surface.DrawingColor = 15; // True White
  surface.DrawString (x, y, eFontMetaverseText, text);
  surface.Release ();
}

But it doesn't seem to work right at all, and I have to manually specify where I want the text to go. Ideally, I'd want to be able to just print a bunch of garbage to the screen line by line with it wrapping round and leaving the underlying image intact. But the black boxes I draw don't line up with the text I've drawn /at all/. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here - the boxes and the text will misalign vertically and often the boxes will be twice to three times the size of the text (again, vertically only). I've tried to fix it several times but every time it just comes out.... wrong. I'm probably being stupid and missing something simple, but I probably need a fresh pair of eyes to look at it.

Thankyou for the help!

The "tool", let's call it the Editor, would allow you to enter your data much like the AGS editor does. But when you "compile" your game, all it does it spit out Lua code which is then run by Love. This means no compiling necessary and it should be very fast. Adore will maintain no "sprite cache" like AGS does but just use pngs from a folder which can be updated at will and the changes will be reflected next time you run the game.

Will there be some way to pack those folders into a resource file or something? While loading PNGs from folders is all well and good and easy, it does make a huge mess of the directory, looks horribly amateurish, and allows people to just pick up the resources and walk off with them, or easily edit them. And, well, I just don't like huge directories of resource files.

Will there be support for actual vector graphics? I expect now that we're talking about high resolution graphics, they may as well be /resolution independent/.  I would love to see vector graphics being given the same ease of use as any raster format. And vectors are much easier to generate, nowadays!

I am quite intrigued at this project. I am interested to see more.

Yume Nikki is pretty good at this. You walk around, exploring and finding new things to explore, and items to interact with the world with. Not a battle in sight.

Undertale is an RPG in which every monster is a puzzle to solve, rather than an enemy to oppose. When it says noone has to get hurt, it means it.

[TENG.asc(6893): Error (line 6893): cannot create dynamic array of unmanaged struct]

As I aded to my post above, I guess that's a historical issue: perhaps AGS cannot distinct initialized global variables from non-initialized.
Never paid attention to this.

Silly really.

Abstauber, Scavenger, I think the solution would be to use dynamic arrays instead (tiles = new ctile[] etc).

That is very, very interesting. No wonder there were so many 00s in one block in the engine - it didn't occur to me that AGS would store that data. So, the fix is:

Code: AGS

//TENG.asc
// ctile tile[NUM_MAX_TILES];
ctile tile [];

function game_start () //The one in the module
{
tile = new ctile [NUM_MAX_TILES];
}

I didn't know structs could be dynamic arrays!

EDIT:
TENG.asc(6893): Error (line 6893): cannot create dynamic array of unmanaged struct
I don't think they can.

Is there any way to deal with all of this extraneous data, if it isn't possible to just... not have it (since it doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to take up space, literally)? It's mostly just uninitialised data (so 0), so would it be possible to add RLE compression on it?