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That's interesting, I may look into this if I have time;
but I must say that since many things in AGS are constant sized, like objects number, not only this prevents from making more objects, but this adds a lot of unused data. For example, there's data for all 50 hotspots for every room, even though only small number of these may be used. The amount of useless chunks grow with room count.

The game is 4mb normally, and there's no extraneous stuff in my game - the compiled file literally explodes outward when I add in elements from Austauber's platform engine. I'm loathed to let the project slip out of my grasp, but if it helps, I can provide you with both the pre-TENG project files and the post-TENG project files.

Did that, still having the problem, unfortunately.

Edit: More research, AGS appears to put a ridiculous about of blank space between module scripts in the EXE, in random locations. (In one compilation it was after PPCOLL.ASC, then INTERFACES.ASC. ) Turns out it was a similar, but distinct module that it was bloating after, instead of the one I deleted. I'm just not sure why it's doing this.

This is awful, as the game itself works but I can't have this huge bloated file for no reason. The game is only going to get bigger, and having 40 metabytes of 00s is not a good thing. I tried to see if it was having too many module scripts, but that wasn't it, as I made a test game with about 15 of the things.

Am I just coding my game wrong? Is there something terribly wrong with me? What could possibly cause the compiler to freak out like that?

I've been adding some code to my game recently, and after I completed it, I noticed that the game's filesize has jumped from 9mb to 40mb for no discernable reason. It compresses down to 3mb as normal, but the uncompressed filesize is amazingly huge. I looked at it in a hex editor, it seems to have freaked out after writing function names from a module that I had deleted (!!!) and wrote about 40 megabytes of 0s after it. After reimporting it, it managed to compile a working executable that was 1.70mb, and then was 40mb again after that. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, really, since I can't well restart my game project, and I don't see what I'm doing wrong.

Why is AGS writing a whole lot of pointless garbage in my EXE?

Hi,

AFAIK you can't scroll with custom GUI Dialog's, unless someone has made a module or other to do so.

I thought you could? I'm using This module in my game, and I got scrolling options. (it is a really good module, too, I've had absolutely no problems with it, even when I needed to change the behaviour of the dialog gui.)

Animation wise it actually seems more complex than Sam & Max Hit the Road.

Scavenger, frankly it looks so good that I'm starting to worry you may not manage to finish the project while aiming at such high standard. Or have you a team of animators working with you now?

Hah, no, it's just me doing the animation, I'm afraid. Would that I could have a team, that would be amazing. But I'm carefully balancing what I can and cannot do, making sure that only the important parts of the game get full animation, and the rest gets limited animation.

I can tell you all, you ain't seen nothing yet. I'd show you, but I don't want to spoil ALL the surprises :3c

It's a good thing no religion has ever supposed in the existence of more than one god. I mean, seriously.

Would you prefer it if I edited that line so that it was " and the existence of a deity or deities presupposes the existence of your deity or deities."? Binary as in "Either my god(s) exist, or none do.". Come on, you're a programmer, aren't you? You know about booleans?

I mean, if we're going to argue semantics, I may as well clarify my position. You're just making yourself look like a fool if you pick apart my wording rather than the point I am trying to make. It really weakens your position. Alright, I'll try to be less ambiguous about the ambiguity of the deit(y/ies).

Once all gods can exist, none of them can.

Once all people can exist, none of them can.

Once all animals can exist, none of them can.

Once carbon-based lifeforms can exist, no other forms of life can exist.

Once answered, no question can exist.

Again, same logic is same.

Really, your grasp on the subject is very tenuous. It's not the same logic at all. Maybe I did not explain myself clearly enough.

We can see, objectively, that people exist, lots of different people. As well as animals. We have instruments that can measure their existence.

We do not see the existence of otherworldly beings that exist beyond the physical plane. There's no evidence of any particular one. You may provide me with evidence (if there is any), that there is another plane of existence, but without solid proof of one, all gods, all deities, both imagined and unimagined, have the exact same chance of existing as one another, in as many iterations as there are iterations to have. And since we cannot see, touch, smell, taste, or hear them, we don't know which state they are in. They are Schroedinger's God, existing in every possible form, alive, dead and extant, because we have no solid clues on the form of the gods. As soon as we are able to open the box that contains the god(s), we will know their form. We will know whether that/those god(s) is/are alive or dead or not god(s) at all. But until then, they are inside that metaphysical box, being simultaneously every god(s) possible. And perhaps, when we open the box, it will be empty. Equally likely.

But until the day we open that box and find out what our deific mystery prize is, we must think logically about the scripture that exists. What is the chances that it is correct, as opposed to any other scripture, written or unwritten? Can we really use it, or the lessons it teaches, as a moral foundation if it is in fact, likely false? The Book of Mormon is just as likely to be a true account as the Twilight novels, scripturally. I am not saying that to denigrate the book as false, oh no. But the chances of it being real are just as likely as Twilight. So do we base our entire society around both? Of course not, the probability of the Twilight novels being true accounts are so low as to not even register. We don't shine UV light on pale, dirty looking teenagers to see if they shimmer or anticipate them being made of rock and blood. It doesn't even come to mind to consider those things as part of our decision making process.

The point being, that scripture in all probability has no power. It is a warning sign saying "DO NOT WEAR LIPSTICK ON THIS HILL: YOU WILL GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING". Sure, the words exist, but there's nothing in them that guarantees what they're warning about will take place - it may happen, but there's such a small chance as to be useless to us. There's nothing divine about any scripture that is any more likely to happen than any other piece of scripture. I could write some scripture today and it would be just as valid, divinely, as the bible, or the Quran, or the book of Nephi, the myths of Odin and Fenrir, ancient egyptian hieroglyphs, or an ancient death cult prophecy. But they are just words. It is up to us to decide whether or not they are useful or not to us. "Do not murder" is still a good tenet to live by. "Stone gay people to death" is not. "Don't allow gay people equal rights to you" is also not. By using common sense, and not zealotry, we can build a moral system that's a lot better than what any religion tells us. One that has less "stone gay people" and more "be good to everyone". And because it's acknowledged to be written by man and not gods, it can be amended, changed, mistakes admitted. Fallible, but in progress. You know how much of a farce it is when a church submits holy errata to their books. The revelation that black people can in fact be elders, eh?

Firstly, gay marriage has nothing to do with happiness. It has to do with the benefits offered by the government to married couples. Nothing more. So, opposition to homosexual marriage is not an issue of happiness.

As for the "happiness" of marriage, modern society actually dictates that marriage is an antiquated idea which actually has a statistically higher chance of leading to divorce and the misery of both parties than if they had simply not gotten married in the first place. I appreciate your open ignorance of modern society.

The fact that marriage is, or isn't a good thing is beside the point. Once gay people can get married, then we can work on abolishing marriage altogether. Then we can all crush it underneath our collective, and equal, heels. This is more about treating gay people as equals, than whether or not marriage as an institution is a worthy one. There is no reason to deny people rights other people have. Mixed race marriages were illegal once - would you have argued against that with the same logic? Oh, no, let's not let black people marry white people, marriage is a bad thing anyway. Let's keep white people marrying white people, so that black people are spared the misery of marriage.

No. You spread misery by treating certain people like second class citizens by denying them something the majority of people have. Marriage itself may not bring happiness, but the ability to, if they want, marry, does. In the case of interracial marriage, it's that a black person couldn't marry a white person. In the case of gay marriage, it's that a person cannot marry someone of the same gender they are. Because somehow that is "wrong", and "unnatural" and "not what marriage is about". If you were black and told "You cannot marry my daughter and legitimize your relationship, you are a black person.", that would cause misery. If you were gay and told "You cannot marry my son and legitimize your relationship, you are a man.", that would cause misery. All consenting relationships should be equal, and equally able to marry, divorce, whatever.

Really, if you're going to use the argument that marriage itself is bad, abolish marriage for everyone. If that's what you want, then you oppose marriage itself, not gay marriage, and there is no point bringing up an unrelated topic (the opposition of the institution of marriage itself) in a topic based around equal rights in marriage. It's really not an arguement against it at all.


*"Being pretty sure", as opposed to "I believe", since belief is a charged word in this discussion. I am as sure there are aliens as a dice rolled a thousand times will land on all the same number. I do not believe that the dice will definitely land that way, but I can be pretty sure it is not impossible. But until I see it, my opinion on the matter is a solid "maybe". I wouldn't be preparing for an alien invasion or anything. I mean, come on, is it that hard to say "Yeah, I don't discount the possibility", without saying "I specifically believe in this"? TK, demons, souls, gods, all of that stuff could exist. But as with any wild bet, you shouldn't base your life around it. The chances of it being real are far too small for it to affect you in any meaningful way. Athiesm, when it's entire philosophy is "there is no god", falls prey to people who say "There might be a god!". There might well be. It's not likely your god, though.

No, you're right. Three dimensions are the most that could possibly exist. Human beings are the most complex lifeforms that could be rationally conceived, especially given the terrifically finite size of our sole universe outside of which nothing could possibly exist.

String theory is a good example of how few dimensions of existence could possibly exist. Which as everyone knows is only and exactly three, because believing in anything more than that is indicative of severe brain hemorrhaging.

Please, dispense with your fake histrionics. It's not a good look for you. Let's wrap this up.

Let's say, yes, there is something beyond what we know.

There may be more than three dimensions, there may be particles that man does not currently see or understand, there may well be beings that are more powerful than we could ever conceive of. There may be countless things, lurking behind the curtain of our reality, invisible to our crude instruments and intangible to our senses. There may be gods and demons, there may be other planes of existence. There may be any number of laws of physics that we have not yet discovered.

But. (and here's where we bring this discussion screeching back to the original topic)

The existence or nonexistence of any of these has no bearing on morality. The possibility of every god, no god, or some gods existing remain roughly equal. Their reality is not diminished by whether or not they are popular, or whether their texts are pleasing morally. With this caveat in mind, that there may in fact, be (a) god(s), and it may not be yours, or indeed, anyone's, you come to realize something very, very important.

Once all gods can exist, none of them can.
Both the religious and the irreligious alike often fall into the very easy trap of thinking that the existence of a deity is binary, and the existence of a deity presupposes the existence of your deity. This is an incredibly shallow reasoning - once you open up the possibility of the existence of a deity, you don't strengthen your evidence for your deity, be it Yahweh or Odin or Ra. You posit that there is something behind that curtain pulling the strings, and it is your god. But until that curtain is actually pulled, it may as well be anything. But I can tell you something in a heartbeat. It could just as likely be Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Gate, behind those curtains, and not Yahweh, the All Benevolent.

What does this mean for our topic at hand? Well, it means that all morality as set out by all scripture has now no more divine power than the paper they are written on. We must choose, then, to follow the rules that result in the most amount of happiness to the most amount of people. These will, naturally, overlap with tenets set out by scripture, since the scriptures themselves aren't devoid of wisdom. Be nice to people, do not kill them, don't be wasteful. All good. But then you have the more iffy scriptures, such as the one calling all homosexuals abominations that must be killed. Probably something to set the early jews apart from other cults, or something to ensure procreation and no wasted energy on something that didn't result in babies.

And that echoed throughout history, causing the gay marriage problem. There is no logical reason that homosexuals should have lesser rights than straight people. With our new perspective that all scripture is equally theologically valid, can you find a reason? The answer is no.

Even if a god existed that really hated gay people's happiness for some reason, the chances of that are so remote, so incredibly tiny, that following it out of fear of that god is worse than trying to have a job playing the lottery. It is so cosmically irrelevant, that basing your society's decisions on people spontaneously combusting is more likely to have an effect on your life. Basing your society on the chance that, at some point, someone will turn into a pig, is more likely to have an effect on your life. These chances, that a certain iteration of a certain god with a certain belief system exists and cares whether or not gay people get married, are so small as to be completely and utterly useless as a belief.

So believe in any god you want, they're all equally valid. Believe whatever you wish is behind that cosmic curtain. But don't base your capacity for allowing other people to be happy on it. If they're murdering someone, yeah, put a stop to that, that is making someone miserable. But something as prosaic as two guys or two girls getting hitched? You ain't got a say in that. Stop forcing other people to be miserable.

So if you oppose gay marriage, you are not only an asshole, but a complete idiot with no sense of cosmic scale.

I ask again: how is theology different from arguing about fairy wings?

Scale.

You destroy a child's belief in fairies, and the wound it inflicts on them will heal quickly.
You destroy a man's belief in deities, you wound his entire world, the world of his ancestors, and every piece of culture that relies on his belief to exist. There is a reason why people feel the world would be an empty, soulless place without the existence of a deity. Because then everything that they held dear, all that energy, all their accomplishments, and all the accomplishments of their forebears, would be wasted. For nothing.

Ain't no one man fights harder, or suffers more, than the man who doesn't want to believe he is wrong.

"No one" is two words.

Fixed. I'll try to be more careful in future.

Here's hoping that the game feature's some high res artwork of the two human females. Desiree looks quite lovely! 

Of course, there will be plenty of high resolution images of all the main characters.

And I really shouldn't be sharing this yet, but I just wanted to show off some of the animation that will be in the final game:

You can get the in game font here in TTF format. As for the title font, I think it was a bespoke one.

That error is done on purpose, I couldn't find away a neat way to finish the game so I did that.

Code: AGS

QuitGame (0); // This is generally the correct way to do it.

Code: AGS

// room script file
function room_load()
{
cBoram.y=370;
}

function repeatedly_execute()
{
cBoram.y+=1;
if (cBoram.y==380) cBoram.y=370; // Comparitives always use ==, not =.
}

You almost had it, but when declaring a new value for a variable, you use =. If you compare a variable, you use ==.

Why not use the inbuilt AGS video codecs?

Because my game uses the 8-bit colour depth, for various reasons (I can't use 16bit or higher because of this). I can't use the in-built codecs because of this. Smacker is an 8bit video codec, so it'll fit the technical and aesthetic requirements of the game. Besides, the plugin can play non-blocking video.

So I figure it's been too long since I gave you all an update on where I was making this thing.

Firstly, have some screenshots:


Secondly, some other news:

• The interface for three of the characters has been completed. The game will change entirely when you're playing as them, right down to how you access the in game menu.
• I have someone working on creating a plugin for FMVs, based on the Smacker codec. Hopefully (and I mean hopefully), we'll be able to see actual animated cutscenes in the game! There's a lot of palette issues at the moment, but I'm sure they can be ironed out.
• The fonts have all been tidied up. Gone is the amateurish and disjointed font of old, replaced with snazzier new fonts.

Hi Ghost,

Got this error:

Code: AGS

}
  if (IsTimerExpired(3))
  {
  AudioChannel *channel = aScuttling_creature.Play(); 
  
  int soundPos = -100;
  while (soundPos < 100)
    {
      channel.Panning = soundPos;
      soundPos++;
      Wait(1);
    }
  cspaceman.SayBackground("What the hell is that scuttling noise???");
  Wait(60);
  cspaceman.SayBackground("");
  SetTimer(3, 600);
}
}

Variables are case sensitive. Also, remember to bracket your while loop! Otherwise the code will just hang.

Use a sound effect for the speech, instead of Say (), and orchestrate the subtitles with SayBackground and Wait (). Just have the character loop their speech animation throughout. It'll look identical, and have no sound breaks.

Try something like this:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/Ek7isVu.png[/imgzoom]

I just evened out the upper and lowercase letters and made them a consistent size. The lowercase letters there are just a test, I was bored, they probably won't be useful.

[Why are you using this particular mechanic for the game?]

Okay, so I've been thinking about this a lot, and really there is only one piece of advice that I'd want to give regarding RPGs.

Why are you using this particular mechanic for the game?

In particular, the battle system and everything in it. The battle system has to serve the greater narrative of the game. You can't just throw things in and expect the game to be a fun, cohesive experience. The battle system has to serve the greater themes, as well. Copying mechanics from other games will only get you so far.

What does the mechanic say about the story? What sort of story are you telling?

For instance:

In FF5, everyone has the same potential for being great, based on the memories of those that have come before them. Is this what you want?

In Planescape: Torment, every character is weighed down with their own torments, and only through dialogue with them can you unlock their true potential. Is this what you want?

In FF8, everyone is a useless lump of mindless flesh who can't even drink a bottle of water during a fight without a guardian force. Is this what you want?

In Albion, some species have different equipment than the human characters, and can equip them in different ways. Is this what you want?

An RPG is not just walking around and having a battle. The battle system is, at best, another mechanic for telling a story. A lack of battles might, in some scenarios, heighten the tension. It is, in fact, just a tool you can use to further your goals. You could have an entire RPG that does not have one single battle. You could have an RPG where the main characters lose something every time they battle. It all depends on what you want to do with it.

Just remember that every mechanic you use is a tool. Don't throw hammers when a screwdriver would be preferable.

The saved games are usually saved in My Documents/Saved Games. The saved games won't show up on another person's computer. If they're in your compiled folder, delete all the agssave.000 - .999 files in that folder. They shouldn't be there, though.

Freelance Animator.