Messages

Do I just have to give up on him having naturalistic pathing and add a simple frame counter to do the room swaps, only worrying about his position if the player enters a room he's in or vice versa?

Quick answer: yes. Only the room the player is currently in is loaded, so the engine doesn't have access to walkable area masks etc. for other rooms, and cannot do pathfinding there.

It would probably be possible to do some quick math when the player enters the room the roaming character is currently in to determine where they should be based on the timing, to achieve the same effect from the player's POV.

Also is there a way to adjust the volume of sound effects without having to tie it to a char or channel or object?

Sure. If you group all sound effects under a particular AudioType, you can adjust the default volume for that AudioType (Game.SetAudioTypeVolume); or you can adjust it individually as you play the sound:

Code: ags

  AudioChannel* ac = myClip.Play();
  ac.Volume = 80;

This code is technically unsafe because AudioClip.Play() will return null if the clip fails to play for some reason—for example that you've exceeded the number of available AudioChannels and the currently playing audio is all higher-priority than the clip you're trying to play. So to be on the safe side you should do a null-check, but this is pretty tedious to do every time, and I think most game makers tend to cross their fingers and hope to get away with it.

Or you could write a helper function:

Code: ags

Channel* PlayVolume(this AudioClip*, int vol)
{
  AudioChannel* ac = myClip.Play();
  if(ac != null)
    ac.Volume = vol;
}

And then you can just call:

Code: ags

  myClip.PlayVolume(80);

Yeah, what CW said. That's not an issue of scaling the mouse cursor graphic, but "scaling" the mouse coordinates. I think I mentioned to you on Discord that to avoid this, you'll have to snap the mouse coordinates to the closest multiple of the scaling factor.

Just wanted to say that I think it's great that you're opening all these "tickets," even if it turns out that some of them are not priorities to implement. Once you've used the engine for a while, you get used to its quirks, and it can make you blind to things that should be fixed.

With TextBox this is handled in a dumb way, the first enabled TextBox found receives input.

Are you sure about that? The way I remember it, every TextBox currently visible receives the input.

What "items" are you referring to here? In AGS 4.0 a lot more project assets are stored as files in folders, so there is less need to export things.

So the only thing I can think of at this time is to having an object for presenting the mouse sprite in any of the rooms (since we can't have global objects)

I still think the easiest way is the no-code solution of simply importing a sprite that has been scaled up for the cursor graphic. In most games the number of cursor sprites is very limited, so this is quick to do and won't make any appreciable difference to game size.

I question whether there is any actual need for engine support here.

Scaling cursor graphic is as trivial as creating a resized dynamic sprite and setting to cursor.

There are a few wrinkles with this, if you want a "general" solution that "just works":

-There's no way to know the cursor's hotspot coordinates (the cursor pixel that acts as the "point" of interaction; e.g. in the LucasArts crosshair it's the center of the sprite), so when scaling up the cursor you have to just know what it should be and manually set it
-You can have animated cursors, and in that case you need to replace the sprites in the view. (Possible to do, but adds complication; also, if for some reason you reuse the view for something else, e.g. an in-game manual, that will also be affected.)
-If you're using a module that changes the mouse graphics, it won't respect the rescaling

Labels are not conceived as an interactable element, so the concept of "highlight" doesn't really apply to them. It is possible to implement it in script if required.

But I agree that all controls should offer other text alignment options, at least right-alignment.

* The entire Parser could actually be replaced with an external text file for adding/editing words and types, instead of needing to edit everyting direclty in the editor.

It wouldn't be too difficult to write a parser module that could do this. (Personally I'm not convinced that a parser belongs in the core AGS engine/editor.)

That's my thinking as well, but on Discord @Crimson Wizard had a different take, essentially arguing (if I have it right) that even though inventory[0] is not a valid inventory item, Game.InventoryItemCount should be equal to the size of the inventory[] array (i.e. the highest valid index + 1).

I think the problem here is that the design choice to use 1-based inventory ID numbers but access them through an array (with 0-based indexing) is inherently inconsistent, so there is no truly "correct" way to do it. The proper fix would be to start the IDs from zero.

search for sprite sheets of games that you like and draw over them and change it a little bit to your taste

I'll point out that the AGS Awards client includes an avatar gallery that auto-plays forward walk animations for a whole bunch of characters, and many of those assets have been theoretically open-sourced under a Creative Commons license. (Maybe all of them at this point? I seem to recall a discussion about removing any that weren't.) It's just that nobody has done the work of actually uploading them anywhere, but I have most of them on my computer/dropbox.

Just make sure you keep a backup of the original WAV files.

You would need to detect that the mouse button is held down over the GUI (Mouse.IsButtonDown), and change the GUI's coordinates as the mouse coordinates change (all in repeatedly_execute_always).

It shouldn't be too hard, but you can also check out https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-dragdrop-1-1-0-helps-to-drag-things-around-your-ags-game!/

According to the manual, the same per-character property controls both behaviors, if the "Characters turn to face direction" setting is true.

TextBoxes eat all keypresses, so on_key_press is never called. Instead you have to use the TextBox.OnActivate event (from the event pane in the GUI editor).

Welcome back, BTW!

I think the Wiki is still good to have, and I don't think it needs to be "for" a single particular thing. Why would it be a problem that it's a mix of different topics? Basically, if the Wiki has an article on something, it's because somebody at some point thought it would be useful/nice to have an article about that—I don't believe there's been a particular problem with spam or other junk content. Besides, it is part of the history of the AGS community, preserving things that are not stored elsewhere.

Now, some of the information may be outdated, and some articles should possibly have disclaimers, but I wouldn't really delete much, if anything.

[any]

You say "add any word someone types," but do you mean any word, or just any word that is actually the name of an inventory item in the game?

If what you want is the first option, that's what Khris's code will let you do. If it's the second, you can do:

Code: ags

function AddItem(String name)
{
  for(int i=0; i<Game.InventoryItemCount;i++)
  {
    if(inventory[i].Name == name)
    {
      player.AddInventory(inventory[i]);
      break;
    }
  }
}

No, the entire Gabriel Knight series is still available on Steam, so the copyright on the IP is still very much in effect, regardless of region. Jane Jensen herself has commented on the difficulties of trying to obtain permission to continue the series from Activision as recently as 2022.

Well, abandonware is not a legal concept in the first place. (I seem to recall a few years back there was a push to try to create some system by which permission could be secured to publish books where the copyright owners could not be found, but I don't think it went anywhere.) From a quick look around it doesn't seem like the French version of the game is available for sale anywhere, so in that sense it is "abandonware," but no, of course that doesn't mean that the owners have relinquished, abandoned or forgotten their claim to the copyright.

Wasn't Quest for Glory 4.5 hit with a cease and desist order as well?

I don't think so.

Well damned if that doesn't take the wind out of my sails.

Look, fan games are always (unless they actively secure permission/license) copyright infringements and liable to be hit with a C&D notice.

Whether or not that will actually happen depends on the company that owns the copyright, and to some extent on what the fan game looks like and how you promote it. In practice, it almost never happens with point-and-click Sierra fan games, at least not recently (we're going back two decades to find examples), and the exceptions tend to have very obvious reasons. There have been probably half a dozen Space Quest fan games in the last few years, and as far as I know none of them have been met with any reaction whatsoever from Activision.

Just don't try to make money off it or make it seem like it's an official game, and don't include anything that could inflict reputational harm on the property (porn, hate speech, that kind of thing), and you'll almost certainly be fine.

[Important:]

To change how the list of dialog options are displayed you can first of all edit the GUI that they're displayed on. If that's not enough, you'll need to implement custom dialog options rendering.

There's currently very little ability to change how the response when you select an option is displayed. See the release notes for AGS 3.5.0:

- Added "Custom Say/Narrate function in dialog scripts" options which determine what functions are used when converting character lines in dialog scripts to real script.
   Important: this does not work with the "Say" checkbox. The workaround is to duplicate option text as a first cue in the dialog script.

In other words, the "Say" checkbox always uses Say(). As already suggested you may set and position an invisible dummy character to say it, but you won't be able to control text width, for example.

In general, this whole approach is probably not the best way to do what you want. (You'll also have to deal with the text advancing on timer or when the player clicks.) I would suggest using a GUI with a Label. Then you can set the text however you like.

Basically, I had a cool idea for a game that's a nostalgic love letter to Sierra, mixing a lot of their work into a multiverse plot.  I'd like to adapt art and sprites ripped from their games, edited for new animation styles similar to Dorkly.

The concept reminds me a bit of the Adventure series by @Akril15.

There hasn't even been a King's Quest fangame that's received C&D either (as far as I'm aware), and that franchise received it's last entry in (check's Wikipedia) 2016.

But has there been a KQ fan game (not just an unofficial remake, but an original game) since 2016?

Didn't the Silver Lining get C&Ded? And at least one quest for glory?

Yeah, TSL did at one point, but they were then able to strike some kind of deal with Activision. The developers released 4 episodes in 2010–11 before the project apparently ground to a halt (the last development update is from 2019).

And the Quest for Orgy parody games were shut down by Vivendi.

But these are the exceptions. There have been a lot of Sierra fan games that never faced a reaction of any kind.