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Wrong forum. You want "Technical Questions", or "Beginner's Technical Questions".

Well, you could start off with more natural seeming movement, by using the Keyboard Movement module that comes with it - make sure in global script that you change it from "Tapping" to "Pressing".

I read a similar question about jumping a while ago - it doesn't make them *actually* jump, but create the illusion of it, and from what I can tell, is a similar effect to what was used in things like 1213.

Ah, many thanks! By using absirdly high scaled ints, then using a scaled Y value, it seems to be allowing me to create a more "natural" feel to the flight. Now I just need to find the perfect thrust/gravity ratio.

If anyone's played one of those reeeaaaallly old lunar-lander games, they'll know what it is I'm trying to implement as a mini-game in AGS. I think I might have gotten myself in over my head, but it also makes an interesting thought-experiment. There are a couple of problems I've noticed having been experimenting with it. I've probably gotten it organised in a really ineffective way, and any pointers would be helpful!

I start off in the level, having the player as the "lander". The three main variables I'm using are "Thrust", "Gravity" and "Speed". In Repeatedly_Execute I have the following:

Code: ags

int Gravity = 1;
Speed=Speed-Gravity;  
  
player.y=player.y + Speed;

This alters the speed of the "lander" every cycle, based on the force that gravity exerts on it. In effect, making it move downwards more quickly as time progresses, as "Gravity" is subtracted from "Speed" every cycle. The problem I find here therefore is that it becomes absurdly fast, and zooms downwards off the screen, even when gravity is only 1.

My second issue is thus - controlling the lander.

Code: ags

  if (Thrust>0) Thrust-=1;  // So that thrust doesn't stick at full every time it's pressed
  
     if ((IsKeyPressed(eKeyUpArrow))&&(Thrust<5)) {
      Thrust+=2;
   }
   
Speed = Speed + Thrust;

In order to make the thrust propel the craft upwards, the addition of "Thrust" is designed to counteract the subtraction of "Gravity" from "Thrust", resulting in net upwards movement. once again, it moves far too quickly.

As I say, my first problem is the absurd rate of movement, but for the second, I notice that as it gets faster, it will move by several pixels per cycle - this will actually cause trouble by, for example, leaping straight past the "ground" at the bottom if falling too quickly. What I need it to do instead is always move at a *distance* of one pixel, but the speed of this one pixel movement to change depending on the speed of the lander.

If anyone could offer any suggestions, I'd be most appreciative, or if they could point me towards a helpful thread - I've not been able to find something quite appropriate yet though.

Many thanks!

How important, do you feel, is it for backdrops to have some kind of activity going on even if the player isn't moving. I see in things like Space Quest (4 through 6 particularly) that there is always *something* active - neon lights, people walking past, fans spinning - ans I was wondering how much importance you folk placed on making sure something was going on. I seem to have had a mad quest to shoehorn any kind of movement I can into it lately, and was wondering if there were any precedents for not having to put quite so much in.

Bugger. Moral of the story - MORE TESTING. New version up, and as far as I can tell, I've managed to fix it.

[BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!]

The very first game I've actually managed to get finished with AGS is, ironically enough, not an adventure. In fact, it's

BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!

Do you like colours? Silly question, of course. Do you like vats? Hell, who doesn't? What if, by some freaky coincidence, the two needed to be combined?

BILLY certainly does. He has been tasked by the PROPHETS to find KREZUNTHOR, a mystical colour which only he can see; it is also the key to defeating the evil Lord Prezorthh@x. So what do you do when PROPHETS order you to stack colours? Well, you stack 'em of course! Or else.

Featuring game modes like:
- Quantum!
- Clockwise only!
- Bombs Away!



Aside from the action-packed story, this is a puzzle game, involving the stacking of coloured pieces. They fall from the top, you make rows of threes, they disappear. What more could you want? What's that? Points? Well, yes, you get those too.



Find it here at GameJolt.

Do let me know what you think. I just needed to get this damn thing out of my head before I move back on to adventure games. Keep an eye out of "Cyclone's Eye"!

[BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!]

The very first game I've actually managed to get finished with AGS is, ironically enough, not an adventure. In fact, it's

BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!

Do you like colours? Silly question, of course. Do you like vats? Hell, who doesn't? What if, by some freaky coincidence, the two were mixed?

BILLY certainly does. He has been tasked by the PROPHETS to find KREZUNTHOR, a mystical colour which only he can see; it is also the key to defeating the evil Lord Prǝzorthh@x.

Featuring game modes like:
- Quantum!
- Clockwise only!
- And many more!



Aside from the inane story, this is a puzzle game, involving the stacking of coloured pieces. They fall from the top, you make rows of threes, they disappear. What more could you want? What's that? Points? Well, yes, you get those too.




It's a simple game, it won't take you too long (unless you choose the reeaaaallly easy difficulty, or have a personality that makes you addicted to things easily). Just a few things to round off, but it's nearly complete - I can guarantee you'll have it by Christmas - whether it's actually finished or not!


Code & Game: 100%
Storyline: 100%
Decontamination: 100%
Graphics: 100%
High Score mechanism: 100%



EDIT: The internet here in Saudi Arabia is ghastly, so I've thus far been unable to upload the game to the internet. I'm afraid that it's going to be a New Year release rather than a Christmas one! Unless we can get some kind of international petition movement going to push Christmas back a week, but that seems somehow unlikely.


PPS Disregard that, it's done. Look at the completed games thing!

Hopefully the topic was expressive enough. What I've got at the moment is an array (int Rainbow[7]), and ten different values that each part of the array can be. To give the first one a randome value is easy enough:

Rainbow[0]=Random(10);

But now I need to make the next one random, but a different value from the one before it, and so on upwards until it does each of the seven parts. Initially, I was thinking of using "while" to go through each one, but it's only seven, so doing the code for each isn't exactly taxing. I'm just stumped as to what I'd tell it to look for each time it went up, or how to make it "re-roll" the random number if it's the same as one of the ones before.

Merci beaucoup!

Well, looks like number 1 is the resounding favourite. I guess it was mine in a way too,  after all, the Cold War isn't a theme that's been visited much, and I like weirding people out with storylines like that! I'm going to have to get some practice at the backgrounds, just got to make the more sixties-ish with the low-res assets available.

Part of the problem I have when making games, is focusing. Not that I'm lazy or anything, I just have too many ideas on the go, and keep making drastic changes. On the whole though, I have four key ideas for proper adventure games, and have done some work on each, but have a desire to push forward with at least one of them. Right now, I'm finishing up a puzzle game, but after that, I'm going to put the (considerable) spare time I have towards finishing up one project in particular, and in order to avoid too much wasted effort, I'd be keen to find out what kind of adventure most people would be more keen to play. So, I present the four ideas I have - do tell me which would appeal to you the most, or how you might alter one to make it appeal more!

1: Cyclone's Eye
      - 1963: an experimental USAF spy plane develops a malfunction over Soviet Kazakhstan, forcing the pilot to eject in dire circumstances amidst the crumbling wreckage of his aircraft. As he comes to, he finds himself recovering in a rural doctor's surgery; in Oklahoma. A year before he took off. His goal is therefore to find out how he got here, and why everyone's a little bit off-kilter.
- Intended to be slightly more serious, in as much of a FoA style I can muster.

2: Welcome to the Quantum Police

     - having finally been forced to seek work after sponging off her parents for years, the only job that a young lady can find and keep is with an underground, well-meaning if often unsuccessful quasi-vigilante group, who take their orders from a quantum-supercomputer a bit too literally. While initially there for the money, she takes well to it, and finds herself increasingly becoming the "common sense" of the group.
- a shorter game, episodic with a story-arc over a few of them. More cartoony, sort of a Sam & Max style.

3: Manifold Selfhood
     - Harry Janeiro's acting career took a turn for the worse after his sudden and unexpected death in a transit accident. Fortunately, his insurance company stumped up to have his mind backed up into a computer, but no more. Now effectively stuck in a small box in his own apartment, he gets an offer he can't refuse from an old friend - pretend to be him for a week while he does some slightly shady work for a biotech company, in exchange for a new, grown-from-scratch body. But of course, it's never going to be as simple as that.
- sci-fi styled, sort of taking Deus Ex 2 as an aesthetic inspiration, and once again a bit more serious.

4: Sami the Cat and the Blasphemous Cake

   - Sami is, of course, a cat, and she would like to do something special for the
guy who took her in's birthday. Being a cat makes this a bit difficult, but an evil arch-sorceror decides to give her a bit of a hand by turning her into a girl, and suggesting she bakes a birthday cake. She's given free reign of the castle to do this, and is cheerfully oblivious to the sheer evil that resides within this temple of despair while she searches for the ingredients.
- Once again, more cartoony, with a strong theme of the juxtaposition of the sheer evil in the environment, and her nonchalant attitude towards it.


I'm well aware I should be making something I want to make, but these are four things I would like to see finish. I'd just rather that what I make is something other people want to/are going to play! Thanks in advance for your input.

*EDIT* - corrected. Consistently four now!

Ah, I see. For my purposes, if I use your script verbatim, it's making an array go out of bounds, so now I'm adapting it to my purposes as well based on that. Many thanks!

No idea if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how AGS's mouse things work, and do point me in the right direction if I am, but I'm wondering if there's a means of getting an int to change with the mouse's movement. In my case for example, increasing as it moves to the right, and decreasing towards the left. I was thinking of something like using the mouse's.y position on the screen, but a) the int would never get below 0 or above 320, and b) the int would always be the y position, rather than consistently increasing with right movement, and vice versa.

Hopefully I've made myself clear enough! Merci beaucoup.

Now I have a strange urge to play the first one! I look forward to this...

Of course, a game crashing when you don't expect it to is annoying, but in this case there's a good reason for it (I promise!)

Some interesting ideas, merci beaucoup! Looks like I've got some crashes to engneer...

Bit of an odd question perhaps, but for the purpose of a game, I'm looking to cause the game to crash when then user does something. Not just "close down and pretend it's a crash", but a proper, error-message creating crash, for authenticity's sake.

A lot of the time when I'm making something in the script that'll lead to a mistake, the game refuses to compile. I've managed to cause stack overflow errors, but what other kinds of interesting problems can I deliberately cause and how, for variety's sake?

Does anybody else have any odd quirks of the way they do their AGSing? Like a certain way/place it has to be done in, or in certain conditions?

In my case, I find myself only able to do anything in the middle of the night. For some reason, nocturnality is conducive to me actually getting things done, otherwise I fidget and find other things to do. Also, I cannot stand having noise in the background, especially not televisions. Music is ok if what I'm doing it repetitive.

Aaahhh, ok, that makes sense - plus, I can now apply the technique to other things I've been doing that seem to have been suffering from the same "flatness" problem.

The reason I've gone for a small mask is to try and accentuate how comically large the character himself is - he'll be even larger than the other characters in game, too.

So, not the Roger Moore kind of Saint? 'cos I'd have gone for that.

Ian Ogilvie is fine too.

Trying to go with a "grotesque" theme for some aspects of what I'm doing, so I've opted for making this health professional ironically unhealthy, most evidently through his penchant for saturated fats, his triple chin, and ill-fitting surgical mask.

Something about the way I do shading makes it feel wrong, though. Like it's a sub-image within the picture sticking out by about an inch, with an otherwise flat surface.