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For a title screen, we need a title, of course.

Title ideas, from this thread (including some joke titles) and new ones:

"Curse of The Swarm"
"Drop by Drop" - It's related to the vampire and also to "the drops" given from a lot of artists to make the game. (says Tabata )
"Chronicles of Merrick"
"Merrick's Quest"
"Merrick's Euest" - because my E key is not working properly...
"Merrick's Euesthesia"
"No Euest For The Wicked."
"The Importance of Being Euest"
"The Experiment" - referring to the vampire experiment and the swarm experiment
"In the Fangs of Science" - referring to the story, who would have guessed.
"Another One Bites the Dust" - because Merrick's biting!
"Merrick on a Bloody Rampage" or only "A/The Bloody Rampage"

Okay, my barely creative hour is over... now you decide! (and may of course suggest other titles, but to reach a compromise fast, it's probably best to also state your favorite title(s) from the present suggestions)

Also note that the online manual is out of date when it comes to audio. The built-in manual (menu Help->Contents, F1 key, etc.) is up to date.

Works for me.

I just put

Code: ags

SetSkipSpeech(3);

in the game_start() function in the GlobalScript.

Where did you enter yours?

You can also set that option in the general settings if you never change it throughout the game:
It's the "Allow speech to be skipped by which events" setting, set it to "Mouse or keyboard"

Don't judge me by that, pleeease :'( At least I misunderstood the topic and thought it would be a suggestion of a new name for the whole forums to replace "AGS Forums"!

Congrats!

As for the walkthrough: Choose your own adventure!

[n]

I guess I'm the only one who never read anything different than "board name" then

I just found this huge list of questions in ads here:

"Plymouth--isn't that the kind of car America wants?"
"Shouldn't your family be drinking Hawaiian Punch?"
"What do you want most from coffee? That's what you get most from Hills."
"Touch of Sweden: could your hands use a small miracle?"

Searched for "claims rhetorical questions", there might be some more samples there with these search terms.

something like

Code: ags

    
    //predefined size of view rectangle
    int num_view_tiles_x = 20;
    int num_view_tiles_y = 10;
    //player position in view
    int player_view_offset_x = 3;
    int player_view_offset_y = 9;

    //player index to (x,y) position
    int player_y = player_index / num_tiles_x;
    int player_x = player_index % num_tiles_x;

    //compute the x and y coordinate of the upper right corner of the view rect
    int view_offset_x = player_x - player_view_offset_x;
    int view_offset_y = player_y - player_view_offset_y;
    if (view_offset_x < 0) view_offset_x = 0;
    //and/or similar range checks...

    i = view_offset_x;
    k = 1; // I ignore it ;)

    while ( i < view_offset_x+num_view_tiles_x && i < num_tiles_x ) //last bit is also a range check
    {
      j = view_offset_y;
      
      while ( j < view_offset_y+num_view_tiles_y && j < num_tiles_y )
      {
        int index = j * num_tiles_x + i; 
        if (tile[index].tileno[k] != 0) {
          // and so on...

should do the trick.

Also, I don't know if it really makes a difference in performance, but I usually prefer to go in the y direction first and then in the x direction, to traverse the fields in the same order as they are in the array. It may have a better performance if the region around the field you access are cached (like, when you access array[0], array[0] through array[32] are read into the cache; now you would access fields 0, 70, 140, ..., 1, 71... in that order and not benefit from such caching).

Is there a particular reason why you use a custom Say function, centered on the screen and with preceeding character name, instead of just using the standard Say function centered above the character, with different speech colors?
I find it always hard to see who is speaking with this subtitle kind of speech.

I like the idea (and silliness). The "losing is more fun than winning" scheme is implemented in some games already: think about Lemmings, isn't it more fun to let them all commit suicide? (which gives you a bad highscore or lets you not win the level)
And I think there are some games where it's possible to drive over or shoot people you were supposed to rescue, and if you do it for fun, you (sometimes even instantly) lose the game.
Sim City let you ruin your city with disasters, only for fun.

If you knew of the Character.Clickable, why didn't you try Object.Clickable?

Probably because in the editor, the Clickable property is only available for characters, not for objects. This is indeed a bit inconsistent and allows for misleading logical deductions.

We need your code to find the error.

Maybe you wrote more than one line after the if statement, and didn't use brackets?

it show-cases just how insignificant we [humans] are.

More distressingly, it shows how insignificant we [members of the AGS forum] are!

And every single one of our creations :'(

Just an Idea that's been done already but not in this way I don't think ?, but is nice for opening up the thing's you can do would be ...let's say...you have a detachable hand that you can detach and use to walk around with, on it's finger's like evil dead the movie. Just like the whispered world, you can use this hand to go to places a human could not reach or fit through. ( far out there, Yes, but just an idea of doing puzzles with something other than your character all the time ).

That's a terrible idea! (I haven't followed the thread that closely, but I think they ended up not using it.)

For the sake of completeness, this guy is also working on such a game mechanic.

Though A* is not really suitable for this problem

Instead of

check which of the adjacent tiles has a value that indicates it was the previous step (its remaining movement points value is higher by the right amount, and your tile is reachable from it).

you could also create a second array to store the predecessors in the path for each tile (values 0-4 as left, right, up, down, and "not set", or something), and update accordingly during the search.
Then you don't have to do the local search during the backtracking, but have to use more memory; might be better, might be worse.

Good to know that a scrambled and a solved Rubik's cube are the same size!

This reminds me of the classical film and book "Powers of Ten", had the same concept, but with less objects for comparison.

These two figures about scale on xkcd are also quite interesting.

Ah, I found the problem: I already had the codec (and registry entry), but I also had a third-party codec pack (K-Lite Codec Pack) which added some missing, but also replaced or essentially disabled some of the existing codecs, including this one. Thanks for the help!
Now let's see if I have the balls to finish this game 8)

I think I might have found the (or a) reason for the glitch with disappearing text:

If I turn on the "Windows Presentation Foundation" plug-in (version 3.5.30729.1, seems to be the latest. Also, I'm using the latest FF 4.0.1), the text immediately disappears, if I turn it off, everything seems to work fine.

I don't know where and for what I had to install this WPF plugin, hopefully I'll never need it again, seems to be only another security risk anyway.

--

I've not encountered any display problems with Chrome though, but I haven't used it much, only occassionally when something didn't work in FF or when I wanted to compare the speed on a particular web app.
But it's strange that there are problems with a Google owned site (can't use Google Voice in my country, unfortunately, I'd love to try it out), I would have expected Google to go for 150% compatibility with their own sites and only then looking at problems with other (non-major) sites...

Anything new on the original issue of the thread? Babar, could you fix it?

Until now, I've noticed the problem in this forum only.



After some scrolling and mouse moving (links appear on mouseover):


If I highlight the text, it appears.

This thread here is the first result on the issue in Google, and in other forums, threads on this problem didn't get any helpful replies...

I had a really hard time voting on this one, thanks to all the participants for all these completely different games! Congrats to you, hedgefield, and the close second winners!