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"reglion" you say? Is that like a lion who lives in your registry to ward off malicious registry predators (viruses, ignorant n00bs, etc.)? It sounds..AWESOME. I think I'll call mine Aslan.

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I wanted to say something similar, but then, since I'm not a native speaker, I wanted to make sure it's not actually a pun with some word or meme I don't know, and found this. Now I'm not interested anymore in Calin's reglions



Darth, I think I see another issue with your troll-flag-system that was not mentioned yet:
What if the troll has/makes a second account (I'm sure a good number of the truly malicious trolls even uses second accounts to reply to their own posts), he'll be soon aware of what's going on and start the whole make-new-accounts-and-start-massive-trolling/spamming-and-complaining-about-the-censorship thing that often comes with banning, so this advantage over banning may actually not be 100% effective. Have you considered this, or maybe observed that it's not a problem?

Some thoughts on why people feed trolls, not in any way claiming to be complete or universally applicable:

- The trolls' topics/posts are usually addressing everyone (no special technical knowledge required) and - explicitly or implicitly - provoke opinionated (not factual) answers. It's easy for everyone to reply to such a topic, easier for example than to make a paintover or to try out some code and look things up in the manual (or other things in other forums). That way, you feel like you have contributed to the community (like "Yayyy, I shared my thoughts on why people feed trolls! Now I helped everyone to widen their horizon!" )
Of course I don't mean every question for opinions to be a troll post, but they often contain something you can strongly disagree with, judge as plain stupid, and things like this.

- Trolls give easy targets if they annoy most people. You know that everyone else is annoyed by them, so you can easily call the trolls out because you know you'll get backed up by the majority of the active community.

- People have experienced bullying (as victims, bystanders, or indirectly through media etc.) and feel uncomfortable seeing everybody turning against one person, at least after a while, so they try to defend the troll.
- Similarly, people are looking for peace and want to mediate between the troll and the troll-haiting community, hence give advices or defend the troll to give some counter-weight.

- Trolls may provoke overreactions by otherwise moderate users, or dumb reactions by not-openly-dumb users, which amuses other people, and some of these other people will defend the trolls, as long as they don't overdo it (in their sympathizers' opinion).

(I may or may not be guilty of, and may or may not endorse some of these behaviours)

Surely there must be someone in Vatican City who has played adventures. The "Latinitas Foundation" maintains a dictionary of latin words for current topics (they invented a translation for "abuse", hooray!), so maybe someone wants to send them an e-mail and ask how they would translate "adventure" in the sense of adventure games?

(As Khris said, please don't quote the full post, only the relevant parts, if any. It's hard to read and spot the new things otherwise)

The error is indeed that AGS cannot convert an int to a float. That is: x and y are integer values, and the Maths functions (here: Sqrt) take floats as input. The functions to convert values are FloatToInt and IntToFloat.
You may either declare x and y as floats instead of ints, and convert the values you store in x and y, or you can leave it as is, and convert x and y to float where you need them as floats (that is, everywhere). Generally, I'd prefer the first option, but it doesn't make much of a difference in this case, as far as I see.

I'd been looking at XNA a year ago, but decided to put that on hold until I got back to the UK, and more regular access to an Xbox.

As far as I know, XNA requires a paid dev-community membership or something to work with Xbox or Windows Phone, otherwise it can be used only to develop PC games.

I've never worked with it, but Microsoft's XNA framework for (especially) C# seems to be similar to AGS in terms of logic from what I read in a small tutorial: There's a game loop which is repeatedly executed, and you update and draw your game objects, and the XNA framework handles most of the resource management, like sprites and audios. As a general game development framework, it has of course nothing included like walkable areas, pathfinding and such (afaik; there are probably libraries for everything though).

C# as a language is syntax-wise very similar to AGS's scripting language, only much more object-oriented.

Edit: what mode7 says

As to the best way of learning, I think there's no golden solution, it really depends on how you learn best. By studying the code of an existing project, by doing a simple game and then try to extend it, by watching video tutorials, reading manuals and browsing function references, or a mix of everything...

Amazing graphics and animations, and nice puzzles, a fun little game.

Was the "Hint" arrow supposed to do something? When I clicked on it, the pigeon just walked a bit, so the click went through the arrow I think.

I think about half the spam I get is not because someone sold or I provided my address, but because my address is guessed.
I started with Gmail when it was still invitation based, so I had the "luck" to get one of the very short addresses (6 letters in the local part) instead of having to append a birthyear or something. But many spammers send their shit just to every combination of, say, up to eight letters, so that was not too lucky. Another spam source is some other address that consists of two dictionary words, also too easy to guess by a brute force approach.
But most of the spam is detected correctly, only once in a month or so a spam mail is delivered into my inbox or a legit mail into the spam folder.

The first thing that comes into my mind there:

Operators like || and && work only on boolean (true/false) expressions like equations, you can't directly substitute them for any "or" or "and" in a natural language sentence. So "if the location is a character or object" must be rewritten as "if the location is a character or the location is an object" before you can turn it into a condition.

Tuomas, is it something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23rdefO4gBU ?
Sometimes, my cell phone interferes only when it's directly beneath the speakers, or not at all, sometimes it makes noise even when it's 3-5 meters away.

Whoever designed the quiz has a twisted idea of what the word 'percent' means.

Well, it's not a "how can we divide your person in these religions"-percentage (which would be inappropriate since many religions overlap), but a "how much of each of these religions is in you"-percentage, so I don't see a problem with that in particular.

EDIT: flower-quiz:
"You Are a Canna - You stand up for what you believe in, even if it gets in the way of what other people think. You are proud of yourself and your accomplishments and you enjoy letting people know that."
I've accomplished being a Canna! Am I good or what!? 8)

Also, in the belief quiz I'm the typical dirty atheist with Secular Humanism on top and probably Jehovah's Wittnesses at the bottom.

I once got this, which was not linked or anything, so you'd have to type the URL from the image:



I can't read anything of the non-english text, but "Emu Hatchery", seriously? I think this must be the worst targeted UCE with the least universally relevant topic I've had so far.
From which I guess it's actually a desperate Emu farmer trying to get any customers, and no virus on the site... (though I'd not recommend to try it out)

You have to start a dialog (created in the "Dialogs" pane of the editor), not a character.

Also, it's worthwhile to use the naming convention to begin every dialog name with a "d", character names with "c", objects with "o" and so on.
So you would have a character cNC which you talk to and a dialog dNC which you start then.

It's [hide ]my spoiler text[/hide ] (without the spaces)

Spoiler

my spoiler text

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I wouldn't say #2 looks boring or generic, but like a completely different character.

I like #1 most, and concerning the "too cute" look, maybe it helps if the moustache points down like in the other versions instead of twisting upwards?

Khris, I think you misunderstood what I was suggesting. I wasn't talking about "fixed" linkage at all.

But I was

Character, inventory and GUI events link to the global script.

Oh, yes of course. I had events like on_mouse_click, game_start and such in mind.

Fixed linkage is out of the question; there are several situations where it is convenient to put one function name into multiple event fields

True, I forgot that.

The only thing mildly inconsistent is the room rep_ex event.
Also, the current system may not be perfect, but changing it because every other newbie fails to read the tutorial properly surely isn't the way to go. Why not fix the tutorial instead by expanding the explanation?

In interface design they say "if a user does something wrong, it's always the system's fault" Doesn't need to be that radical, but if a problem pops up regularly, it might be that the system just isn't too clear at that point. Changes that make the system less usable for experts or even take away possibilities, like the one you mention with one function for multiple events, should of course not be made, so my suggestions above are partly invalid.
Another try: Maybe the editor could display a warning message if the user writes or pastes a function with a default name instead of linking it?

Sorry for continuing this offtopic thing a bit:

I think it might actually be worthwhile for the editor to look for functions in room scripts that would match the default name of otherwise unlinked events and attempt to link them automatically. If you were using a non-default name (like "room_BeforeFadeIn") then it wouldn't work and would have to be manually linked still..and of course automatic linking shouldn't override any manually linked events..but it would probably help AGS newbies out a lot (since this type of issue seems rather common).

The way it works at the moment is also pretty inconsistent, most functions have to be linked, but some can't (rep_ex_always) and in the global script there is no linking at all for the predefined functions. Also, I find it confusing that the naming in the events pane and in the script differs so much, it would be better if the default name for "Before Fade In" would be "room_BeforeFadeIn", for example.
I think it would be best if a) there was no real linking - so the events pane still shows the available functions (and there should be such a thing for the global script, too), where you can jump to them or create them in the script, but it would not have any "linking" effect, and would also display any functions that are directly written/copied in the script; and b) if the function names were fixed, because what you write about having default function names overridden by other function names would probably also be too confusing.

Such a change of how the linking works would IMO be worthwhile especially to make it less confusing for beginners, but on the downside it would lead to some problems with backwards compatibility that would have to be taken care of...

No, I don't think the problem is the hotspot, as beenf seems to use the default cursor, which is properly defined already

The inventory items are indeed too big, or rather the other way around, the inventory window has too small items.
In the "GUIs" pane in the Editor, there should be one GUI called "gInventory" (if you're using the default template for your game, which I believe you do). If you open this, you can click on the white frame in the GUI editor to select the inventory container.
In the property editor, there should be properties "ItemWidth" and "ItemHeight", initially set to 22 and 40 pixels. Change these to the width and height of your inventory items (or the biggest inventory item, though you should try to make them approximately the same size), and it should work.