Messages

Hey people.
I'm having trouble with clicking on some hotspots. Here's the code I'm using...

Code: ags

function on_mouse_click(MouseButton button)
{
  if (IsGamePaused()==1) { }
  else if (gInventory.Visible==true && GUI.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y)==null) {gInventory.Visible=false;}
  else if (button==eMouseLeft) {
    if (cCharacter.Room==cEgo.Room && GUIControl.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y)==null) {
      cCharacter.Walk(mouse.x, mouse.y, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cCharacter.FaceLocation(mouse.x, cCharacter.y, eNoBlock);
    }
    ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeInteract);
  }
<snipped>
}

Now, the problem is on the screens where cCharacter is in the same room as cEgo.
Most of the time it works as it should, but sometimes the character just walks over to the hotspot and it doesn't process the click afterwards. I've also got rep_exec telling the cursor to change its graphic when over a hotspot, so I know the game knows there's a hotspot there, it just sometimes chooses to ignore it. Furthermore, from what I can tell, the closer the mouse is to the centre of the hotspot, the more likely it is to not register.

Any ideas on why this is happening and maybe how to stop it?
Thanks in advance.

I hadn't set the game.screenshot values because I figured they'd be redundant, as DynamicSprite needs width and height variables to work anyway.
But I was wrong, and setting them has indeed fixed it.

Thank you both.

Haven't seen Eulogy, but Death At A Funeral was awesome! Very funny!

Ditto.

I wonder how bad next year's remake will be?

Pokemon is stupid!
Not saying your story is stupid or that you are inherently stupid for having written it. I just felt like expressing angry faces at how stupid Pokemon are.

It actually made me appreciate the 'Mons more than I previously had done.
So much so, in fact, that I tried to find a fansub and watch the old series though fresh eyes, but I couldn't find more than a few episodes that didn't have that Ameridub on them.

So... yeah.

Also Babar, that's song was the first thing that went through my head when I saw this thread title, too.

Hello people. I come to you with an aesthetic problem.
And that problem is that DynamicSprite.CreateFromSaveGame looks terrible after resizing.

On the left here, we have CreateFromScreenShot, on the right, CreateFromSaveGame.


Is there a way to make CreateFromSaveGame look better?
Alternatively, is there maybe a way to make a dynamic sprite less dynamic, so I could use CreateFromScreenShot and it will still be there after closing and re-opening the game (other than saving it to a separate file)?

3.1.2 SP1, by the way.

Thanks in advance.

[IT'S BUMPDATE TIME!]

What time is it, kiddies?
IT'S BUMPDATE TIME!
Quite a lot has been going on as of late....

About half way through August I had an idea for a really cool ending to the game. It'll take a lot of work, but it should be well worth it. In a way, then, it's good that I didn't finish this before now, otherwise this new ending would never have existed, and the game would have just finished in a bland and obvious way, whereas now it'll be epic. Fact!

Then, an offer of help with the dialogue finally arrived near the beginning of the month from new guy smartgenes. Which is awesome. FACT!

Not long after that, I had another idea on how to make the UI flow better, so completely overhauled that, with a tonne of scripting around it. Which is annoying. FACT!

So... yeah.
Stuff's coming along quite nicely, if a bit slowly.

I know you don't care, but then why are you reading this?

That was a pretty cool little game. Some good funny dialogue especially.
Also, I really dig your graphic style (in this game and the Biggles one you did), but I do think Paul could do with a walk cycle.

Also, a short line of dialogue explaining why...

Spoiler

the robots won't follow you through the sad door

[close]

...wouldn't go amiss. And...

There’s a full track listing in the readme file.

Not in the one I got.

But overall, well done. I enjoyed that.

To my shame UM, it took me a paragraph or so to realise that rant wasn't serious. But I was laughing before that point, so all was well.

If you haven't already, take a look around the site. The guys that wrote Old Man Murray also did the dialogue for Portal and Psychonauts.

Here's another cool AG one, which admittedly I should have mentioned earlier to help virtualpsycho out. Sorry about that, vp.

[Hide all their controls]

When player interface is disabled, GUIs should: Hide all their controls

I didn't think this applied to labels. But why wouldn't it? :

For anyone who cares, it can be changed at runtime with SetGameOption(OPT_WHENGUIDISABLED, x);

I tried your first method with a 640x400/16bit game with both DirectDraw and Direct3D.
The text was always visible from the start just fine, no matter which mode or what .Transparency.

Any idea why it's not working for me?
I tried it in 16 and 32 bits, with DirectDraw and Direct3D, both through the editor and compiled, and it's still giving the same result.

What's more is if I put...

Code: ags

 while (gFrame.Y>=356) 
 {
  gFrame.Y-=5;
  Wait(1); 
 }
 Wait(100);

...then the text stays blank until after the wait period, the same way as I mentioned earlier with the transparency attempt.

You can download the tween module

Thanks, I'll look into that.
I'd rather not have to use a plugin just to make a game do what it's supposed to be doing in the first place, but I'll try it if nothing else works.

Well, in that case...

While on astronauts thing - they should give them something like the ropes Batman uses for grapling (only maybe with some thing sticky or magnets at the end, so they don't damage the actual ship). They should have that on their arms so if the drift away they just point it at the shuttle and shoot...maybe they even have that.

They do.

Fixed that for you.

While on astronauts thing - they should give them something like the ropes Batman uses for grapling (only maybe with some thing sticky or magnets at the end, so they don't damage the actual ship). They should have that on their arms so if the drift away they just point it at the shuttle and shoot...maybe they even have that.

The trouble with that idea being that Batman uses one in a situation where there's gravity and a clearly defined 'up'. Because the grapple pulls him away from the Earth's gravitational pull it's easy for him to stop. In a Zero-G environment, once you accelerate you need to apply an equal force to stop yourself moving which is basically asking astronauts to pick up over their own body weight. End result - astronauts slamming into the ship's hull and it becomes a contest as to whether the suit or the ship takes the worst/most expensive damage.

Not necessarily.
You're assuming it must include the rope-retracting mechanism, but it doesn't have to.
The astronauts could just pull the rope by hand once it's attached.
They could probably even still include the retracting mech if they made it sufficiently weak.

Tools don't work predictably in space. They found early on that a drill used in Zero-G would actually cause the astronaut to spin around at great speed, for example.

Even if that astronaut was anchored to the rest of the shuttle in some way?


Edited out rather condescending pic.
Sorry, I mis-read your post. Upon re-reading, it's clear I didn't need to explain that to you.

[Idea #1)]

I'm having trouble with text showing up and acting accordingly when I use gui.Y and/or gui.Transparency.
Here's what I've tried so far...


Idea #1)
I started with a little text box (gFrame) sitting below the screen with a label (lblSubtitle) saying "Day One", and this code...

Code: ags

function room_AfterFadeIn()
{
 while (gFrame.Y>=356) 
 {
  gFrame.Y-=5;
  Wait(1); 
 }
}

gFrame moved up from below the screen as it should, but the text didn't appear until after it had stopped.
I figured this was because the engine doesn't want to waste resources by writing text while it's off-screen, so...


Idea #2)
Move lblSubtitle to a different gui (gFrameover) and have it fade in and out over gFrame after it's stopped moving.

Code: ags

 while (gFrame.Y>=356) 
 {
  gFrame.Y-=5;
  Wait(1); 
 }
 int trans=gFrameover.Transparency;
 while (trans>0)
 {
  trans--;
  gFrameover.Transparency=trans;
  Wait(1);
 }
 Wait(200);
 while (trans<100)
 {
  trans++;
  gFrameover.Transparency=trans;
  Wait(1);
 }

gFrame moved as it should, and then nothing. No text, and the game hung as if I had called Wait(∞).


Idea #3)
The gFrame.Y code seemed to work well enough, so I tried adjusting the gFrameover.Transparency code to be more like it.

Code: ags

 while (gFrameover.Transparency>=1)
 {
  gFrameover.Transparency-=1;
  Wait(1);
 }
 Wait(200);
 while (gFrameover.Transparency<=99)
 {
  gFrameover.Transparency+=1;
  Wait(1);
 }

Still nothing. Same result as #2. However, when I change it to...

Code: ags

 while (gFrameover.Transparency>=5)
 {
  gFrameover.Transparency-=5;
  Wait(1);
 }
 Wait(200);
 while (gFrameover.Transparency<=95)
 {
  gFrameover.Transparency+=5;
  Wait(1);
 }

...the text finally shows up, but it instantly flashes on and off instead of fading. I tried changing the instances of Wait(1) to a higher number (in case it was working, but just going too fast), but that only makes it take a bit longer before the text still flashes on and off.


Also, I found an old thread where people said that it might have been the Wait(200) in the middle screwing it up, so I tried all of the above codes using SetTimer(20, 200) instead (with the latter part of the code in rep_exec under an if (IsTimerExpired(20)) clause), but that gave the same results for each of them.


Any ideas how I can fix this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Can anyone tell me...

1) Can the volume of a video be controlled from within the engine? How? Is it just by the master volume, or does (could) it have its own channel control like music and sound effects?

2) How is this affected in 3.2, where (from what I understand, not having used it yet) you have to choose a channel to play a sound file and then call back to that specific channel to adjust its volume? What channel would a video's audio be in?

3) Has anyone made a game using ogg video yet? By which, I mean has it been tested on a distribution-size scale? Are there any issues such as the old "some avi vids might not play if you have ffdshow installed" one?

4) I'm currently using Scotch's Theora plugin for the most part, which allows me to play videos and keep the game's gui overlaid (but not clickable, by my choice) onto them at the bottom of the screen. This means I need to include the vids in my compiled folder, whereas the manual says that if I used PlayVideo() instead they would be absorbed into the exe, which I kinda dig.
My question is: is there a way to either use PlayVideo() and keep my gui (and possibly soft subtitles) visible over the bottom of the clip, or keep using the plugin but not need to make the clips available outside of the game?

Thanks in advance for any help.

It's because your room is huge.

See here and here.

These aren't my rules, but I don't think the appendix strictly counts because it did have a use at one point, whereas the clitoris has always just been there.

Also, I think I read/heard somewhere (probably QI) that if a person were to go feral and start eating grass and leaves again, after an initial period of being really quite ill, the appendix would slowly work it's way back into the digestive rotation, if you catch my drift.

Think of it as a muscle that's atrophied: it was useful once, it's pretty much dead weight as is, but with proper stimulation and exercise it can become strong and healthy again.

Of course, I can't remember where I got this info, so I could well just be repeating spurious bollocks.

God specifically created a male and female version, so why give the man useless nipples? He didn't give the woman a useless penis.

It's called a clitoris: the only organ in the human anatomy (incl. males and females) that serves no pertinent function, other than "it feels a bit good when you touch it".

Ultra Magnus: That wasn't an answer.

How was that not an answer?
You're alluding to the presence of animal fossils that aren't rabbits, but resemble them on a DNA level, thus proving evolution.
But why can't those fossils just be the pre-Ark-era rabbits?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Bible only states that mankind and the animals were created without evolution, not that those animals couldn't have evolved since they were created. And that's what (I think) Nathan was saying about the many different animals around these days being bred up from one or two on the Ark.

Although he seems to have copped out of this point, so maybe I just read him wrong.

As far as the seven pairs or just seven of every clean animal that's just a translation issue.  But God commanded first that he bring two of every kind so that the earth could be repopulated. Then later, god commanded that he bring extra of every clean animal.  There could be several reasons for this.

I'm aware of that, my point was simply that it was a load more animals that needed to fit onto that boat.

So it seems realistic to me that two of every kind could fit into the ark.

Or seven.

"Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth."

Or maybe fourteen.

"Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens also, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth."

How come we never find fossils of current animals like rabbits or lions?

He already answered that one by saying it was possible that the Ark only held representatives of each species as a whole, from which lions and rabbits may have been bred since.

MediaFire's always been good to me.
The only times I've seen files deleted were when they had been reported for copyright infringement.

Otherwise, they generally get good speeds, files stick around for as long as they keep being accessed (for instance, my game's demo is still where I left it 18 months ago - and I never signed up for an account), and contrary to what monkey_05_06 said, they've never made me wait between downloads like RapidShare or MegaUpload do.

The only drawbacks I've encountered personally with MF are that they don't allow more than one simultaneous download per IP (but virtually nowhere does without charging for it) and they have a limit of 100mb per file, so big stuff has to be put into a split archive.

So MediaFire's always been my go-to hosting site, save for the occasional glitch.
Or SendSpace for the bigger stuff, if I can't be bothered to archive it.

It would certainly be appreciated.