Messages

Re: Tax Game:

Spoiler

It goes to the room with boxes and then freezes?  Is there any actual interaction here or is it just unfinished?

[close]

Re: Don't Worry Baby:

Spoiler

Is there a way to stop the baby from asploding?  I don't know how to stop him from touching the electrical outlet.

[close]

Re: Well, well, well:

Spoiler

The second clue says go north twice the circumference of the well.  I've clicked the trowel on the grass everywhere along what I'm pretty sure is north from the clue and nothing happens.  Is there something else I'm supposed to be doing?

[close]

My previous questions still stand.  Want to finish them all before voting.  Completed the other four, though.  Some really nice variety among entries.  None of them were generic "Help, I'm stuck in a room and must escape several illogical inventory puzzles" games, which is nice! 

ptpt88 (Re: One Room)

Spoiler

Each time you type anything it hints you towards the word dictionary.

Now, what do I do with these colored light balls?

[close]

Re: By the numbers

Spoiler

How do you solve this?

[close]

Still have a few more to try, but low on time!  Good job everybody who participated!  These are fun!

New alpha, new levels.  Level 3 underway, but if you can get there you can see the new projectiles feature.  Frame rate also has some improvements.  (Screenshot not a very good demonstration of this )

You'll have to clear your saves using the top right door in the menu level since old saves won't work.

Download Alpha 7

There should already be a on_mouse_click function in your global script file.

Yeah, I just ran a test and the dialog GUI is still set to visible=false, x=0, y=0, width=200, height=100 whether it's currently on screen showing dialog options or not.  So, my suggestion won't work.

I've never used Text Window GUIs before (Resonance doesn't use AGS' dialog system, instead using a custom module and custom GUIs), so I didn't know this before, but you'll need to use DialogOptionsRenderingInfo functions to get at this info.

Edit: I'm messing with this and it looks like you may not be able to get the auto-generated values for the dialog out of this, rather it's used for setting it up yourself.  So, the only solution might be to custom render your dialog boxes and set the transparent background that way.  A lot of work.

Any one else played with this before and know of a better way?

The top-left edge would have an x and y of zero.  You'll want to grab the x and y coordinates from the parent gui (and then, if necessary, add the x and y vals of the edge components)

As far as it not showing up at all, check the General Settings panel under "Run game loops while dialog options are displayed".  I think dialogs by default block even rep_ex_always. (IIRC)

Yup, use a GUI with a label.  Look up Game.GetLocationName or @OVERHOTSPOT@ in the manual or by searching the forums.

For left click interact, right click examine, you'll just change the on_mouse_click function.  Something like:

Code: ags

function on_mouse_click(MouseButton button) // called when a mouse button is clicked. button is either LEFT or RIGHT
{
  if (IsGamePaused() == 1) // Game is paused, so do nothing (ie. don't allow mouse click)
  {
  }
  else if (button == eMouseLeft) 
  {
    ProcessClick(mouse.x,mouse.y, eModeInteract);
  }
  else // right-click, so examine
  {   
    ProcessClick(mouse.x,mouse.y, eModeLookat);
  }
}

[New features:]

Went on vacation for a week.  Just got back and here's a new alpha:

Download Alpha 5

Zyargeikunn: Levels have been tweaked a lot. Saves now working in latest build.

Radiant: Yeah, I'm having big framerate issues with all the drawing commands.  I'm working on optimizing.  Part of the problem is that all along I've been making the game without really knowing where it was all going.  So it's been cowboy coded into the state you see now.  All the drawing code is modular, so I should be able to rewrite it, but I'll do that later.  Gameplay first.

New features:

-Saving tiles work.  Step on them to save.
-New level zero which serves as the load-a-game and options menus.  (I always liked when game menus are built using the games' mechanics, so I wanted to try that out!)
-Level one significantly updated.
-Ship now lands on new levels to allow actual progression.
-Tweaked guy's running speed for the intended 20 fps.
-Gas tiles now fill up the ship.

Still to do:

-All levels after the first. (Right now your ship will just die at the end.  This will change when an actual level two gets dropped in)
-Fix that damn frame rate.  It still chugs on slower PCs.  I'm working on it, but not sure how much I'll be able to improve it, especially in the time frame.

Try it out and please let me know what you think!


EDIT:

Another alpha:

Download Alpha 6

New features:

-Much improved framerate!  Still not perfect, but better.
-A few tweaks and bug fixes.
-Better on screen messages.
-Taking off gives you a few seconds to get your bearings before giving you control.
-Kind of started putting in level two.

Still to do:

-Levels
-More framerate improvements.

I'm getting to the point where I can just focus on level design.  I'm thinking around 10 levels.  I've got some ideas to keep it fresh.  Should be able to bring this in on time!

I totally still need some music and sound.  Anyone interested in helping with some NES-era stuff?

Woo, went out on vacation for a bit and forgot about commenting!  Well done to everybody and nice job Stu!

Story B was definitely as confusing and twisted as the stairs prominently featured within and I loved it!  My ending was waaay too long, but I wanted to tie all the loose ends up (and I did get them all!) and add some fun twists.  But yeah, waaay too long and probably waaay confusing.  Sorry!  I actually considered making a flowchart version of the story so you could follow it through in chronological order from the point of view of each characters as well as the briefcase. 

Congrats to ddq who managed to wrap it up even better, and in fewer words!  Loved it!

Hrm, I don't really understand why it dropped so much when I changed to drawing 10 layers to the background either.  Maybe when I changed the function to tell it to draw all, it caused some kind of loop that's drawing them all multiple times or something.  I'm going away on vacation for the next couple days and will spend nights rewriting the draw code to see if I can figure this out.


One thing different between the front layer and the other nine, is that the deeper layers all use scaled sprites while the front uses unscaled.  Might that slow it way down?

Mostly, my code just passes the surface around to several different custom functions for drawing rectangles/lines/sprites at the correct scaling for the requested layer.  There may be 1000 or more rectangles on the screen at once plus maybe 100 or so sprites, most scaled.  I could do some testing to consolidate rectangles into fewer larger rectangles, but I wasn't of the impression that the rectangles were the problem.

Yeah, it's an alpha.  Lots of features like saving not implemented yet.  And I tweaked his speed and acceleration on a machine that was getting 15 fps (though I didn't notice how bad the frame rate was at the time) so it feels quite comfortable at that speed.    I'll retweak when I know what kind of framerates to expect.

The outer boxes have alpha channels to have smooth corners, but I could axe that in the interest of frame rate.  But even turning those graphics off, I'm getting similarly slow rates.

But regardless, I gave it a go and changed everything to draw on the background.

I removed all the GUIs and had just the main level (no frames, just the rectangles and character/object sprites) draws to the background every game loop, everything speeds up considerably.  30-34 on my machine.  However, if I'm drawing to the background, I need to draw all the levels every loop.  When I make all the levels get drawn to the background every loop the frame rate drags even lower than it is now.  I was getting 8-9 fps.

It may just be that I'm trying to do something that AGS is incapable of handling speed-wise, which is fine.  It's just a little for-fun project and programming challenge.  I'll release source code when the game's done and maybe someone can look and find a way to improve the speed.

Yeah, if you look at screenshots or try the alpha out you'll see why I'm doing it with 10 GUIs. 



Download Alpha

Each layer is framed with an alpha-channeled sprite and has a different transparency.  The whole thing slides around when you move the mouse, so keeping them on separate guis means I can move them around without having to redraw the all ten layers every game loop.  Usually, the background GUIs are drawn once (until the player moves to a new layer, at which point they're all redrawn again), and then the front GUI that the player is on is drawn every game loop since the player is moving around.  I want to have enemies/etc on deeper GUIs moving around, which makes me nervous since each layer with enemies will have to be redrawn as well.  I suppose I could reduce it to drawing every other loop and see how that looks.

It would help if you also posted the drawing code, because getting DrawingSurfaces isn't that slow a process in itself.

The drawing code is just drawing rectangles to form the level based on a tile map and then a few sprites (non scaled on the GUI that gets drawn every loop).  If I comment out all the drawing code and just leave the creation of drawingsurface etc code from the pseudo code above, I only see a one, maybe two, fps increase.

The advantage of the GUI setup (I thought) is that I don't need to draw those other levels, so they're stored on the GUIs and can get moved around freely.  And I can easily change their transparencies.

And leaving the GUIs there just with the alpha-channeled sprites on them but removing the drawingsurface code gets the frame rate right up there to max, so the GUIs themselves don't SEEM to be hurting the frame rate.   I'm wondering though if it wouldn't be worth all the work it would take to redo the drawing code to just draw the whole shebang to the background.

Hey, with Resonance, I don't do a whole lot of drawingsurface stuff.  I can only think of two places I am using that kind of stuff.  But Infinity Bit is pretty much entirely built around it.  I knew AGS wasn't really intended for that kind of use, but hell, it's just for fun.

But I'm finding my framerate taking a much bigger hit than I expected.  I'm trying to figure out how much of it is due to AGS and how much is due to my approach (I programmed a large portion of the game before I had decided how the game was going to work )

Basically, I'm drawing onto the backgrounds of  10 different GUIs.  Not every loop.  Most loops, I'm only drawing one GUI: the one the player is on.

But to do that, I need to take an existing dynamic sprite or create a new one, create a drawing surface from it, draw on the surface, release the surface, and set the background of the GUI to the surface's graphic.  Is there some way of doing this better than by doing all of this each loop?

Basically my code looks like this and is run through rep_ex_always (pseudocode):

Code: ags

function drawFrame(int i){
  sprite = DynamicSprite.Create(w, h, false);
  DrawingSurface *surface = sprite.GetDrawingSurface();
  drawEverything(surface, i); //pass surface on to get all the drawings on it
  surface.Release();
  gui[i].BackgroundGraphic = sprite.Graphic;
}

sprite is declared elsewhere so I can manage its memory.

I've tried keeping the sprites and just clearing the drawing surface each loop, but it doesn't provide any noticeable change in framerate.

How do I do this better?

Download Alpha 4

Alpha 4 has a close-to-final level one. There are still a few bugs getting squeezed and features to stick in.  I've got to get the save squares working as well as the gas squares.  Initially, your ship will have next-to-no gas and you'll have to step on that gas square before you'll be able to take off towards the next level (which isn't out there yet, and if you get far enough, the game will crash! )  But you can imagine how that works.

This should give you a pretty good idea of how the game will start out.  When you take off with your ship, you'll be on to the next level.  Each consecutive level will be harder with some new twists thrown in like enemies and breakable blocks, etc.

Now, I know that this build is getting some pretty miserable frame rates.  My dev machine was getting around 15 fps, and then when I tested it on another, it ran at 20, and the guy ran too fast and became difficult to control.  Once I can get the frame rate under control, I'll have to tweak the speed of everything to feel right.  Unfortunately, AGS isn't really intended to do all the things I'm forcing it to do right now (go figure), so, I've got to find the best way to optimize the drawing routines.

I'd be interested to hear what kind of frame rates people are getting on different hardware.  It's intended to be run at 30, though that is almost certainly unbearably fast, since I tweaked speeds on a machine that was getting 15 (but I hadn't noticed at the time).

Thanks for trying it out!

New Alpha 3!  I added a simple particle system to make things asplode.  Tweaked a number of other things to optimize drawing and to make room for future gameplay.  Also improved the game's ability to interface with Mappy.

I just tested this out on a better machine than the one I'm developing on and the game goes way too fast.  Stupid dev machine.  I'll have to slow some things down a lot.  Let me know if you're experiencing things going faster than you think they should.

[∞ bit]

Alright, so I'm still working on Resonance, but for the last week I've been letting myself spend an hour a day on Infinity Bit to help me purge some pent up creativity that isn't getting properly channeled since Res has been pretty much entirely designed for well over a year.

I'm making this for the "A Game By Its Cover" contest at TIGSource.  So it will be done this month.

The idea of the concept is to take a fake box art from somewhere like here and make a game inspired by that case.

I chose

∞ bit

The game will involve piloting a shuttle craft from level to level and then platforming around to collect upgrades for your craft to get you to the next level.

This is intended to be a very open development, so I'll be posting alpha versions of the game every couple days or so, and hoping for whatever feedback you can give me so I know how to tweak the game.  When I release, the game will be open source as well.

Screenshots

Download Alpha


8.1.10 - Alpha 9

-Mouse controls corridor, spaceship
-Arrows or WASD control character.
-Down or S to open/unlock doors.


Help!

If anyone is interested in whipping up some improved ship, character, and enemy sprites in roughly the same black-and-green, lo-res style you see above, send me a PM.  I need the ship angling in 9 directions (up-right, up, up-left, right, straight, left, down-right, down, and down-left), character running/jumping animations, and some enemies.

Also, if you're interested in whipping up some NES-era or chip tunes for the game, let me know via PM!

Thought some of the people on this board would like to join in on the new TIGSource competition:



Basically, you choose any fake box art from anywhere such as:

Famicase 2008
Famicase 2009
Famicase 2010

http://fx.worth1000.com/contests/11213/beta-busts-5
http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2008/04/21/fun-from-yesterday/?

or anywhere else, and create a game inspired by that case art.  The famicase stuff is especially cool with lots of inspiration to be had.

I definitely think AGS folk could make a bit of a showing in the competition.  Back Door Man, I believe, tied for second (?) in the last TIGS compo, so maybe somebody can have similar luck.  Regardless, it's a good excuse to just hunker down and finish something!

The competition runs through July 31!  All information here.  A ton of people have started posting about their entries here.

I've started my own small hour-a-day project for the game to blow off a little pent up creative steam.  Thread is here.  Hope to see some AGSers join in!  Show off our beloved engine a bit!

Also, you could totally wait to start until the OROW and do a game for both compos at once!

Woot!  I'll wait for voting to close to discuss my thoughts on some of these, but overall they were really good.  I think A definitely wound up easier to wrap up than B, which probably accounts for the difference in completed endings.  A seemed to lend itself more to the mysticism explanation where you don't have to really explain anything, just say "It is that way because it is supposed to be that way" ala Lost.  B got all timey wimey which is a great challenge!  Plus, A wound up with two, maybe three characters and a mysterious object while B had four characters and two (maybe three: inter-dimensional beard?) mysterious objects that all needed closure and explanation!  Quite the challenge!

So, well done to everyone!  My votes:

Story A- Entry 5
Story A- Ending 3
Story B- Entry 5
Story B- Ending 1  (though 4 was hilarious)

Big thanks to Stu!  Good idea and good hosting!

Luckily, at this stage, it doesn't matter how many people turn in endings.  If you don't turn one in, you can't win.  But winning isn't really the point of the exercise anyway.  So, if you don't write an ending, the only real punishment is that you didn't get to challenge yourself, practice writing a bit, and have a bit of fun!  (Though there's nothing stopping you from writing  your own ending after the deadline!)

I do hope, however, that enough people turn in endings so we have a good field to vote on!

ddq, anyone can join at this stage, though there's only about five hours left minus however long it takes for Stu to send you one of the stories.  Just PM Stu and he'll send you one of the two chain stories for you to attempt to complete!

I guess if Stu isn't around I could send one of the stories, too.

Mine's done!  Can't wait to read these and to see how the other story turned out!