Messages

JimBob, you're a king among men!  Thanks for all the support so far everybody!

Hey everybody!  Two quick notes:

1) If you're not into Twitter (where I've been posting fairly regular production updatelets), you can now become a fan of Resonance on Facebook.  There will be regular status updates, especially during our current big push, while we get the game ready for IGF.  So, if you're on Facebook, be sure to add yourself!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Resonance/163224168451?ref=ts

2) Also, in order to help me out with IGF entry fees and some extra expenses I'd like to take on for the game, I'm having a little fund raising drive.  I don't expect any big donations unless anyone is feeling particularly generous, but I've set up a way for people to pledge money to help the development of the game and to get something in return for your pledges.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/VinceTwelve/resonance-retro-styled-adventure-game-contest-e

Basically, this is the first way to preorder the game, as anyone who pledges $15 or more will get a coupon to download the game when it becomes available.  There are more gifts for pledging more than that like an early playable mini-demo, guaranteed spots on the beta-testing team, posters, and for the crazy generous, yourself in the game!

Again, I'm mainly providing this as a means for people to get pre-orders, but if you're feeling generous, or any of the gifts tickles your fancy, I'd appreciate any other support you can offer.

$150 covers the game's entry to IGF and a little bit extra.  Anything beyond that goes straight to the team, speeding up development, and to improving Resonance even further!

This is a bit of an experiment, and your chance to support closes on November 1st.  Thanks!

What the---?  A pigeon just landed on my window with a message rolled up on his leg.

It says... "Please post two INGAME screenshots or I'm going to lock this thread."

Miguel, you don't need to defend missionaries from me!  I said they do good things and I had nothing bad to say about them!  I think that no matter why someone does it, bringing medicine or food to people who need it is pretty much always a good thing!   Please don't think that I was disagreeing with you.

Even in my first question, I wasn't passing any judgement on them!  Just asking what people think the conversion rate is with them, and attaching no value to it either way!  My third point was just pointing out what I see as a flaw in the internal logic of some people's (not yours!) religious beliefs and was not passing any judgments on the good that missionaries across the world achieve.



And though I understand the sentiment, "Star Wars Fanclubs" do not usually support charities or help out developing countries (As far as I know!  It would be pretty sweet if an army of Storm Troopers descended on Rwanda to build a school though.)

As for foreign missionaries, I have problems relating to a part of history that is no longer mine. Seams like you are reporting to something that happened a long time ago. As I said, the current modern world doesn't work like that and how many times in your life were you approached by missionaries?

Maybe it's a language issue.  Lots of churches and religious institutions mount missionary expeditions to Africa or South America or somewhere.  These missions often do great things like build hospitals or schools and also do a lot of evangelizing and preaching while they're there.  I'm not saying anything bad about these, as obviously a christian school in a poor town in Africa is better than no school.  So, that's good.  I was just creating a HYPOTHETICAL argument that they might, in fact, be condemning more people to hell than they help reach heaven by trying to indoctrinate the people they help.

Obviously you have a different belief in heaven and hell than a lot of people.  I very much respect your beliefs and think that you have more faith in your god as a kind, loving being, rather than the jealous dick-hole that some religious people make him out to be. 

My 3 part mental exercise really only applies to those who believe in a god who damns people to eternal burning for not accepting him. And, in my experience, there are a lot of those people, and they're often the most vocal and adamant about spreading their beliefs.

Hey miguel,

I think you didn't quite understand part 2, or by extension part 3.

I'm not asking about kids or raising them or whatever.  I'm not making any suppositions on the nature of heaven or hell or any judgments about whether or not kids more often than not follow in their parents' religious footsteps.  Nor am I taking into account the benefits Christianity could have in someone's life (helping them learn morals, be more fulfilled, have a same-minded community, be less worried about death, etc.).

Not even asking a moral question, just a mathematical one.  Just asking for a guesstimate.

I'm just asking what percentage of people who are told about Christianity and its rules or benefits or whatever will eventually convert to Christianity?  Do you think that 15% of people who have a jehova's witness knock on their door will convert?  Do you think that 75% of the people who are approached by foreign missionaries will adopt the bible? What's the percentage overall?  Just looking for you to make a rough estimate in your head.

In other words, if you walk up to a random non-Christian on the street and he allows you to sit down with him and tell him all about Christianity, what are the odds that that person would wind up converting to Christianity and accepting Jesus as their savior?

As far as heaven/hell in part 3, if someone hears about Jesus and the bible and is told about everything by their friend, but decides to continue following their own religion, say, Hindu, where they worship other gods, would they still get to go to Heaven?

I'm just making the argument that if someone has never heard of Jesus, but lives a good life, that person will not go to Hell.  But if they are told about Jesus and reject him, and this person goes to hell, then wouldn't it have been better to not have told that person at all?  Just a hypothetical.

Sounds like a unique story!  That Satan fellow -- he's not so bad.  He's just misunderstood.

Quick thoughts-

1) Do you think that a boy, born on an island who lives a good kind life, loves his parents, is nice to animals, etc, but who will never hear about Jesus or God or the Bible because he's cut off from the world will go to hell because he hasn't accepted Jesus?  Or can he go to heaven?

If "Hell," then I'd argue that your god is a jerk.  But ignoring that, if he can go to heaven:

2) Do the majority of people who hear about Jesus and the teachings of the Bible wind up converting, and thus go on to being welcomed into heaven? Or do most of them reject the teachings for whatever beliefs they were brought up with and wind up in hell?

If you think the majority accept the bible once they learn about it convert, then I would ask you why only 33% of the world is Christian.  Have most of them just not heard of it?  (They have.)  Or, do you think that even a slim majority of the people evangelized to will reject the teachings of the bible?  If so:

3) By teaching people about the bible, you're giving them the option of going to heaven by converting, or go to hell by not converting, and most of them will wind up going to hell(2), whereas if you had left them alone they would have gone to heaven due to the "ignorance clause(1)," is it still personally ethical to evangelize?

Oops! 

I'd go with using characters to simulate bullets so not to complicate things too much for a start.

Room objects are much better choices

Only if the gun can only be fired in one room.  Otherwise, you'll have to create the bullet objects in every playable room.  Apart from this being slightly more work, you may want or need that object for something else in the room.  In this case, characters are much better choices.  You can create as many of them as you want (only need to make them once) and they can all be used regardless of what other objects are in use in the room.

Edit: clarification

Happy Birthday to my soul mate and dirty little secret, Nikolas!

Longer view descriptions and descriptions for loops would be useful.

Pretty much all of Progz' suggestions would help with issues I've bumped up against in the past.

#1 for taking the guesswork out of setting NPC starting positions, or where I'm using a character instead of a room object (which I've done for lots of various reasons.

#2 I often find myself using a hotspot for an object's click interactions instead of the object.  Especially if the object has, for example, a shadow included on it's sprite that I don't want to be clickable, or if it has holes in the middle, like a ladder, that I want to be clickable.  Drawing that hotspot usually involves me turning on objects, putting my fingers on the screen, then switching to hotspots and drawing lines between my fingers.  Being able to see them together would be useful.

#3 I don't usually use background frames for animations, but could see how it would be useful.

#4 In Puzzle bots, there are a bunch of playable characters and one of them was really wide, my choices were to A) Have the thinner bots walk up to the edges of rooms/ledges and have him hang way off the edge, B) Have the thinner bots stay a large distance away from the edges of the rooms and have the wide bot walk up close to them, or C) Draw a walkable area around an inner walkable area and turn it on/off depending on which bot is currently walking.

On a related note, I could still use way more walkable areas.  Nanobots and Puzzlebots need way more walkable areas than I have (making option C above much less usable), but I find ways to work around them, like using solid invisible characters to block off walkable areas.

#5 I don't know that I would have a use for, since at most, I use two or three regions in a room usually.  But it's the same thought process as the walkable areas.

#6 Very useful.

But yeah, a lot of these would require some fundamental changes and are non-trivial obviously.  Good ideas though!

VinceTwelve  Mostly Resonance updates.  Some nonsense.

Take all the code out of room_Load() and just try to change maya to the new room using ChangeRoom.  Does it work?  Make sure ChangeRoom is actually getting called.  Is the character that you're calling ChangeRoom on the player?  If not, no visible room changing will take place, it'll just be moving an NPC between two rooms under the hood.


Alternatively, you could move the NPC to the new room and then call switch character and not have anything in the room_load function.  For example, if the player is currently Maya and you're in Room 9, and you want to change to Willow in Room 10, you could just call the code

cWillow.ChangeRoom(10);
cWillow.SetAsPlayer();

(This code would go somewhere in room 9's script or maybe in the global script, depending on what's causing the room change)

When you change to the room, it's going to set Willow as the playable char, but you need to make sure that willow is in that room first.

So, if you're in the real world as Maya, and then she changes to one of the bizzaro world rooms using the code:

cMaya.ChangeRoom(10);

then in Room 10's script, you need to make sure willow's in the room, then switch to her, then move maya out of the room.  (unless she's supposed to be there)

function room_Load()
{
  cWillow.ChangeRoom(10);
  cWillow.SetAsPlayer ();
  cMaya.ChangeRoom(-1);
}

Thrice, actually.  One got deleted.  Plus, he started a thread in Adventure Talk & Chat.  So four posts in all, not counting this one.   But that was all after he started this thread. 

There are several ways to do this.

One would be to use two inventories, then when you pick something up, you would add the computer mouse to one inventory and the real mouse to another.  Then, when you're in one world, opening the inventory would show you the first inventory, and in the other world, it would show the other.

Another way would be, when you switch worlds, call a function that goes through and changes the name and graphic of each inventory item.  So, for example, inside the function it would say:

Code: ags

if(changing to real world){
  iMouse.Name="Computer Mouse";
  iMouse.Graphic=25;
  //other inventory items here
}
else{ //going to the zany world
  iMouse.Name="Live Mouse";
  iMouse.Graphic=26;
  //other inventory items here
}

Then just call that function each time you change between worlds.

There are probably more ways to do it as well, just throwing out the first ways that came to mind.

Edit: Matti beat me!

You're going to need to read about the on_key_press or IsKeyPressed functions in the manual.  Start from there and then ask any specific questions you have.

Though, I should also recommend, that while it is possible to make a platform game with AGS, it is not easy and will require a lot of complicated coding.  There are other engines that may be more suited to creating the kind of game you intend to make.

Although my syllable count hasn't touched yours yet   

Keep practicing!  You'll get there! 

No,  Do not post in the AGS Games in Production until the game is well underway with several completed in-game screens to show.

If you're asking for people to join your team, post in the Recruit a Team thread.