Messages

I think you're right on, Eggie. Try to aim for a little more of that in your characters.

Very well done. I'll be looking forward to the game.

Can you make me some characters?

I've got the walking aimlessly command working, but Xyzzy (the dog) tends to clip through the player. Is there a way to set him to walk around the player character?

I tried this:

if ((character[XYZZY].x == character[KEITH].x - 45) && (character[XYZZY].y == character[KEITH].y - 45)) {
 MoveCharacter(XYZZY, character[XYZZY].x, character[XYZZY].y - 50);
 }
if ((character[XYZZY].x == character[KEITH].x + 45) && (character[XYZZY].y == character[KEITH].y + 45)) {
 MoveCharacter(XYZZY, character[XYZZY].x, character[XYZZY].y + 50);
 }

But it doesn't seem to work very well.

If you leave the stickman in you could make a kickass flash movie.

Exactly. That's what I was talking about. It could be used for changing variables or calling functions, simple one line commands like that.

I don't know if what you're thinking of is possible yet (*nudge* *nudge*, CJ). For now, just use a button to turn off the GUI.

I don't really find the Debug Mode console useful, as I cannot directly enter script commands into it. I think if you could do that, it would be a much more useful feature.

Uplink did something like that, and it worked well.

Where would I get that?

I'm interested in using Virtual Theater (Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky) style AI for some characters in my game. However, I'm not quite sure how to script it. Here's an example: the main character has a dog, and I'd like it to behave like one. So, it should do the following:

Choose one of these actions at random:
Go to a region and lie down in it
Follow a character
Pick up a toy, run around with it, and put it down
Walk around aimlessly

I'd like the dog to do these actions for a random amount of time before switching to a different one. I know how I'd script some of the actions (in theory):

Lie down in region: Select one of many regions, walk to it, perform the lie down animation and stay in the final frame.
Follow a character: Self explanatory
Pick up a toy: Go to the location of one of several toy objects, remove it, change the view to the dog with the toy, and then go to one of many regions and put it down there.

However, I don't know how I'd program the dog to walk around aimlessly (it might be told to go to a non-walkable area) or how to make it do actions for a random amount of time. I'd also like it to stop what it's doing if the player tries to interact with it.

Another related question: how do I make some walkable areas and walk-behinds only availible to the dog character?

It's been sent.

I am not sure, but i think in the manual it says that rooms above 1000 pixel revolutions were unstable, unsupported, and unpredictable.

I fixed that problem, thanks...

How big is the game? Any chance you could upload it for me to take a look at?

It's about 15 megs, but I can give you an older, 7 meg version (which still has the save bug problem, though not compiled with 2.6 SP1).

Where can I email it to? There's not enough room on my ftp.

Wait...did you happen to load the demo game into AGS before it happened?

I did that to look at some of its dialog scripts, and then the room was messed up when I reloaded my game.

That's really amazing! I think the second MOHO animation would look more adventurey, I'd use that one.

I've just had almost all data from one of my rooms deleted. The only things that were left were the room variables, the room messages, and the walkable areas. Everything else: hotspots, interactions, regions, background...gone. I don't know how it happened, but I'd like something to be done about it to prevent it.

I think that if it's not too intrusive, it can be done well. However, the early Sierra games did it horribly, which is why I've come to hate it. Not only can you easily die, but if you save after getting stuck, you have to redo the entire game. I was playing the original Police Quest the other day, and died when I got shot in the jail by the car theif. So I reloaded, tried to search him for weapons, and the game lovingly presented me with "You should have thought of that when you had him on his belly!" That's when I stopped playing the game, and I haven't gone back to it since. Some people can tell me "use multiple save slots!!!" I shouldn't be forced to do that in an adventure game. A well-designed adventure game should not allow me to get stuck and have to restart the game.

Didn't Butcher use Flash for the intro of Robert Redford 3?

It was part of a seperate exe file.

that would only be okay for the first room they appear in, but for other cases...

NewRoomEx
NewRoomEx (int room_number, int x, int y)

Identical to NewRoom, except that the player character is placed at co-ordinates (X,Y) in the new room.
Example:

NewRoomEx(4,100,50);

will move the player character to room 4 and also place him at coordinates 100,50.
See Also: NewRoom

So basically I cannot use the Interaction Editor to do it, I have to use scripts. I can do that, but I wish I didn't (CJ, if you're reading this, please fix this in the next version).

EDIT: I just looked at the interaction editor, and I feel really stupid...