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Hey, if you've been here long enough, you know that there's been times when AGS games have been sold on ebay and whatnot without the author's permission. So, what I do is stick a license agreement on all of the MonkeyGames Related games. There have been a few changes to it over the years, and here's a brand-new version:

This computer game software is considered FREEWARE and cannot be distributed for commercial profit.

This game may be redistributed on websites focused on video games or computer software as long as it includes all of its original files and documentation. It may also be redistributed in a disc bundle attached to a software or video gaming magazine under the following conditions:
i)   The magazine publisher has prior written consent from MonkeyGames Entertainment
ii)   The game is featured in the magazine itself
iii)   The game is redistributed with all of its original files and documentation
iv)    The game is strictly marked as FREEWARE

If you, the user, have acquired this game from none of the means above, then return it immediately and contact MonkeyGames Entertainment at netmonkey@cellosoft.com.

Anyone is free to use this template for their game... I won't get mad.

Now here's where I need your help. Maybe someone could look at this (play lawyer ) and see what needs to be added and changed. Maybe we can build a general license agreement for everyone to use, too! Well, at least the freeware folks. We could call it "The AGS Game User License" or something (TAGUL?!).

I'm suprised that this feature has not been implemented yet: where you can animate inventory items when they're on top of hotspot or object or when it's moving, just like you can do with cursors... there is probably a work around to it, but it would be a pain in the ass to do it if you had like 150 inventory items or so.

Also, IsInteractionAvailable and IsInventoryInteractionAvailable are pretty handy, but I also need a way to check whether there is an interaction available for a specific inventory item... Like, for example, you use the key in the door, and it's not the right door and the character knows that, so he says something like "That's not the right key for that door.", instead of walking all the way down to the door and trying, which is what would happen if you used the correct key.

I want to make my game so that when the player interacts with an object, the Player Character walks to that object without blocking.

However, If I use MoveCharacter(GetPlayerCharacter(), mouse.x, mouse.y) for example, there is a posiblity that the character moves to the wrong spot compared to MoveCharacterToObject because MoveCharacterToObject apparently moves the character to a spot below the object.

My question is... how can I find that spot below the object manually? any suggestions?

Blocking sucks

Is there a way to check whether the player character is hidden in a room? I have a blocking function call on on_mouse_click(..) relating to the player character, but since the character is hidden in a particular room the cursor switches to wait and it waits... forever. 

Edit-
Also, is there a way to make the whole active inv (when you cycle through actions, you get the last item you selected) not be a "Standard cursor mode"? Even if I make my own SetNextMouseCursor() or whatever, internally AGS still considers it to be a standard cursor mode.


I guess making my own user interface is a bit harder than I thought

I was just thinking and it seems to me that a big difference between Graphic Adventures and other game genres (action, action-adventure, rpgs, some god games, and strategy games)  is that Adventure Games don't really have nameless NPCs (Non-Player Characters) you can kill for no meaningful reason other than to defend yourself or make the game easier.

I'm thinking, however, are there any non-adventure games out there that do not have the option for the player to kill random npcs? Can it be possible to include nameless characters with a good purpose? I guess TLo Zelda kind of did it, but the game is more of a Console action/adventure game. And the survival horror did it too, but they too are Console adventure games.

Discuss.

Where exactly can you have speech capabilites? I know you can have it on:
Dialog Options (I guess it assumes it's the player character)
Dialog Scripts
Global/Room Scripts (with DisplaySpeech)

What about:
Global messages?
Room messages?
Display?
how does ags know who's saying the line then?

I always wondered how people like Grundislav managed with several voice and sound and music files in their game folder (for like Carver Island 3), so I decided to come up with a solution for it. This is the first step, which just organizes the sound files. It does not yet organize the voice files based on character, but I'll implement that sometime soon. I always wanted to make a media player of some sort, and this is where this plugin is heading towards. Eventually you'll be able to play the sound and audio files, as long as you have support for them (like an OGG plugin for DirectX and whatnot). I have already messed with playing files, but this version does not include that feature because it's still very buggy.

I wanted to release a full-featured version in one blow, which might be the next version you'll see, but I wanted people to test this to test AGS Editor plugins and also to test .NET-based plugins, which was not the original idea supported by CJ-. It seems to work very well, just follow the 3 step install process in the readme file enclosed with the plugin.

Enjoy!

Download


Update: There's a new update to the plugin... download it if you downloaded it before the "Last edit" date on this post.

You know that the japanese wish they had big fighting robots like they do in their animes, just look at what their latest achievement is:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040325/photos_od_afp/040325143653_fsj1cesr_photo0

Soon, we will all be doomed... doomed, I tell you! DOOMED!!!

I was just wondering since ags now has a wide range of support for alpha blending, can you have alpha blended regions (that you would import, of course). I guess not, since I can't find anything in the help

I'm looking for the font used for the 5 Days A stranger logo, which Yahtzee doesn't have anymore and I'm trying to make a higher res version of it.

Here's the logo:


I would appreciate if you checked in your fonts directory and tell me if you have it. Send me a message if you do, or reply to this message.

I think it would be neat if we could hightlight words in a Display box by using some sort of special character (like using [ to go to the next line) where that word would be in a different color from the others in order to highlight something important...

I just had the craziest idea while I was walking around the campus: What if you could have an adventure game where you have the option to connect to IRC while you're in the game in order to get some hints or talk to others playing the game at the same time? I think it would be pretty interesting specially since the AGS community hangs out on IRC and whatnot. I guess the plug-in would have basic irc commands like ctcp, connect, join, part, and quit where the programmer could set it to either make the player choose or connect automaticly to a server (like to quakenet).

I would implemet this in my game is someone made a plug-in out of it.

I was talking to this guy and he said that he wanted to play some AGS games, but he has a mac, though. So I wondered how hard would it be to make a mac version....

Anyway, the only problem I can think of is that the runtime uses Allegro, right? And I guess that's only available for windows and linux.... hmm. So, would it take a big rewrite of the code?

The AGS help file explains some of the setup features a little bit, but the explanations might be too technical and more developer-oriented to include in a game's manual. I was wondering if anyone would like to help by describing each feature of the setup for a player that has is not familiar with it.

Some of the features are easy to explain, and if you think you have a good explanation for them, reply to this post.

Other features are kind of difficult to explain, like the advanced settings, Use 85 hz display, etc... and if you're confident you can explains these in simple terms do so.

If you think you can explain a feature better than someone, then just reply with your version.

The result? I'll compile a manual so that everyone can include in the game's manual to explain the setup program So we all benefit from this.

Here's an image of the current setup:


Here's the features that need to be explained:
resolution (320x200, 640x400, etc... just one explanation), Run in a window instead of full screen, Use 85 hz display (CRT Monitors only), Force alternate letterbox resolution, Anti-alias scaled sprites (fast CPUs only), Downgrade 32-bit graphics to 16 bit, Digital sound, Midi music, Use digital music pack if available, use speech pack if available, game language, replay, and sprite cache size.

Hey, I was wondering if anyone knows if this is possible, where while you hold down the mouse button and the cursor mode is set to walk, the character moves to the current mouse position (if you've played Diablo II, you'll get what I'm talking about). I tried it but Roger just seems to stop until I release the mouse button.. I don't get it.

I'm sure we're all hear for the good reason that we like adventure games, right? But I bet we all agree that there are some things in adventure games (sometimes based on the developer) that we really dislke. So, I created this thread to point out these things; maybe we can learn from them. Maybe I'll write a website with the information that'll be gathered here or somethign.

I'll point out a few examples to see what I'm talking about:

Walking dead - when you miss something in an earlier puzzle and you're basicly stuck forever without really knowing it. This happens in sierra games from time to time. This just... pisses me off

Dying for stupid reasons - Ok, maybe in the days of text adventures this made sense, but with point and click it's extremely hard to click in the right place sometimes. It's like you were playing warcraft and all of the sudden you click in a deep region of water all the people you have selected go there and drown. Dumb!

I think it was Pumaman/Chris who said once that he hated the whole LucasArts thing where you try to use an object, and the main char walks all the way to it and says "I can't do that!" wasting your time waiting for him to get there and do absolutely nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, now it's your turn. I have more things to point out, but I'll just wait and give the chance to someone else to do it. If nobody does, then I'll point them out later.

Hey, I was wondering if anyone has the AGS Plugin template for delphi because I can't download it from the API page....

I've been trying to come up with a new game, but I'm totally stuck. So I've been trying to analyze/study adventure games to see if I will somehow get guided into coming up with a story for my game.

Anywho, about 10 minutes before I posted this, I realized that most (or all?) adventure games share common goal categories... and here's the two that I found:

1) Quest - I think this is probably the classic goal in adventure games... the whole goal would be to get something or to achieve something. For example, in The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush wants to be a pirate so the quest is do three trials to become a pirate (and eventually there's other quests like rescue Elaine and such, but they're still quests). Same thing on King's Quest I (hence the name?), where the quest  is to find those three things (the mirror, the shield, and the chest?).

AGS Games that are quest-styled include: Rob Blanc (all three), Calsoon 1/2, I Spy, King's Quest VGA, odysseus kent... I think you get the idea.

2) Mystery - Basicly, the player/main char has to figure out what in the world is going on. I think this is more of a recent category and there are a lot less mystery adventure games than quest adventure games. Myst is the only comercial example I can think of, but games like Pleurghburg, 5 days a stranger, Out of Order, Sol, Larry Vales, etc. kind of follow this style. I guess the player has to do more investigation than anything; you sort of have a mission, but it's not really a quest.

Some games are kind of a mix between the two. Grim Fandango is kind of a mystery because there's all that corruption going on, but I think it's mostly a Quest adventure because every time you get to play you have a mission... either get the eggs, or escape, etc. So, there's mystery in the story, but the gameplay is mostly quest-based.

Anyway, I'm sure there's other goals that I haven't figured out yet, so feel free to reply to this message and post them. Also, you guys can also point out goals for other kinds of games.... maybe it'll help us analyze adventure games better and also steal stuff from other categories

I'm sure you have thought of this, Pumaman, but I was wondering if you have considered addding a switch () statement to the script editor recently. I think it would be pretty useful, specially  for scripts like dialog_request which require zillion of if/else if statements, and on_mouse_click would even look prettier

Hey, I was wondering if the default fonts that come with an AGS game are available online... if they're in the font resource pack, which ones are they? if they're not available they should be so we can modify them (I need to add some extra characters, you see)