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Here's a random thought I had: how would one go about creating a Deus Ex-like inventory screen in AGS? For those not familiar, the inventory in Deus Ex was a big grid, and different items took up different amounts of space. You could drag different items around to make more room for big things and had to be very careful about inventory management.

Here is a link to an image of the screen: http://www.the-spoiler.com/Sinjin/DEUSEX/inventory.jpg

Anyway, I couldn't think of an obvious way to do something like this in AGS, but thought I would ask! I had an idea for a possible game where the player would have a very limited (read: realistic) inventory system and had to make a lot of decisions about what to pick up (rather than the "fit everything you see into your pocket" model of most adventure games).

Any thoughts? Obviously the base would have to be a GUI of some sort and you'd need some sort of matrix to keep track of item locations, but what about dragging and dropping? It doesn't sound like something AGS would natively support but I am always ready to be surprised when it comes to AGS!

Wow, I never realized what a pain in the ass it was to do animation (not in AGS, in general). Here are my first real attempts (other than walk-cycles, from which I happily use others as a good template) at animation. Comments, critiques, suggestions, etc., are desired.

Filling out forms, staring into space (we've all been there):





Here's the one that took me all evening to do -- putting down the pencil, getting up, scooting in the chair.





Here's that last one again in context:





Thoughts, suggestions? I did these all in Photoshop with about a zillion different layers. The last one (some fifty-five frames or so) really made me almost go quite mad, but at least some of these animations should be useful elsewhere (e.g. the "leaning" one). I got away with just using my walk-cycle animations for some of the frames but the standing up bit really was tedious. I'm rapidly scaling down my ambitions from an animation point of view.

You guys helped out a ton with my last background and so I thought I'd post my next one too to get comments, suggestions, etc. This one took much less time than the first one and I'm much happier with the first draft of it than I was the last one, so I think I'm getting more of the hang of things. The cars were the hardest bits (I'm planning to use them in many other scenes as well, so it was worth the investment); the rest was pretty straightforward.

The setting is once again 1957, Los Angeles. You're a homicide detective working the night shift. A call goes out on the radio -- possible homicide at a laundromat. You go to the scene.

It's an outdoor scene. There will eventually be a beat cop there as well (hence the squad car) but I haven't made the character yet. The protagonists' car is on the right (it's supposed to look a bit wimpy--it's a "get you from here to there" sort of car) and the protagonist is just there to give it a sense of scale (and to showcase how non-Indiana Jones-like he is -- this ain't your average adventure game!).





The other establishments are closed at the moment though you'll be able to come back the next day to talk with people there. (The one on the right, the Neutron Bar, is a set up for my all-time favorite gag: "Neutron Bar happy hour special -- second drink, no charge! Get it? Get it? Neutrons -- no charge!" There used to be a Neutron Bakery in a town I lived in for many years and I always thought that would be a great pitch). The place on the left is just a seedy pawn shop; the bar on the right is meant to be somewhat hipster 1950s. The laundromat itself is a 24-hour, unattended bleak place (based off a real place I frequented while I was in college).

Any thoughts about any aspect of it would be appreciated! Thank you.

Hello! I am working on my first adventure game. I don't have a lot of experience with pixel art, so I wanted to get some feedback early on. This is pretty much the setup of my first room of the game. The game itself is going to be set in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, and has a purposely muted palette.

The goal of the graphics is something that evokes the simplicity of the early Sierra games but with a somewhat enlarged palette and much richer scenes. A direct nod to Trilby's Notes is order too.

Anyway, let me know what you think on any aspect of it. I've been staring at the same scene for about two weeks (not constantly, obviously!) so I'd like a little outside feedback, a fresh viewing.

This particular room is the detective's squad room in the LAPD. That's one of player characters on the right (the game has you switching between player characters at different parts in the game).

[Sierra | File | Action | Special | Speed]

How would I go about creating a GUI for a menu that would be like the old-school AGI games (Police Quest, Gold Rush, King's Quest, etc.) whereby pressing Escape would trigger a menu at the top with menu options (in the case of Gold Rush, they were Sierra | File | Action | Special | Speed) and then the arrow keys left-to-right would trigger sub-menus (About Gold Rush! | Help, Save | Restore | Restart | Quit | Inventory | Elapsed Time, etc.), which could be cycled through by pressing the arrow keys up and down?

I feel like this is probably just something that AGS isn't really equipped to do (since the GUI is basically mouse-based), but I thought I would ask. My game doesn't use a mouse at all and suddenly having it come in for those sorts of operations is a bit weird. At the moment I'm just using the text parser for those sorts of commands ("Save game", "Restart game", etc.) and having a list of them displayed when you press ESC or F1, but I find this to be a bit silly.

Any thoughts or suggestions for a mouse-less menu-like GUI, or a mouse-less GUI for these sorts of "game" functions in general?

My game is not mouse driven and I would rather have an AGI-style text inventory (you hit tab and a little display box comes up enumerating all of the stuff you have). I plan to just cycle through the inventory, grab the names, and put them in a big string. (If they type in "look at [inv item]" then I'll display the sprite and a little description or something like that.)

Now it seemed natural to me that there would be some way to see what inventory a player had, but for all of my searching through the manual and on the forums I don't see an easy way to do it. The non-easy way would be to cycle through all possible inventory objects (and I imagine I'd have to hard-code a maximum array size to cycle through) and then use InventoryQuantity to see if the player had it. Surely there's a better way!?

What's the best way to have the lights in the room "turn off"? I can imagine doing it a few ways but all of them seem rather hacky to me. How would you do it? I'm not experienced with animated backgrounds but that struck me as one possibility (have a frame that was the same room but with the lights off and switch to it when the switch was hit). Any and all suggestions would be appreciated! :-)

Though the manual says Display() is blocking, it seems that it actually is Pausing (it stops even repeatly_execute_always, for example, and will jump ahead in the event cue so that some actions immediately in front of it won't execute without a Wait(1) in place).

Since a non-pausing, just-blocking Display() seems like a rather big feature request (and since the last request for it I found on the forums was from 3 years ago, it doesn't seem very popular), I was trying to create my own little Display() GUI that wouldn't interfere with my repeatedly_execute_always() commands.

So far what I realize I'd like is a command that would wait for the user to hit a key (space, return, whatever) and then release program flow. But it would be blocking, not pausing â€" so things in repeatedly_execute_always() would still work.

I've searched through the manual but I didn't find anything, unfortunately. The Wait() commands seem to require time-out settings (though I could loop it, I guess), but they are pausing anyway, yes?

Any idea as to get this sort of functionality? It feels like it should be do-able, even if it is done in a semi-hacky way. Am I totally crazy? Have I gone off the deep end? :-)

Thanks a bunch guys, you've been really helpful...

I'm trying to make it so that whenever my character enters a new scene, overlayed upon the screen will be some sort of line (e.g. "Somewhere in L.A.") that will by typed out character by character and then fade away. Ideally this would not be totally blocking (sometimes I will want people to be walking across the screen as it is typing, for example).

I searched for Typewriting on the forums but all the other examples were in an earlier version of the language, I believe, and most were blocking, and from what I could tell none of them could be faded out.

At the moment I have started putting it together in the following fashion. I know that Wait() is not an ideal function here and I will eventually replace it with timers (one step at a time here!).

Code: ags

function typeText(String TextToType) {
	gTypewriter.Y = 100;
	gTypewriterText.Text = " ";
	gTypewriter.Transparency = 0;
	gTypewriter.Visible = true;	
	int i = TextToType.Length-1;
	int x = 0;
	while(x<i) {
		x++;
		gTypewriterText.Text = String.Format("%s%s",gTypewriterText.Text,TextToType.Chars[x]);
		Wait(1);
	}	
	int trans = gTypewriter.Transparency;
	while (trans < 100) {
		trans++;
		gTypewriter.Transparency = trans;
		Wait(1);
	gTypewriter.Visible = false;
	}
}

Where gTypewriter is a GUI with no background color or border, and gTypewriterText is a label on that GUI.

Now the above looks to me like it ought to work in some fashion, and compiles fine, but unfortunately I just get an awful, awful error message when I try to run it.

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x0047AA75 ; program pointer is +6, ACI version 2.72.920, gtags (5,0)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.

in Room 1 script (line 81)
from Room 1 script (line 98)


Most versions of Windows allow you to press Ctrl+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

Line 81 in the room script is the one with the String.Format on it. I'm only using that String.Format because I'm having trouble concactenating the text otherwise (it doesn't like me mixing string and char types, apparently).

Any thoughts/suggestions?

From what I can tellâ€"unless I am wrong on thisâ€"the only way you can manually specify the import resolution (i.e. the "Import at 640X480" checkbox) for sprites is when you import them individually. When you try to import multiple sprites or import from an animated GIF, it assumes that you want to import them at 640X480.

I need to import things at 320X240, and as a consequence am having to export all frames as single files from Photoshop and then re-import them one by one -- what a pain! It'd be nice if I got a little checkbox like that on ALL sprite importing options.

(For those who care, my game is actually set to run at 640X480 but it's really a 320X240 game. I run Windows in an emulator that doesn't support 320X240 resolution, so I have to double it and have it automatically scale things up. If I mistakenly import at 640X480 then I get tiny sprites. Boo hoo, what a sob story, I know, but anyway, it'd be nice if that option was just made universally click-able.)

Throughout the manual I see references to being able to call an event for when the player enters room, after fade-in, but I don't see how to do it. I see the on_event function only has a setting for calling an event BEFORE the fade-in. I can see how to set up an interaction for it, but I'd rather do this in the script itself (I need it to reference a few variables and be something I can easily change along with the rest of hte script).

From using the search feature on here I see some people with code that looks auto-generated by AGS (with #sectionstart headers) for this purpose, but I don't see how to get mine to do that. Is this a bug in the current version of AGS? (I only wonder since apparently another aspect of it didn't generate the appropriate code block when I asked a previous question of this nature)

Thanks again! Things are going along quite nicely on the whole with this project.

I'm trying to make a Sierra-style text parser GUI. I've set up a GUI with the appropriate controls on it, and I think I've basically got it to work, except that the function called based on the Activate property of the Text Box control seems to be expecting a variable to be passed. Basically the game crashes and says that it expected 0 variables but instead got 1.

I couldn't find any documentation on the Activate function in the documentation. The documentation tells me how to use the parser once I've gotten some text inputted, but the description of how I get to that point is a little sketchy. Could someone help me out?

I don' t think this is my fault, but I am new at this, so it might be.

Basically I am running the AGS editor on a MacBook by running it in the Parallels environment in Coherence mode with Windows XP installed. The editor itself works fine. Testing the game itself works fine, except that when I exit it, it doesn't actually terminate the process (mygame.exe or whatever I have called it). The editor still displays [Running] in its menu bar even though there is no active, selectable process available to Windows, though the .exe shows up in the Task manager when I Ctrl-Alt-Delete. If I force it to quit, it gives me a little message about how it didn't shut down properly and I should report it here, and then the AGS editor registers it as having closed.

Anyway, it is not impossible (I can quit it via Task manager) but I thought someone might like to know. The game itself at this point is nothing but a single room and a few sprites, and absolutely no custom scripting or anything like that, so I find it unlikely that I somehow made it do this, but again this is my first time really playing around with AGS so it's entirely possible that I'm causing it to do this one way or another. I'll play around with it a little bit and see if other settings do the same thing (i.e. if I run it in OS Mode or Full Screen Mode). I'm also aware that the total number of people trying to make games in AGS running Windows XP on a MacBook is probably pretty slim, so I doubt this is very high priority.

This is only a "technical question" in the broadest sense, but this seemed like the best place to put it.

I'm thinking about beginning an AGS project (SCIV sort of interface, nothing too technically ambitious). I know there are many tutorials and FAQs (and I have looked at a few of them, but not all of them), but I was wondering if there was a good source for sort of "general suggestions" as to beginning with AGS. What common mistakes do new people make which keeps their projects from getting off the ground? What's the best way to start off without getting burned out? What are common pit-falls? What's the secret to success?

Any thoughts anyone had, and any links they wanted to share, would be much appreciated as I think through this project and the time commitment it will involve. The sorts of questions I have are things like, "Should I bother spending a lot of time on details from the beginning, or should I put very bare-bones sprites and rooms together and then try to add detail later once the project has gotten some of its own momentum? Should I do all the room backgrounds first and then put sprites in them, or should I go about it room-by-room? Should I work on making a very polished and very short demo so that I can more quickly get feedback on the overall project?" and things like that. Obviously much of this will depend on my own work habits and preferences, but I thought some of those with a lot of experience at this might be able to share some wisdom.

I'm worried that if I start worrying about details too early on, I'll get frustrated and never finish it, but I'm also worried that it might be hard to add details later if I have neglected it too much to begin with. And I'm also worried (boy, I worry a lot) that if I make it too bare-boned from the beginning that I'll end up spending a lot of time on something unimpressive and become similarly uninspired with the project.

One general graphics question I have is if there is any common way to make the Monkey Island II-style VGA graphics. They have a very specific and stylized look to them and I haven't spent a lot of time with that particular type of computer graphics but I was curious if there was any general technique for getting that "look."

Another general question I have is how long I should expect to put into development for this. I'm thinking of something in the classic SCIV sort of approach, with a Trilby's Notes level of graphics (relatively simple and straightforward), something that would just about fit into the "long game" category but not be too long. Assuming I am not working at this full time or anything (it'll be a hobby if anything), how long should I expect this to take? A year? Longer? (Note that while I have never used AGS before, I am very familiar with similar component technologies: graphics editing/creating, scripting in general, etc., so I'm not re-inventing the wheel entirely on top of everything else.)

If this is an exceptionally common sort of thread, I very much apologize, but I didn't quite see anything in the FAQ that really addressed it very well. Thank you.