Messages

my point is simply this: Unless YOU yourself, have flown around the world, how can you possibly say "The world IS DEFINITELY 100% round and not flat" without it being a belief?

Because I have seen photographs of the Earth from space. I have observed the arc of the horizon. I don't need to have been to Turkey to accept it's existence

And the cat in the box is an observer too.

Hmmm, not sure I would umbrella both science and relligion as systems of "belief".

As you yourself say, science is about hypothesising and theorising based on observation and experiment. The only point "belief" enters into this is if you are seriously suggesting that scientists may be lying to us. If a scientist comes up with a hypothesis, then I won't automatically accept it. If I read that same hypothesis and gleam some knowledge of their observations and reasoning then I may agree with it. There is no "blind belief" in science.

As I said, that is why I side on evolution over God creating the world, it's not "blind belief"... my point is simply this: Unless YOU yourself, have flown around the world, how can you possibly say "The world IS DEFINITELY 100% round and not flat" without it being a belief?

I'm not saying the Earth isn't round, of course it is, it's just to illustrate the point. It's still a belief, just it is a belief that's near infinitely more probably right than it is wrong. Whereas a lot of the beliefs Fundamentalist Christians have are (to my mind) almost infinitely more probably wrong than they are right.

In my opinion science and religion are both two distinct types of belief. On one hand science is a set of belief systems built up from observations about our world, and "provable", methodistic conclusions you draw from your observations.

Furthermore, for 99.99% of the population of this planet, science is even more profoundly a belief system, as to a large extent you are believing what is written by those who are a lot more intelligent than yourself, or at the very least those who have invested the time into finding out about the subject that you yourself would not...

But the other side of the fence is religion, which to my mind has formed due to human's natural inability to believe that they and the world around them has been created by some natural process. Who was it that said "Nature itself has imprinted on the minds of men the idea of God"?

The way I see it is that everything boils down to belief, when you get to the nub of it. Do I believe Stephen Hawking's theory that dark matter exists? Do I believe the Earth was made in seven days? Do I believe that we all used to be skuttling trilobytes?

What's important to me, I guess, is what is easier to believe, or what is the more likely thing in which to believe, i.e. what does the evidence available point toward?

In this case science usually wins out, because generally I believe in what a scientist has to say over what a priest does... this does not mean the scientist is right... I just feel the scientist has more founded reason to believe what he does, and takes a more objective approach to determine what his belief systems are.

Of course, we could all be part of the matrix, thus rendering all the scientist's observations completely invalid... in this case scientific method becomes just as unprovable as all the world religions, but whilst we have no reasons to mistrust our observations about the universe around us, it seems baffling to me why people would put more stock in a 2000 year old book than observational evidence around them here and now...

So to sum up, I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that I 100% believe in evolution, I consider that the theory is built up of a lot of circumstantial evidence such as fossil records.. we've not sat and watched, generation after generation, a species evolve into another species, (though the snail thing Binky mentioned, as well as the results of selective breeding of dogs are both very interesting piece of observation evidence for me personally), and all of what I know about evolution I've been effectively "told" by others (biologists, archeologists, Darwin himself)

But it is a damn convincing theory, everything we have discovered about it seems to point in that direction, and my money would definitely be on that over divine intervention any day.

This kind of brings me onto the alien thing. I've never seen an alien, but yet I'm more accepting of their possibility than I am of the foundations of the various world religions, due to my interpretation of the universe around us, largely based upon evolution and astrophysics, the size of the universe etc. These all give me a grounded argument as to why alien life existing is quite probable... albeit still one where I am taking a lot of things as truth that I personally have never proven.

I won't *believe* in aliens until I see one myself, however, and maybe not even then...

As in Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, the planet of Krikket (sp?) having no visible stars in the sky... if I lived on Krikket, believing in aliens would be as blind a belief as I feel most religions to be.

Hopefully this makes some sense

> OMG IT'S ONLY 2 COLORS ISHEFEKINGINSANEOMGLOLZORZ!!!!1

hehe

That's nothing! check this out!!




0 colours! I win

I intend to do a retro 40's style point-and-click programmed onto a punch card at some point using my fabled 0 colour sprites. I plan for dialogue options to be printed out on ticker tape too.

To try and bring this post from the brink of pointlessness just want to say I agree with Binky's sentiment that the number of colours doesn't really matter  to me now-a-days. I respect the skills neccessary to pull off a sprite using few colours but rarely feel it adds anything to the sprite unless the style of the game itself is to use a specific small palette (Like the Herman Toothrot game).

In fact when I remember old speccy games I subconsiously remember them as high-colour, high-res graphic fests. It's more the style of game, and the style of art, music and such that gives me that nostalgic feeling.

Cheers,

Lemmy

Yeah, we looked into doing this first. Worked great in windowed, but unfortunately D3D doesn't seem to like AGS stealing full-screen and basically died. I can't claim any credit for this rather novel approach Nikenstien came up with, though

Edit by strazer (again): No need to quote the whole post directly above yours!

w00t! cheers Pumaman! (From Nickenstien too)

New preview in April edition of Adventure Lantern. Read it here:

http://www.adventurelantern.com/previews/forgottenElement/forgottenElement.htm

Or download it here:

http://www.adventurelantern.com/magazine/AdventureLantern_Apr2006.zip

There's a request outstanding to either password protect room files, or better still, to enable compiling "mini-patch" type things which would create a DAT file with just a specific set of rooms and which would take precedence over the main EXE file.

Hi Pumaman, about this...

how about .zip support like in the Quake engine where they had renamed .zip files that the game engine would be able to query the enclosed filenames, and extract them on demand as fi they were simply present in the directory... then everyone can easily make compressed passworded data files simply with a copy of winzip?

cheers,

lemmy

With the latest beta you can use speeds of -2, -3, etc to have a slower-than-1 walking speed.

awesome! that slipped me by somehow

cheers CJ!

The game engine does not include the script compiler - it is unable to compile any scripts, it can only run the compiled byte-code that the editor produces. This is unlikely to change in the future.

Ok cheers Pumaman, I kind of expected that would be the case, I guess I could make my own functions to route through instead. It would have been nice, but not totally necessary for what we need to do.

Thanks again!

Lemmy

Hi all,

We're currently writing a plug-in, along with an editor, that we want users of which to be able to write in bits of AGS script into flowchart nodes, which will then be run by the game engine. I've found two functions in the engine interface relating to calling scripts in-game:

int CallGameScriptFunction(const char *name, int globalScript,
                int numArgs, int arg1 = 0, int arg2 = 0, int arg3 = 0);

void* GetScriptFunctionAddress (const char *funcName);

The first I'm guessing is only for my own functions, the second obtaining an address to an AGS script function for me to call.

I was wondering if, either directly or indirectly, there was any way for me to pass a string buffer of actual script for the engine to run, or is this impossible due to internal compilation of the script or something?

Something line:

char szBuf[] = "cEgo.Walk(oBeachWaypoint.X, oBeachWaypoint.Y, eNoBlock, eWalkableAreas); cDoctor.Walk(oBeachWaypoint.X-30, oBeachWaypoint.Y, eNoBlock, eWalkableAreas);";

If this is not currently possible, is it something that is likely never going to be due to internal workings?

thanks!

lemmy

That sounds like exactly what we need

Thanks! I'll give that a go!

If you are using the dialog editor, no chance.

run-script X
Runs global script function "dialog_request", with X passed as the single parameter. This allows you to do more advanced things in a dialog that are not supported as part of the dialog script.

Yes, we tried this. Unfortuntately it still rests on having a view with just the idle pose to switch to, and another view with the talking animation itself. Effectively having to put the first frame of each talking pose in a seperate view themselves.

I guess I may be able to fudge it somehow change the frame delay to near infinite to keep it on the first frame?

Cheers for the suggestions,

lemmy

Hi all, we're having problems getting our talking anims working properly.

Basically, what we want is to have 3-4 forward facing talking poses, say one with hands on hips, one with folded arms, etc etc. The problem we're having is that the character reverts back to their idle pose (i.e. "SetIdleView, delay 0)) as soon as their line has been spoken. The snapping between the talking pose and the idle pose doesn't look too great, unless we use the talking pose that's the same as the idle pose.

We could turn the Idle anim off, but in that case it uses the first frame of the walking animation, which again causes a nasty snap.

Lastly, we could see a solution of having an idle pose for every single talking pose in the game, but we have fears for the 600 view limit, as we've already hit 100 and can't even be a tenth into the complete game, so don't want to start frivolously creating extra views.

Is there anyway to do this without doubling up our talking views? I was hoping to use the first frame of the talking animation, in the same way as the game automatically uses the first walking frame if no Idle View is set.

Also, as a side note, a suggestion on anims which we would find really useful for doing gestures and anim transitions and such:

Would it ever be possible to have a loop specified as a "transition" loop. where, for eg: Loop 0 of a view was a transition from idle 1 to idle 2, and loop 1 was the idle.

So when you told the character to switch to that view, they would play the transition loop automatically, then start looping the main anim loop. Likewise when leaving that view, you could set up a loop to be the transition out of that anim? I imagine this would lead to more opportunities for more animated dialogue as the character could shift poses and do gestures from those poses smoothly without loads of extra views and script commands needed?

Cheers again!

lemmy

In a similar vein (sorry for hijacking the thread, but pretty relevant) while the discussion of improving the dialogue system is going:

We are using full screen talkies in our game for major plot conversations, and it would be wonderful to have Lucasarts style speech on the full screen talkies. Just so it fits in the style of dialogue use in standard dialogue in game.

Also, in our fullscreen talkies we have one character on the left talking to another on the right (on alternate screens), so what happens is since our main character is on the right, the dialogue box covers her.

Some way of having Lucasarts style dialogue text on a full screen talkie, where the text can appear on a side (or better still any position) of our choosing would be great if possible.

Cheers CJ!

The power to control small rodents with the power of my mind. They would call me "rat man". My alter-ego would work in an animal research labratory submitting bogus papers about mice having the cognitive intelligence to learn to play the piano.

My nemesis would no doubt have the ability to dominate the minds of owls. My vole armies would always win out in the end though.

I dont have a gun  but i have a CANON! 

A photocopy of a gun? That might just work.

If someone says they are into freedom of speech more than I am, they better have a gun. That's all I'm saying.

Hello all, I know I said I wasn't going to post again but just thought I owed a few people an apology for being a bit narcy about some of their comments on the vulgar thread. At the end of the day I joined this community to make some new friends, not new enemies, so this one goes out to Squinky, Big Brother, Helm, and everyone else, I still disagree, but respect I should of perhaps bitten my lip on a few occasions. You're entitled to your opinions, and you've all been here much longer than I have.

I was going to post this on the vulgar thread but thought since it's dying out I didn't want to risk resurrecting it

neway I'm still not gonna be around here much for a while, lots of stuff to do, not least FE, but didn't want to leave any sour feelings behind.

Laters all! Take care, and sorry again!

lemmy

[every]

I don't see how big brother is coming off high and mighty.

Big Brother comes across high and mighty in every single one of his posts, and this opinion LONG preceeds him making any comments directed at us. We were (at least I was) eagerly awaiting the inevitable time when that happened so we could tell him what we thought. Our friends who have browsed this forum since our game was announced, have even commented on the same thing with no prompting from us. He does unsolicited paintovers of people's work in the game in production thread, believes himself to be better than everyone in this forum. The name of their "studio" implies that they put more effort in than anyone else, and that they are the best.

I personally think it's sickening that in a free community, where people who may not have art skills, but love adventure games, put a lot of work into making a game regardless. Then this guy, who is, admittedly quite good, comes along and says "I'm better than you and I've put more effort in than you." How dare he???

Anyone who doesn't see that is willfully disregarding it.

I'm personally amazed that he isn't insanely unpopular in this forum. And in that same forum people can get so vocal about a pair of damn boobs. To be honest the fact that he struts around unopposed is half the reaosn I've got so annoyed about this thread.

So there, I've crossed that line into flaming, but I don't care. As you say, the people getting up in arms are the minority here. A minority I no longer care what they think.

Later! I'm not posting in this thread (or any other thread in this forum) again.