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Lemmy and Binky.

I'm realy eager to play this 

How many Locations etc will it have ? what kind of length demo will it be ?
Also, what kind of audio are you using ?

Cheers,
             Nick.

Hi Nick, we'll have about 12 locations in the demo. It should take about 30-45 mins to play through, and serves as the prologue and introduction to the full three act game.

re: audio, we're using midi, but we're working on a plug-in which may allow us to try something a little different with it.

Thanks everyone for their kind words, you horny devils. Yurina: we're sorry you've taken offence to our main character, hopefully when or if you play the demo you'll be able to find some enjoyment in it regardless.

This seems like a very nice idea. Though the story might be a little cliche, with this character and the art you offer it's going to be hard (no pun intended) to stay away from this game.

Thanks for the kind words. The "cliche" thing has occured to us. At the end of the day, a character having no memory may be cliche, but it's an extremelly good mechanic for introducing a character world that the player has no previous knowledge of. Rest assured that the memory issue is not the main plotline for the story.

In fact, as in the edit I've made to the original post. The cliche is, if anything, totally misleading. You'll need to play the game to understand, but we're hoping after finishing the demo, when it's released, it will no longer seem quite so cliche (or perhaps cliche for different reasons? )

Hey, if we have to draw 20 frames of walking * 4 directions, plus pushing, pulling, talking, idleing, opening things etc animations all in whatever spare time we can muster, then it's going to be a girl. Nothing wrong with that. Honest. *ahem*

It's worth pointing out though, that although the main character might lead you to believe this is solely a cheeky and gratuitous boobage game, we've made a real attempt to write a relatively serious story (though quite light hearted in parts) and the choice of main character and her attire is not quite as arbitary as wangling a "sexy nurse" into the game though it's certainly a huge bonus for development as well as hopefully playing the game!

And I honsetly hope that you animate also her tits while she moves...

Ohhhh yes I refer you to http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24991.0

We're making sure that particular animation is as smooth as humanly possible

[Entry for Seahorse Island in Widdenfel Travel Guide]

Lemmy & Binky present

Something is terribly wrong with Seahorse Island.

It's about a thirty suns now since the crops and trees began to wither and die. It has been raining for what seems like an eternity, but the rain does nothing to nourish the soil. The leaves have been gone from the trees outside my office for many suns now. The trees look like twisted corpses. I don't recall ever seeing such a sight as I do now as I write this.

Farmer Haywood has stockpiled the remaining grain, and has begun rationing it to the town. It should last us a while, but what then?

Mr. Clancy came to visit me today. He is looking for a woman--an ‘evil and manipulative creature' is how he put it--a mainlander spy, incredibly dangerous, and should I see or hear word of her I should report to him immediately. It may be my imagination but I seem to be seeing a lot of people around town I don't recognise lately. Out of the corner of my eye, just stood in the shadows--watching. The townsfolk seem to pay them no heed, which I find odd given their inherent xenophobic natureâ€"or, dare I say it, am I seeing things? Has the madness that is spreading across our fair island started to affect my mind also?

The headaches are getting more frequent, my eyes burning with their intensity. I would hope it is just fatigue, but I am beginning to doubt that. Either way there is no time for rest now--I fear it is going to get much worse before it gets better.

- Dr. E. Carter

Entry for Seahorse Island in Widdenfel Travel Guide

This small secluded island is situated six miles off the south coast of Widdenfel and is home of a curious community who have long lost touch with the wider world that flourishes around them.

A very much insular society that looks largely at foreigners as dangerous and untrustworthy, although the sea town of Derry in the North West of the island has recently accepted trade agreements with the mainland, and is developing a more trusting and relaxed attitude to their over sea neighbours.

Curiously, Seahorse Island is perhaps one of the only places in the world that employ the Caste System. The island has no formal government structure of any kind, and it is remarkable to see how this way of life has worked so harmoniously for the inhabitants for over 500 years.

Despite the frosty welcoming committee and unsure glances one would be sure to receive, especially as a woman, Seahorse Island is a remarkable place to visit. The island is steeped in a rich ancestral history, with many beautiful landmarks harking back to the Days of Kings. Anyone with an interest in this period in history, particularly of the Great Siege, should make it their aim to visit Seahorse Island at some stage in their lives.

Hopefully, in the years to come, the local community will become more accepting of influence from the continent, particularly in their attitudes towards gender inequality, and Seahorse Island could become an extremely popular and rewarding travel destination.

Now featuring 32bit rain effects!

Continued after Chicky and Saberteeth's posts until server issues are solved.

When we turn off anti-glide mode, the animation looks lovely, but we hit this hurdle when moving up and down that we would need to set the speed to less than 1 for the speed and the animation to match (left and right is bang on).

Exactly.

Also, as I said originally, because anti-glide mode is a global thing that is either on or off, we only have one realistic choice for movement speed for EVERY character in the game: 1.

This means either every character in our game will have to have exactly the same walk speed, as well as really fast up/down walk speeds, or we lose the fluidity of the main character's walk cycle (the animation you will see most of the time playing the game) which we definitely don't want to do

Hi guys,

Binky and myself are having a problem with character walk speeds without anti-glide set.

Basically, our main character has a fair few walk frames in her animations (20 per direction), which means with anti-glide mode enabled she is coming out really jerky (we're guessing anti-glide is probably designed for lower numbers of walk frames). We turned it off and her animation is now nice and smooth, but we have found that the only sensible speed option for her and every other character is 1. Any higher and they move too fast, and we are unable to slow her down any more.

This also means that, due to the perspective our backgrounds are at, even with scaling the speed of movement, her up/down walk speed is way too fast. But as it is set to 1 we are unable to slow her down any.

So first, my question: Is there any way to either A) change the entire game #cycles per frame, thus giving us more choice for character speeds than 1, or B) Somehow slow the characters down, yet allow them to still obey walkable areas etc.

the ideal would be to have a floating point value for a character's walk speed, so for e.g. setting her walk speed to 0.5 would move her once every two frames, and so on and so forth.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

I doubt there's anything significant stopping you from being able to do a multiplayer game with AGS. It all comes down to having a good plug-in TCP API that is easy to use. I think AGS scripting is, especially now, powerful enough to cope with a multiplayer game.

A MMORPG though? I don't see why not, to be honest, but it'd be a lot of work...

here's what you'd need as far as I can see:

1) An up to date TCP/IP plug-in for AGS, obviously.

2) A server program, likely not written in AGS, which routed all messages from clients, and was aware of the game world you had created. It would store the states of everything in your world.

3) A system, either a plug-in or module, that took care of the states of objects and characters throughout your game world. A bit like the Character Control plug-in, but the actual states would be stored remotely on the server.

4) A client module, which accepted commands from a plug-in (which in turn got them from a TCP/IP connection) for all common actions such as "ChangeRoom", "ChangeView", "Say" etc etc. In the repeat_always_execute function you would then poll for messages from the server (via the plug-in) and execute any commands locally. This system would also have to request all states of objects/characters in a room from the server when you enter a new room.

5) You would need to have a maximum num of player characters allowed in a single room. Then you would need to create dummy characters to represent each of them. A player would select their avatar, which related to a specific range of views. Most likely dynamic sprites would be the better option to bypass any system limits (or a nice email to Pumaman? ) When a player entered a room on their client it would assign an unused character, poke in the name, views and everything else, and then recieve commands from the server whenever that player walked or said anything. If the maximum amount in a room is approached, then you would need to create another version of the room to share the load. This would be done on the server, and the AGS game would not know about it.

Plus more that I've not thought of, so I'd say it's by no means a small task but doable...

But the way I see it is... we're not in a shortage of MMORPG games. We have a shortage of traditional point-and-clicks... which is what I love about AGS.

Can't you write the size (in a long, for example) and then write the data, then read the size, then read the data...

Doh! Ahh right I see, I thought I only had the one FWrite/FRead to work with. Thanks!

Hi all,

I'm using AGSE_SAVEGAME & AGSE_RESTOREGAME to write/restore data from my plug-in to the save file. However the AGS Plugin API tutorial tells me I "must read in the same number of bytes that I wrote", and the FRead function requires that I pass in the number of bytes I wish to read in... But how can I know this without reading the data in first?

I have the size that I wrote in SAVEGAME, but since this is most likely a new instance of my C++ class, and a new instance of the AGS engine, I've no longer got access to this info. Do I need to store the data size in another file? Or perhaps some of the AGS stuff is loaded in by this point and I could set a GlobalInt or something?

Any suggestions will be much appreciated!

This is an interesting idea ... the original idea for AGS was to make it as much of an "integrated IDE" type thing as possible, and so that once you import an image it no longer relies on the image file still being available.

However for quickly updating sprites I can see the benefit of having AGS automatically grab the image file from disk when you compile the game, to save you having to re-import it every time you change it. I'll have to look at how easy this would be to implement.

This would be great to have. The best way I can see it working would be to seperate "Test Game" from "Distribute Game". Distribute game would go through all the motions of importing all images etc and storing them in the exe as you do now, where in development using Test Game would run it with dynamically loaded gfx. Best of both worlds.

Tho this all depends on how it's implemented in code and may not be as straightforward as that.

I thought GoSub commands move from the script to another part of the script and then jump back to where it was?

That's what GoSub does in BASIC, AGS is based on C/C++ syntax which has NO GoSub. Instead that's what a function call does in AGS.

AGS and BASIC are two different languages...

It's like saying "I thought Bonjour was English for hello?" It does mean hello, but it doesn't mean hello in English, it means hello in French.

In AGS you don't need to GoSub, it is implied by you typing the name of the function (i.e. the other part of the script) that you want to go there, and that after it has run jump back to where it was.

Here's the correct AGS code:

Code: ags

function HelloWorld() {
  Display("Hello World!");
}

function Main() {
  HelloWorld();
}

PS: It's not his homepage, afaik this domain belongs to Neole.

my head hurts. The dangers of having a net connection on a different computer to what you're commenting on.  Yeah that's C/C++ code I gave you there, sorry.

I know loads me, honest!

Could AGS ever have a GoSub command or DIM arrays?

GoSub and DIM arrays are methods of calling functions and declaring variables in Basic languages. AGS already has this functionality, but they handled differently. I'll assume you've seen these on Visual Basic 6 for example purposes.

Calling a subroutine (function):

VB:

Sub HelloWorld()

     Console.WriteLine("Hello World!")

End Sub

Sub Main()
   
    GoSub HelloWorld

End Sub

AGS: (edit: cheers khrismuc)

function HelloWorld()
{
     Display("Hello World!");
}

function Main()
{
   HelloWorld();
}

DIM array:

VB:

Dim   MyArray(50) As Integer;

AGS:

int MyArray[50];

-----

So as you can see, you don't need those two keywords in AGS.

Hope this helps...

Cheers,

lemmy101

PS: Love the background art on your site. They yours?

Hi all, I'm having a problem using the import mask stuff on scrollable backgrounds, mainly for the following reason:

We use DPaint Animation for doing sprites/backgrounds, which is great. Setting up the palettes for import mask is easy... Except DPaint Animation cannot draw a screen larger than 320 x 200, so for scrollable backgrounds, which we paint in Photoshop first, we cannot import it into DPaint to sort out the mask palettes...

Photoshop does stupid things to the palettes, reversing them, and no matter what we try (mainly setting up a palette in reverse in DPaint and exporting it to Photoshop, we cannot seem to get a palette that's accepted in AGS.

Please can anyone suggest any good (free) tools/apps for sorting out the palettes?

Cheers!

lemmy101

Just out of curiosity you wouldn't be Nemu64-Lemmy would you? 

Nope sorry

Woah, well turns out a fair few of my gripes have work arounds  anyway cheers for the response:

1 - You can actually name views and use things like

cEgo.ChangeView(WALK1);

-- Cool stuff, I'll definitely use that. However that's an enumeration, is it not? if so, it still means that views cannot be deleted due to the indexes changing (am I understanding that right?)

3 - While it's not a bad idea, it can be easily arranged by having more than one walkable area/region and a couple of Walkbehind.Enable/Disable commands.

--Excellent stuff, I'll have a play with those commands. thanks!

6 - I don't know what "sprite pages" are, but you do know you can import GIF files and also tiled sprites, right?

--tiled sprites, as in you can have a single image which each frame on, and use that in-game?

9 - Dunno what that means... hopefully someone else does.

-- Sometimes you need to make a sprite area bigger than the actual image. For e.g. if a few frames of the anim extend quite a distance (e.g. where a character/object travels within the sprite animation). Thus sometimes you end up with a lot of blank space around the sprites, or inconsistant spacing around the sprites. Being able to set your own specific offset, for e.g. setting pixel 16,31 on a view would define that as the point the character can be truly said to be in. char.x, + char.y would take these into account, and would give/set a location relating to a part of the sprite you specify (bottom of feet for a character, end of cable on a dangling light) instead of them all being (i think) the centre bottom of the sprite by default.

So on a lightbulb, for eg, I'd set the origin to the end of the wire it's hanging off. Then by setting the x, y I am setting it to the exact point the wire connects, making it easier to place, and also to allow easier lining up of another sprite, for e.g. a character wanting to grab hold of it (not that they would want to grab a lightbulb, but you get my point).

10 - Again, I don't really see what you mean, but I'm curious.

I was trying to get a character to push a trolley object in a room. I tried:

cChar.Walk(x, y, eNoBlock, eWalkableAreas); // speed is 4
oTrolley.Move(x, y, 4, eBlock, eWalkableAreas)

and...

oTrolley.Move(x, y, 4, eNoBlock, eWalkableAreas)
cChar.Walk(x, y, eBlock, eWalkableAreas); // speed is 4

however the object would dart along really fast ahead of the character. Best I could do was putting the object speed to 1, which was close, but not exact.

As I said, Iv'e wrote a module to allow you to link an object, with an offset, to a character, and that object will move along with the character. It's not perfect yet, and I want to make sure it's bug free, and at that point I'll post it here.

Cheers for the replies!
And hya.

Hello, my first post here. 1st off wanted to say how cool AGS is. Just happened upon it a couple of weeks ago and was quite gobsmacked. I work in the game industry and a lot of tool programmers in the industry could take some important lessons from how AGS has been approached... Congrats, I'm now officially hooked!

Anyway, since I do not yet have a solution to someone else's problem, have a problem of my own, or have some screen caps from our AGS game ready to post, I'll start with a few things I've noticed that could be improved. Sorry if some have been suggested before, or if they are already implemented and I've missed them...

* Views and other non-deletable main types referencable by string instead of the explicit index? e.g.:

cEgo.ChangeView("walk1");

Might be some speed issues doing a string compare each time, but then how often do you change the view of a character? Not every frame hopefully, so should be ok? As well as making the script more readable, and specific views easier to find, this would allow them to be deleted without nerfing the scripts I assume?

* A drawable null area around the rooms in room hotspot editor etc. Allow the user to put down a point in this border to make it easier to draw a line that goes through the entire screen. At present you have to aim precisely at the edge pixel.

* Walk-behinds "Set Walkable area", a walk-behind can be told to only affect only one walkable area. This would allow for walking over hill brows unless there's something I've not thought of...

* Walk-behinds "Set peak-line", only a base-line OR a peak-line could be specified for a walk-behind. A "peak-line" would do the reverse, and hide the character only if they're below it. This would be useful for the above hill brow thing (tho it could be worked around without this by setting the base line to be at the bottom of the screen thus on that walkable area ALWAYS walk behind.

* Test Game to automatically ask to close the script window, and then run the game. Having to close the script window manually, and then reclick test-game is very irritating, and the time adds up when retesting regularly...

* Support for sprite pages please!!! Sprite pages would be completely awesome, save a lot of time importing sprites into the editor.

* A quicker way of adding frames to loops. Selecting a range of sprites and it filling out the loop would be great.

* Support for externally accessed sprites. Being able to replace sprites on the HD and re-run the game would be well funky.

* Setting origin point on views. Being able to set the point on the sprite that you consider 0,0 would be great for easier lining up sprite interactions and such.

Some others that are doable as modules, and so are less important, but would be cool for newer users nevertheless:

* Linking objects to characters - I've wrote a module for this but only supports 1 char and one object at the moment. May redo it with 2.71 assuming I can now have an array of pointers in a struct, but being able, for example to allow for someone new and non-programmer savvy to be able to, for e.g. push a step-ladder across the screen, would be very handy. (As a side note, I found I had to do a linking system was because the character movement and object movement speeds didn't seem to tally as the help suggested... tho I may have being missing something)

The way I have it set up:

ELM_BindObjectToCharacter(cEgo, oTrolley, 10/*xOff*/, 0/*yOff*/);
ELM_UnbindCharacter(cEgo);

-------

That all aside, AGS is great stuff and it looks like it's realizing your ambition to bring back point-and-click games to the masses. thanks for this wonderful tool, and thanks for keeping it free!

I'll be sure to release all my modules and plug-ins once they've been tested in our game enough.

Oh and hello everyone

lemmy101