Messages

Do you have servo steering? I know little about cars myself but the hint with the steering wheel could mean that it's the pump of the servo steering.
Depends if its really loud so you can hear it from far away it could also be the V-Belt rather than the timing belt. The later would probably very expensive to fix.

Everything is possible but especially the battle system needs some more advanced coding. Theres no premade battle system anywhere in ags.

Well for the navigation. It sound to me as if you have a screen of a city and you get a dialog where you choose what to do next.

I guess the easiest way would be to just start a dialog. You can run any script command in a dialog script by butting an" " at the bgegining of the line.

You also would have to hide the player. I think theres some attribute like
player.Visible = false;
to do tis.

Just a few things to get you started.

It's not true. I know about scructs and arrays and I do have sex!
I think you're just a bunch of nerds!

...

Masturbation counts as sex right?

Thanks monkey - thats a good thing to know - I always thought the object array at least was global for all rooms.
Well I guess I'm finished here. Thanks everyone for the help.

I assume you mean: "WHAT is the difference"?
- Well, Hotspot* is a pointer to ONE hotspot.
- The "hotspot" array is an array of SEVERAL objects/structs of type Hotspot (or Hotspot*, I'm not sure anymore).

Yeah that was my question. It clears this up a bit.
Thanks for the code you're right looks much better this way.

Thanks the hotspot array did the trick.
Just out of couriosity: Where's the difference between the Hotspot* struct and the hotspot array? Because I here I had to use the array here but AGS is fine with me putting the data back into the struct. This is what I did:

Code: ags

 
 CurrentHotspot = Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(player.x-GetViewportX(), player.y-GetViewportY());
 if (CurrentHotspot == hotspot[0]) DestroyHotspot();
 else if (CurrentHotspot != hotspot[0]) CreateHotspot (CurrentHotspot.Name);

Wait a minute..You want your character to jump up and down a few times...on a bed..before...getting of??? Waht kind of game are you making?  

Sorry for that okay so you basically want to do an animation of a character jumping on a bed. You could just do this in your animation frames and play the animation a few times.
You could also move the player around like this:

Code: ags

 
int i;
while (i<5) {
player.Move (player.x, player.y-20, eBlock, eAnywhere); //This is probably what you're looking for most moves player up 20px
player.Move (player.x, player.y+20, eBlock, eAnywhere); //moves player down 20px
i++;
}

Makes the player jump 5 times.
This

Hey Guys!
I have this code I want to call from a module script:
Ultimately I want to have a bool that checks for a hotspot and returns true or false to avoid redundant and messy code in my room script

Code: ags

if (Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(player.x-GetViewportX(), player.y-GetViewportY()) == hHotspot0)

When I compile I get an undefined symbol error. This is even what I expected cause I guess hotspots aren't global. So is there another way to check this?

Oh my got - this months mags games are both awesome. Finished the Beacon and struggling in La Sol. It's going to be a tough vote for me.

Alternatively you could also use the AGStween module which can tween all sorts of settings including transparency in an very easy to use manner.

I really like the new version a lot. Keept it!
I did a render of the mesh as you sent it to me but in terms functionality your's is much better. Have a look anyway


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

You could do the volumetric effect in photoshop and export it with an alpha channel. Put it insode an object in AGS to draw it in front of the player and it will look very convincing.
Concerning making the player walk around: Most 3d programs can render a so called z-map which is a grey scale image storing the z-channel. With photoshop and some adjustments you can extract very nice and accurate walk behind masks

The Elder Scrolls IV (Oblivion) landscape sucked greatly. (...) because everywhere was (...) computer generated.

I'm gonna say Morrowind (...) was awesome.

Wasn't it Oblivion that was created by hand with great attention to details, while Morrowind was computer-generated and disappointed everybody? That was my belief so far.

I think you're talking about Daggerfall. Which was computer generated and very buggy. It was also an awesome idea and featured a gameworld the size of england.

I wonder nobody mentioned CMI yet.

combined with the awesome  music the whole atmosphere ob blood island was IMO never reached again. You gotta love bill tiller.

Yeah the shading of the branch is ok but the contrast and saturation of the leaves are much to high.

I especially like the rock
The woman is unfinshed isn't she?

The pink/purple you added to the guy/trees shadow is also to bright and to saturated

You shouldn't use the grass brush or at least shade the grass.

There *are* well-designed adventure games that do have a sense of flow and good hinting - the Blackwell trilogy being a very good example - but on the whole the genre still offers plenty of situations where you find yourself walking around for half an hour clicking everything without a clue of what you're even supposed to accomplish before you can proceed. That, to me, spells broken.

Figuring out what to do is what you're supposed to be doing in an adventure game. Getting stuck on a particular problem is not any more broken that not being able to get past an action-arcade challenge.

Exactly! And like in an arcarde games there are unfair challenges which makes you think "Why should I play this? This is just unfair" and challenges where you'll say it's my own fault ("Why didnt I think of this solution" / "Why weren't my reflexes faster")

This little distinction makes all the difference between great games and shitty games.

There's always been a solution to the problem of getting stuck. It's non-linearity. Think of monkey island for example. Can't beat the swordmaster? Try to find the treasure first first.
Most adventures are best when you have a set of objectives which you can solve independently. You can really get into the flow this way. RPGs like Oblivion extend this idea with their quests. You can really have 20 or more quests simultaneously (The quests themselves are an insult to your brain of course - this is where adventures are much more sophisticated and interesting). I'm going to try such an approach with Dacey II though I'm not sure on the design of the "quests" yet.

Of course I get you point about not thinking inside of genre borders, on the other hand it's not that easy to abandon the genre completely for video games cause they have to have a interface in some way. GTA 3 was very new and unique you say - I say it's just an action game. Braid? A platformer. Heavy Rain? Adventure. It's very rare for games to completely fall out of genres.
For me an adventure is definied as a game where you have to solve puzzles to progress. This is what I meant when I said a "pure" adventure. Every other element is up for discussion.

@skitt2501
You're definitely getting much better here. The lightning could use some more color though.
Could you send me the model? I could show you how much better it could be with porper lightning and render setup.

Here's an interesting interview with Jonathan Blow (Braid) about his new project The Witness.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/15/jonathan-blow-interview-social-game-designers-goal-is-to-degrade-the-players-quality-of-life/
Overall I feel he's quite arrogant and I really doubt if the game really will be the holy grail of adventure gaming (especially as he mentions Myst as main inspiration) but he's got a point when he says that adventure games haven't changed much since the nineties. Of course the old prinicple still works pretty well but pretty much every other game genre has evolved. Why not adventure games?
I'm starting this thread because I've been thinking about this alot. I'm planning to do some things very different for Dacey II. Like introducing gameplay elements from other genres - but still making a pure adventure and not some watered down genre mix.

Do you think classic point and click gameplay is outdated? Or are there at least elements in these games that should be modernized?

Probably not very helpful at all though. I'll just slink off back to my scribbles now.

Quite helpful indeed. You're right above the roof.

Also nice idea Tabata, I'll have to try this.
I also think the problem of the house is due to my inabiliy to shade big plain areas.

Works here - I had no idea AGS could do that - oh the posibilities.

You might be right - I give the sharper brush a try.

@Ryan - I get the concept but I don't think it will work in my framework - as I'm using walkable areas for collision detection and it would therefore mean recoding the whole engine.

About the idea using AGS blend - Any experience if this is actually faster then AGS' own alpha blending?