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Well, I'm stuck right at the beginning...

The game language is stuck on Italian, and no matter what I do (select English or Game Default from winsetup.exe (selecting "En" crashes the game), delete the autosave file, uninstall and reinstall), it won't change to English. I could play it in Italian, but I'd prefer to use English. How can I fix this?

[This City at Nightby Paul Giaccone and Ben Chandler]

After 11 years on and off working my fingers to the bone, it's finally here!

This City at Night
by Paul Giaccone and Ben Chandler



Tracey hates her humdrum job at Insurance International, but it turns out there is more going on there than meets the eye. An unknown organisation is plotting a coup that will have catastrophic global consequences, and unless it can be stopped in time, the world will be brought to its knees...

Special features:

* Early scenes contain gameplay, art and special effects not seen in the demo
* Multiple endings
* Minigames
* References to many classic adventure games
* Easter eggs

Screenshots:







Note that this game is marked as "mild" for language, but some players may find the language offensive. Some stronger words are censored (but guessable). There are one or two mildly suggestive scenes, and some mild violence. This game isn't suitable for young children.

Game page: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2313/

Currently available in English only. Italian version coming shortly (done and currently being checked).

My game This City at Night is nearing completion, and I'm looking for two or more enthusiastic proof-readers:

1. The game text is almost 50,000 words long, so reading it will take some time. Perhaps this job could be split between two or more people.
2. I have also prepared an Italian translation (for my Italian friends here whose games I have translated into English). I am looking for a native Italian speaker with a good knowledge of English who can check my translation for any grammar mistakes or phrases that don't sound right. (I have prepared the translation manually and not just run the English text through an online translation service.) I have also advertised for someone on the Italian site www.adventuresplanet.it.

Any willing volunteers will of course get a credit at the end of the game!

Many thanks,

Paolo

I'm not sure whether this is an actual bug or a feature...

If you set Visible to false for an object, and then animate it, the game hangs. Obviously you wouldn't want to do that, but my game was hanging and I found out I had forgotten to make my object visible before animating it.

At the very least, I think this should generate a warning at compile time or runtime, or maybe it does already and I didn't notice it?

PS: I saw this in v3.3.4, build 3.3.4.2.

It looks like the Games in Production thread for my game, This City at Night, might be locked as I can't see a reply button there, so I'm posting a quick update here.

Anyway, I'm still working at it. Just the last big scene to complete and a fair bit of tidying and bug fixing to do. And I've FINALLY upgraded to v3.3.4 from ye olde v2.7.1 It took quite a bit of effort (including buying a new PC) to get everything working with the new version but now it's so much easier to do stuff.

Apologies if there's already a hints and tips thread for this game - I searched but didn't find one, so please redirect me if I overlooked it.

Spoiler

I need to find a man's blood for Prospero. I thought I might be able to get it from the head on the stake, but no joy. I have killed the beast and worked out how to get in and out of Volksville. I have the fish, pint glass and helm. Thanks for any hints.

[close]

I've finally updated AGS from v2.72 to v3.0 and got my game building with very few changes needed. However I'm unable to run my game as I get the error "No mouse was detected on your system, or your mouse is not configured to work with DirectInput. You must have a mouse to play this game."

I've had a look at the other postings on this subject but they haven't helped. First of all, the obvious: I do have a mouse and it is working. I have updated to DirectX v9.0 (although I think I might already have had it). I have run DirectX Diagnostic Tool and the entry for my mouse device reads "Device Name: Mouse; Status: Attached; Controller ID: n/a; Vendor ID: n/a; Product ID: n/a; Force Feedback Driver: n/a

I am able to run AGS games that I download, just not my own when I build it, so my problem is not quite the same as the one that other people have had in the past.

I am running AGS on Windows XP SP 3. Device Manager gives these details about my mouse: HID-compliant; manufactured by Microsoft; connects via USB port; working properly.

Thanks for any help. I could keep slogging away with 2.72 but given all the advantages 3.0 has to offer (including a debugger - hurray!) I'd much rather use the newer version.

I've got a bug in my code that I'm not sure how to fix.

At various critical places in the game I automatically save the game to give the user a "safe point" to reload if they mess up so that they can try again. One of these automatic saves is in a block of code in dialog_request(), and works more or less like this:

function dialog_request(int index)
{
    [...]
    else if (index == 17)
    {
        //check whether all dialog options have been used
   if (dialogComplete)
   {
            StopDialog();
            [...]    //conversation between characters
            warnOfDanger();    <--- safe point is set here
            [...]    //conversation between characters
   }
    }
}

The crash happens when the following takes place:

* Player completes dialog and the above code is executed
* Player messes up and gets killed
* Room changes to another playing an ending
* Room changes to a blank room that displays a "Try again/Restart/Quit" GUI
* Player clicks "Try again"
* The safe point is restored
* Player plays on
* Room changes eventually (either because they get killed again or are successful)
Crash at this point

Note that I test whether the dialog is complete and stop it myself so that the last dialog option can be displayed by itself in the dialog.

I'm aware that StopDialog() is executed at the end of the request, but I'm puzzled why the crash is happening because it doesn't happen when the room changes after the player was successful first time round. The safe point is saved using SaveGameSlot(100, "#SAFE POINT#"); and restored with RestoreGameSlot(100); Surely the game should continue from where it left off?

I love the new website, but where has "Recently added games" gone? You can find games by award-winners, picks of the month, etc, or by clicking "Browse" and selecting categories, but there doesn't seem to be a way of finding out what's been released lately. There's the Completed Game Announcements forum, of course, but that isn't quite the same and not everyone announced their games there.

I haven't been around here much for the last few months (my computer was up the spout for the first six months of the year so I couldn't play any games) and I'd like to know what I've missed out on!

Thanks.

Just played this little point-and-click game, Follow, listed on jayisgames.com. It's stirring up some controversy over there for its content. The artwork and music are really well done, the gameplay is quite good and the game itself is pretty easy. Just mentioning it here for anyone who'd like to play it.

Ben 'Yatzhee' Croshaw is making a new game!

It's called Poacher and you can read about it on his blog. It's a platformer and reminds me a bit of Knytt's games.

I was getting through this quite nicely until

Spoiler

I got into the apartment. I've escaped the bad guys. I can't leave by the apartment door yet. Looks like I have to do something with the console, but tinkering around with it doesn't seem to help.

[close]

So what's the next step? Thanks.

EDIT: OK, I worked it out in the end:

Spoiler

I needed to phone Matthias.

[close]

I know that you can extend or shorten the time that each frame of an animation is on for using the SPD setting below the frames in the animation view, but is there a way of varying, in any given frame of a walk animation, the speed that the character moves across the screen while that frame of the animation is being displayed? Specifically, I want the character to go through the full cycle of frames, moving forward as they do (as already happens), then remain stationary for a moment before repeating the cycle. Is there a way of doing this in AGS? At the moment the only solution I see is to write my own code to do this, which wouldn't be too hard, but obviously I'd prefer not to if there's a way to do it in AGS.

On the subject of writing stuff myself: is there a way of determining in AGS which position a character will walk to when the user clicks on a given position on the screen that is not in a walkable area? Again, I could code this up myself but it would make life a lot easier for me if the information is already accessible somehow.

Just to be clear, I'm asking if there are functions to do this in AGS rather than how to code either of these things up from scratch.

Thanks.

I've nearly finished this game. Just one more thing left to do:

Spoiler

get the monkey suit out of the upstairs room.

[close]

I'm guessing I need to

Spoiler

open the window

[close]

and to do that I need something

Spoiler

to oil it with

[close]

but the

Spoiler

cleaning products in the cupboard have childproof caps.

[close]

Any suggestions?

...then he might very well write something like this.

This is from a Casual Gameplay competition over at jayisgames. Here are the other entries.

The intro to my game features a conversation between two characters (essentially a bunch of "Say" commands). I'd like to make this skippable, which of course is easy enough to do if you use the StartCutscene and EndCutscene commands.

Rather than doing this, I'd like to have "Skip intro" displayed on the screen which will do what it says when clicked on. This can be implemented in various ways (perhaps the simplest of which is to make this an object with a script that runs when it is interacted with) but no matter how I implement it, whether as an object or a GUI, clicking on it has no effect while the characters are talking.

I've tried adding code to on_mouse_click in the global script, which didn't work, and writing an on_mouse_click function in the room script, which didn't work either. The problem is that the game engine does not do anything with mouse clicks while the characters are talking except advance the conversation.

So is there a way of doing this, that is, of making the interact mouse mode operational while characters are talking? I can't use SayBackground because then the characters would talk over each other, and in any case, I'm using portrait-style speech.

I'm using AGS v2.72. Thanks for any help.

My monitor resolution is 1024 x 768, which means that if I play a game that is at that resolution, I can't play it in a separate window. If I then press Alt+Tab to switch from the game to a separate application, sometimes the game crashes with an error about drawing the image. I don't think it's an error in the game itself.

Is there any way of playing a 1024 x 768 game in a half-resolution window? There is no option to do so from winsetup (although the resolution can be increased), but is it possible some other way?

I am running the game on Windows XP SP3.

Thanks.

I have a scene in my game in which I create multiple graphical overlays, and this code has always worked just fine up until recently. What has changed to cause a problem is that the backgrounds in my characters' speech portraits have coloured-in backgrounds, whereas they were transparent before. While any given portrait is being displayed, one of my overlays (it's hard to tell which one because I display, remove and reuse them rapidly and randomly) turns into a rectangle that is the same colour as the background of the portrait being displayed.

The simple solution would be to set the backgrounds of the portraits back to being transparent, but I don't want to do that. So, my questions are...

* Do portraits take up a graphical overlay? I suppose they must do.

* What is happening, exactly? Is one of overlays I am using somehow overlapping the portrait overlay in memory or something?

* Does the overlay used for portraits have a particular index (eg, overlay number 0) or does it just occupy the next available slot out of the maximum 20 overlays?

* If it uses the next free slot, how can I tell which overlay is being used for the portrait so that I can avoid using it for my own overlays?

and finally, the important one:

* How can I fix this problem without resorting to making the backgrounds of my characters' portraits transparent?

Adding an extra line to the top of my characters' portraits and setting the transparent colour to be the top left-hand pixel does not make any difference, presumably because it's a question of overlays being reused rather than which colour is transparent in the portraits.

I am using 18 graphical overlays as I know one is needed for speech overlays and I have another use for the remaining overlay. Reducing this number to 17 does not fix the problem either.

I'm using AGS v2.71 on Windows XP, and my game uses a true-colour palette.

Thanks for any help.

This thread on reddit contains a comment (the one beginning "This is one my dad told me.") that sounds awfully like some of the gameplay in This Game. Spooky!

[1]

What no H&T thread yet? Is it just me or is everyone else breezing through this game

I've got a long way through the game without getting stuck and so far the puzzles have been just hard enough to be challenging but not so hard that I've been completely stumped, so well done on that, Ben and Dan. But I'll leave the review for after I've finished the game... on with my stuckness.

Spoiler

I think that all my woes stem from not being able to open that bottle of alcohol - there are at least two puzzles that, as far as I can see, will be solved once I've got it open.

Now I have seen something that looks an awful lot like a corkscrew but need to find some way of detaching it from its owner... perhaps something from the construction site will help here?

[close]

So could anyone hint on the following, please?

1

Spoiler

Getting the saw from Frank.

[close]

2

Spoiler

Getting the toffee from Frank.

[close]

I think that's probably as much as I need for the time being in order to get further.

Thanks.