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I was doing so well, and then...

Spoiler

I have the appropriately styled hair, the jacket and the "smoke" and have proved to Klaus that I have the right attitude, but what happens now? I still can't get into the club, speaking to Klaus just throws up the "How do I get the jacket/'smoke'" options again, and using the items on myself doesn't work.

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I've just taken a look at the complete list of games, and I see there are 998 in the database! So before long we will have 1000 games! I wonder what game number 1000 will be?

RELEASED December 2018.

Game announcement thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=56750.msg636599275
Game page: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2313/

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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...

Some screenshots for you (these will look different in the finished game):







Ben304 and I started work on this game not long after completing Trance-Pacific, so as you can see, it's been in production for a while. Ben was producing the graphics but unfortunately had to bow out, so the project stalled for a while. James DiGrizz has produced some great backgrounds for me, three of which are shown above.

Latest update (11 April 2016): Demo version released. Play the first few scenes of the game! Some features are not available in the demo and the artwork will be updated in the full version.

Game page: here
Download link: here

Here in London it snowed last night and is still snowing this morning. It's 6+ inches (15+ cm) plus deep on the ground. There are no buses, long delays on the trains and even most of the underground trains are not running (because most of them are overground for part of their routes). So I'm off work today!

So is it snowing where you are, and does snow disrupt things where you live? Every year here we have the same discussion - why does the UK come to a standstill when it snows when countries in northern Europe (Sweden, etc) can cope? (I hear that in Los Angeles everything grinds to a halt when it rains. They should try living in London!)

Ugh, I'm sure this must have been covered somewhere before but I'm not finding it in the manual or in older messages, so apologies in advance if I have overlooked the appropriate thread.

I am using v2.71 (yep, still - it's a game that's been in development for a while). I have a number of .ogg files (called SOUNDx.ogg, where x is 1, 2, etc) for my sound effects. If I include these in the Compiled folder, then I hear them when I play the game. If I put them in the Music folder (Music and Compiled are in the same folder), I get nothing. If I run Rebuild VOX files, no VOX files are generated, no matter whether the sound files are at the time in Compiled, Music or the directory above (the game folder containing the .dta and .crm files). I don't want to have to release the sound files with the game, so where should they be in order for the VOX file to be built?

Thanks for any help.

I'm stuck!

Spoiler

I've spoken to the mother and son. I've also opened the closet and taken what's in it. I have the following inventory items: brochure, recipe book, salt, sugar, pepper, can-opener, peaches, milk, rubber band, jam, cheese, preserves, detergent, ice-cream, milkshake, silver key, nail-file, gold key, coat hanger.

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But I don't know what to do next. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Does anyone here use Media Subtitler? It's a great little freeware application for adding subtitles to videos.

Anyway that's enough free publicity from me. I'm having problems embedding the subtitles in the video. I've saved the subtitles as an .ssa file, I've downloaded VirtualDub and the filter, I've loaded the video and the subtitles into Media Subtitler and set it up to point to the VirtualDub folder, but when I click on OK to begin the embedding process, I get "Can't open script file".

Alternatively, does anyone know of any other freeware to embed .ssa or .str subtitle files in an mpg video?

Thanks.

Sigh, never try to debug other people's code (although that's a large part of what I do for a living, but that's another story...).

The code I'm having problems with has a dialog that contains a "new-room" function. In the room_AfterFadeIn() function for the room that the character goes to there are five calls to dialog[xx].Start(), each followed by the animation of two NPCs:

Code: ags

function room_AfterFadeIn()
{
  dialog[26].Start();
  character[35].LockView(76);
  character[35].Animate(0, 5, eOnce, eBlock);
  character[35].UnlockView();
  character[34].LockView(77);
  character[34].Animate(0, 3, eOnce, eBlock);
  character[34].UnlockView();
  dialog[27].Start();
  // snip
  character[35].Say("says something here");
  character[0].ChangeRoom(12,170,180);    // this is the PC
  character[34].ChangeRoom(-1,100,100);
  Wait(100);
  character[0].Say("something else here");
}

The final part of the code is intended to move both NPCs out of the room and to move the PC back to the room he was in when the original dialog started.

To sum up, we have a call from a dialog to change room, run several dialogs and then change back to the room we started from.

What happens is that the game changes to the new room and the animation runs several times, but the dialogs do not start up. Then the command to move the PC back to the original room causes the following crash: "Error: NewRoom: Cannot queue action, post-script queue full".

What should happen, fairly obviously, is that the the first dialog playes, then when the appropriate topic is chosen, the game changes to the new room, we see the dialogs, the animations run in between them and then the player gets moved back to the original room.

It looks like this code has got itself a bit tied up in knots and a script is not returning in time for something else to happen, or something like that.

Can anyone suggest how to fix this? I'm using v3.0.0.23. Thanks very much.

I'm having problems with my script actions happening in the right order with FadeOut and FadeIn. This question has been asked before several times on this board, and I'm aware that FadeOut and FadeIn work in mysterious ways but I don't see anything that helps me with my problem.

Here's what I want to do:

* Fade to black
* Wait a moment
* Change character's views
* Fade back up

The idea is that the character gets changed while the screen is faded out.

Here's my (slightly disguised) code:

Code: ags

FadeOut(2);
Wait(10);
cFred.ChangeView(3);
cFred.SpeechView = 4;
FadeIn(2);
Display("blah blah blah");
cFred.Say("Fred says something here.");

And here's what happens:

* Screen fades to black
* Game pauses (verified by changing 10 to 100)
* Screen fades back in
* "blah blah blah" is displayed
* Fred's view changes
* Fred says "Fred says something here."

So the views are changed after the FadeIn and Display commands have executed, as if changing view has to wait for blocking actions to complete. Is this true? How can I get this to work without messing around with testing stuff in repeatedly_execute (which would probably work, but seems to be unnecessarily complicated)?

I'm using v2.71, by the way.

Thanks for any help.

This game is trickier than I thought it would be...

Spoiler

I have the ball and the dog whistle. The whistle has no effect on the dog. I've tried using the drainpipe, the mud, the board on the shed and the holes in the tree, and tried getting in round the back way, all to no avail...

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Any hints on what I am missing?

Thanks.

I'm adding sound effects to the game I'm working on. Some of the longer effects are over 1M in size.

I don't want the game to end up requiring a huge download, so I'm wondering how I can make the files smaller. Obviously, all the files for the game will be zipped and compressed when the game is released, but already the zip file is 7M big with less than half the game done and the sound effects added to only one room!

Any tips on how to make sound files smaller (like you can do when saving a JPG) with minimal loss of quality? I'm using Audacity to edit the sound effects.

Thanks.

Mannaggia ho! (That's "Oh, damn it!" in Italian.)

I'm stuck already...

Spoiler

I've turned on the monitor and used the air vent/air conditioner (il condizionatore) but I can't find out what to do next.

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Grazie

I'm having fun adapting to 3.0. It's very nice, guys, and a great improvement over 2.7x.

I have a problem with the OnClick function for a button. In 2.7x, when you opted to run the global script on clicking on a button, AGS wrote the function stub for you. In 3.0, you have to do this yourself. Fair enough, but this is where I am running into difficulties.

The button was initially called Button1, and so I wrote

Code: ags

function Button1_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)
{
	//my code here
}

This worked fine. Then I decided to give my button a more meaningful name and changed the Name field of the button to GameActionsButton. I updated my code accordingly:

Code: ags

function GameActionsButton_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)

Now nothing happens when I click on the button. If I restore the old function name, it works again. Does this mean that once you write an OnClick function for a button, that name is set in stone, or that you can't rename buttons, or that you mustn't rename buttons after you've written OnClick functions for them? Surely AGS 3.0 isn't so restrictive. What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks.

EDIT: Ah, I've found what I need to be doing - I should be clicking on the lightning bolt above the attributes panel to generate the function stub in the code.

However, the function is still Button1_OnClick - why does it not update to the new name?

My scenario is this - I want an action to happen after a set time has elapsed, and this action will involve blocking functions, specifically, Display() and/or Say().

I have got this partially working as follows:

* Set timer in room A script, and set a boolean to false.
* In repeatedly_execute_always() in the global script (because the timer can expire in either of two rooms, A and B), if the timer has expired, set the boolean to be true.
* In the scripts for room A and room B, whenever X happens (see below), call a function that checks whether the boolean is true and then carries out the action accordingly. As this is function is not called from repeatedly_execute_always(), the AGS engine is happy.

This is pretty much the standard workaround, as I understand it, and it works just fine, except for one thing. My "X" in "whenever X happens" above is that the mouse moves over any hotspot on the screen. I have ensured that the whole screen is made up of hotspots, so that no matter where I am on the screen, as soon as the boolean is set to true, the action gets triggered automatically. (I also set the boolean back to false in the first line of the function, otherwise it would be triggered multiple times, which I don't want.)

The problem is that I have a GUI at the bottom of each of the two rooms, and GUIs receive the mouse focus when the mouse is over them. So the hotspot or part of a hotspot below the GUI will not detect the "Mouse moves over hotspot" event. Furthermore, a GUI does not itself have a "Mouse moves over hotspot" event. The best I am able to do is to pick up when the user clicks on a GUI.

So the difficulty I have is that if the user moves the mouse over the GUI and leaves it there, the action is not triggered when the boolean becomes true.

Hence what I need is either a means of processing a mouse-over event for a GUI (which doesn't seem to be possible, at least, not in 2.71), or an alternative method of causing my action to happen as soon as my boolean is set to true, irrespective of what the player happens to be doing at the time, and not within repeatedly_execute_always().

I'm sure this problem must have been solved before. Anyone have a solution? Thanks very much.

paolo

Is it possible to change the Text Color attribute of text window GUIs from within a script? I've looked at the attributes of the GUI, there doesn't seem to be anything like TextColor. The manual doesn't mention how to do it, and threads in this forum suggest it might not be possible...

Specifically, what I want to do is set the text colour in the Sierra-style GUI I'm using for their speech so that "Say" uses different colours for different characters, like it would do in LucasArts style.

I'm using v2.71. Is this functionality available in a later version, or is there a workaround for v2.71?

Thanks.

I have a sound effect that I am playing repeatedly using PlayAmbientSound, and it works beautifully, until I click on another window (say, Firefox, to read the AGS forums), at which point the sound stops (rightly enough) and then click back on the game window, at which point the sound does not start playing again.

Is this a bug in AGS, or am I doing something wrong? Is there a workaround? Adding the following to repeatedly_execute_always (with channel = 1, sound = 1, maxVolume = 255, as in the original call to the function) does not solve the problem:

Code: ags

if (!IsSoundPlaying())
    PlayAmbientSound(channel, sound, maxVolume, 0, 0);

I'm using AGS v2.71.

Thanks.

How can I get function parameters to be passed by reference? I suppose I should first ask whether this happens anyway. If not, is the best solution to pass pointers to the variables instead?

I want to write a function like this:

Code: ags

bool foo(int x, int y)
{
    if (certain conditions not met)
        return false;
    else set x and y appropriately
        return true;
}

The reason I need to do this is of course that you can only return one value through the return type, and I need to make the function effectively return three values. I could use global variables, but I'd prefer not to.

In C++, I could make the parameter types int& or int* to do this. What is the best way to do it in AGS?

Thanks.

Hm, I've

Spoiler

got three of the pedestals done but am stuck on the sun and moon ones... I'm guessing I need to make the light go to the sun and away from the moon, perhaps by turning the diamond, but that doesn't have that effect. I have the two cups, the vine and the burning bone.

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Any hints?

Hm, I'm stuck already...

Spoiler

I've got through the portal and am in the place where the block of ice and gate are. Nothing seems to work... I've tried knocking on the house door as well.

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Thanks.

This is the official Hints and Tips thread for Anti-heroes.

Be nice to others:

* When mentioning anything that gives away the plot or gives hints on solving puzzles, please use spoiler tags, like this: [ hide]your hint goes here[ /hide] but WITHOUT the spaces before the "hide" and the "/hide". This gives:

Spoiler

your hint goes here

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* Please do NOT post solutions or walkthroughs.

The game's pretty easy so I imagine most people shouldn't have much trouble completing it.