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One small point to add: if you haven't already, do look up Format in the AGS manual, as %d will work only for integer variables. If you want to display strings, floating-point numbers, etc, you need a different symbol (or symbols) following the per cent sign.

This is what I got when I wanted to download the first chapter:
The file you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.

I had the same problem - it doesn't work for me either.

Hem.. now it's working..   there's any italian here? 

Hi there, I know Italian. Send me a PM if you would like me to translate your game into English for you.

[Oops, sorry - I accidentally replied to my own post.]

Leon and neon (are you related, by any chance? ) are quite right. There are various things in the text of these games that machine translation would have made a complete mess of. The literal translation of certain phrases would have sounded wooden, so I have used more natural-sounding English expressions that conveyed the same sense. Google Language Tools would have given unnatural-sounding language here. There are lots of words whose spelling has been changed to show the way someone is speaking, and translation tools would have given up on them and left them untranslated. Finally, there are also several puns that are completely untranslatable (example: "What do you call an eight-legged dog in the sea? A dinghy!" makes an Italian-speaker groan but makes no sense in English), so I replaced those with completely different English puns. (Anyone who has read with the Asterix and Obelix books in more than one language will be familiar with this trick.)

Anyway, I have now completed the translation but am waiting for clarification of a few issues from Fafri before sending the translation back, so expect to see the English version soon!

Fafri has contacted me and I'm on the case... Thank you for the kind comment, Leon - consider it reciprocated!

I'm stuck early on...

Spoiler

I'm in the gallery. I've found the map, and noticed that I might be able to move the statue of the woman. I'm guessing I'm supposed to move it to seven locations in sequence, or something like that, but don't see any way of doing this.

[close]

How do I do this, or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?

I haven't read the whole of this thread yet - in fact, I haven't got through all of Darth Mandarb's original posting yet, but I really relate to this point he made:

There was a part, in the Pandora jungle, where there were bugs flying around.  The focus was not on the bugs, they were just adding to the immersion.  I actually, entirely sub-consciously, swatted at one of the bugs in my peripheral vision.

I had a similar experience. There were also a couple of points in the film when I thought "I wish people wouldn't keep getting up and walking in front of the screen" before realising that those people were in the foreground in the film!

As Darth says, it's that good.

Woo-hoo! Excellent! Well done, guys.

EDIT: And the winner is...

Realistically, I don't this game will be seeing the light of day until 2010.

And indeed that has been the case. As things go, I think a more realistic release date is going to be something like summer 2010, but please don't hold me to that

I am still slowly working through what needs to be done on this game. The bottleneck is the drawing, but I downloaded Sketchup just before Christmas and this is great for drawing rooms and objects (not so great for drawing walk cycles, though, but I have other sources of help for these).

I'm going to update the progress in the original posting now.

You might try upgrading to 2.72 as a low-risk move to see if the problem is fixed by that.

OK, thanks. I'll try that and see whether it solves the problem.

EDIT: Yes, that fixes it. Thanks very much for your help!

EDIT: I've made a cut-down version of the game that demonstrates the problem (this has now been deleted).

When you run the game, initially you'll see the rain overlay and other overlays on the ground, and everything is as it should be. After one second, the character speaks. One of the overlays on the ground turns into the top lefthand chunk of the character's portrait.

Thanks very much for your help.

Some people think a hotspot indicator gives away the puzzle, but if pixel hunting is the puzzle, I'm not interested.  If a hotspot indicator gives away the puzzle, it's probably not a good puzzle in the first place.

Well, as I see it, a hotspot indicator only gives away the puzzle there is only one hotspot to indicate. A good game will hide that hotspot among many others. I love ending up in a new room and finding a dozen new hotspots to play around with before I get down to the more serious business of solving the next puzzle.

Hi all,

I played this yesterday and loved it. It was really original and fun too. Often I turn the sound off when playing games, but the really cool music made me leave it on this time. If you haven't already, try clicking on the bench in the top middle square

I too spotted the theme in the phone puzzle.

Spoiler

To tackle it, I 'ad-a(nine) try, then saw how to go-on-in. Ben, thy-mean puzzle's the best sight-I-seen! (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase if you haven't got a clue what I'm on about.)

[close]

One minor thing that looks odd to me - side-on, his feet look like pink shoes because of the gap at the bottom of his feet. I suggest straightening out the soles of his feet. You wouldn't see light through there unless your eye level was right down on the ground, and even then he would have to be arching his feet so you could see a gap.

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.

With any code that uses Random, you will get the same results if you rerun the program. If you want different numbers each time you run the program you need to seed the random-number generator.

I don't have the code to hand but this can be done using the current time. I'm sure someone else will be able to show you how to do this.

[Monk - Final Season- 3 more episodes left. Who killed Trudy? - Possible spoilers]

Monk - Final Season- 3 more episodes left. Who killed Trudy? - Possible spoilers

There's a definite spoiler right there in the thread title. Outside the US, not everyone will know Trudy is dead.

Anyway, my money's on an "it was all a dream" cop-out, Bobby Ewing-style

Open source?
That's cool Mr. 05_06 & Mr. 304

3040506

So now we know the real reason Ben chose his nick.

Whew, I've just finished this. Well done, Ben, another quality game from you. The artwork, story and immersion were all top notch.

I had the same problem as Chicky, namely that I couldn't easily distinguish the objects from the background, and sometimes you I could barely see them, for example,

Spoiler

the charge on top of the crates.

[close]

I am keen to know how you got Thadd's walkcycle so perfect... the feet don't glide at all when he walks.

Off to vote now...