Messages

(if it's computer screen coordinates the y has to be negated)

If you're working in screen coordinates, the above formulae require the angle to be measured clockwise; if you are measuring the angle anticlockwise, then you need these instead:

x = startx + dist * cos(angle)
y = starty - dist * sin(angle)

Additionally, you might need to convert the angle from degrees to radians (I don't remember whether AGS trigonometric functions work in radians or degrees). Look up "cos" or "sin" in the AGS manual to see if this is necessary. If so, then I think it explains there how to do the conversion.

Thanks Ben... I... I... I am 30!!!  :'(

Happy birthday, Nacho. Don't worry, you'll get over it quickly!

It'll soon be me turn to hit a birthday ending in zero (it's the next one up from you)!

I'm stuck in the room after the desert.

Spoiler

I haven't found a way of getting across the gap, even after going back to the previous two rooms.

[close]

Thanks.

In the front view, he looks like a well-built chap - broad shoulders, big chest, narrow waist... but the side view doesn't confirm this. The front of him is straight up and down. His chest is probably large enough in the side view, but his waist needs to come in.

Even if he isn't as I have described him, his tunic comes in at the waist in the front view, but doesn't in the side view.

A method not yet covered in this thread, basically because it's a bit stupid but I thought I could mention it anyway, is to have the object not appear until it's needed. In Lure of the Temptress there is a special herb that grows in a patch of grass, but it's not visible until you're told to search for it. Not very logical but still...

Definitely be careful with this method, if you use it.  This was going to be one of my Why Your Game is Broken articles.

[snip]

If I can pick on just one game, (and this is by no means the only game to make this mistake, I even see it in some professional games) Diamonds in the Rough makes this mistake several times.

[snip]

When expressing my concern with the game's author, however, he told me that he likes this kind of puzzle in a game and enjoys wandering around a large gameworld taking notes.  So, to each his own, I guess.

Each to his own indeed, but if you want people to play your game, you need to consider what will go down well and what won't. The game developer might like a particular type of puzzle, but if most people don't, he or she should not then be surprised if people then criticise the game because of it. After all, games are (usually) written to be played by other people.

I had assumed this was poorly coded (the practice I always use in C++ calls for {} regardless of whether I am using one line or not, for readability) [snip]

Alternatively, if you are going for readability but don't want to bother with the braces because only one line follows the if, I would strongly advise putting the "if" statement and the statement that follows on separate lines.

Code: ags

if (long conditional goes here) do this;
do that;

is bad style, as, at first glance, it looks like it means "if (...) do that" when in fact it means "if (...) do this; then do that whether or not (...) was true ". One statement per line is good practice, unless you are writing a book and your publishers want to keep paper costs down.

I have found something on an Art article: "..For now, the two mediums [contemporary painting and photography] seem locked in an endless dialectical two-step: erase one and the other would appear to be saying less... the liaison seems symbiotic...". Anyone wanting to expand on this quote, they should go and read the whole article (bibliography will be given).

Sorry, but this sounds like typical arty-farty nonsense to me. If you can just fill your essay with ten pages of this kind of pretentious waffle, you're sure to get an A

Seriously, though, I'd be suspicious of an article about art that doesn't know what the plural of "medium" is - anyone who's studied art seriously will know that it's "media" (as in "mixed media"). "Mediums" are fortune-tellers and people who wear medium-sized clothes.

I'm trying to establish that there is a connection between painting and photography. That there is a relationship.

In what perspective? By what standards, what measures? Are you writing an essay on semiotics, art history, or the theory of picture composition?

I rather suspect this might be one of those essay questions of the form "Painting and photography are connected. Discuss." which would mean that it is open to a wide range of interpretations. Yuk. I always hated those sorts of essays.

Well, of course you can discuss realism in painting, and the even stronger link given by photorealism. If you want a name here, check out the work of Chuck Close.

Has photography ever aimed to imitate painting? I think you could say that it has. That might be an interesting angle worth exploring.

One other thing no one has mentioned yet - the profile image is shorter than the forward-facing image.

tolworthy, check out http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Meh. Apparently some paper dictionaries are considering including "meh" in their next editions. (By the way, there may well be a pause but that's not what apostrophes are for.)

My uncle has the same,but bigger
Reminds me on the time when my cat chased a dachshund through the park
I bet you will not put this into your nose
Susie once put something like that into her nose,it took them 3 hours to remove it
That reminds me on a joke i heard:"A priest ,a horse and Micheal Jackson visit the Vatican to talk with the pope about [string]..."

Now, I would be much more likely to click on lots of objects if I got amusing responses like this. To my mind, "meh", "boring", etc, would get really tedious really quickly. Ben There, Dan That had a witty response for just about every incorrect action, and it made the game fun to play while you were hunting for the right action to move the game on.

I would like to present:
The Class-I CAL (Cybernetically Augmented Lifeform).

[snip]

vvv  Ghost! Now that's a pun!    vvv

Now here's another pun... Ghost drew an "arty miss"

[My question, and it's a two-parter:]

An good example of said infatuation is that girl you masturbate to in the bushes. A good example of love is your significant other pretending to be the girl who you masturbated to in the bushes.

It's a subtle difference, but it's there.

-MillsJROSS

You and Mr Boon write such romantic stuff...

@Stupot: I would say most people say "fizzy drinks" here in London in the UK. Or if you are in the industry that makes them, "carbonated drinks".

@Buckethead: Isn't a normal map just a representation of the actual normals of a surface, while a bump map is a modification of a normal map in order to simulate texture by changing the results the lighting model gives when applied to the surface?

My question, and it's a two-parter:

a. Why do cyclists' magazines claim that it is safer for a cyclist to go through a red light than to wait? If you're waiting alongside a juggernaut that's about to turn in front of you, then yes, you are in a dangerous spot, but getting hit side-on from traffic crossing your path is just as dangerous, surely?

b. Why do so many cyclists (not all cyclists - I don't want to generalise) in the UK think it's OK to cycle on the pavement (the sidewalk) or to go the wrong way up a one-way street? Do their magazines tell them to do that too? If it's because they think the road is too dangerous, then why cycle at all?

OK, rant over.

Yesterday I was doing some heavy searching and I found myself this website:
http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

It's got an amazing flash demonstration that you can play.  For example, rag doll physics using rectangles for the body parts and elastic joints.  It seems very easy to use.  I even checked out the forums and read some of the user reviews.
I believe it's the physics engine used by Fantastic Contraption.

Yes, this is the sort of thing you will need. Coding the equations from scratch will be tough unless you have a firm grip on the physics involved, so it makes sense to use something that already does all the difficult stuff for you. Bit like AGS, really

Nah, sorry to spoil your excitement, but as Snarky has already said, you've just rediscovered the torus (the shape of a ring doughnut or quoit).

You're right about the triangle thing - if you draw a line along the "equator" and make this line the right length (I think it needs to be one-quarter of the circumference of the torus as measured going through the hole) you can then draw two more lines, one at each end of the line on the equator and at right angles to that line, and they will meet in a right angle. This gives you a "triangle" with three right angles.

This works because the parallel postulate doesn't apply - in plain English, this means that the two "vertical" lines would normally be parallel in "ordinary" space but aren't on the surface of a doughnut.

Have fun with your doughnut.

PS: KhrisMUC - the room is still flat, but you can move around it in the same way as you would move around on a torus. If the room were wrapped round side to side only, the moving around it would be like going round the surface of a cylinder. A torus is just a cylinder that has been bent round to make its ends touch.

[F]

So I'm still on the hunt for some nice simplified physics equations or what-not if anyone happens to know of any.

Sir Isaac Newton is your friend here... check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics for an introduction, although depending on your maths you might not find this easy to convert into nice simplified physics equations.

If you want to do the maths yourself, then a knowledge of vectors, Newton's third law and the conservation of linear momentum (and maybe conservation of angular momentum too) are going to be essential.

OK, here goes with some equations you might find handy. The bold letters are vectors. These will work whatever units you use because they don't involve any universal constants, but beware - some equations in standard use by physics, such as  the one describing how two massive objects (eg, the Earth and the Moon) move relative to one other, require you to use SI units (seconds, metres, kilograms, newtons, metres per second, metres per second per second, etc).

F = ma : force = mass times acceleration. Put simply, the more massive (by which I mean heavier, not bigger) an object, the harder you have to push or pull it to make it speed up, slow down or change direction.

s = v0t + at^2 / 2 : this gives the position of a moving object acted on by an acceleration a. The vector v0 is the object's initial velocity, and t is time in seconds. One common use of this is for the acceleration to be gravity (a = (0, -9.81) on Earth), which allows you to work out the paths of objects fired out of cannons and the like.

m1u1 + m2u2 = m1v1 + m2v2 : conservation of linear momentum. Two objects with masses m1 and m2 that start off moving with respective velocities u1 and u2 and then collide end up with respective velocities v1 and v2. This law of physics means, for example, that if you throw a solid, light object against a solid, heavy object, the light object will bounce off at about the same speed as it was going at before, while the heavy object will hardly move at all.

And that's just for starters... I hope it helps.

The cat's loving it.

That's unusual, or are you being ironic? Most cats hate the cold and the wet. My parents' cat would try to tiptoe through the snow as quickly as possible to do his business and then scarper back indoors again.

If you suspect a retailer is adverting a reduction in price when the product was not for sale at a higher price for at least three months previously, then you should contact the Office of Fair Trade who will dispatch a Trading Standards Officer and the retailer will be taken to court and sued for false advertising.

(I think your message was in reply to the one about HMV, so if that's what you were referring to you, please ignore the rest of this comment.)

You're quite right about that, but Woolworths has closed down for good now. No one would get very far suing them now.

Anyway, that's not what they were advertising - they were saying that their goods were "up to 50% off" (which increased to 60% and then 70% in the final few days). That's above board, because it means some prices can be reduced by less than that, some can stay the same and some can even go up. There was no suggestion that everything was being sold at half price.

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!)

I'm still working my way through the game and enjoying it very much.

I've found a few bugs:

1

Spoiler

I'm not sure whether this is the one mentioned in the first post, but if you leave the temple through the hole and then attempt to re-enter by the main entrance, the guards cross and then uncross their weapons, you hear Groth say "Wait for me!" and then the game crashes as it attempts to move the Groth (who is not present) to the interior of the temple.

[close]

2

Spoiler

It's not possible to walk directly from the prison to the temple. If, on the map, you click on the temple after leaving the prison, the figure of Rabokk remains where it is. This might be more a bug in AGS's path-finding algorithm than in the game itself.

[close]

3

Spoiler

If, while you are with Groth, you attempt to walk into the doctor's surgery or the tavern, the door opens in each case and Groth asks whether you are going to the temple. When you return to the avenue later, the doors are still open. This isn't a bug as such, but more of an inconsistency with the game world - given that there is a fire in the tavern, it must be cold, so no one would want to leave doors open.

[close]

Well, not really. Group theory is a mathematical theory (useful for talking about how to solve a Rubik's cube, among other things, but nothing to do with manipulating the universe) [snip]

I believe you yourself refuse to believe it because you are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Group theory is a set of mathematical functions and groups to define and solve equations. It's specifically to do with groups. What I meant by bringing it up is that unlike what Akatosh believed, there aren't too many variables to predict what a group of people will do. [snip]

Cognitive dissonance alert You and I seem to be talking about different types of group theory. Group theory in maths has nothing to do with how groups of people behave - that sounds more like behavioural science.