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Looks like I've missed the UK deadline by just over an hour. Damn! I was looking forward to paying for this exciting new Microsoft product.

I think I'm still in time to buy the US version though.

Layabout has covered just about everything, but I'm not sure about the shading in the shadow on the ceiling. If there is only one light source, then this area would be in complete shadow (except for ambient light). There would not be a bright patch of light in the middle - compare the 3D rendered images.

However, you might get something like this if the fitting just above the bulb were translucent or transparent. Is this what you are going for? If so, the fitting needs to be made lighter and brighter to show that light is passing through it. At the moment, it is very dark and so looks opaque.

I was clearly drunk when writing that. To clarify:

Be inventive in the gameplay - not the story.

You are ofcourse free to be inventive in both.

Agreed - how many films/books/plays must there be with this very plot, or something similar? Whether they are good or bad depends on how well this situation is used in the story.

I'm in Chapter 2 but

Spoiler

I didn't pick up the lantern in chapter 1. (I did once, but kept having to go back to old savegames when the ghosts kept killing me.) Now I am walking around in the dark and keep getting killed.

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Is this a walking dead, or is there another solution?

OK, I've added my bit and posted it on to TheJBurger (and also PM'd him).

The switch between narrators makes things a bit hard to follow, but I've just switched to the third person because this makes it clear who is saying what. My section is from [edited to remove potential spoiler] the perspective of one of the secondary characters, in any case.

Good luck, guys, just three more sections to go! I can't wait to see how this turns out. Hear, hear, voh - thanks for setting this up, Andail.

Paolo, there are only 10 tiles.

OK, thanks. Hm, I suppose that would have been obvious if I had seen

Spoiler

where they go, so could someone indicate to me where Jack is supposed to put them?

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Thanks.

Sorry to say this, but I feel a bit like Rui does in the Completed Games thread for this game.

I'm not a fan of asking for solutions rather than hints, but this is annoying me and making me want to give up playing the game (and maybe even post a bad review, and we wouldn't want that, would we? )

Spoiler

Could someone please tell me where all the tiles are in chapter 1? I get as far as finding 10, and then just end up wandering around until the ghosts get me. I've managed to find one or two that are not in plain view.

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elentgirl - if you haven't already, please, please, please can you make the character walk faster.

Thanks.

The chair's shadow is the wrong shape - it's too long and its edges seem to taper inwards. Sketch lines from the light to top of the chair to the floor, and you'll see the shadow should be about half as long as it is now. The sides of the shadow need to splay outwards rather than being parallel or tapering, because the light source is nearby and not at infinity.

The light patches on the left and right walls look good, but the one on the back wall is a funny shape - it should curve downwards only, but seems to curve up at the ends.

Other than that, it looks pretty good.

OK, I see what I have to do...

* Click on the lightning bolt
* Delete the name already against "OnClick"
* Click the ... button

The new function name then appears in the panel and in the script.

That's great - thanks for your help.

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?

Ben,

The cute little touches like the windmill and the balloon are fantastic!

One point about the balloon - I don't think it would behave like that when the rope is taut. I think one of two things has to happen here:

* if the balloon is just drifting, the rope would tug the balloon back again straight away (so the taut rope should last for only one or two frames), or
* if the wind is strong (which it might well be, because the windmill is turning) then the wind would keep pushing on the balloon, but because the rope is at its full extent, the balloon would tip over to the left. When the wind dropped, the balloon would go back to being upright and be pulled back in.

I'll check my email when I get home tonight.

When making the plane land, I didn't want it to look like a cardboard cutout dropping down [snip]

I thought this should do the trick, but when putting the animation in place, I feel the effect was lost completely [snip]

Ben, I think this is fine. The fact that you can't see it means that it works. If the person playing this looked at the spaceship landing and thought, "There's something funny about that animation... it looks wrong," then that would be cause for concern, but the fact it doesn't attract attention means it has been done right. I don't know if I've explained that very well - do you get what I mean?

EDIT: I disagree with ProgZMax about the size and movement of the shadow. The shadow would start off small and increase in size only if the light source were overhead and not very far away, but it is neither of these - it is behind the ship and very far away. Shadows cast by a light source at infinity - which we can consider the sun to be - do not change size as the object moves because the rays striking the object are parallel. So I think the way Ben has done it is correct, although I think the shadow should be closer to the viewer, judging by the angle to the sun.

EDIT (again): Actually, if the light source were close, the shadow would start of large and diffuse, and then get smaller and sharper as the ship moved in to land. Cartoons often draw the shadow small and getting larger because this is how the umbra changes - they don't bother to draw the penumbra.

D'oh, I thought that neither of those functions could handle blocking functions.

OK, that makes everything much simpler, then. Come to think of it, I'm sure I must have put blocking stuff in repeatedly_execute() before now.

Thanks, guys.

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

This is an excellent idea! Yes, I'm sure people will definitely use it. I wish I had thought of it myself.

I notice you said "could be made" - does this mean that these rooms were drawn in some other application for the sake of example, and that the project isn't under way yet?

Wow, this was exciting! Congratulations to all the winners - your awards were well deserved!

Yes, there's no problem with this if you make it original, I think.

Trance-Pacific has a locked-room puzzle at the start, but it has an original solution method. It also makes fun of the slide-paper-under-the-door-and-push-key-out-of-keyhole cliché.

I've been getting into Agatha Christie's novels lately. She's rated as a literary genius, but I find she can be a bit hit and miss, with some of her books being much better than others.

I didn't think "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" to be the masterpiece that it is often claimed to be (I much preferred "After the Funeral") but "A Murder Is Announced" was a great read, especially as I worked out who the murderer was about halfway through! Currently I'm reading "Ordeal by Innocence", which has a more serious style than the Poirot and Marple novels, which tend to be more light-hearted and unrealistic - everyone in those seems to find having a murder on their doorstep simply super.

I often think her books can be a bit dull for the first 100 pages or so, with lots of dialogue and description of people's thoughts and not much happening, but they are usually worth persisting with as the eye-opening twists tend to come later.

I started AGS V3 to check something today and I'm scared! Damn photo!

Yes, I saw that too. Anyone know who the people in the photo are? I'm guessing one of them might be Chris Jones.

Coo, it's getting near the deadline... I'm going to throw myself into the ring, hoping that I'm not the last person! No one seems to want to have to write the end of this thing.