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Thanks for the quick reply!

I think the code you posted might be a little beyond me at this point (though hopefully not when I'm all finished).


The inventory thing would work great, I think, especially since it would give me more direct control over the font and formatting. I'm going to give it a shot and maybe come back to the other when I've learned more. Thanks. 

I'm working on making a GUI-based in game journal. So far I've created the GUI and added a list box to it, and experimented with adding items to the list box both in the global script and from the room script. All of that works fine thanks to the help I got in my Strings question.

I'm realizing now, though, that the list boxes have some peculiarities which make them seem not very well-suited to journaling for someone who knows as little about scripting as I do. For example, if there is a way to word wrap inside a list box, I'm not aware of it. To get the entries to fit into the GUI, I've had to break them up into multiple strings and format manually. This is not really a serious hardship, but it seems an inefficient way to go about it; I just don't know enough to think of a better way.

The main issue I have right now, though, is that only one (or two, max) journal entries will fit on the GUI at one time. I need a way to allow the player to scroll down in the list box, or turn pages in the list box. The only way I can think of to do it is to have multiple identical GUIs and have the page flip buttons send you to the next GUI, which displays the next entry, but looks identical to the first. But that's going to leave me with like 20 journal GUIs, which, again, seems like the most inefficient method possible.

Could someone maybe point me in the direction of a better way to do this? 

Thanks, Gilbot. That worked.


However, I'm thinking the manual entry should be edited to reflect what actually works.

in 2.71, you can now do:
String text = "This is my text";

it's still a pointer (a struct actually) which can't be assigned initial value during declaration.

I entered

Code: ags

String journal_1 = String.Format("This is a test entry.");

and got the same "cannot assign initial value to global pointer" error message I got using the example from the manual.

Am I trying to put them in the wrong place?

I'm putting them here:

Code: ags

// main global script file

String journal_1 = String.Format("This is a test entry.");

#sectionstart game_start  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE
function game_start() { // called when the game starts, before the first room is loaded

Thanks for your help so far.

Try setting the value in the game_start() script:

Code: ags

message.Text = "This is some text."

Hmm, when I tried to compile after adding that it said "Text is not a public member of String".Ã,  *headscratch*

I'm trying to declare some Strings in my global script in preparation for implementing a journal in my game.

The manual says:

Upgrading to AGS 2.71
AGS 2.71 adds new simple string support to the scripting language. Strings have long been a pain to use in AGS, but this is finally addressed by v2.71.
There's a new String type (that's a capital 'S'). These new strings behave like Java/C# strings in that you can easily assign to and manipulate them.

For example, in 2.7 and previous versions, you had to do this:


string text;
StrCopy(text, "This is my text");

in 2.71, you can now do:
String text = "This is my text";


However, when I put the following code as a test, I got an error message when attempting to compile:

String message = "This is my message";

The error said, "Error in line 3. Cannot assign initial value to global pointer"

I tried doing just

String message;

And that worked but then I'm not sure how to tell it what value the string is supposed to have, and the manual seems to be under the impression I wouldn't have to do it like that anyway.

Clearly I'm missing something obvious, but I'm too inexperienced with scripting to figure out what. Any help would be appreciated.

I think this is a good start for a background. Even though it's empty (at the moment) it's pretty interesting to look at all by itself.

I know you said you'd add light sources later, but you must have had one in mind when you were shading. Based on the floor and ceiling it sort of looks like it's right above the camera but it's not really clear.

Also, the bricks seem a little bit wide to me. Their lengths are four or five times their heights when they should be more like two or three, I think.

I think the ground texture would work (if you're going for cement) if you lowered the contrast some and did some tweaking, but I'm not entirely sure without trying it.

This is adorable. I love the paisley background, and the "dialogue" is totally atmospheric. Neat! 

Here's a thought-
the entire world population are the insane ones, but the ones inside the asylum are sane?

That makes me think of that classic Twilight Zone where the girl had her face horribly mangled and everyone's shocked about how ugly it made her, and she's devastated, and at the end you see that she's beautiful and everyone else is hideous.

That bait and switch has been done so many times you'd have to do something really brilliant with it for it to work.

IMO unless you know you're capable of doing something that brilliant it's better not to set the bar so high for yourself. Choose a plot that isn't going to be continually compared to something everyone is aware of that did it 10 times better than you could ever do it. Trying to pick something reasonably original isn't simply an end in itself; it's a great help because if there's nothing for people to compare it to they can just enjoy it for what it is.

I'm not sure I follow. How does having a weird dream make him insane?

Also, why do the robots tell him what he needs to do to defeat the robot overlord? Aren't they his minions or something?

Where does the pirate costume come from? What's its function?

Couldn't someone with a slightly higher IQ and a little more adventure game savvy find a better way to defeat the robot overlord than strapping an AK-47 on his arm and blowing him away? I mean, isn' t that the kind of solution reserved for action games? Not to stereotype, but for example even Ben Throttle didn't just run around machine gunning obstacles. It would have made that damned junk yard sequence a lot easier if he had, though.Ã, 

And again, why does having a weird dream make him insane?

I'm with Ali. I would strongly suggest you choose one or two gimmicks that really light your fire and then try to build a story that makes sense around them instead of trying to make them the sum total of the story. Remember that no matter how cool you think robots are, most adventure game players aren't going to stay with you if they're not interested in the character they're controlling, and in what happens to him, so just putting in a lot of robots isn't enough. The fun of putting in something like robots in an adventure game is how the player gets to interact with them (are they scary? cute? incomprehensible? hilarious?).

I admit I've been dying to know what kind of game was going to incorporate all these people in yarmulkes with pulp detective lighting. I'm excited and I hate you for getting so much done so quickly.

I don't think there's a pull-down option for what you're wanting to do (if there is, someone will point it out and I'll look dumb, but that's okayÃ,  ), so you'll need to do a miniscule amount of scripting.

Go to the interaction menu for whatever it is you want the player to be able to look at, find the "Look at" flag and pick "New Run Script action". Then pick Edit Script and type in:

character[EGO].Say("That's a whatever. I remember one time...")

where EGO is your character's script name.

What works for me personally when attempting to script anything (because I'm not very savvy) is to do it with the help file open. I think about what I want to happen and then I search keywords in the help file until I find a scripting function that does what I want. Then it's just a matter of following the example and testing it out.

Here are some screenshots from the game my partner and I are working on.











And here's a group photo of the PC and main NPCs I rigged up:




I saved them as jpgs, so they look a bit better in the actual game.

Oh, and here's the theme, written by me.

I think that's a great idea for a game, Breeta. I would definitely play it.

As for the other questions, you might find the thread about making RPGs with AGS helpful.

I think it's a very respectable first go at making a background and if you made the whole game using exactly that style, if the puzzles and plot and characters were good I think for all but the most graphically-fixated your art would work just fine.

I'm only just learning to shade things so that they look anything other than awful, but one tip I can give you is that when you construct things geometrically the way you've done, to achieve a simple shaded effect all you have to do is vary the darkness/lightness of each face of the object according to its relationship with your lightsource. For example if you want the room to appear to be lit from above, make the top of your desk the lightest, the edges a little darker than that, and the sides of the desk a little bit darker still. Also, if the light source is evenly distributed over the ceiling (as opposed to, say, a lonely lamp in the center) your walls are all going to be lighter than your floor instead of vice versa.


Edit: Did a quick paint over to play with darkening and lightening some colors. Hope it gives you some ideas.




I'm by no means a master of shading but I think people who are better at it might be farther removed from their learning process and have the urge to just say, "Keep practicing and you'll get it," which is good advice but doesn't give you much to sink your teeth into. Hopefully the benefit of my meager experience will be in some way helpful to you.Ã, 

There is a really awesome, step-by-step photoshop tutorial for making Sierra-style backgrounds here.


If you notice, after he lays out the color and blurs it all to heck, he's only halfway done.

Fun, fun! Looks great, Dave.

I just noticed that the women in both of the reference pics have apple cheeks. It might be worth experimenting with shading under the cheeks to suggest that? Just a thought. 

I did a paintover, using vict0r's paintover as a base.





I changed her hair from gray to brown and tried to keep as close to the original style as possible.

-tweaked the overall shape of the hair. Some places just didn't seem to flow naturally.
-shortened the height of the head and brought the nose more toward the mouth, as in the reference photo
-made the bulb of the nose more narrow, as in the reference photo
-gave the eyebrows more arch
-hid the right ear behind her cheek to go with the slight turn of the face
-made her lower face narrower (though it could still stand to be even narrower, imo)
-highlighted hair to give it more sense of shape


Hope this helps.

Wow, those look great. I have fond memories of the Perils of Rosella from childhood. I can't wait to give this a shot. 

When I saw the title of this game in the subject line I knew it was going to be cool. Tom and Mr. Hatsby are adorable, the bgs look great, and I'm jonesing for a demo.