Messages

I only read the first bit of that post and didn't realize that it was expanded from the original concept to the same things as I was posting.  Sorry for the extra thread then.

Thanks.  I hadn't thought of a #define.  However, it still would be nice to be able to do it through the Room editor and not have to wade through a lot of code to find the one you are looking for.  One of my rooms alone has about 20 different locations in it for entry points, walking destinations and so on  It would be a little cleaner to handle it in the Room Editor.  Unless I'm missing something else.

I had thought of using Hotspots but I didn't want to waste them.

I have a suggestion for AGS's Room Editor.  I was thinking of implementing it as Extender functions but it would be so much better as part of the Room Editor.

Basically, it is a way of tagging a specific point within a room and giving it a name.  Then instead of teleporting a character to a specific Room and coordinates, you can just give the name of the location that you want the character to move to.  Each Room would have a list of x,y coordinates and a name.

So a teleport would go from:

player.ChangeRoom(11, 400, 337);

to:

player.ChangeRoom(11, "EntryWay");


This gives two benefits:  Your code is more readable than just numbers and if you have to change the location, you just have to edit the one Location Point with the Room Editor and all references in your game are updated.  No fuss or mess.

I hope you like the idea.  Thanks.

James

Is there any chance that this port can be used as a basis for the OS X port?  I think there are many who would like to see a native OS X port.  I'd do it, if I knew how.

Thanks.  I'll give that a shot to see what happens.

That makes sense although I haven't seen Base 64 with output looking like that before.  So the binary data is something like:
red,green,blue,alpha, red,green,blue,alpha, red,green,blue,alpha, ... width, height, bpp
?  

Thanks.

Yes, I thought I'd make a quickie character import tool for my project just to tide me over until the AGS editor supports something like this.  My aching wrists would be appreciative of any kind of View Wizard type thing that is less intensive than what it is now.   Thank you!

I know that the Character file that is exported from AGS 3.1+ is an XML format.  The only part I'm not sure of is how the sprite image data is stored.  What format is the binary data that is between the SpriteData elements?  Is that UUEncoding of some type?  If so, what algorithm and what is the format of the original source binary data?  PNG? RAW Binary?  or something else?  Thanks.

James

I know that this idea will only be useful to some and not all view creation will benefit.  However, please hear me out.  The game that I'm making uses 3D pre-rendered sprites.  Each character sprite has 15 frames for each of the 8 loops as well as 15 frames per loop for speech.  I have quite a few characters and I'm getting tired of generating the views for each character.

Since each character has the exact same number of frames in the exact same order, it would stand to reason I should be able to automate view creation easier than the Assign View loop by loop.  The idea is that you select a range of frames that represents the entire view, right click and start the wizard (just like we do with Assign View..).  The first page of the wizard takes the number of frames per loop (it should be able to tell from the number of frames per loop and the number of frames selected whether you have enough for 4 or 8 loops) as well as the view number that you want to assign the loops to and whether you want to Add or Overwrite the current frames.  Then the next screen should show the first frame from each of the loops and a dropdown box to name the direction of each loop.

I think this form of view creation would be faster and more productive, if your character has a constant order and frames as mine do.  Most of my characters are asymmetrical so I don't use flipped sprites.  However, I'm sure with some cleverness, that too could be handled with an option on the first page to handle flipped sprites and another on the second page to say which loop gets flipped.  Thanks.

James

Thank you!  I'm going to download this and give it a try.  Thanks again.

Have you ever used a 3D program?  There is one called DAZ Studio that is free.  DAZ also has some free models that you can download.  If you pose them and render them to a bitmap, you can paint your character over them and you would have perfect posing everytime.

Of course, if you wanted to do photo realistic characters with DAZ, you could do that too.  But it costs money to purchase new characters and morphs.

The Top and Bottom margins do match.  The font height has some extra space at the bottom to add space between lines.  However, it throws the vertical alignment of the text off within the Bubble.  But I think I figured a way to fix it in the code.  I offset the text Y placement by the same number of pixels and it centered no problem.  Thanks for pointing it out.



Sorry that the room graphics have changed a bit from the first post.  I've been playing around with the room lighting and textures.

Thank you and thanks for the sample adjustment.  I didn't try an alternate Bubble outline color.  Maybe if the bubble outline was dark purple instead of light purple it would be better.  But I originally had it as Black and White and the contrast got to me after awhile.   I didn't like it because the font looked even harsher.  The purple shades for the bubble is in keeping with the colors used in my Inventory HUD and I felt it was easier on my eyes.  Maybe it's just my imagination.

The font is an SCI font.  I converted it by hand from the TTF version for better performance.  I don't think it can be anti-aliased because of that.  But I'm not familiar enough with AGS to know for sure.

Thanks!  At least I feel like I'm on the right track.

Here is the final look with Speech Bubbles implemented (Thanks to SSH).

Thanks, everyone.  I'm in the process of converting Venice Classic to a SCI font.  I'll test it out and see how that looks.  Thanks again.

It shouldn't be any trouble to fix the line height issue for the last one -- nor any character spacing problems.  However, I thought the height of the characters may be too small for a 640x480 game.  They are only 12 pixels high.  But may be it is good for the character's size.  It doesn't seem to overpower the chibi like some of the others do.

Well, may be I'm barking up the wrong tree.  I just poked around the bitmap fonts section on Dafont and found some interesting ones there.  They are crisp and clean at their appropriate size.  They are a little old school but perhaps that's what is needed.  The two I like are Lunchtime and Venice Classic.  However, I think, Mister Pixel is the easiest to read.

Tell me what you think:

I know what you mean.  I went through many nice fonts but that just looked terrible scaled down because they weren't clear. 

I took another look through and found some Celtic founds as well.  I'll make a list of them scaled down to the size that I think is good for AGS.  I'll include those ones as well.  If I can find a decent font, I will convert it to SCI.  I did that with Lady Ice and it turned out not bad even though I have to agree it doesn't quite match the genre.

Ok.  Here it is:



Just my thoughts.  The Art of Illumination doesn't have any uppercase characters.  So that would be a problem for that font and it looks pretty heavy too.  The last font there is a little too heavy as well but it might be able to be cleaned up.  However, I think one of the other fonts would be much better.  They are lighter weight and more readable, imho.

Which one do you think that you could stand staring at for hours on end?   Any of them?  BTW... If I go with a different font, I will donate the Lady Ice SCI font to the AGS community.

Sorry, Dualnames.  I probably took what you said the wrong way.  Are you saying that the font looks too techno for the game?