Messages

plan 9 from outer space?

How did you get rid of the splinters in your arse after using your pegleg as a dildo.

Me? You should take a closer look at peoples faces when watching those streams on pirateasses.com

â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"â€"

I wouldn't hire you as crewman if we were the only men alive.

hmm … Game.MinimumTextDisplayTimeMs did the trick after all. I've tried it before but probably screwed something up and figured that it just doesn't work if I use text that never times out itself (the manual actually says so as well).


i take that back. The property itself works fine, but: if the user clicks during the defined timeframe (in my case 500ms), the text disappears as soon as that time runs out.
and the manual is not exactly on point about this.

NOTE: This property is ignored [...] if the General Settings are set not to allow text to be automatically removed.

it's not ignored. just acts slightly different (see above).

We all know the problem of players accidently skipping dialog lines by clicking at the wrong time.

as the font in my game needs some time to get used to and can be hard to read, I decided to never let it time out itself. every text needs a click/key to disappear.
I use a lot of small pauses inbetween text lines for dramaturgical reasons. When watching others play the game I noticed that during those pauses they sometimes assume the cutscene/dialog is done and start clicking (who can blame them). So it happens that they skip the following line by accident.

While there exists the property IgnoreUserInputAfterTextTimeoutMs; to avoid similar issues, I would like it to be the other way around.
Something like IgnoreUserInputWhenTextAppearsMs;

I tried adding a Wait(); into my custom speech function (see below). It kinda works. The text lines don't dissapear, but the characters' speech view stops. I could live with that, but it's still not an optimal solution. Is there any other way I could go about the issue?

Code: AGS

	void Saa(this Character*, String Aussage) {
  lblText.Text = Aussage;
	InvOff();
  gDialog.Visible = true;
  this.Say(Aussage);
	Wait(20); //click during that time stops the speechcycle.
	InvOn();
  gDialog.Visible = false;	
 }

your question about the "else" is a little vague (actually very vague).
if you referr to your initial code posted here: the "else"'s there will never come to play as they're taking the "if (CauldronCounter < 4)" as reference.

if (CauldronCounter < 4) { code here }
else { code here }

i suggest you go through Khris' code line by line and try to make sense of everything that's happening and how it is connected.

edit: Khris beat me to it.
I was referring to the code he posted earlier.

Your lines 7, 23, 31 etc make no sense at all.

I'm actually happy to read that. I was already cursing my lack of knowledge and wondered if in nested functions it may be possible to skip all following "if's"

Line 3.

Every time you use an item on the cauldron the counter is set to 0.

*sigh*
I think I actually read about exactly that on another (maybe old) topic where CrimsonWizard mentioned that (or something along those lines).
*double-sigh with bumping my head into the wall*

thanks!

I don't need any help, as I managed to make it work exactly how I want, but I'm a little confused.

The problem in a nutshell (slightly simplified)
I have only one hotspot in a room, called hLoad. Now I want to change the mousecursor when over that hotspot.

now this doesn't have any effect (in the room's rep_exec)

Code: AGS

	if (Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y) != null) mouse.UseModeGraphic(eModeUsermode1);
	else mouse.UseDefaultGraphic();

while this works just fine:

Code: AGS

	if (Hotspot.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y) == hLoad) mouse.UseModeGraphic(eModeUsermode1);
	else mouse.UseDefaultGraphic();

I just can't find out what's going on and that bothers me. Why does != null not cover hLoad?
… what annoys me most is that this is probably a ridiculous basic thing and I'm making a fool out of myself by asking.
I tried some crazy theories like "maybe 'null' can only only be used with pointers" without getting any results.

New Screenshots available (in original post).

It's been way too long since the announcement.
When I first announced the game, claiming it could be released in a week or two, I couldn't understand why some answered along the lines of "I hope you manage to finish this."

Well, now I know better. Never assume you're almost finished until you are finished.
Over the last weeks I redid all graphics, as the initial canvas had an uneven grid, which resulted in some graphics not looking how I wanted them to (mostly font-related).
Now everything sticks to the grid, thanks to some input from Selmiak all character animations/movements do as well.

At some point during the process I asked myself if this is how Vaporware comes into existence
Now I'm back on track in finalizing the game. There's still tons of small details that need fixing (and tons more will probably come up during beta-testing).
At this point I want to basically finish the game, as this took way too long for what was supposed to be a small first test game. I'm very happy with the overall concept, even though at this point I feel that the puzzles/dialogues lack love/quality. But I guess I have to draw the line somewhere and just ditch all the extra ideas I have for the game (and save the energy/time for the next project).

*sigh*
thanks for the info. I guess I should go through the whole manual once again as I seem to have forgotten most topics I skimmed over.

I just noticed this and it's a bit annoying in my situation. I don't know if I should put this down as a bug or if it is a feature and I don't know how to deal with it.

all the text in my game is on a grid. 3 lines maximum.
I managed to place it just fine using the .say and .display (I'm using a custom font and Calin Leafshade's SpriteFont Renderer).

When dialogue options are displayed, the line spacing seems to decrease by exactly 1 pixel. That might not sound much, but can have quite an effect. Doesn't make a difference if it's 1 option that has text going over 3 lines or 3 options with 1 line each. Also (de-)activating bullet point image or numbering the options doesn't make a difference.

Here's a screenshot. On the left a normal .say, on the right the dialog options.

[imgzoom]http://www.whalesplash.com/CrossStitchCasper/Examples/dialog_pixel.png[/imgzoom]
(don't worry about the horizontal pixels being off, that's because I added a random bullet point image when doing the screenshot).

I'm not really sure what my question is (or if I even have one). From what I understand line spacing can't be addressed inside the editor. So I'm happy to hear "yes, it's a bug" or some suggestion how to get around it.

look around for something like 2-click-control, you'll find several helpful topics.

when I was in need of the same thing, this topic helped me most: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=48051.0
great simple starting point. It's easily understandable, but needs customization to adapt to your needs. So a great way to practice/learn some more scripting.

love it! was great fun to play.

I got stuck as well, I assume it's the same bug waheela mentioned. Standing next to the battlefield, I have Knight and Rook dresses but no valid moves for either of them … and not able to go back to the tent.

Up till now I think it was very well balanced. had no problems with the puzzles (and I usually do). enjoyed all dialouges and the artstyle is great. I have to disagree with waheela about the walking animation as I think the somewhat 'choppy' movement really fits the military parody style.

Looking forward to play the rest of it!

after looking at this thread for the 3rd time and liking it every single time I really owe it a comment.

I love those scenes. I have no drawing skills myself and can't point the finger at what makes it so great, but I'm fairly sure I'm attracted to and drawn into the (warm) colors of the backgrounds. Wonderful atmosphere!

What I would do is make sure it's actually the room backgrounds. Copy the game folder, remove half the rooms, then check the file size. Did it go down by half, too?

yep, you're right, it's actually not the backgrounds. So I guess when I replaced the previous backgrounds with room objects using the same sprites, at the same time I added a lot of other stuff to the game so I didn't notice a significant change in size.

I actually wondered why room backgrounds are not sprites but imported seperatly. Is there a special reason for that? Or something mundane like a linguistic issue, where 'sprites' can never mean 'background picture'.

what does AGS do with imported graphics that are not used. Are they compiled into the game.exe too?

From what I read when doing some research on this topic: yes, they are part of the game.exe.

I've gone through countless topics regarding game size but none quite suit my problem.
My game is around 120mb big. While that's not really problem, I consider that being a little too much for what the game itself has to offer.
I'm fairly sure that a major part comes from the room backgrounds.

Every room (total: 12 rooms) has basically the same background (see announcement thread), so I'm trying to find a way to reduce the size there.

(if this can be resolved using room templates: shame on me … I found that option too late into developement)
here's what I tried:
- have a blank background. insert an object in each room using a sprite. Result: works just fine, but no effect on size.
- create a view with the background image. then insert a blank object in each room and set that view to it in the room_load. Result: see above.

At this point I'm asking myself how the rooms/views are actually compiled? Let's say I'm using a 10-frame long door animation. 3 doors in every room and 100 rooms in the game. Does AGS actually see that as 3,000 single pictures instead of just the 10 from the animation? (and does my question make sense?).

[Deadline.]

I will give it a try.
I think the idea of having something like a contest for this has great benefits, but I see some potential problems with this.

Deadline.
July 2013, but may be extended.

for 90% of people (myself included) this is an invitation to just forget it, after they told themselves "oh, with all this time I can think about this later on."

I guess this thread is still active as it is 'sticky'
I started with AGS some weeks ago, so here's things I would have loved to stumble upon earlier than I did (some AGS specific, others general scripting).
… oh, and I leave the wording to one of you guys

- you don't need {} brackets if there's only one action after a condition
- want your character.say() not to time out? Change the behaviour in 'General Settings'
- lots of rooms looking the same/similar? create a basic room, right click and make a template out of it (god I wish I'd known that one earlier!)
- walkspeed 10 means a character moves 10px on each game cycle (at least that's what I heard)
- a quick&short note that about 1 second having 40 game cycles on default settings
- interested in a specific feature? take the time to read into it (manual!) or search the forum. most things are wasy enough to understand even for new scripters if they're willing to concentrate.

So does it work now? You should see the option when you right-click an empty area in the sprite manager.

it works just fine. I was just mentioning the fact that AGS doesn't seem to recognize graphics in the clipboard if I copy them on osx and then try to use them in AGS on parallels/windows. other win programs I tried had no problems recognizing the same clipboard (so in theory it works if I paste it into a random graphic-prog and then copy it again from there to use it in AGS).

AGS does recognize text in the clipboard though.