Messages

You have had quite a few ideas thrown to you.

I agree and am eager to work around with them.

I love the idea with the gramophone and dont't think at all it's a stretch. What might be a stretch is putting it into the sad/poor/simple life atmosphere I try to build.

What I'm definately going to use are flies! Can't believe I didn't think of them! They're like the missing link in the whole 'hearing distant animal sounds through the walls' topic, as a randomly flying single fly sfx will fill up the scene.

I see you all like the animal sounds as well. While I agree that it doesn't need much, it feels those sporadic noises from the outside are just too quiet.
An idea that just came to me is a mouse running through the room every now and then (but then I have to find a way to work said mouse into a puzzle ).

I don't want to start using music. Even though it would be wonderful (I even have quite a specific idea what would fit), it feels like I have to add music to every room then. I'm not even going down that road (this project is already 20 times bigger than I imagined it to be).

I'm going to have a look at Red Dead Redemption, there might be some inspiration there (although I think they're using background music all the time)

i really like the models. maybe they all look a little too much alike, but depending on what kind of world/society you want to show for that future that might be exactly what's needed.

in case anyone cares. here's what I go with as the main font (the last greyed out line are alternative letters).

[imgzoom]http://www.debe.at/44pixelfont/show3.png[/imgzoom]

feedback still very welcome

It doesn't fit the critic's lounge 100%, but I give it a go.

I have several rooms that still need ambient sound. The rooms in question are inside a ranch/farmhouse. Here's what I did in some rooms:
- clock to the wall that's ticking
- open fire in the chimney
- boiling water in the kitchen (as that's part of a quest it's not the only sound there)
- snoring man in a bedroom
- purring cat

… but there's still rooms left that are creepingly quiet. I guess I can't just put a clock on the wall or a cat on the floor in every room
Any suggestions?

The game takes place ca. 100 years ago. Think of it as a Wild West scenario. So no radio, traffic from outside, dishwashers, air condition fans, ...
I can not have more NPC's creating noises as they wouldn't fit the story. There's nothing in the story itself that could cause a noise coming from outside.
I like the idea of little wind and slightly rattling windows with a wooden squeak here and there, but when I try that it always gives the game a horror-like atmosphere which I really have to avoid!
damped animal sounds from outside could be nice (but it fells like that by itself is too little sound with a horse/pig/chicken shouting every 20 seconds).

Best would be to give the rooms a depressing/sad/lonesome feeling.

I have a pendulum clock on the wall. I assigned a ticking sound to each of the 2 frames in the clocks view. Now when the game is paused (i.e. opening save/load gui), the animation pauses while the sound keeps going. when i go out of the pause, the animation starts again and with it starts another frame-sound.

so if I open/close the save/load gui several times, at one point I have several ticking sounds overlapping each other.

I don't even know how to phrase this into a question. maybe: "what can I do?"
what I would like best is the animation going on in the background during game paused (not the sound stopping)



edit: solved it myself:
the sound wasn't actually overlapping. or it was kinda. the soundfile was way longer than a frame (didn't cut it down yet). so when the game gets paused, it keeps play. now unpause the game and the (same) sound from the other frame starts on top of the first.

now tell me how i can delete this post to spare me some embarassement

If the dialog is supposed to be run from one room only, you may use "object" array:

Code: ags

 object[N].SetView();

where N is the index of your object in that room.

Ah, wonderful. I knew there had to be a very simple solution. Thank you so much! I think this will help me on several other occasions later on as well.

edit: if i get it right, that simple line in the dialog could be even used to trigger events in several rooms (as long as all those objects in question look the same and I place them with the same Object-ID).

How can I set the view of an object at the end of a dialog? The simple workarounds I tried don't work.

Here's the situation. When the player opens a door a dialog starts right away. Once the dialog is done, the door should close again.
I set the view for the open door in the oDoor_Interact(). dMail1 starts. Now if I change the view back to the closed door inside the oDoor_Interact it won't wait for the dialog to be done, but changes right away (obvious). I was hoping Wait(1) would do the trick, but as you probably already know it didn't.

If I put the oDoor.Setview into the dialog it tells me it's an "Undefined token" (makes sense).

Is there a simple way to pause the interact function when a dialog starts? Or to address the object from inside a dialog?
One workaround I could think of is creating a global variable and use it in the RepExec of the room to set the view.

(while I have not much programming/scripting experience, I kinda don't like the idea to use RepExec if it's avoidable. Feels strange to have a piece of code basically flodding over the game all the time).

When reworking my custom font and playing around with some glyphs I decided to use a variable width instead of a fixed one.

Unfortunately, now the line breaks don't work anymore. Everything is just written in one line. When there should be a line break, it just jumps to the beginning of the same line and draws the next letters on top of the previous ones. I could work around it using a lot of %s but I'm sure I'm just missing an obvious detail. How do I set the line spacing?

I can't reproduce this. For me line breaks work fine as seen here:

I fixed it myself (well, "fixed" is a big word). I only tested it with numbers 0-9. Now I defined all 90 characters with SetGlyph and voilá: all works fine (maybe that makes sense to you).

I don't understand why this plugin doesn't get more love (like an insane amount). It's just amazing and I'm quite sure I'm going to use it for every project I'm going to do in AGS. So thanks again.
(or maybe I just didn't realize yet that there are several other plugins/methods to use a custom font).

When reworking my custom font and playing around with some glyphs I decided to use a variable width instead of a fixed one.

Unfortunately, now the line breaks don't work anymore. Everything is just written in one line. When there should be a line break, it just jumps to the beginning of the same line and draws the next letters on top of the previous ones. I could work around it using a lot of %s but I'm sure I'm just missing an obvious detail. How do I set the line spacing?

here's the code I'm using. As soon as I'm deleting SetVariableSpriteFont all lines break perfectly.

Code: AGS

// SetSpriteFont(0, 18, 5, 20, 43, 45, 32, 122, false);  //Custom Font

  SetVariableSpriteFont(0, 18);
  SetSpacing(0, 5);

  //SetGlyph(int fontNum, int charNum, int x, int y, int width, int height)

   SetGlyph(0, 48, 688, 7, 27, 38); //0
  SetGlyph(0, 49, 731, 7, 20, 38); //1
  SetGlyph(0, 50, 774, 7, 27, 38); //2
  SetGlyph(0, 51, 817, 7, 27, 38); //3
  SetGlyph(0, 52, 0, 52, 27, 38); //4
 

so maybe this works better:
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/rPekKJ9.png[/imgzoom]

omg that's awesome!
I'm still playing around with your suggestion about the M and W, as starting to add more pixel all of the sudden opened up like 10 new possibilities

try adding an extra pixel to M and W like you did for the E.
for the 8 two alternating zig zag pixels with a width of 4 could do

btw, no matter if it's easy to confuse it with the d or the b, I draw my 6 the other way round

great idea with the M and W! The letters get a little heavy compared to the rest of the alphabet but I think it's an improvement. I don't get what you mean about the 8.
about the 6: well, I have no excuse. I redrew the font 2 minutes before posting it here, so I blame it on that. Come to think of it: it's actually a feature! You know, one of those lefthanded fonts.



thanks everyone for the input.
having 5 pixels height would make things a lot easier, unfortunately 4 units are all I have on the grid I'm using in my game. Obviousely it is a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, but as long as it's readable I have absolutely no problem with that.

Without getting too much into details about the game I'm working on, I present you the font I developed for it. While in the game it's dozens of pixels high (due to the graphic style I'm using), it's basically a pixelfont working with a height of 4 units (and max. 4 units wide).

Would love to get some input and suggestions to improve it.
The characters I'm very unhappy with are '8' and the comma (hard to make a comma without going under the baseline), while I kinda accepted 'M' and 'W' weird look.

I'll post 2 pictures of it (actually 8 pixel high … I know it's kinda ridiculous to expect anyone to read it without ruining their eyes )

the 2nd picture shows punctuation and alternatives to some glyphs.

[imgzoom]http://www.debe.at/44pixelfont/show1.gif[/imgzoom]
[imgzoom]http://www.debe.at/44pixelfont/show2.gif[/imgzoom]

goddamn it!
I must have screwed that up like several times in a row as I didn't just try it once.

Feeling even more embarassed I'll call it a night. Thanks for your quick response!

Being new to AGS I jumped right into it and am working on my first game for some weeks now (… and enjoying every second of it).
While I try to find out as much as possible myself (I know how annoying beginners questions can be and most answers can be found in manual/forum), I hit a dead end when it comes to this. I realize this is probably a ridiculous question, I'm missing one the most obvious basics and feel kinda ashamed of having to ask.

As most of my graphics only outline the objects (so lots of transparent areas), I'm working with hotspots to interact with objects. While that seemed like a good idea, I can't get around this problem:

I can only interact with the hotspot where the graphic of the object isn't overlapping it. Let's take a door as example. I have the outline of the door as graphic, the hotspot covers the whole door. Now I can not click on those pixels occupied by the graphic (i.e. the doorframe or knob).

object.Clickable = false didn't change anything. I tried to change the objects baseline, hoping it would move it behind the hotspot. Didn't help.
A solution that would work is to apply the same code to the hotspot and object seperately … but that seems a bit complicated to do on hundreds of objects.


p.s. a general question if anyone cares to answer: I'm working a lot with objects, even where I could simply make them part of the background (as 'look at' is the only possible interaction). Should I avoid doing that (one 'problem' I can see being the game size becoming unnecessary big)?

This Sir probably saved me weeks of worktime!
I made a custom font for my game and was extremely happy with it (any existing font would have destroyed the whole look). But had no idea how to implement it. Your plugin is better than I could have ever expected … and only took me a few hours to get it working (well, I am an absolute beginner and at first I did everything wrong that could be done wrong ).

Short: Thanks so much!!

I've been teaching myself AGS for some weeks now and since I'm eager to find out everything myself before asking stupid questions in the forum. I'm happy I finally have a good reason to make my first post:

Thanks a lot Snarky! Your script helped me out a lot! (as my scripting skills aren't high class pro …yet). Works like a charm and was easy enough to customize to my needs.