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Up until now, when I have different dialog options which are controlled by variables or items, I have turned these options on/off by just making a new dialog, and then calling the appropriate dialog when they try to talk to the character.

But this is getting sort of awkward, because sometimes the option that I want to be available is nested within dialogs that are called from other dialogs....and since I can't do conditionals in the dialog script (to my knowledge), this would mean that I would have to duplicate copies of the entire dialoge tree and call the approprate "spawning" dialogue at the very beginning of the conversation even though most of the dialogues are the same.

So my question to you is...do I have to do it this way, or is there a more efficient way?Ã,  Thanks

EDIT - if there were a way to turn a turn a specific dialog option on/off from outside of the dialog script, this would do the trick...does this exist?

EDIT: all done, no more help needed

Can anyone recommend a FREEWARE mp3 recorder (by mp3 recorder, I mean capable of writing whatever audio is streaming out of my audio card into a high quality mp3 format) ?  I have found plenty of shareware ones but I can't afford to pay for things   The best I could find was a wav recorder called All2WAV. 

I like the fade transition, but it is unbearably slow for me.  Is there any way to adjust the speeds of these transitions?

Here's how it works....

I post a picture of the main character/avatar from a famous ancient computer game.  Someone who knows what it is responds with the game and then posts a new one  (inspired by Dart's icon)

What am I?

My game is already 1 GB and I don't even have much in it yet...I'm not sure how it is getting so big, unless...does it compress and contain everything that is in the AGS game folder?

I know...I posted the intro screen...and now the cutscene...don't worry I'm not going to show you guys everything about the game, I just want to make sure that the introduction is quality because that's the most important part.

So, just look over the narrator speech here, and tell me if it sounds ok.  I have a feeling it sounds a bit dry and uninteresting.

[hard drive breathes a sigh of relief as, after over an hour, the animation for the last line of this cutscene has finally completed being rendered...yey!]

ALSO....once I am satisfied with this, would anyone who thinks they have a good narrator voice volunteer to do a voice recording of it?

[fade from black to view of map of Frealand]

"The people of Frealand were as wide and varied as their country was vast."

"Between the mountains to the west, and the cold sea cost to the north and east, they lived in relative harmony without threat of war."

[cut to view of statues of the warrior kings, King Eichnar and King Caroth, each riding standing horses sharing a pedestal in the center of Aldor]

"They had gone without war since the ancient reign of King Caroth nearly 200 years ago."

"Frealand was safe.  At least, for most people."

"But there was a secret war being waged..."

"...one that had endured the passage of time..."

[cut to closeup of Aldor on map]

"Here, in Aldor, the majority of Frealand lived.  But that is not where out story begins."

"No, our story begins far to the east, in a less travelled region."

[scroll map to left until centered on mountain village of Glessing]

"Here dwelled the small mountain town of Glessing, which was barely large enough to justify the small Bedaic church in it's hills."

[cut to scenic view of Glessing]

"From this town, a hero emerged."

"Wistan was his name, but he was not born here."

"He was born to the south in Garnier.  His father, Leodwald, was a poor farmer.  His mother, unknown."

"So when Wistan was given the opportunity to live at the church as a scribe, his father knew it would be best for him...even if it did make farm life hard."

"There were not many in Frealand educated as well as the Bedaic priests and scribes."

"But where his teachers achieved in knowledge, they lacked in tenderness."

"As a child Wistan was shown little remorse, and when he grew old enough he was put to work for long hours."

[cut to view of Wistan (now in his early 20's) toiling away in the monastery hand-writing books by the window]

[pause]

"But Wistan didn't mind the toilsome work.  In fact, he rather enjoyed the opportunity to read so much."

[longer pause]

[bird flies in the window]

Wistan: "Ahh!  Bloody hell!"

[bird flies around in circles in the room and then lands on the sill]

Wistan: "Be gone, stupid bird!"

Wistan: "What, are ye just inclined to sit there?"

Wistan: "Do thy not quiver in fear before the human?"

Wistan: "Ah well...who does..."

Wistan: "Ho there, what is that tied about your ankle?  A note, no less?"

[Wistan pushes back his chair and gets up.  Player gains control of character]

Sheesh, a year ago I would never have to ask this but the internet just isn't such a free place anymore

I could have sworn some games had a GUI popup at the bottom of the screen...like maybe Apprentice...

anyway, I want my popup window to pop up at the bottom of the screen, but it seems by default to only count the above.  Can this be changed?  If so...please tell....it would be nice if it were POpupX position also and if there was just a checkbox for above/below left/right.

Technical difficulties with the "h"...hopefully I will figure out how to fix that, for now just ignore that.



I feel like there should be more writing or logos or something but I'm not sure what I could add

by the way that's not my art

How about a little logo that we can put in the corner of our game intro screens that sats "made with AGS" or something, to promote AGS, as well as giving us a little extra to beautify our intro screen with

Im planning on doing this anyway, but it would be cool if everyone had the same symbol.  Someoen is going to say used the mug but...no offense to whoever made it...its ugly :/

This is a question I have thought long and hard about, because I want to consciously make an attempt to get all the good elements and leave out all the bad elements.  I've come up with a list of things.  But I'm just one person, I need to know what other people think too.

Here's my list:

1 - discovering epic secrets, coverups, and mysteries from the past

2 - logical puzzles, riddles, and word games (but not too hard)

3 - ability to solve puzzles various different ways

4 - not having annoying fetch / find quests added purely to increase gameplay time

5 - not allowing me to keep on playing unaware that i have unwittingly done something to prevent the game from being completed

6 - always having a clear knowledge of where im trying to go or what im supposed to be accomplishing, as well as a sense of urgency

7 - well developed personalities for NPC's, and lots of conversation, so they come alive

8 - regular feeling of satisfaction/accomplishment, either from solving a puzzle or winning a fight

9 - not having a plot that is so epic such as saving the world or similar, and nothing to do with time travel

10 - anything "fairy tale"

Everything that I propose here is something that I wanted to be able to use in my game.Ã,  Some of them would just make programming easier and more efficient, others would add new functionality.Ã,  Some of the issues I have found workarounds for, many of them not.Ã,  But one thing is for sure, I think they would all be good additions to AGS.

in the order that I ran into them...

1) complete String class support (including arrays of strings)

2) for loops

3) switch statements (i must have hundreds of "if=0 / if=1 / if=12 / etc)

4) infinite string capacity (or at least 1000 chars).Ã, 

5) increase maximum character length for text boxes and text labels to whatever maximum string size is.Ã,  even if you do not choose to increase the 300 char string limit, you could at least remove the extremely low cap on the text box / tex labels.Ã,  this is causing some real problems in my game because I'm trying to display descriptions for different parts of my guis when they click there, but i can only get in about 1 sentence worth of description :/

6) Be able to save with errors…sometimes we don't have time to debug it when we have to leave the computer!

7) when deleting objects from a GUI, don't automatically rename all objects with subsequent labels…then all the code must be changed!

8) remove the room maximum of 300 (i havent gotten there yet but this project has more than 300 areas and i dont wanna split the game up into 2 parts), allow rooms to be named anything, and even if you choose not to remove the 300 room cap, STILL allow rooms to be numbered greater than 300 please!

9) new GUI object: sprite image! currently, if someone wants to have images on their GUI, they need to make that area of the GUI transparent and then create a graphic overlay of the image which normally appears UNDER the gui but can now be visible through the hole...problem is this is UNDER the character so the character might be covering up this image.Ã,  this feature would be awesome, allow for much more versatile GUI's that looked like popular RPG games such as Diablo where you have inventory items visually pasted onto a character image, for example.Ã,  there are countless reasons to be able to put sprite images as gui objects though.

10) new GUI object: dropdown list box.Ã,  similar to the list box, only when you click the arrow it expands...this could allow more compact GUIS because if you want a list box to take up a small height than its difficult to view the contents you need to scroll too much.

11) function to gradually change music volume over a specified time duration to a new volume setting.Ã,  ie, FadeVolume(int targetvolume, int time)

12) new GUI object: rectangular outline.Ã,  people like to see similar GUI objects surrounded by a box.Ã,  this can be done by drawing a box around the specified area and using it as a background image, but this is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

13) function to gradually move overlays similar to the object move command.Ã,  i wrote a function to do this myself, but it can only slide them vertically/horizontally.Ã,  sliding diagonally would require use of decimels, sqrt's, and powers.

14) function to get coordinates of graphic overlay.Ã,  REALLY need this one, and its so easy.Ã,  you have a function to SET the coordinates but not one to GET them! (this makes my slide overlay function a bit crusty as well because they need to already have saved the coordinates to some global variable to use it..)

15) support for decimals, powers, and roots


16) ability to duplicate a GUI and give it a new name (if multiple GUIS are very similar this way it doesn't need to be made all over again)

17) allow built in support for multidimensional string/char/int arrays.Ã,  this can be done, as shown recently by indexing over a 1d array, but it shouldn't be so cumbersome...esp for 2d arrays which are used SO much.Ã,  and string arrays are a MUSt.

18) allow integer arrays to be defined at declaration.Ã,  i have probably 460 lines of code dedicated to setting each element of an array, and i dont want to load it by text file (i want it all condensed into the exe and i dont want to bother with text parsing).Ã,  Ã, this is one of my biggest requests also.

19) allow the ctrl+f find to be able to find more than just the first instance when searching through the code, can be helpful when making modifications

20) SetTextBoxColor(int color) function.Ã,  i am displaying damage in a text box and i want the color to change based on the damage type (green=poison, blue=psychic, etc)

21) SetButtonTextColor(int color) function (could be used to represent an inactive button among other things)Ã,  an inactive button COULD be done by changing the button image to grey using SetButtonPic but the customary way in windows we are used to is grayed out letters not background.

22) you already know this one, but...allow overlays to use the alpha channel

I found this topic in the tech archives (because I'm getting guilty asking so many questions so now I'm trying to look things up)

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=6918.0

which is very pertinent because Scorpious wrote a function for a 2d array...but I need a 3d array.  I'm sure it can be done this way as well...but my mind is a bit fried.  Anyone want to write it?  eh?  eh? 

CreateGraphicOverlay (int x, int y, int slot, int transparent)

Creates a screen overlay containing a copy of the image from SLOT in the Sprite Manager. The image is placed at (X,Y) on the screen (these are screen co-ordinates, not room co-ordinates). If TRANSPARENT is 1 then the overlay will be drawn in the same way as characters/objects, if it is 0 then the a black rectangle will be painted behind the sprite.

I am confused on the isue of the transparency.  When set to 1, I expect it to display the same as characters/objects...yet, it ignores my alpha channel for transparency, which works on characters and objects.  I have found that using the upper left pixel as transparent DOES work, BUT it is not possible to get antialiasing this way.  When I change transparency to 0, it does not seem to have any affect when displaying sprites with or without an alpha channel.  Hence the confusion.

How do I get the square root?Ã,  Do I need to write a cumbersome approximation (using a cumbersome algorithm to compute powers as well)?

(I need this in order to compute the distance between two points for the function I am writing to slide graphic overlays since none seems to exist...and I need to slide graphic overlays instead of objects because I can't create objects during runtime!Ã,  sheesh, it's just one roundabout after another)

EDIT: nooo!Ã,  I can't even use a decimel data type to store the number...I'll need to write an approximation for that too...oh dear god.

EDIT 2:  ok...forget this...I'm abandoning diagonal movement and easily adjustable movement speeds.  I wrote the function more simplified, it slides horizontally then vertically to the new position, and to control speed you set the step (pixel jump) and pause (probably zero) between steps.  here it is if anyone wants it, its nothing special but might save u time.



function LW_SlideOverlay(int overlayID, int x, int y, int newx, int newy, int step, int delay){
// can only slide vertically or horizontally
// step MUST BE > 0
  if (x<newx){ //if moving right
    while (x<newx){
      MoveOverlay(overlayID,x+step,y);
      x = x+step;
      Wait(delay);
    }
  } else if (x>newx){ //if moving left
    while (x>newx){
      MoveOverlay(overlayID,x-step,y);
      x=x-step;
      Wait(delay);
    }
  }

  if (y<newy){ //if moving down
    while (y<newy){
      MoveOverlay(overlayID,x,y+step);
      y=y+step;
      Wait(delay);
    }
  } else if (y>newy){ //if moving up
    while (y>newy){
      MoveOverlay(overlayID,x,y-step);
      y=y-step;
      Wait(delay);
    }
  }
}

When I try to use the variables I have "exported" from my main script in my room script, it doesn't seem to recognize that they have been defined....

eg:

at the beginning of global script:

int LW_SKILLS[18];

at end of global script:

export LW_SKILLS;

in room script (walks onto region):

if (LW_SKILLS[1]==0)
Ã,  something;

I can get around with by making a function to access and return the variable...but I'm confused why this doens't work to begin with

okay, I don't know about you guys...but for some strange reason I find these books compelling beyond words and they are by far my favorite adventure game even though they are not for the computer...until...now...

I'm working on a FAITHFUL representation of book 1 right now (you can even pull up your action chart in the game!)Basically every detail of the game will be the same, almost down to the last word, except instead of flipping through pages you will be walking around...and instead of pointing at the number table etc to fight, I'm going to do something that looks similar to QFG1.

I'm just curious...is there anyone else who shares my strange love of these classics?

ok first of all...

i know how hard y'all work on your preciousl little MIDIs, but I personally get annoyed by all of them and I would much prefer to

a) disable AGS sound, so that it does not interrupt my existing winamp music

or

b) keep AGS sound enabled but running but not cut off sound from other things (like winamp!)

[Edit by strazer:]

ok...i tried the string class method and the generic method,

string skills[5] = {"dddsf", "fgfdg", fdfg", "fgdf", "fgdfs"};

and

char skills[5][10] = {"dddsf", "fgfdg", fdfg", "fgdf", "fgdfs"};

and variations of each.

i looked in the help file, the online manual, and browsed some of the other tutorial/information files.

i'm sure it's out there but i'm wasting too much time on this, please throw me a bone.

Edit by strazer:

AGS v2.71's new "String" type supports this:

  String skills[5];
  skills[0] = "dddsf";
  skills[1] = "fgfdg";
  skills[2] = "fdfg";
  skills[3] = "fgdf";
  skills[4] = "fgdfs";

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