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great, thanks:)

well speaking of customizable settings on this line of thought...it would also be a nice alternative if you could control a variable used in the equation that determines how long to display it by default.  this way you could choose between 2 good options: reduce the time displayed but prevent skipping, or allow skipping but not in the first .5 seconds.

when playtesting my game, i am finding it difficult to not accidentally skip over information that should be gained in talking because it is given through dialog trees...and clicking the mouse skips over what is being said.  the text seems to hang there for a bit too long, which makes me want to click the mouse...but just as im clicking the new dialog comes up, causing it to be skipped.  im afraid this is going to cause important information which cannot be backtracked to be missed by the player, so i want to disable the "click to skip" feature.  how should I do this?

or you could make the shadow part of the character and use a 32-bit sprite wher the alpha channel is gray under the shadow so its transparent

of those 3 animations, I think the middle one is the best.

these characters are superb.

the only criticism i have is...the girl was totally ruined when you made her eyes bigger.  she doesnt even look human anymore...before, she looked hot, and i thought she fit in with the others before too...

one frame--- what are you talking about?

well...it looks to me as though the arm is all the way down one frame and all the way up the next and it is a pretty big jump.  if there is a frame inbetween these, it's hard to tell...but it seems like the jump is too sudden and too much.

the hand moves too high up thats the problem, its also only moving in one frame, i think it should be gradually moving to the apex as the leg does.

I think its great, i dont mind the shading.  the only thing that is bothering me is tha the perspective is really wacky.  the sign is not perpendicular with the edge of the "space road", which it should be.  Also, the bars...the lower bar gets larger on the right side making me think its nearer but i think more logically it would be farther away.  The upper bar is like "coming at me!  aahhh"  I think the bars should be parallel with the road, and all in the same plane.

Indeed it is, Strazer  thank you for pointing that function out for me.

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

Dart,

I KNOW THAT GAME! this is driving me mad I can't remember the name of it.  Mad I tell you.

I wonder if anyone else here has even played it...

And Worm you cheated and drew all over it...maybe you thought that was obvious but there were actually a loy of crappy games and homemade games so I thought you were referring to the game that was drawn OVER doom1...

bad toys was like a crappy cartoon version of doom which looks like this (now that i look at the picture it doesnt look so similar but in my memory it was more similar )

Next...george bush, in an awkward situation

why are you suggesting this?

you haven't even downloaded it and tried to make a game yet.

Yup, Raptor is a sweet game.
I've played all these...Jill of the Jungle, Cosmo, Crystal Caves, sigh...

http://www.freewebs.com/wormie_eng/Stickmen.bmp

this oen didn't get answered...but I think it's Bad Toys.

By the way, LIERO is still my all time favorite game to date (of any genre) !!!

First of all...do you really want these underrated bands to become overrated?  Because honestly...don't you kind of like it when you discover some less-known music, don't you like listening to stuff that isn't blaring out of the radio 24/7?

But...if you must know, some underrated musicians that I love are...

1) Faith no More
2) Muse
3) Doves
4) Remy Zero

and here is a really cool song by an underrated band called Shiva in Exile which you can listen to streaming:

http://magnatune.com/artists/music/World/Shiva%20in%20Exile/Ethnic/04-Nightheat-Shiva%20In%

It's possible that Winamp requests an exclusive lock on DirectSound, so when another application starts up it gets locked out.

Do you have this problem with other DirectX-based Windows games?

Nope.

Hmm it didnt seem to work for me at first, but then I realised that you had to restart winamp for the changes to the plugin to take affect. Make sure you do this.

Like I said, I can configure Winamp to run in the background...we are just discussing why it works with certain settings and not with others. 

Also, I do not need to restart Winamp for the changes to take effect.

1. is there a way to control sound volume in different sound objects or is it a global property, so they go all up or all down. (for example, background music could be turned off, or if present it would play at a constant level or a level set in intro by an options menu, but sound events would play in a volume according to scene and event)

Volume for all these things (and more) can be adjusted separately.  If you have other questions like this, try going to the FAQ on the main site...there, you can view the entire AGS manual, and do a quick search to find a certain function you are looking for to see if it exists before downloading the game.

2. somebody said it was possible to script sound usage from within the game, is it possible to 'really' toggle sound on/off and if so, releasing sound resources, or 'toggle' consists in if (!sound) {volume(0)} (*or whatever the syntaxis*, but you get the idea)

I'm not sure what you mean...you can turn sound/music on and off.  More technical audio controls that have to do with sound drivers and stuff can be controlled by the small settings program before starting AGS, I don't think you can control these using scripting...but I also cannot see any reason why you would want to.

ook ook: he was replying to my topic numbers, his numbering is correct

miez:  Sure, it would be POSSIBLE to make a humongous texture to have the other way take up more space...but take this simple example...

The desired goal is to have a character 300 pixels high be able to walk, open doors, shake hands, stoop, wave, and have an idle animation.

Using sprites, with an alpha channel, that would probably be over 20 MB.

But using 3d,

I don't think the size of the keyframes would even be signifcant enough to take note of.

Let's say a 500x500 JPG was used as a texture (64 KB)

And the model takes up about 200 KB (probably less than this, I was looking at a high poly char for ref)

Then you now have all the same animations, and possibly more animations, for about 300 KB...this is 67 times less space, and I think this is a fairly median case.

MrColossol:

these other programs that support 3d are not really designed with adventure gaming in mind...im not suggesting AGS ever become a full 3d program like them, but having 3d characters just seems like a really prominent adventure game feature and deserving of being in AGS.

[I really hope that AGS does incorporate capability for 3D characters.]

I really hope that AGS does incorporate capability for 3D characters.

I was originally going to argue that AGS didn't need 3d characters for the following mentality:

"You can already render your characters doing their different animations, and then use sprites.Ã,  This will give greater character detail than is possible by using a runtime rendered 3d character."

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was wrong.

1) Using game rendering could allow for much smoother animations.

2) There are a lot of technical pains I went through to get my animated walkcycle into the game.Ã,  First of all, my rendered cycle was 30 frames...but I can only used 20 in the game.Ã,  This means I had to use only 10 frame animations because I wanted to have the start/stop animations be the correct ones, while mainting even frame spacing.Ã,  The process is quite painstaking also...the character has to be set up to walk through a path that is evenly lit from all sides, and the camera must be animated to follow at the rate that the character is moving, then each frame must be rendered which took me an hour or so, then each frame needs to be cropped...this is difficult because the centerlines must be maintained, I used actions but even so it's a lot of work and a lot of room for error.Ã,  Then all the walkcycles must be scaled to the same level.Ã,  Then they all need to be imported into AGS.

2) It would drastically conserve file space.Ã,  Using a SPARTAN 10 frame walking animation with 1 standing still animation, it costs 10 MB for each character (suing 800x600 alpha channel blended) just to have sprites for walking in the 4 directions and standing still, not counting diagonal animations, and animations for other things such as opening doors, gesturing, idle animations, handing things, taking out of pocket, stooping down to pick things up, random cutscene animations, etc.Ã,  AGS does not compress the sprite images internally, unlike backgrounds etc, so these 10 MB's go straight to the file size.Ã,  Using 3d rendering, only the small 3d information would need to be downloading.Ã,  In a well-made game that used 3d rendering and had equivalent animations to a game like Broken Sword or something, this could reduce the downloaded file size by hundreds of MB's.

3) People would take advantage of it, making many more animations in their games.Ã,  I love animations, they bring the character to life...and I feel there should be animations for basically everything the character does...this is really discouraged in AGS presently.Ã,  ALL of the newer adventure games are doing this.Ã,  Not only would people have MORE animations, but I think it would be less work to do all these animations than to do a single frame by frame animation for walking in AGS...because once you've spent all the hard time of modelling, texturing, and rigging a character....making new animations is easy, and only takes a few seconds to make him bend down, walk, whatever.Ã,  It's such a struggle with sprites.Ã,  I find errors with my animation, but it takes so many hours just to re-render, re-crop, re-put into AGS (and keep having to start over the uploading into AGS because I can't tell what frame # I am looking at from the sprite so I ahve to keep starting alll over)....so instead of fixing them, I say screw it.Ã,  This is not the kind of problem an engine should be encouraging.

4) It would allow for more advanced character shading/lighting.Ã,  Not a big issue for me, but a point nonetheless.

5) AGS already seems to have the most well developed fanbase and forum life.Ã,  Why force people who want to make modern-quality adventure games to leave the dear AGS community, or not become involved in it from the start?

6) There are enough people here with 3D knowledge already, I think, that would really take advantage of this.Ã,  There would also be more people coming to AGS from other engines, or choosing AGS from the start, to make this worthwhile.

7) People keep saying that there are other programs for 3D, use those for that, use AGS for 2D.Ã,  First of all...if you already know AGS...you don't want to learn some other program.Ã,  But, I did some looking into this...Wintermute isn't 3D, and it has no forum presence, meaning that it's going to be much more of a pain to learn when you don't have a community like this one to help beginners along.Ã,  I looked at Reality Factor too...the games made with that are 3D sure enough, but they're all first person (yuck) and they suck, and I couldn't find any real adventure games made with it.Ã,  So there doesn't really seem to be any other good options for people who just want to have good character animations.Ã,  Why would you want to push these people away from the AGS community anyway?Ã,  AGS should evolve with the times, I'm not saying it should be the end-all-be-all of freeware game engines....but shouldn't it live up to it's name, and be the end-all-be-all of adventure games?

let me guess, you are using the "PlayMP3File()" function?  It didn't work for me either, but this does:

try naming your music like "music1.mp3", "music2.mp3"

and then running them like "PlayMusic(2)" or by checking the play music on room load button and entering the music # there (on the room properties)

[chuckle]

ah, what a nuisance 

thanks, though.