Messages

IMO, the blue cup signifies the AGS community and is really just an in joke.

Hahaha, yeah....

okay the reuse is up...I don't get the joke!  I must not be in

A competition would be great!

In fact, AGS should have more competitions.

Perhaps these things go on without me even knowing about it but wouldn't it be cool if there were, you know, best background competition and stuff every month that got hosted on the main page?

ah, thanks    I should have thought of that.Ã,  i have strayed from ever using the repeatedly execute because i don't want to create a non-smooth mouse movement, how much have you found you can put there without noticeable difference?

okay???

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.

I also recognize the textures on the ground on the in-game shot 

No you don't...I made those myself from digital photographs.

That's a great intro screen ... it gives all kinds of expectation for a great game!Ã,  You better make sure the game is good!

I'll add that to my list.

What's the game about?

I don't want to spoil it for you...because I'm going to force you all to play it when I'm done.

Wow, it's incredible! Did someone else draw it, or is it a photo?

Silly girl...it's a painting not a photograph.Ã,  Actually it's an oil painting of Old Man Willow done by Dan & Tim "the Brothers" Hildebrandt (wierd, huh?).Ã, 

Here is the original (looks better after I edited it, right?):

See, my opinion on this depends largely on the level of detail & quality found in the rest of the game.

When people see this, they are going to expect such a high level of character & background art within the game. I can't remember seeing any of your other stuff, so I can't comment on this, just something to think about.

Here is an example of the graphics you will see in this game, which I made last night (I thought about putting it up for C&C, but I decided...I don't want criticisms haha) :


Okay...and here's Edit #2.Ã,  Since I hate to obscure the beautiful scene, and since I need more than just a few options (they NEED to resume game and they NEED to see credits since I pirate so much of other artists work), I've decided to make the menu options popup from the bottom of the screen when you mouse over down there.

Before mouse over:


After mouse over:


What do you think?Ã, 

PS - Still having technical difficulties with the 'h'

EDIT - I'll make the black bars a little bit transparent too.

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 :/

Im starting this thread because of the events that have occured in the past 24 hours. The way many people acted (Including myself) twords legge was inappropriate and wrong. I believe there should be some forum reforms instated in light of the events. My ideas:

I suggest that whenever you clikc "post" a dialog box comes up and says "did you remember to think before you post? and then there is a checkbox for "interesting," "funny," or "helpful."  THis would also be good because people would know when to laugh at your jokes.

[check] funny

I originally started before I heard of project Aon...then when I found out about project Aon, I decided mine would still be somethign new since the combat and randomness and stuff is not built into the Aon project...but now there's so much WRITING to do to put the actual book in I don't have the energy.

@#$%$#%%$

That is me being frustrated with myself.   

Yet another project I have started....got almost all of the work done...and then drop it right befor completion.

I have written the entire engine, and now I'm dropping the project.  But theres so much work put into it I thought I would see if anyone else wants to use the engine to make their own text adventure games, or make the lone wolf series themself. (oh by the way, I decided to drop the whole idea of being able to walk around and stuff and just made it a text adventure).

At this point, all that needs to be done is to go through the book and type in the story at the appropriate places.  A monkey could do it...actually I thought about writing a text parsing program to go through a text file of the book and write it for me...but I just don't have the energy.  But seriously if anyone wants to do this, let me know...all the work has been done.

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"

the current model for the spaceship looks really good, but i think you need to work on your texturing...like with the glass, and id think a spaceship would have some detail like seems and rivets and stuff

heh, that is wierd.  funny thing is, this works:

int result = lists[letter[1].list].entries[5];
Display("%d", result); // returns 666

[just make programming easier and more efficient]

Pumaman: I completely understand that you don't want to spend your time adding a lot of new things just for ease of use.  The three that you added to your list will be quite heplful though, thanks.

Colossol:

when did CJ say he wanted to make AGS commercial?

That one thread was a joke, an April Fool's joke and he stated it a few times.

No kidding?  I saw the thread, read a few replies...it didn't seem like a joke, I'm not sure where it is now but it's cool to hear that it will remain free.

Sylpher:

A simple yet useful suggestion.

1. Spend a bit more time in the engine before making a suggestion.

(Time counted in months)

(If you ponder the nature of this seemingly rude but more accurately setting things straight post. Take a look at the Todo list included with AGS. If you still don't get it there may not be hope.)

(Okay to honestly explain. Half of your "suggestions" are either unexperienced mistakes in the engine or trying to solve a problem the way you want it to be solved rather then using an already efficient solution. I don't mean my post to discourge suggestions cause nobody can really turn them away except CJ but I mean.. blnahgah)

Sylpher, I could offer you an equally condescending suggestion:

1) Don't post condescending replies without fully reading the post you are replying to

Observe the following 2 sentences from my original post:

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.

I'm sure you can agree that most workarounds, by nature, are less efficient for the game designer.Ã,  I guess we have a difference of opinion here...I would like to see the engine made more user friendly, and you would like the engine to take months and months for new people to get accustomed to.Ã,  Pumaman, understandably, would rather spend his time adding new functionality than increasing efficiency.Ã,  That's understandable, he's just one guy and it's a big project....but it doesn't make the suggestions unwarranted.

(And FYI you can measure the time I have been using it in months; 1.5 to be exact, and used it every day)

8) 300 is not the real room max, its just stated as that, since all rooms above it will not have its state saved when loading it again(when playing)
room ints will still work

can you elaborate on that explanation a little?Ã,  not quite sure what you mean

19) F3 key, baby

thanks

9) cant you just make a button, set its image, and then not have it have a function?

hah, i should have thought of that.Ã,  still it wouldnt be much work and it would be more intuitive.Ã, 

most of the other points you guys brought up fall under the same category...possible, but unintuitive, and less efficient for the programmer.Ã,  my understanding was that pumaman wanted to make this into a commercial product, which is why i am suggesting ways to make it easier and faster to use even if some of those things are already TECHNICALLY possible

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

Nope, I am afraid. If you need to set specific values for each element you has to set them manually (or read from existing file). You can use an absolute indexation though:

array[ 0]=1;
array[1]=13;
array[2]=15;
....
array[TOTAL-1]=11;

aieee

at least I am dealing with a "small" 3d array so I only have 460 elements...

 :DÃ,  thanks Scorp

yeah, Gilbot...I understand the concept, I just didn't want to derive "((a*4 +b)*5 + c)-th element" that part...it's a bit confusing

before this gets moved into the tech archive...i have 1 more related question..

can i define the contents of this at declaration, or do I need to individually set each element?

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?