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[Time Gentlemen, Please!, the sequel to last year's Ben There, Dan That! is out now.]

Time Gentlemen, Please!, the sequel to last year's Ben There, Dan That! is  out now.

There's a free demo for you to sample, but the whole thing costs a whopping £2.99/ $5ish, for reasons explained on the game page. That’s about the same as a pint of frothing Lion’s Roar Real Ale in an overpriced London Boozer, which isn’t much really for several hours of joyous gameplay.

If you donated anything to Ben There, Dan That! then for heaven’s sake whatever you do don’t buy a copy: there’s one waiting for you free of charge in your email inbox.

Featuring stuff and bits by The Forgetful Elephant's own 'Lemmy and Binky' and some glorious art from lovely Mashpotato, PARTICLE EFFECTS and everything by Nickenstein, a full soundtrack, and some adorable puzzles. It's longer than Ben There, Dan That!, with better puzzles and sheen and all sorts.

It's stated on the gamepage, but worth reiterating:

Q: Does Time Gentlemen, Please! contain any naughty swears?
A: Time Gentlemen, Please! was designed and written as an adventure game for grown-ups. As such, it contains all the naughty swears, and contains adult themes. If that sort of thing isn’t your cup of tea, or if you’re a tiny child, TGP isn’t for you

Other than that: enjoy, hopefully

EDIT: the AGS game page is now set up, here.

www.zombie-cow.com/tgp

I've used InnoSetup to package up my game.

If the .exe in /Program Files/GameDir is double clicked, it runs fine.

If the shortcut generated by InnoSetup is used, the game boots up but crashes on (seemingly) the first blocking event. A custom shortcut has the same effect.

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x65B935DE ; program pointer is +5, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (0,100)

No crashdump is generated.

Just wondering if anyone can shed some light on this, while I struggle with it this end.

??

My compiled cut of the game is creating a warnings.txt file in the .exe's directory. It's very long, and gets bigger the longer you play, due to a harmless animating/ following conflict AGS is flagging.

I'd rather it wasn't happening, in all honesty. Is there a way to shut it off?

I'm using game.read_dialog_option_color, but sometimes it'd be nice to re-classify a previously-chosen dialog option as unread, so the player knows there's potentially new stuff by clicking it...

Is there a way to flip dialog options as read/ unread that I'm missing? A search brought up talk of it round 2.72... was it ever implemented?

Is it possible to change 'Automatically move the player in Walk mode' in the game script?

I'd expect it to be in game., but can't see it... is it somewhere under my nose?

Cheers,

d

I'd like a sound effect to play whenever the player pressed a key into a textbox.

It seems on_key_press doesn't get called if there's a textbox active, so that's out. What I need is the equivalent to:

if (IsKeyPressed(eKeyANY))
{
PlaySound(42);
}

...except eKeyANY doesn't exist... Is there a sensible way of doing that??

cheers,

d

Was anything ever done about this?

The spaced out sentence is the way AGS displays outline fonts right now. it's not too bad, but the longer the sentence, the worse it gets.

Basically, I've got a lovely .ttf font in use, but auto-outline isn't quite thick enough to render it readable in all colours on certain backgrounds. Ideally, it'd have a 3+ pixel outline thickness.

I've tried making my own outline font, but instead of centering the specified outline font directly behind spoken text on a per-character basis, it does so simply as a larger font... so I get the issue as described above in 2003; at the start of a sentence the two fonts are aligned, by the end they're well out of whack as the outline font is larger...

Is there a known workaround for this that I've missed?

I recently updated to 3.1.2 SP1, and I've been noticing some issues relating to character transparency. I haven't been able to thoroughly look into this yet, so it might be that I'm just overlooking something.

Previous versions of AGS 3+ had a weird fade in/ out effect where the sprite would bleach out to white, before fading. It looked kind of funky. The latest version fades in/ out as expected.

However, I've ceuurently got two issues that have suddenly sprung out of nowhere. Firstly, in rep_exec:

Code: ags

        if (bFadeOut)
	{
		if (cDan.Transparency < 100) {cDan.Transparency++;}
		if (cDan.Transparency >= 99)
		{
			// do whatever!
			 bFadeOut = false;
		 }
	}

Works fine! cDan fades out nicely. But in reverse:

Code: ags

	
	if (bFadeIn)
	{
      		if (cDan.Transparency > 0) {cDan.Transparency--;}
		if (cDan.Transparency <= 0)
		{
			// do whatever!
			 bFadeIn = false;
		 }			
	}

This way round the code seems to hang - it won't take anything off cDan.Transparency whatsoever.

Ok, so possibly my fault. I'm looking into it, but there's nothing obvious like cDan.Transparency = 100; in rep_exec_always or anything. This one's odd too:

Code: ags

if (whatever)
{
   // do stuff..
  // do more stuff...
  // do a bit more stuff....
  oDan.Visible = false;
  cDan.Transparency = 0;
}

Ok, this flips from a Dan object to Dan the character after a cutscene.

In the previous cut of AGS it'd happen simultaneously, so the transition was seemless. Since the update, what seems to happen is that oDan.Visible = false doesn't take place until after we drop out of the rep_exec loop (after some Wait(x)s etc). So the two are on screen at the same time, until we drop out.

This is all code that pre-update was working fine... is this a known issue somewhere that I've missed? Something relating to changing character transparency properties in a loop?

Any advice would be awesome.

Further to this thread, I'm having some problems with custom Dialog display. THought I'd better shift discussion to here, since it doesn't seem like a Beginner problem anymore.

I've made a custom GUI for dialog, gDialog and set it to be used in General Options.

Under Direct Draw it displays fine, as intended.

Under D3D9, I'm getting a screenwidth wide black background directly behind the GUI.

The GUI works as intended, and the black disappears when the GUI disappears. I've tried several test games, default games, different GUIs, different image/ colour combinations... all with no change.

Any idea what might be causing it, and if there's a 'do not display big black background' option I've failed to uncheck somewhere? I'm on AGS 3.

I'm using a custom dialog GUI (gDialog). I've set the appropriate option in General Options to use it, and it's displaying in the right place.

Problem is, it's displaying a screen-wide block chunk of solid black behind it of the same height as gDialog, and the mouse disappears when I roll over it (it reappears only when I end the dialog). The GUI itself works fine, bar the no-mouse issue.

Presumably I'm either missing the 'turn off big chunk of black' or a chunk of general script as a result of starting with an empty game.

Anyone know what I'm doing wrongo?

[That's right:]

That's right: there is going to be a sequel to Ben There, Dan That! after all, even though I totally can't afford it! It's going to be better and tighter, more gorgeous and more puzzley than ever before.

What's more, I'm giving away the opportunity to get your ugly mug in the game, playing the character of your dreams.

All you have to do is come up with an interesting character that you’d play, someone fitting of the nonsense BTDT Universe.

Full details are here - if you're going to enter, please do leave your entry at the Zombie cow comments section/ forums, and not here, in case I miss them. And so I can contact you easily.

Someone downloaded Ben There, Dan That! and got this on bootup:



Room 45 is my initial title screen (first thing player sees), line 70 is PlayMusic(2);

Does anyone know if this fixable 'my end'? I've suggested having a fiddle in winsetup, there's some sound options in there, no??

['Ben There, Dan That!' is a freeware comedy adventure game by Zombie Cow Studios]

'Ben There, Dan That!' is a freeware comedy adventure game by Zombie Cow Studios, written by and somewhat-narcissistically starring the eponymous Dan and Ben, a couple of layabout geeks who always seem to find themselves knee-deep in high-adventure.

Through an improbable series of events, our heroes find themselves trapped on an alien spaceship, and must puzzle their way through multiple madcap dimensions to make their way home.

‘Ben There, Dan That!’ is bursting with bold cartoon graphics, reams of laugh-out-loud dialogue and colourful characters. It also features an incredible musical score by Mike Watts of Encore Music.

Written, naturally, in the ever-awesmoe AGS. Thanks Chris!

Download your copy today FOR FREE, let’s not forget:  www.zombie-cow.com

      

If you like it, please do tell your friends and mention it on other forums... thanks!

Let us know what you think! Here's our AGS game page.