Messages

Wow, I got a feeling of Deja vu from reading Dualnames post, it's like I read it before...

Oh, and if there was any doubt, I'm also looking forward to this game. It's good to hear that it will be released soon.
It's always better when you don't have to wait a lot between episodes, it keeps thins fresh in your mind.

Snarky, that's a great idea, I would definitely play this game!
Go on and make it, now!

Awesomeness all around! 
I played it to the finish, although I did die several times (and that was in the easiest difficulty).

I liked the Mario reference, and all the different gameplays inserted into one game!

And Ryan Timothy, I thought it's actually a nice piece of ass (on her, I mean)...

The CSRun is only a generic method to run delegates, it's an inner implementation and have no effect of the API, I could have easily replaced that call with a simple:
return "hello world";

This would have worked all the same (guaranteed, this was the first thing I tried when I started playing with smiley's api).

The source codes don't hate you, they're just a little shy...
Sorry for not mentioning it, this was made by AGS 3.2, try it and you'll see some source code lovin'.

We have a winner!

Spoiler

Sorry, could not resist...

[close]

One of the funniest actors ever, he will surely be missed.  :'(

MediaFire gave me an "invalid or deleted file" message..

In the same manner you can make gIconBar visible and not visible (and enabled or not), you can do the same thing to each ones of the buttons in gIconBar (you can get their names if you double click the gui in the designer and look at the combo box in the properties window).

You basically need to make gIconBar and bInteract (or however its called) visible, and make all other buttons (bLookAt, bTalk, etc) not visible.

[bottom center]

And as I already explained, this is so you can place the character with precision since character x and y values are based on the bottom center of the sprite.

I understand your reasoning, but it's still feels a bit weird, and possibly there's a better way.
I thought of maybe moving the character towards the cursor instead the other way around, but on second thought, that would be even worse for the user.
Maybe just placing a marker at the bottom center of the character instead?

...And neither are objects.  Scaling items in the room editor based on walkable area scale values would be extremely dodgy, particularly due to the zoom feature.  It might be something I'll look at later, but aside from yourself I'm sure many many people will find it useful as it is.

Agreed on all accounts. It will be difficult to implement, but worth it.

It loads fine, the swatch cannot adjust to the engine-custom colors because the 0-31 values are kind of a hack that auto-assigns every 8 units of Blue up to 248 a specific color, so 8=1, 16=2, all the way up to 248=31.  You can test this with the palette form.  Unfortunately there's no way of making the color swatch match a color that's being assigned in this fashion, though as I say, entering in these values will resort in the proper in-game color.

Pretty much what Calin said.
No need to alter the setter though (since the swatch will not allow for 1-31 colors anyway), but changing the getter to something like this should do the trick (unless I'm missing something):

Code: ags

    [CategoryAttribute("Speech Settings")]
    public Color SpeechColorVal
    {
        get { 
                   //getR, getG, getB, are the methods I mentioned earlier
                   int R = getR(SpeechColor);
                   int G = getG(SpeechColor);
                   int B = getB(SpeechColor);
                   return Color.FromArgb (R ,G ,B);
            }
        set { 
                  ....
            }
    }

No.  SpeechColor is an integer property and for the purposes of the editor loading must remain one for now (especially for backwards compatibility).  SpeechColorVal is a Color property that converts the color swatch value (R,G,B) back into an engine compatible color. 

You can change the display name of a property without changing the real name of the property (with a DisplayNameAttribute), so that's not really a problem. Simply put:

Code: ags

    [CategoryAttribute("Speech Settings")]
    [DisplayNameAttribute("Speech Color")]
    public Color SpeechColorVal
    { 
       ....
    }

Did a little QA, awesome stuff!

Some issues I did find:

* The handling of the character is weird due to the fact you place the mouse cursor at the bottom of the sprite. You said you were aware of it, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, because it really stands out...

* The characters are not scaled according to the walkable areas they stand on (at least not with continous scaling, I didn't check with single scaling). In my scenario, when I draw the sprites at a big scale, and then scale them down, it makes the feature a lot less useful. Also, if this was implemented, it can also help testing the min & max range of the continous scaling (by dragging the character across the screen).

* Speech color is not loaded properly if it was under 31 (the colors which AGS preserve). You can take a look here to see how the colors should be converted to RGB values.

* The attribute reads as SpeechColorVal in the designer, should be SpeechColor.

Thanks for the heads up, I re-uploaded it to here.

As for the short version answer, I don't have something special to offer here, cause I don't remember doing anything different for strings that I didn't do for the other types, if was pretty straight forward.
You're probably missing something simple, so I would compare my code to yours and see what's different...

Also, regarding the new audio, my guess is that the API doesn't have that functionality, so no way to access it. However since the source code of the editor is available (and in c#), you can possibly modify it to access the audio somehow, though I'm not sure how much work it will take.

Very nice! Especially #3!  
I will hopefully download it this weekend and do some QA...

And Sslaxx, don't worry, we've only just began, I intend to release my source after I put some more stuff in there, and I believe the rest are too.

You can take a look at the code I wrote for c# runner (the source code is in that thread), there are some functions there that return a string.

Both scripting and composing I started at a very early age.

My story with scripting began as a child (~7 years old?), when my parents bought me my first computer. It came with three games (digger, root beer tapper and another one with spaceships), and I remember thinking "Wow, there is so much more to create here!", so I asked around how do people make games, and that lead me to teach myself some qbasic, which I used to create mostly idiotic text adventures... Later I took CS in university and it became my day job.

As for composing, my parents (again), bought me a keyboard and keyboard lessons (also from a very young age). I was not much of a keyboard player (and I'm still pretty mediocre at keyoard playing) but I got really interested in composing music.
Also, there was a project in our school with a youth wind instruments orchestra so I joined in and played the Tuba for 6-7 years, and that's where I got the feel for arranging parts.

Both story writing and drawing, is something I have no knowledge or experience in, and try to learn as I go...

Thank you Rulaman, but you kinda missed the point.  

My point was that most agsers would not think to check the audio for null (or to test the game with no sound), and so most games that use this feature would crash in that scenario.
So while what you said would indeed fix this, it will only be fixed after a player reported the crash, which is not desired, and could be avoided by changing the behaviour of the engine.

No, I didn't implement it for the dialogs (and in fact, I didn't know it didn't work on them already).
I'll see if I can include the dialogs as well, thanks for the tip.

Wow! This is awesome! Super useful!  

Potential enhancements for the future:
* Being able to load the log file in the editor to implement the changes you made in the game.
* Being able to edit the walkable areas as well (probably not possible ATM, due to not having access to the mask at run time afaik).

Returning null makes sense if the normal case is for user to want to know if the action worked.
But in this case, in 99% of the cases the users won't want to know, and for the remaining 1% you can add an "IsValid" property to the channel that can be queried.

Most people will not think of checking it for null, and to prove it, even the example in the documentation for changing the volume doesn't check the channel for null...

So far so good, I've also enjoyed the first two episodes, and very interested to see where this is going.
And it's also pretty classic for a video game adaptation...