Recent posts

#31

Competitions & Activities / Re: MAGS May “Phone” (CLOSED)

Last post by heltenjon - Yesterday at 01:13:03

Late to the party, I played this one tonight, then read everyone's comments here. I understood the story, and despite the bugs, I solved it on my first go, though I had to repeat actions to get progress.

Spoiler

I started by pulling the big lever on the machine, guessing it was the on switch. But resetting it and pulling it again later did the trick. And I had to click a lot of times on the Angel before something happened.

[close]

I guess my understanding of the story has more to do with me reading Clive Barker and the Bible than anything else, though.

So...

Spoiler

is "God" evil? At least those mad Seraphim are scary enough to break the mind of anyone.

[close]

.

The bugs have been commented by others. I do wish to emphasize the need for a consistent policy of either naming all the hotspots or none of them. I prefer them named, but once they are visible by mouseover, the player assumes that anywhere a name does not pop up, is not an active hotspot.

Looking past the bugs, I like the moody drawings and the angelic plotline. The story could be told more clearly, to the benefit of players who has not read Clive Barker.  Thanks for the game!

#32

Beginners' Technical Questions / Re: Script link failure for in...

Last post by Crimson Wizard - Yesterday at 01:04:47

@edmundito
I've been testing attributes today, and found out that this case works (in the modern versions of AGS) if you don't declare getter/setter in struct, but use extender syntax instead. I.e. using following code:

Code: ags

managed struct Child {
  int Index;

  import readonly attribute String Name;
};

managed struct Parent {
  import readonly attribute Child* children[];
};

String _names[];
Child* _children[];

String get_Name(this Child*) {
  return _names[this.Index];
}

Child* geti_children(this Parent*, int index) {
  return _children[index];
}

#33

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Animation options.

Last post by Squinky - Yesterday at 00:09:40

Hey folks,

 I've used AGS before but it was a really long time I ago. I'm getting the itch to play with it again but there is one element I'd like to figure out before I start.

Animation. Back in the day I did pixel stuff very badly. I can draw ok, but I just don't have the patience to do pixel by pixel animation. Has anyone used these newer programs to add in bones that allow you to animate easier? Would you recommend them? Last time I looked they used flash style art primarily, and I had troubles cleaning edges.

Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

#34

AGS Engine & Editor Releases / Re: AGS 4.0 - Alpha 22 for pub...

Last post by Crimson Wizard - Fri 18/07/2025 23:33:45

Well I was thinking about :

- importing a font file
- create a button
- give this button the font you just imported
- choose the size of the font for THIS button (and eventually its style if possible)
- allow to manipulate font's property for each button or things using texts (labels etc...), such as the font's size, dynamically in scripts. My best example for it is about translations : if you have a button with the text "ABCD" inside, and when you change translation the texts becomes "ABCDEFGHIJ", the button could be too small to have the text properly inside, so you could just change the font's size to fit the text there.

Giving each control additional font settings will be suboptimal IMO, not only because that's going to be an extra hassle to configure font on each control, but also because the font renderers must cache the glyphs (letters) in each separate size and style (they don't load font once and then display resized, they actually precreate letters in each size). If there will be a setting for each button, label, etc, that may give users an idea that they may ignore the number of font variants, and they will eventually boost the amount of cached fonts. So I'd rather not do that.

I'd rather keep a single "Font" property on things, and have all settings in a Font object. You can already have any number of Fonts from a single file in AGS 4, where you import a font file once, and create any number of font variants from that font file. We may have a "style" added later as well, if we support attaching multiple style font files as a single "font file source".

This leaves a translation problem, and ability to create Font objects at runtime, either as a command in script, or an instruction in the translation file. That's something that has to be developed from ground up, as right now there's no font structure in script at all, nor a collection of fonts that one could iterate, only numbers. But that should be feasible in theory.

[BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT]

#35

Completed Game Announcements / BvR - No Copy Protection Versi...

Last post by Knoodn - Fri 18/07/2025 23:30:17

Hello adventurers.

There is a new version of "BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT" available.
This release removes the copy protection at the start of the game – in an appropriate way.

Many thanks to Morgan for the idea.
And greetings to the "Special-Purpose Algorithm Machine" crew for the realisation.

The original version is still available for download.

AGS Database Entry:
BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT

#36

AGS Engine & Editor Releases / Re: AGS 4.0 - Alpha 22 for pub...

Last post by Baguettator - Fri 18/07/2025 22:29:41

In the latest AGS 4 you can import only 1 font file and create any number of fonts from it, each with different settings. Is that what you are referring to?

Well I was thinking about :

- importing a font file
- create a button
- give this button the font you just imported
- choose the size of the font for THIS button (and eventually its style if possible)
- allow to manipulate font's property for each button or things using texts (labels etc...), such as the font's size, dynamically in scripts. My best example for it is about translations : if you have a button with the text "ABCD" inside, and when you change translation the texts becomes "ABCDEFGHIJ", the button could be too small to have the text properly inside, so you could just change the font's size to fit the text there.

#37

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by LimpingFish - Fri 18/07/2025 21:21:42

This sounds like the next speculative bubble.

https://gizmodo.com/wall-streets-ai-bubble-is-worse-than-the-1999-dot-com-bubble-warns-a-top-economist-2000630487

It's much worse, apparently.

#38

Competitions & Activities / Re: Fortnightly Writing Compet...

Last post by brushfe - Fri 18/07/2025 18:39:26

Oh man, I blew it! Sorry everyone - I didn't realize that rule! I can see how admins could abuse it (I wish I was smart enough to have thought of that...)

Any admin votes will be void. Though I imagine that won't be a problem with the excellent stories you've all told. And thank you for the great feedback all the same!

Apologies to you all @Sinitrena @Baron @Mandle again!

[ISSUE #7 : Catastrophic failure]

#39

Editor Development / Re: My personal list of proble...

Last post by Monsieur OUXX - Fri 18/07/2025 18:26:43

ISSUE #7 : Catastrophic failure

This issue is probably not new, but reveals an old problem of AGS :
- I had an exception while saving the game. This time, the "out of memory" issue hit the JsonWriter.
- I told myself : "Nevermind, I'll close it and re-open it".
- When I re-opened AGS and the game, I had a message that over a thousand sprites were missing.
- I exited the game without saving and did a copy of my game folder.
- Then, I re-opened AGS and I helped the game going back to a healthy state by doing "File -> Restore all sprites from source".
- But then the sprites themselves were of course still missing.

NONE OF THE BACKUP FILES HELPED:
  - game.agf.bak was the exact same as game.agf
  - acsprset.spr had been partly overwritten by the corrupt data (incomplete file)

I'm not allowing myself to panic yet because I still have the files from before my AGS 4 upgrade. EDIT: I used the acsprset.spr file straight from after my AGS 3.6 upgrade, and it worked directly.

But I think this highlights the need of a better recovery mechanism :
-  If the saving crashes in the middle, then the critical files SHOULD NOT be overwritten. They should be swapped only after the save is successful.
- Or, at least, there should be more than one backup file generated. It's no longer 2005, we could have 10 of them (I'm exaggerating to make a point) and it would still use close to no resources.

#40

Editor Development / Re: My personal list of proble...

Last post by Monsieur OUXX - Fri 18/07/2025 18:19:43

So, I did some tests and can confirm that this starts happening after "Watch Panel" gets enabled. It even keeps happening if I hide "Watch Panel", the only way to make it stop is to restart the Editor.

Not that you need it, but I can confirm that you're on the right track, because to my great surprise the issue DIDN'T happen to me for a few minutes, and I noticed that the panels being displayed were not the same as before (I might have closed one of them by accident). I tried investigating it by opening and closing some panels but couldn't find the correct state of open/closed panels (no wonder, if like you said it can't be fixed until restart).