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Topics - organican

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Technical forum / A partial screenshot?

« on: January 17, 2007, 04:29:13 PM »

Hi muties,

Just a simple question...

Is it possible to take a snapshot of just a part of the screen in wme?

Like this:

XXXXXXXXX
XXOOOXXXX
XXOOOXXXX
XXXXXXXXX

X=screen
O=snapshot

Is that by any chance possible?

Game design / Time in adventure games

« on: January 15, 2007, 08:45:10 PM »

Hi,

I was thinking about the passage of time in adventure games.

Things like how it affects the gameplay, and which system is the best, and what are the ups and downs of the passage of time in adventures.

After some thinking I came to the conclusion that there are 4 different models for time in adventure games:

1. Time doesn't pass at all in the game, or time only passes between different chapters or parts of the game. This is the most common.

2. Time passes all the time in real-time. This is very uncommon in adventure games. One example was the game KGB, where you had to do things at the right place at the right time. Another example, if it can count as an adventure game, is Zelda: Majoras Mask. There was a three-day cycle and a special calendar system, where some things only happened at certain times. You had to meet people and do things at a specific time, so that new things could happen etc.

3. Time only passes when important things happen, like when you talk a certain person or take an important object. So if you meet that person or find that specific object, or do something important, time passes for example 10 minutes. But you have to play it cool, because you can only talk to some people at certain times, and there are doors that are only open at specific times, etc. So just like real-time adventures, it can be quite annoying if you miss important clues or forget to talk to someone, or do something else really important. I've only seen this time system used once, in "Cruise for a corpse".

4. Time passes in the game, but only in between different time blocks. Each time block can be for example two or three hours (10:00-12:00, 12:00-15:00). And within each time block time stands still, and you only move to the next block when you have done everything you're supposed to in the present time block. New things will also happen in each time block, and people are at different locations, and so on. This model was used in Gabriel Knight 3, and maybe also some other GK game.

So, in your opinion, which is the best model?

What are the pros and cons with using time in adventures?

And will it just frustrate and confuse the player, or can it also add to the gameplay?

General Discussion / Happy year everyone!!!

« on: January 01, 2006, 10:38:41 AM »

That's right...

Happy new 2006, folks!

A whole new year with all new possibilities for all us wintermuties...

Technical forum / Sound fading along the Y axis + direct control for 2d characters?

« on: October 26, 2005, 08:37:44 AM »

Okay, alright...

Is there an easy way to have the sound fade in and out as you get farther away from things, also in the vertical direction. I know it works left and right...
but not up and down, it seems.

Edit: i tried with
this.SetSoundVolume(100-(0.15*(position_Y-this.Y)));
where position_Y is the actor's Y position. But it didn't work. What am I doing wrong?

Edit again:

Code: [Select]

var ent = this.entity;
ent.SetSoundVolume(0);
this.SetSoundVolume(0);

...doesn't appear to work either. What am I missing?

And now for the second question...

What's the best way to implement direct control for 2d charcters. I mean:
up - he walks up.
left - he walks left.
Right - hw walks right.
Down - he walks down.

Like regular action movement.

Or is direct control out of control for the 2d characters altogether?

What's the best way to do a "simple action movement" for the actor?

General Discussion / Just a friendly reminder...

« on: October 16, 2005, 09:06:36 AM »

Hi wintermuties!

I installed an anti-virus program and a new firewall a day ago.

I also updated ad-aware and scanned with it for the first time in ages.

And the result?
A virus, some ad-ware, mal-ware, spyware...

I had a few bugs in my computer!

So you better take care of your computers. And also backup your projects regularly.

Just a friendly reminder...

Game design / Game design ideas

« on: October 09, 2005, 12:25:46 PM »

Here is a thread where you can post all those ideas you have that you don't think you'll ever get around to do. So that others might get some inspiration and ideas for their games.

And remember, folks: you can't own an idea, you can only own the implementation of an idea... (

riiiiight... tell that to Bill Gates

)

Anyway, here goes...

Idea Nr 1.

A "claymated" game.

If I had a digital camera, I might, just might try and make a small claymated game, just for curiosity's sake.
It's an interesting idea, and if you want your game to feel and look different then all the rest Myst clones and Monkey island lookalikes (bless you, Ron), this might be one way to go.

For those of you that don't know, claymation is when you take pictures of lumps of clay that you have shaped into, say, the game character or a table, for instance. Then for the next picture, you make just a little change to the clay, and take another picture. And when you show those pictures in a sequence, you have a claymation. The tricky part, I guess, would be to get the lighting right.

Then the question is if you should try and make the game mechanics "realistic", or if the physics of the game world should follow the clay's properties (for example, that the characters can change themselves into other forms).

As for the clay... well, colorful, "kids clay" would probably be fine for something like this.

Moving on to...

Idea Nr 2.

A realistic-looking game

Take pictures of real people, real places, and real objects, with a digital camera, and make them into a game. This would mean that everything would look and feel more real and realistic, and the players immersion in the game might be increased.

One of the advantages of this idea is, that you don't have to think about rendering 3D characters and backgrounds, or even hand-drawing endless frames for the one thousand animations of the game. But at the same time, this idea would probably only work with a first-person game, where you have mostly static pictures and just a few images for each "actor"...

Then you try to make everything look as real and realistic as possible, and throw in a story or a mystery.

A relationship drama? A ghost story in a real house? Suburban adventures among beatniks, goths, and everyday loosers?

A detective game?

You can probably do plenty of stories with a real-life setting and "real" characters.

And, the way I see it, it's just that a real-looking game would be a refreshing change of pace to all the cartoon games and "faked realism" graphics out there...

And also, one of the ideas here, is to look different, to feel different, to taste different than all the run-of-the-mill games out there...

Of course, looking any different doesn't mean that the contents of the game will be good. But it will at least give you a chance of standing out in the endless stream of same-looking games that gets thrown our way. And you also have a chance here of taking gaming in a new direction, with ultra-realism and really real-looking graphics.

So are you up to it?

Technical forum / Action/puzzle elements...

« on: October 04, 2005, 01:57:55 AM »

I had an interesting idea for an action/puzzle/adventure hybrid, but I'm not sure if WME is the best engine for this job...

The thing is, this game would use an awful lot of collision detection, making, and changing objects.
It would make and handle maybe hundreds of objects on a single "level" or screen.

Just to give you an idea, picture a mix between monkey island, tetris and super Mario.

But the things I'm unsure of, is if WME is that good for creating and handling objects on a mass scale. It's really much better suited for games where the single objects are unique and adventure-esqe (one-of a kind).

To make a game where you get to have some puzzle action, and play around with a bunch of changable "tetris blocks" (no, not anything like tetris, but you get the idea)... that would probably require an engine that is suited for that kind of game play and system, all the way from the beginning.

So to do it would probably be like cutting down a tree with a swiss army knife. Sure, it can be done, but as they say: The right tool at the right place. Or something.

So maybe WME isn't the best engine for this particular idea, maybe I should stick with making adventure games with WME and do other things with some other programs...?

Note: This was just a simple question, I've had such an interesting game idea here that would be a waste not to realize. But there's no hurry, and I have lots of "pure" adventure game ideas that I'd just love to bring to life. So this is no critique of WME or anything (that it can't do every single genre out there) this was just a question about WME's limits in this particular field. So no bad feelings here, okay?

And I also have to say again... what an absolutely wonderful job you've done with WME.

Best. Adventure Game Engine. Ever.

Technical forum / Moving dialogue...

« on: December 29, 2004, 08:30:44 PM »

Welcome back organican...

OK so now I decided to try something simpler for awhile,
after taking a timeout from the WME scene and having my project on ice...
Maybe I will get back to that later... no hurry really...

But right now I decided to try and make a mix between a graphic novel and adventure game,
so... but then, when -- btw, it's first-person, and in this simpler project I don't have all the text in a text-box like in the other game but let the people do their talking...
ok,so when I talk to this woman, the text moves like this, like it's walking or something...
hello
hello
hello
what do you want
what do you want
etc, then it stops and stays in the same position for the rest of the time while in that room.

So what I want to do is to have the dialogue/peoples words in the same place all the time
(yeah, the people are region entities if that has anything to do with it..)

Maybe you can tell me where the code that controls the position of "the talking" is?
I don't want it to be moving -- unless I tell it to!

There. A simple question to get Mnemonic's brain cells back in order...

Technical forum / Effects, techniques and various solutions

« on: November 04, 2004, 05:59:37 PM »

Just downloade the game enclosure and started playing it, when in the intro the screen was shaking.
Then I remembered people here talking about a shakescreen effect (like in MI2 the elevator?),
and at the same time I realized this should be possible with moving the "camera position".
Any thoughts?

(Camera Left<- Sleep 50 camera right -> Sleep 50 etc)

And it would be really great if we could all just share our solutions and techniques to various situations and dilemmas and put them in this great WME techniques and ideas document.

Any thoughts, guys...?

So in this case, if we take the MI2 elevator as an example, you can have your shakescreen by changing the camera positon back and forth (after detaching it, making it stop filming the main character, and then having it follow the character again as usual).

You could also have it follow an invisible object, I guess... Cool...)

I can really see this making a game more dynamic and stuff.

Technical forum / Why didn't I think of that?!

« on: October 19, 2004, 09:52:17 AM »

...
How was I supposed to solve this?
Then it hit me:
the script of an object or entity is reloaded each time the object is...
so if I put:

global whatever_active;
if ( whatever_active==1)
{this.Active=false; }

inside the objects script, then each time you enter the scene or reload the window,
the object or entity will become inactive if the variable is 1.

Pure genious!

Just say inside the snow's script:
global snow_active;
if (snow_active==1)
{ this.Active=false; }

on "lamp"
{ this.Active=false;
snow_active=1;
actor.Talk("Look, the snow melts away... and there's something...");
actor.Talk("*Activates the laser ultra 200 000 setting*...");
actor.Talk("Oops, I burned down the entire house, and the city's all in flames...");
actor.Talk("Game over, man, game over. But at least the snow won't be there anymore.");
}

So now whenever you use the lamp on the snow, it will hide,
and it will stay hidden whenever you come back to this place.
Way to go!

(it works with =false and ="anything you like" as well,
instead of =1.)

Some of you probably already knew this,
but newbies might find this useful.
(I know I did.)

(Edit: this is especially useful if you have any number of windows where objects can be taken or removed or become visible/invisible. It's in windows that this really RoXs

Technical forum / How many ways are there to say I have a few questions??

« on: October 18, 2004, 04:27:46 AM »

Ok, question time again...!
(Number One gives you three points, two gives you 6, and three gives 5)

1. Quick one - icons.
2. Hard one - game settings and registry paths
3. Slow it down, bro' - or the "why does all those one thousand windows inside one another slow down my game so much?"

1. Why can't you use icons in Win98. This sounds strange. Why? (why you can't use icons in WIN95/98/2000, that is, not why it sounds strange...)

(I happen to have Win98 myself)
So you mean that if I take my game to someone else's computer
and compiles the game there, it will work? And then the
icon will be visible on all computers, including Dos/Win3.x/Win95/98/2000/NT/XP/Linux and any other comput0rs, including my gameboy(!).
(just kidding...

)

Sorry, but the WME icon doesn't look too good in my eyes...
Though the engine roXx!!

2. Somehow it seems you can only choose your settings once per lifetime(!). Because when the registry settings is added to Windows... the settings window won't ever come back again.
Only when I removed the path in the windows registry it appeared once more, only to be gone again forever the next time I started the game.

(How often do you expect players to "hack" the windows registry?)

I then removed the registry path specification of my game inside WME.
Then it works with the settings every time with the compiled game... but... Now the settings is not saved any longer.

I'm not sure what I want really,
but what if a player selects the 16 bit option, and now the game looks bad, really bad.
Or they select the hardware acceleration enabled or disabled, and the game becomes too slow or ugly or whatever.
Then they can't change back. Ever.

3. I noticed my game runs somewhat slow on my computer (PII 350 mhz 64MB RAM, WinFast 3D S320 WINFAST ADAPTER)

Not a really big deal, just the cursor doesn't follow very smoothly.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that I have pretty many windows.

I have for example small windows, like small "scenes" that open sometimes when you look at something or do something, open a box and things like that. Originally I tried to load different windows for all the "small scenes", but the objects you took from them came back every time the window reloaded. I guess this can be corrected with variables, so the best solution might be to just load the windows one at a time instead of have all of them running, only invisible, like now.

You might think it's a miracle I can even run the game at all on my old and slow computer, but I don't have lots of animations, mostly static pictures in this first-person adventure of mine.

So one question is - does windows slow down things much even if they're invisible (that means that they're still active, so it probably is like that anyway)?

Nr 4: I fixed this one while I was offline.

5: Bonus question...
I have have a few variables I use in almost every script.
It definitely sounds easier, but what about memory and such...
I'm thinking about having them all in the base.inc file.
This doesn't take away much memory and power does it?
I mean, I'm reasoning like this - if you add a line to the base.inc it will be added to EVERY script that you're running. Am I right? Am I right? Simple mathematics on my part. I'm probably wrong. But still...

Sorry for all the long questions. Give and take, you know.

Technical forum / A few questions

« on: October 12, 2004, 09:09:35 PM »

OK. First of all.
I have some graphical effects, invisibility and such,
that I use a few times in my game.
But what I'm thinking of is, if there is a way for the code to
recognize if the player has the hardware acceleration activated or not,
and then I give an alternate graphical solution if it's not enabled.
This would be good for greatness on both modes.
Ok, I know, in some cases it would be almost twice the size of work,
and maybe you'll abandon the non-accelerated mode sometime in the near future, but it would be kind of nice.

Second of all. Is there a way to have both a 'on "LeftClick"' and a "while(true)" in the same script?? I'm attaching scripts, and it works great, but I have so many. I mean, I have a lot of objects where you can leftclick, and at the same time it has to see if a certain variable is something, and then it changes sprite or becomes invisible etc. It's not that I can't handle all the scripts, It's just that it seems so unnecessary to have to scripts for alot of objects.
Blablabla... AND: does two scripts of 2 kb take up more memory (ram or whatever) than one 4 kb script? How many scripts can you have running at the same time? Last I checked I had 60 of them.

Third of all. I had this bmp picture. Then I changed it to a jpg with compression 6 in photoshop (for the people who knows). Then I recompiled the game. And guess what?... The game files is now over 400 (count em') kb smaller. The pic is about 37 kb in jpg. So sometimes it might be great to choose another file format. Other pictures made the game smaller in bmp format. So there doesn't seem to be a universal great one, but they're better at different things. Less detailed pics with fewer colors were smaller in bmp. And jpg is better at detailed backgrounds and stuff. So it might be a good idea to check out ones graphix as "any kb saved is a good kb".

Technical forum / Entity containers scalable??

« on: October 01, 2004, 06:15:24 PM »

I tried to make an entity (entiry container) inside a window to be resized or Scaled.
It just couldn't work.

In the entity's script I added
this.Scalable=true;
this.Scale=50;

It still didn't work.
I made sure I had SCALABLE=TRUE in the entyty's entity file.
It still didn't work.

What am I doing wrong?
Ordinary entities inside the scenes can be scaled.

This would be really cool cause I'm using pictures during conversations and stuff.
I'm also using it to display what item you're currently using.

So as you can see this would be really neat.

So I'm just asking: can this be done?

Technical forum / Some easy questions (newbie)

« on: September 25, 2004, 01:43:34 PM »

Hi everybody

I'm new at this (programming and everything...)

so I hope you could help me out and getting this to work.

I'm trying to learn how to make a "if var a = 1 then do this"
but i'm not sure if i should put it in the object's script..
and i'm not quite sure "if(a=1)" is a real event, like "LeftClick".
I think that maybe it will only be activated once and then not work anymore.
Should I use "for" or "while" or something instead.
Sorry if this is too talky...
and i'm trying to make some things happen every x seconds. Should I use the date object for that?
or does the "Sleep (100)" work?

I'm new at this so I haven't quite figured out the syntax and all yet...
And then I'm trying to make an object rotate 1 degree at a time = this.Rotate = this.Rotate + 1,
but that doesn't work. Ordinary rotation work.. like "this.Rotate = 180;"

some code:

var tree;
var rotate;
/*
on "LeftClick"
{
this.Rotate = this.Rotate + tree;
}
*/

while (tree<10)
{ tree = tree + 1;
Sleep (200);
}

if (tree=10)
{ rotate = this.Rotate + 1;
this.Rotate = rotate;
tree = 1;
Sleep (100);
}

Thanx and everything