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1

Game announcements / Re: Mental Repairs, Inc.

« on: December 13, 2008, 10:56:35 PM »

About the color puzzle:

If you've got the monochrome copy of the colour print, remember that the shades of grey on the white sheet look darker to your eyes than the ones on the dark wall. It's easiest to identify the colors by starting with the darkest grey and going up from there, i.e. the darkest grey on the wall must correspond to the darkest grey on the monochrome test print copy, and from there you can work your way up to the lightest shade of grey. There shouldn't be a translation issue, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to play through the English version myself, as I don't know the right combination by heart.

2

Game announcements / Re: Mental Repairs, Inc.

« on: December 11, 2008, 10:22:42 PM »

Thanks for playing, everyone! I'm currently working on finishing my website with a bit of background info about the game.

If I remember correctly this was your bachelor graduation, wasn't it?

Yes, indeed.

Hey Eshaktaar!

Hey, there! You look familiar. 

Is the german version available too?

You can choose the language (English or German) while installing the game.

3

Game announcements / Mental Repairs, Inc.

« on: December 07, 2008, 09:10:46 PM »

Hello!

Mental Repairs, Inc. is a short 2.5D point'n'click adventure and my first venture into using Wintermute. Maybe you remember me from another adventure called Murder in a Wheel.

Mental Repairs, Inc. puts you into the shoes of Henrik Liaw, machine psychiatrist. Henrik's unusual job is to repair defective electronic devices with his mind by entering their psyche and treating them from the inside. For this he uses the so-called Katharsis Interface, a wrench-like tool that allows him to establish a mental connection with a machine's artificial brain. Ever wanted to talk to an elevator with a split personality? Here's your chance.

The adventure starts when Henrik's PDA receives an emergency call in the middle of the night. The main computer of Rhosonit Engineering, a nearby construction company, experienced a nervous breakdown and needs to be repaired/treated immediately.

Here are a few screenshots (click for larger versions):







I already released the game several months ago, but only now I managed to finish the English translation (about 1400 lines and a lot of graphical text).

You can download Mental Repairs, Inc. (65 MB, English & German) from these locations:

Mental Repairs, Inc. v2.0 (FileFront)
Mental Repairs, Inc. v2.0 (MediaFire)


Enjoy!

4

Technical forum / Re: turn off animation blending

« on: May 19, 2008, 01:45:39 PM »

Have you tried actor.AnimTransitionTime = 0?

5

Fixed / TalkAnimChannel: Talk animation does not stop

« on: May 10, 2008, 08:56:46 AM »

The talk animation of my 3d actor only affects the jaw. To let the idle animation play while he's talking, I set TalkAnimChannel to 1, so the idle animation plays in channel 0 and the talking in 1. The animation works well (using actor.Talk("blah")), but the actor doesn't stop moving his mouth once he's finished his line(s), and even when he walks into other scenes his mouth is still doing a fish impression.
Is this a bug, or do I need to turn off the talk animation manually every time?

Edit: In case it's not a bug, I found a way to do it manually by overriding the Talk method in the actor's script. Here's the code if anyone else runs into this problem:

method Talk(Text)
{
   // stop the player if he's still playing locomotive motions like walking/running
   if (this.IsAnimPlaying("Walk"))
   {
      this.PlayAnimAsync("Idle");
   }
   
   this.Talk(Text);
   this.StopAnimChannel(1);
}

6

Bug reports / Re: Strange Graphic Glitch with Texture Alpha Channel

« on: April 05, 2008, 10:33:38 PM »

Thanks for your reply. To stay on the safe side I made the character without "alpha hair", so it's okay.

7

Bug reports / Re: Strange Graphic Glitch with Texture Alpha Channel

« on: March 28, 2008, 09:37:44 PM »

Thanks for the reply! I was getting the feeling I was imagining things.
The screenshots above were made with stencil shadows disabled. I did notice some additional oddities when they were enabled, though (like shadows appearing on the planes).

I know alpha textures are a fiddly topic, as almost any engine has its own problems with rendering them.

8

Bug reports / Re: Strange Graphic Glitch with Texture Alpha Channel

« on: March 28, 2008, 08:19:04 PM »

So... am I the only one having this problem? Did anyone successfully create/import a character with hair planes without getting these glitches? Does the 3d actor from AlphaTest.zip look all right on someone's system?

I'm asking because I'm at a point where I have to decide how to model my 3d character's hair, and I'd rather not rely on sculpted polys.

9

Bug reports / Re: Strange Graphic Glitch with Texture Alpha Channel

« on: March 25, 2008, 08:53:15 PM »

I also thought it was the mirroring at first, but just pulling out correct hair polys and turning them by 180° makes the glitch appear. The character is already one editable poly (meaning the hair strands aren't separate objects) in 3ds Max and I reset all transformations via Reset XForm.

In the zip file is an example where I just created two planes, then copied and turned them by 180°.

10

Bug reports / Strange Graphic Glitch with Texture Alpha Channel

« on: March 25, 2008, 07:20:08 PM »

Here's something rather puzzling: I've got a low-poly character whose hair makes use of the texture's alpha channel. The problem is that the transparency seems to be bugged on one side of the character:


Looking okay. Don't mind the floating strands of hair, I pulled them out for testing.


On this side, the transparency only works with fully transparent parts (i.e. black pixels in the alpha channel) of the texture.


As you can see, the glitch is only on one side.

At first I thought it had something to do with the polygons being mirrored, put by pulling out strands and simply rotating them by 180° I could make the glitch appear/disappear (as you can see with the hair above the character's head), and it didn't matter on what side (left or right of the character's symmetry axis) the polys were (the floating hair in the second image is behind the character, on his right side where all the "good" hair is).

I suspect it's got something to do with the polygons' normals. All the hair polygons on the left side of the character's head have normals which point to the left, and those are the ones affected. I made a small example 3d actor to test this, which you can download here: AlphaTest.zip
Just copy the zip's content into the actors folder of one of your projects and look at the preview. The actor consists of two pairs of quadratic planes which got a texture with alpha channel on them. One pair faces forwards, the other one backwards. One of the pairs shows the same glitch, at least on my machine:



I could reproduce the glitch on two computers (one with an ATI and one with a GeForce card), so I guess it's not a problem with my PC. I tried both TGAs and PNGs, with no difference. I'm using 3ds Max with the Panda DX exporter, by the way. Can anybody else reproduce this?

11

Fixed / Re: Crash when NPC is reset when walking

« on: March 20, 2008, 02:47:34 PM »

Cool, thank you. I'll try to implement the idle behaviour according to the Wiki example.

12

Fixed / Re: Crash when NPC is reset when walking

« on: March 04, 2008, 09:10:34 AM »

Thanks. I could reproduce the crash on two different machines (one with XP and one with Vista).

13

Fixed / Re: Crash when NPC is reset when walking

« on: February 25, 2008, 12:51:48 PM »

Certainly, the endless loop is also in the NPC's script:

Code: [Select]

#include "scripts\base.inc"

walkAround();

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
on "LeftClick"
{
this.Reset();
actor.GoTo(this.X, this.Y);
this.GoTo(200, 470); // crash happens here
}

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
on "Talk"
{
this.Reset();
actor.GoTo(this.X, this.Y);
actor.Talk("Hey there!"); // crash happens before this line appears on screen
this.Talk("Go away!");
walkAround();
}

// LOOP
function walkAround()
{
while (true)
{
this.GoTo(200, 470);
Sleep(5000);
this.GoTo(600, 470);
Sleep(5000);
}
}

My first description was inaccurate, I noticed: In the Talk event the crash happens before the player actor can say "Hey there!", right after "actor.GoTo(this.X, this.Y);". If I remove the line "actor.GoTo(this.X, this.Y);" in the Talk event, the player actor can say her line, and then the crash occurs.

If I comment out "this.Reset();" and "walkAround();" in the Talk event, no crash happens. In this case, however, I can talk to the NPC only once, and then she becomes "inactive" and talking to her or left-clicking on her does nothing (even though her caption still appears when the mouse is over her).

14

Fixed / Crash when NPC is reset when walking

« on: February 25, 2008, 01:14:50 AM »

Hello, first post here!

I'm currently experimenting with WME to get a feel for what it can do, and I seem to have hit a bug:

I have an NPC that walks around the scene (inside an endless loop). When the player clicks on the NPC, I want the NPC to stop what she's doing until the player actor has reached her position. After a short talk, the NPC will then resume her walk. To stop the NPC, I call her Reset() function. Then the player actor says a line, and when the NPC is supposed to answer, the game shuts down.

I could recreate the bug in a simpler example here (NPC's script):

Code: [Select]

#include "scripts\base.inc"

this.GoTo(400, 470);

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
on "LeftClick"
{
this.Reset();
actor.GoTo(this.X, this.Y);
this.GoTo(400, 470);
}
When I click on the NPC she stops and waits for the player actor to reach her position. But when the NPC is supposed to continue walking, the game crashes. Note that this only happens if I click on the NPC while she is still walking. If she stands still, the code works.