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16

Game announcements / Juniper Games’ Design a Character Competition!

« on: July 10, 2005, 05:10:52 PM »

For those who are interested:


Juniper Games is pleased to announce a contest, where you, the player, have the chance to get a character of your own design into a game.

And not just ANY game –

We are talking about, Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw!

It’s simple.  Go to the Juniper games or participating gaming site and read the rules, design your character, send it in and wait anxiously.  It’s easy, fun and free!  That’s right, you can enter as many times as you like, for free!  Providing you follow the rules.

After the closing date the panel will go through the mountains of entries and pick those we feel deserve to go onto the next round – then it is up to the public. All the finalists will be published at the Juniper Games website and participating gaming sites for public view for 2 weeks.  All the finalists will receive a signed print of a Steve Ince version of their character – worth the entry fee on its own!

Everyone will then be able to vote [only once] on their favourite entry.  At the end of the voting period – we’ll count them all up and see who won [it could be you!].  The winning entry will be used by us to create a brand new character in the interactive thriller...

Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw!

And not only is entering and voting easy AND free! – it gets better!  The winner will see their name at the end of a long list of tiny scrolling credits at the end of the amazing game...

Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw!

Yes!  Fame is just around the corner!  Enter today and avoid the rush!

17

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 29, 2005, 02:52:28 PM »

Thanks.  The -1 fixed it.  I shall run the update in a short while.

18

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 29, 2005, 09:29:26 AM »

I thought that was what I was supposed to do but wherever I call this (I've tried different places in a number of scripts) it doesn't reset the scaling.

By the way, I've been using the following taken from another thread on scaling:

    actor.Scale = StartScale + (EndScale - StartScale) * ((actor.Y - StartY) / (EndY - StartY));

19

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 29, 2005, 08:47:42 AM »

Also note that this event is only triggered once; whenever the actor enters the region. So if you want to continuously change actor's scale depending on his position, this is probably not the right place to do so (or did I understand you wrong?).

No, that's absolutely right.  I realised that the event would only trigger once, so I put a "while" loop in the on "ActorEntry" section.

Although I'm now getting the character to scale how I want in the region, the final scale is still remaining with the character and does not change back to normal.

20

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 29, 2005, 08:42:19 AM »

3, Lastly - double check you are using Region and NOT Entity(rgn). They are different and Entity(rgn) doesn't trigger this event.

This was the problem - I knew I was being stupid.  Thanks for the pointer.

21

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 28, 2005, 09:03:15 PM »

Well, I thought I had a handle on this, but whatever I do doesn't seem to work.  The event "ActorEntry" doesn't seem to trigger.  Do I have to do anything else to trigger it?

I actually want to change the scaling in this region, so tried it based on a range of X and Y values (a bit clunky) but when I changed the scaling it became completely screwed up and wouldn't reset on the next screen.  How can I stop the final scale factor carrying through?

22

Technical forum / Re: Actor in region

« on: May 27, 2005, 10:06:34 PM »

Thanks, man, that's a great help.

23

Technical forum / Actor in region

« on: May 27, 2005, 07:05:36 PM »

I'm probably missing something really obvious, but how can I test if an actor is within a region?

Any help will be much appreciated.

24

Game announcements / Re: Juniper Crescent - The Sapphire Claw

« on: April 29, 2005, 04:09:16 PM »

And - the game is using the Wintermute Engine. 

It's the best around for what I want to do.  What else would I use?

I'd like to thank Jan for his support while I was putting together my prototype demo.   

25

Technical forum / Re: Dialogue

« on: December 30, 2004, 11:29:39 AM »

I like to think I understand the principles, I rarely know the "grammar" of what I should be looking for or how to approach looking for it.  Scene.GetNode would never have occurred to me.

Is there a good resource of these kind of examples anywhere?

26

Technical forum / Re: Dialogue

« on: December 30, 2004, 10:10:29 AM »

Thanks.  That worked.  (This shows that I'm not really a programmer.  )

27

Technical forum / Re: Dialogue

« on: December 29, 2004, 09:13:16 PM »

Then you simply make them talk in a script:

actor.Talk("Hey guys, how are you?");
Bill.Talk("I'm fine.");
Ted.Talk("I'm not.");
actor.Talk("Oh, I see.");

(providing 'Bill' and 'Ted' are actor/entity object previously loaded into the scene)

I tried this and it didn't work.  Do I need to declare the entity or actor in the script that's running.  Also, if I use anything other than self for the object the player is interating with it gives an error.

28

Technical forum / Re: Dialogue

« on: December 29, 2004, 10:27:21 AM »

Hello and welcome,

Thanks.

Since all the characters are "objects" (either actors or entities), and talking means just calling their Talk methods from scripts, it doesn't really matter how many characters participate in a conversation. It's only a matter having multiple actors/entities in one scene. Then you simply make them talk in a script:

Is it better to refer to all characters by their names rather than using the self.Talk() command?  Will this be better for recording and translation purposes further down the line?

This has been discussed before, indeed. It's a little tricky to find the right balance between making the dialogs easy to write and preserving all the power of scripting at the same time. And since I don't see any way of combining these two, probably the only solution will be to have two separate ways of creating dialogs. A simple one, which could be supported by some GUI tool or some simple syntax (the way you suggested). This method would only support some simple conditions/branching etc. Then there would be the "classical" way, i.e. scripting, which would provide all the scripting power when needed.

Currently only the scripting way is available, although I believe FoveverDreams guys already developed their own simplified dialog system on top of scripting, and ClémentXVII is reseraching possibilities of using XML for writing dialogs.

I think I over-simplified what I was saying.  The system I previously used still had other code wrapping up the dialogue and interspersing anims, setting variables and the like.  When the files were built, any scripts that were created were converted/interpreted into something more standard.  What it meant was that dialogue could be written in Word, say, and then copied and pasted into the scene, code inserted and Bob's your uncle.

I have developed a tool for this, but I didn't release it to public yet, because it's still quite raw and I'd like to make it a little more user-friendly before releasing it. But it's usable and has been used in two games already.
This tool scans the relevant project files and extracts all strings. It also automatically adds string-table IDs to all of the original strings. So the idea is not to deal with string-tables while developing the game, but only extract everything once the game is finished. All the subsequent changes (proof reading, translations) are only done in the string table and the original texts only work as placeholders.

This is exactly the kind of approach that we used.  Each language file was a text file with thousands of numbered lines.  The voices directories would contain thousands of numbered wav files, so it all tied up.

It sounds as though you've pretty much thought of everything. 

29

Technical forum / Dialogue

« on: December 28, 2004, 08:53:33 PM »

Please forgive me if this has been asked before.

I'm considering using the Wintermute engine for a project I'm in the early stages of.  Many aspects are pretty sophisticated and I've already set up an initial room with four levels of paralax scrolling, which works very well.  Now I come to putting together the character interactions and I begin to ask questions of the system.  So, I thought I would post here in the hope of finding answers that will convince me to continue with this system.

1.  How do you have more than two characters in a conversation?

2.  Will there be a development of the system so that dialogue scripts can be made more readable?  For example:
Bill: Hi Ted.
Ted: Hi Bill, how's it going?
(I've been spoilt in the past by having tools provide me with this way of scripting through the use of aliases.)

3.  Is it possible to export the dialogue only for recording purposes or for translation purposes?  Is it then possible to re-import it so that it slots into the game at the right places?  How do you keep track of the lines of dialogue in these instances when there seems to be no numbering of the dialogue lines?

Just trying to think ahead... 

Thanks for your time.