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What I meant is that if the player has half-completed one puzzle and decides to leave it and start another, the position of the pieces in the first one will be reset if he returns to that later. This is because the module was only scripted to keep track of one puzzle at a time. If you move the code to your room scripts however, the code in each room will keep track of one puzzle, allowing you to move freely between them.

Of course you can. There's no limit on how many jigsaw puzzles you can use in a single game - you just need to initialize a new one from a different set of puzzle pieces. The only problem would be that the state of the previous puzzle would be lost, so the player can't move back and forth between puzzles in different stages of completion. This could be solved by moving the module code to the room script and using a different room for each puzzle. But if each puzzle needs to be solved before moving on to the next, this won't be necessary. Feel free to modify the module in any way you want.

I'm glad you found it useful. I'll have to fix the coordinate issue when I get the time, thanks for letting me know about it. Unfortunately the module was written just a week or two before hi-res coordinate support was introduced in AGS, so I never really tested it for compatibility.

I'm glad you found my module useful. Let me know if you have any problems with it, as I haven't really tested the module with the native hi-res coordinates of AGS 3.1+.

By setting the LightLevel of a Region you can effectively make a room lighter or darker without having to redraw it.

Huh? This tip seems a bit misleading. The LightLevel makes characters/objects appear lighter/darker, not the background. So you would still have to re-color your background or use TintScreen (which can't really be recommended due to the CPU load). Come to think of it, we should really have a module that uses DynamicSprite tinting to temporarily change the lighting of room backgrounds with a simple function call. Perhaps I could add that to my LightMap module.

Hmm, strange. I haven't done much testing of this functionality, but Jigsaw.GetPuzzleComplete() should work. But I see that I defined the variable jigsaw_won as an int instead of a bool. Perhaps this could cause weirdness.

Could you please try to change the line:

Code: ags

int jigsaw_won;

to:

Code: ags

bool jigsaw_won;

and see if it changes anything?

Hi Kiah. Unless you want to add code to the module itself, the one way to do stuff upon completion is to check the state of Jigsaw.GetPuzzleComplete() in your puzzle room's repeatedly_execute. Like so:

function repeatedly_execute() {
   if (Jigsaw.GetPuzzleComplete() == true) {
      Jigsaw.RemovePuzzle();
      player.AddInventory(iKey);
      player.ChangeRoom(5, 120, 64);
      }
   }

Let me know if you experience problems.

At the start of the summer there was some talk about reviving Photoshop Phriday, but nothing came out of it. So I was wondering, would anyone mind if I relaunched the competition?

Yeah, I'll do that for the next version. By that time 3.03 might also be near final.

11 Jul 2008 Update: No bugs (except the one I found myself) or feature requests were reported for the beta, so I'm declaring this slightly updated version the official 1.0. The download link should work directly. Many thanks to Joe Carl for suggesting googlepages:

JigsawModule 1.00 including demo game

Edit: If you're using AGS 3.03 beta 1, it fixes a bug in the handling of DynamicSprites as object graphics, so you should be able to uncomment this line which creates problems in older AGS versions:

Code: ags

//if (jigsaw_shadowsprite != null) jigsaw_shadowsprite.Delete();

Thanks for mirroring it, SSH. I didn't have any problems either, but downloading from the free host IS quite cumbersome, I agree. Does anyone have a better suggestion for a host? I know there's a whole thread for this, but that's where I found the current host, which sounded like one of the better ones.

Glad to see that someone is giving it a try. Criticism or feature requests are more than welcome. I'd especially like to hear from someone using it with 320x240 graphics - I'm bound to have missed a hi-res check somewhere in the debug code but didn't have time to create lo-res puzzle pieces to try it out.

Found a bug in the Jigsaw.RemovePuzzle() script. Please change:

Code: ags

if (jigsaw_draggedoverlay != null) jigsaw_draggedoverlay.Remove();

to:

Code: ags

if (jigsaw_draggedoverlay.Valid == true) jigsaw_draggedoverlay.Remove();

This will of course be fixed in the next version.

Want to add a puzzle where the player has to assemble a torn up photo, a shredded document or a jigsaw puzzle? Then this could be the module for you!

After Ghostlady posted in the beginner's tech forum asking how to make a jigsaw puzzle in AGS without running into object limits, I came up with a concept for how to do it using a struct and DrawingSurface routines. Originally this module was developed exclusively for Ghostlady's game, but we figured that others could also find it useful, so we decided to add some more functionality and make it public.
The module allows you to create a puzzle either from similarly sized sprites in a View or from individual sprites, which can be any size and have any final coordinates but need to be set up one by one. To help you do this, the game features a debug mode where you can position each sprite pixel perfect and then output their setup script to an external text file for cut-n-paste.

Ghostlady has been testing earlier versions, but this is the first public beta. I'd love to hear any feedback on bugs, usability and feature requests. Thanks for trying it out! See module documentation for description of functions and their proper usage.



10 May 2009 Update: Problems have been reported when setting "Use low-res co-ordinates in script" to false (AGS 3.1 and later). I will look into this as soon as possible.

11 Jul 2008 Update: No bugs (except the one I found myself) or feature requests were reported for the BETA, so I'm declaring this slightly updated version the official 1.0. The download link should work directly. Many thanks to Joe Carl for suggesting googlepages.

JigsawModule 1.0 including demo game.

The demo game was developed in AGS 3.02 SP1. The module itself should be backwards compatible down to 3.0 (which introduced Dynamic Arrays), but you will have to turn on "Left-to-right Precedence" in the game settings because of a bug in 3.0.1 and earlier.

(The author of this module does not condone the excessive use of gratuitous logic puzzles in adventure games. For everybody's sanity, please limit the use of this module to one or two puzzles per game )

Great idea, Vince. I don't think it should necessarily be a constant feature, because it would be a shame to put too many limitations on  unpredictable themes like "game title anagrams" and whatnot. But providing a number of source images as a theme in itself is an excellent idea and adds to the variety of the competition.

What happened to Photoshop Phriday/Biweekly? It's not crossed out in the forum charter, yet there hasn't been one since last summer. I really enjoyed those since it was something fun you could whip up in a couple of hours and didn't require the commitment and time of most other competitions.

I love how PC Zone's reviewer of The Shivah (linked on the Wadjet Eye site) writes: "I won't spoil the plot by saying any more", yet the review features a screenshot of:

Spoiler

Rabbi Zelig holding a gun.

[close]

I myself turned in a review of The Shivah today to the Danish newspaper Politiken, by the way (as a supplement to an article on Manifesto Games where Dave is also quoted). I'll post a link when it's been published.

Try playing around with the contrast/brightness controls to make the darks black and the light grays white. Pretty much any drawing/photo editing program more sophisticated than Paint is able to do this.
If you're using an advanced program like Photoshop you can adjust the contrast curves manually for better control of the result.

Great work SSH! And good idea to add the WithAnything commands. I wouldn't have thought of that myself.