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Throwback Tuesday: I recently lost my mp3 player, so I've been copying my music collection onto my phone from various external hard-drives. (While forced to give up on having a separate device, I'm not ready to go streaming yet.)

That's thrown up a bunch of ancient mp3 files I downloaded in college, from Napster and its successors. Which in turn got me thinking about the tapes I recorded off the radio in the nineties. It's all available online now, of course...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8sf9dNQWQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3sMjm9Eloo

That's it, Buckethead.

Nay.

Well that's embarrassing. I could have sworn I looked it up to verify the Swedish spelling, but I guess I was misled by pronunciation. I withdraw my objection, then.

Antichrist?

No.

The title really rubs me the wrong wayâ,,¢ with its half-Swedish, half-English spelling.

Keeping it summery…

Midsommar?

Playing the Dune board game reawakened my obsession with everything Arrakis. Back in 1992, Cryo did a great adventure (slash-strategy) game with an excellent soundtrack, and I've been listening to some "live" covers of that. This one is pretty cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7UhANJlofg

This one is almost really cool, but he fucks up the percussion/timing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqa3Ed9hHq8

Sniping is almost a requirement on eBay auctions. I've used a site that used to be called Goofbay, now Goofbid, to auto-snipe, and have not had my password stolen AFAIK.

What grinds my gears is sites that pretend to comply with GDPR rules to give you a way to decline tracking cookies, but actually use "dark patterns" to make it almost impossible to do so, for example by requiring you to deselect hundreds of trackers individually. Perpetrators include Vox and Oath (tumblr, etc.). This is illegal by EU law: the choice to decline tracking must not be substantially more cumbersome than the choice to accept it. I hope they get sued, or even better, that people stop going to their sites.

It particularly annoys me because at my work we spent considerable resources making a good-faith effort to comply with the new rules, as I'm sure most businesses have, while these huge Internet companies try to scam their way out of it.

I love Madrugada to bits (their reunion tour absolutely slayed, never thought I would have the chance to hear those songs live), but I always found Hoyem's solo albums to be kind of ehhhhh whatever. This is a very nice track though! Makes me want to check out the album to see if there's anything else I might have missed

I've been a big fan of Madrugada almost since the startâ€"I remember eagerly awaiting the New Depression EPâ€"but I missed them at the Quart Festival back in 2000, and so never saw them live until the reunion this January.

Spoiler

Unfortunately it was a slight letdown for me: I'd have liked them to play more songs from throughout their career rather than doing all of Industrial Silence to the near-exclusion of anything else, and I was almost a bit put off by the scale of the whole production.



Still, it was definitely a great show, and Høyem's vocals and frontman energy are amazing.

[close]

Anyway, I completely agree about Høyem's solo stuff. It just doesn't rock the way the band did. I've listened to his albums a few times, and only a couple of tracks (this one primarily) have stuck with me.

BTW, thanks for the Lana del Rey pick. I've never really cared for her music, but that was quite an earworm.

What I'm literally listening to right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H5kjOanGxs

[AGS vs Hate Speech, and how you can help.]

(This policy is being posted here for now because it's most relevant to General Discussions, but applies across the AGS Forums.)

"AGS vs Hate Speech, and how you can help."

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Highlighting it actually brings out a bit of detail. Oh! There's a dude standing right in the middle of the picture!

The Descent?

man n fist, PJ = Polly Jean.

I saw PJ Harvey live in 2001 at the Reading Festival . I was only aware of one song of hers at the time but after seeing her at Reading, I got quite into her. I haven't really followed her in recent years, though. I will rectify that.

If you missed White Chalk, I'd say that's the only one of her albums since 2001 that's a required listen. After that, I'd pick her second John Parish collaboration, A Woman a Man Walked By, and the compilation The Peel Sessions 1991â€"2004 unless you already have most of the tracks. Let England Shake was well received (it won the Mercury Music Prize), but I've never cared for that or for Uh Huh Her. The Hope Six Demolition Project has a couple of good tracks, but in general I think her current overtly political phase has been pretty weak both musically and lyrically.

Justified bragging, in that case. I'm jealous.
When she was on her White Chalk tour I took a trip to NYC specifically to see her in concert at the Beacon Theatre (and also to see the Blade Runner Final Cut in the cinema). She was great, and played songs from throughout her career. (I think she did "Working for the Man" from TBYML.)

Didn't get a good night's sleep, need something to get me going today. I need some... voodoo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7R5UtMjIhQ

I haven't seen Downsizing, but Danvzare's complaints reminds me of what really rubbed me the wrong way about Stranger Than Fiction. It takes a high-concept premise, and then never follows through on it. It doesn't ask the obvious questions about the potential of the fantastic thing it has introduced, just uses it as a the backdrop for a run-of-the-mill love story.

That's what makes Charlie Kaufman's scripts so great: he'll start from some wacky idea, but then he'll push them further, really work them out to their ultimate implications. There's a tunnel that puts your mind into John Malkovich's body? Well, what happens if John Malkovich goes through the tunnel? We're in a movie written by one of the characters in the movie? Well, what happens if his hack brother takes over the writing? A lot of other writers who try to work in that surreal vein don't seem to have either the imagination or the courage to actually follow through on their setup.

Glad you got it working!

[fnt]

Does the GUI have an actual label control in it, or you're just referring to the whole thing as a label?

No, it should be empty. The text is drawn onto the GUI background image.

Also changed #define FLOATING_TEXT_FONT eFontfntSpeech from line 5 to eFontSpeech - this way it compiles. Correct usage? Otherwise it won't compile.

Yes, you have to use whatever font name you have set up in the game, of course.

GetLocationName(mouse.x, mouse.y) gets a location's (Hotspot, Object, etc.) 'Description' (in the editor, in Properties window, under Appearance)?

Correct. One of AGS's little naming inconsistencies.

The reason it's not showing up is that you've put these lines…

Code: ags

String textContent;
DynamicSprite* sprtFloatingText;

… inside of the SetFloatingText() function. They need to be outside of it, so that the variables persist between function calls. That's why I put them outside.

I think that's also why it shows a copy of the SpeechBubble text: right after the SetFloatingText() DynamicSprite gets destroyed, SpeechBubble creates another one, so that gets the same sprite index, which the GUI background has been set to.

Oh, and also, you shouldn't mess with the positioning code. It's set to be centered and top-aligned within the GUI (with margins just wide enough to fit the outline): You're then shifting it half a screen right, which means it'll show up centered around the right edge of the screen. If you want to move the text, you should either choose a different alignment, or simply reposition/resize the GUI it appears on (e.g. moving it 15 pixels down). If the text may sometimes wrap over multiple lines and you want them bottom-aligned, that would require additional logic.

OK, here you go:

Keep drawStringWrapped() as it is. Just add this line to SpeechBubble.ash so you can call it from outside the module:

Code: ags

import void drawStringWrappedOutline(this DrawingSurface*, int x, int y, int width, TextOutlineStyle outlineStyle, FontType font,  Alignment alignment, String message, int transparency, int outlineColor, int outlineWidth);

Create a GUI that will display the mouseover text. It should be empty, without anything on it. Set the size and position to fit any text it will display. Make the background and border transparent, and make sure it's not clickable. I've named mine gFloatingText, but you can use any name.

Add this code to the script of the module that handles your UI, or as its own module:

Code: ags

// Replace these values with whatever you want
#define FLOATING_TEXT_GUI gFloatingText
#define FLOATING_TEXT_FONT eFontfntSpeech
#define FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_WIDTH 3
#define FLOATING_TEXT_COLOR 11
#define FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_COLOR 0

String textContent;
DynamicSprite* sprtFloatingText;

void SetFloatingText(String floatingText)
{
  if(textContent == null)
    textContent = "";
  if(floatingText != textContent)
  {
    textContent = floatingText;
    if(sprtFloatingText == null)
      sprtFloatingText = DynamicSprite.Create(FLOATING_TEXT_GUI.Width, FLOATING_TEXT_GUI.Height, true);
    DrawingSurface* dsFloatingText = sprtFloatingText.GetDrawingSurface();
    dsFloatingText.Clear(COLOR_TRANSPARENT);
    if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(textContent))
    {
      dsFloatingText.DrawingColor = FLOATING_TEXT_COLOR;
      dsFloatingText.drawStringWrappedOutline(FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_WIDTH,
                                              FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_WIDTH,
                                              FLOATING_TEXT_GUI.Width - 2*FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_WIDTH,
                                              eTextOutlineRounded,
                                              FLOATING_TEXT_FONT,
                                              eAlignCentre,
                                              textContent,
                                              0,
                                              FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_COLOR,
                                              FLOATING_TEXT_OUTLINE_WIDTH);
    }
    dsFloatingText.Release();
    FLOATING_TEXT_GUI.BackgroundGraphic = sprtFloatingText.Graphic;
  }
}

Now whenever you want to set the content of this "label" you just call SetFloatingText(). I'm not sure you can use the @OVERHOTSPOT@ symbol (actually, I'm pretty sure it won't work), but you can use Game.GetLocationName(mouse.x,mouse.y) in repeatedly_execute() â€" see the TwoClickHandler template for an example.

Happened to hear this today, and was reminded of what a beautiful song it is.

St. Vincent's cover of Nico's "These Days":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV4Rz8stPro