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On the subject of impossible crimes (and particularly inspired by "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle, a classic short story about an impossible escape from a locked prison cell), I'm reminded of the real-life stories of the escape attempts from Colditz, the WWII POW camp located in an ancient German castle. Escape ought to have been impossible, but the allied prisoners employed a lot of the methods detective fiction writers rely on to create the illusion of impossible events, and managed to get out again and again (though they were almost always caught before they could reach friendly territory). For example, they had various ways to manipulate the periodic headcount, including an actual dummy, so that the guards wouldn't realize that a prisoner had gone missing.

The classic account is in two books by British Escape Officer P.R. Reid, The Colditz Story and The Latter Days at Colditz (sometimes collected together in one volume); more recently there is Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle by Ben MacIntyre, which fills in some of Reid's blind spots and omissions. There was also an excellent, lightly fictionalized TV show based on Reid's books in the 1970s.

Chesterton isn't the best writer, but he rightly is regarded as being a capable one - which is rare (not impossible) for those delving into detective stories. Some of his detective stories don't feature father Brown (I mentioned the White Pillars one which is freely available online).

Chesterton is a perfectly decent writer, but I'm with @cat (and against Carr, who was a big fan) that his stories are pretty meh. There is rarely anything interesting or memorable about them—admittedly this could in part be because whatever was novel and unique about his stories when he wrote them has been copied so often that the freshness has been lost—and he too often falls into didacticism and proselytizing. He's smug, and I find that a particularly irritating trait in an author.

Hm, is there any story (preferably short, not a novel) that can be reasonably presented as the one with the best use of a locked room plot?

I think the second murder in The Three Coffins/The Hollow Man (a man is shot in the back, up close, in the middle of an empty street with witnesses at either end; the street is covered in snow, and there are no tracks other than the dead man's) has a reasonable claim to being the greatest "locked room" mystery devised, because of its simplicity, apparent impossibility and the elegance of its solution. (The solution to the other murder, and the combination of both, is a bit too baroque and contrived for my tastes.)

Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room is also a strong contender due to overall excellence. And Then There Were None is not always considered a locked-room mystery, but I would argue that it qualifies and is one of the best. I also have a weak spot for The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, which although indifferently written and badly dated, introduced two of the classic locked-room gimmicks. Oh, and Hake Talbot's The Rim of the Pit is tremendously good fun and absolutely preposterous. You'd hate it.

I tend to think locked room shorts are less interesting than novel-length mysteries, as a rule, since the length usually constrains them to pretty trivial tricks. Edward D. Hoch is usually considered the master of the form, but I haven't read a lot of his work. Some would cite Chesterton's "The Invisible Man," but I never found the solution credible. One I personally have fond memories of is the Sherlock Holmes-pastiche "The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle" by Carr and Adrian Doyle, but while neatly done, it's not very original.

There are good lists here (novels), here (novels and short stories) and here (short stories).

Oh, then this book isn't for me after all. I'm not into supernatural stories. Considering this, would reading Rebecca be a good idea? This book I can order easily.

Well, The Burning Court is primarily a murder mystery, but a spooky murder mystery, like The Hound of the Baskervilles or Les Diaboliques (or, for Norwegians, De dødes tjern).

Spoiler

It ultimately offers both a rational and a supernatural solution.

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There is no supernatural element to Rebecca, but it's a gothic psychological suspense novel that appeals to a lot of the same emotions.

It wasn't presented in this thread as a supernatural story, otherwise I'd not have wasted my time with it either.

I did in fact mention "a spooky and terrifying atmosphere, so that some of his mysteries almost cross over into horror" with The Burning Court as the finest achievement of that. There's always been a close link between mysteries and the supernatural, given the common gothic heritage (Poe, Collins, Conan Doyle, ... ), and locked room mysteries/impossible crimes in particular often flirt with the supernatural as a possible explanation. As you were already reading The Three Coffins, this could hardly be news to you.

It's just that Carr is too low value to pull off this type of twist

That's such a vacuous statement. What does "too low value" even mean?

[Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum]

I love mystery stories, and I love stories-with-a-sting-in-the-tail.

This might be a good opportunity to mention that I recently read (well, listened to, in the dulcet voice of the author) Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum.

It's clearly for kids, but even though I'm not in the target audience, I enjoyed it because of the humor, and because the love for the genre comes through so clearly. My favorite gags were the anonymous stakeout vehicle (former ice cream van, painted a discreet gray—including the big gray ice cream cone on the roof) and "St Hilaria's Church of the Unfounded Assumption," while my favorite part of the investigation was the relatively subtle way you hinted at the owner of the hairpin. And I really appreciated that it was a properly constructed mystery story, not the crude simulations often found in children's fiction (where there is no real riddle or any proper investigation, and where plot events are just arbitrary "business" before the solution conveniently falls into the detectives' lap), even if the gimmicks were lifted from various classic stories.

As for literary twists, the final twist/cliffhanger was OK, though to this adult reader it felt a bit low-stakes. But perhaps that was intentional.

From flipping through the book, the illustrations are really fun, too.

So congratulations on the publication! I hope the book and the whole series are a success. There's a Norwegian edition coming out next month, which I take to be a good sign.

[AudioPriority]

Hey. Isn't this for the AudioPriority optional arg?

No. AudioPriority is to decide which sounds play and which are skipped if you run out of AudioChannels when trying to play too many sounds simultaneously.

To change the volume of an AudioClip you play, you need to do something like:

Code: ags

AudioChannel* ac = myClip.Play();
if(ac != null) ac.Volume = 50; // Play at 50% volume

(This assumes that your AudioClip is called myClip.)

Overall, I've never researched how SpeechBubble works, but I imagine that in ideal world it should support running multiple non-blocking bubbles, and optionally running one at a time as blocking.

It was designed to work as much like Character.Say() as possible. From the feedback from actual users, it turns out that it would be useful to further decompose the different parts (sizing, bubble/frame formatting and rendering, text formatting and rendering, layout/positioning, display, repositioning, use with Say/SayBackground) to be able to use it more flexibly. This is a lot more work, though (especially as everything interacts in interesting ways, particularly if you have more than one bubble visible at a time).

When we read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier everyone in my book club expressed quite shocked delight at the twist. Completely recontextualises the story and characters in a wonderful way.

The twist is great, but I also love the ambiguously unhappy ending (of the book, not movie).

I'd recommend, in addition to Rebecca:

I just read Verity by Colleen Hoover, which was recommended in one of those listicles that authors are forced to produce in order to promote their books (you know: "Here's a list of ten of the best psychological thrillers, and BTW, I just happen to have a psychological thriller coming out this month"). It is very much a riff on Rebecca, down to the title, but turns it around by having the new woman be the one to discover the truth about the wife, and deciding whether to hide it from the husband.

I liked that it had the guts to be really nasty (graphic descriptions of violence to a baby, primarily), but the plot was were pretty flimsy, leaving too few possibilities for where the story could go and therefore not generating a lot of suspense. The sex scenes were also rather gratuitous—Hoover is primarily a romance author, and brings some bad habits with her.

Well, I'd certainly advise against paying 100 dollars for this. Or even 1 dollar, for that matter.
Read it all now, btw. The ending somehow managed to be the worst part of this silly book. Laughable farce doesn't begin to describe it.

Well, I suppose it's progress that for once you've actually read the book you "critique."

I probably wouldn't recommend paying $100 for it either, but I do definitely recommend reading it. It is spooky and extremely ingenious. Silly? Sure, but then any book about ghosts and witchcraft is fundamentally silly.

Spoiler

A newly married man comes across a photo of a painting of his wife. Only, it's not his wife, but a notorious poisoner and reputed witch who was beheaded centuries ago. Right afterwards he gets involved in the investigation of a possible murder by poison, aspects of which seem to defy any rational explanation other than witchcraft. As the evidence starts to point towards his wife, he seeks to shield her from suspicion while himself growing all the more frightened of who and what she might really be.

Some of the scenes are as memorably iconic as anything in Dracula or The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the mundane solutions provided for the several locked room mysteries involved are a tour-de-force demonstration of Carr's ability to explain the impossible.

It also has some nice authentic local and period color from Carr's original home turf, the wealthy towns and boroughs along the Philadelphia Main Line (very unusually for him, as he otherwise preferred to set his stories in England or France).

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Hello! Apologies if this was answered in the thread already, but I was wondering if there was a way to make the bubble always appear over the character's head? Specifically, in the following situations:

1 - the character is walking and I want them to talk using the sayBackgroundBubble command. I'd like the bubble to move with the character. Right now, it stays in place where it is drawn.
2 - the character is on a scrolling background and I want to move the "camera" left or right while they are talking. The bubble stays in the same screen position while the rest of the graphics move.

The short answer is no, not at the moment.
I started a major rewrite of the module that would include this, but I got bogged down in a lot of complications, and it's not currently in progress, and nowhere near finished.

Also, is there a way to have TWO bubbles on screen at the same time? My game has a number of background conversations (using background bubbles), and if my player character says anything it stops the background bubbles from playing.

Also no, though @Grundislav has made a version that supports background conversation, so perhaps you can ask hem. But I'm not sure that AGS allows SayBackground calls while Say is running in the first place?

That's very neat, Nahuel, although it makes the tinted characters/objects perceptibly brighter, which might not look so good if they have been designed to blend into the background.

Now can you make it fade?

How to write plugins
FakeScreen plugin by Dualnames (has box blur, other effects can be added)

Where is "Loop" declared? A common mistake is to declare it in a header: because of how headers work in AGS (they are copied into each script below), this actually creates multiple separate copies of the variable (one for each script, including the dialog script), and so changing one of them (e.g. the one in the dialog script) will have no effect on the others (e.g. the one in the room script).

The right way to do it is to either declare it in a script (not a header), export it in that script, and put the import statement in a header, or simply use the Global Variables pane.

There is currently no good way to do this in AGS unless you:

(1) Use a plugin; or
(2) Work in 256 colors (8-bit color depth) — which lets you change colors via palette manipulation

In principle you could grab a screenshot of the whole screen, loop pixel-by-pixel across the whole image, read the RGB value of each pixel, calculate the corresponding grayscale value, and write that to a separate DrawingSurface (and then fade that in over the screen), but in practice this will be too slow, and also GetPixel and DrawPixel only work with 16-bit color and therefore don't give accurate results.

The other workaround would be to supply grayscale versions of every background and sprite in the game, in order to construct a grayscale version of the screen, and again fade that in on top of the real screen. This would be a lot of work and would nearly double the size of the game.

A problem with 256-color games (apart from how they restrict your graphics) is that many modern graphics drivers no longer reliably support 256-color mode, so many players may not be able to run your game.

Really, a plugin is your best option—that would also allow other, arbitrary graphical effects, such as blur. (Strangeland is one AGS game that uses a plugin for graphical effects.)

Over one hundred years of fabulous book covers (or record covers, movie posters...even toy boxes!) show that you don't have to reduce commercial promotional art to the status of the purely functional. Oh, you can, and yes, I'm certain that publishers/manufacturers would indeed be welcoming of purely AI-generated content in this sense.

And I'm sure that there will still be fabulous book covers, record covers, movie posters and other visual designs made. What AI-generated art will mainly replace (in part) is the 90% of book covers (etc.) that are just stock photos mashed together in Photoshop. (Another article in Norwegian.)

And the thing is: a great book cover can be nice in itself, but it doesn't actually affect the quality of the book. Some of my favorite books have absolutely god-awful covers (since the first edition I don't think The Fifth Head of Cerberus has ever been republished with a good cover; this one is particularly hideous), while a book you pick up because of a stylish cover can often be a disappointing read. Someone should come up with a saying about that...

And why deny the guy who designs your milk carton a job, simply because nobody cares what a milk carton looks like as long as it has milk in it?

I agree, that's a shame. I'm not sure it's more of a shame than anyone else losing their job to new technology, but in general I absolutely agree that there is a big danger that AI will eliminate a lot of jobs very quickly, and that people will suffer for it.

But don't you see that as a diminishing of the art, regardless of it's status? Maurice Noble created some astonishing backgrounds for old Warner Bros. cartoons (backgrounds that sometimes whizzed by in the blink of an eye during a Road Runner short), and I'm sure, as he cashed his weekly check, he didn't consider his work would end up as museum pieces. Or what about the beautifully designed backgrounds in Samurai Jack? People care. Granted, not everybody cares, but still. To argue for lesser art, simply because of it's nature, confuses me.

But there is a flipside to that, because lowering the barriers to entry will allow more people to make art. I know you pooh-poohed that before, saying that the thing keeping them back is actually lack of talent, but you've got to consider the people who have a great idea for a computer game but can't make graphics, or the people with a great idea for a cartoon who don't have the time or money to draw everything, etc., etc. Because like I said, a lot of art is just in service of some other/greater work, and merely because someone doesn't have the skill (or the time, or the money, or the friends/connections) to do that particular part, it doesn't mean they don't have artistic talent.

And sure, there will be a lot of crap. Just like AGS, by making it a lot easier to make adventure games, has led to the creation of a lot of terrible adventure games.

Double (triple) logins are allowed? 

No. Or at least not without being open and transparent about it.

Couldn't a lot of what you say about generative AIs also be said about cameras, @LimpingFish? Before photography, it took a lot of training, skill and time to create a painting, whether a person's portrait or a landscape painting. Photography allows "anyone" to create similar images without artistic training, and much faster, just by buying a device and learning a few technical procedures. It's a shortcut to avoid the hard work otherwise required.

Among other things, this led to a large number of amateurs taking a massive number of shitty pictures, and painters losing a major part of their business as fewer people were interested in commissioning portraits, and magazines, advertising posters etc. largely switched from paintings to photos for their illustrations. And it has led to many serious painters incorporating photography into their process.

One thing I think both you and @Babar underestimate is how much of art only serves in a supporting role, as a necessary but not central element of some other work, rather than as an end in itself. For images, we can take book covers as one example: A book needs one, but the cover is not the work being sold. I think lots of authors and publishers would be fine using an AI-generated image for that. Or let's say a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse (or Peppa Pig or whoever is popular with kids these days) standing in front of a local landmark, sold as a souvenir. It doesn't need to be some interesting or "good" work of art, it just needs to feature the right elements and the right look. I'm sure if they can whip up those images automatically, nobody is going to complain that the result is formulaic and insipid: that's rather the point.

The same thing with backdrops or even background characters for TV animation: the goal in many scenes is to provide decent-looking but not attention-grabbing scenery for what happens in the foreground. It's not striving to be the pinnacle of art.

For writing, I don't think we're going to see fully AI-generated movie or TV scripts any time soon (perhaps they might try to use AI to do first-pass adaptations, turning books into movie scripts, but I doubt it will be very successful), but I'm sure we'll get games where generic NPC dialog is AI-generated, or a bunch of the incidental writing (like item descriptions), or where AI is used to create "more natural" variations of scripted repeating scenes. (So that e.g. each time you enter a shop, the shopkeeper's greeting could dynamically reflect events in the game, without having to manually write thousands of variants.)

The problem, of course, is that work like this (and many other examples that could be added) is often a way for artists/writers to make ends meet, or a stepping-stone into the industry. So yes, I think a lot of artistic work can be successfully replaced by AI without necessarily leading to a greatly inferior end-product, and I think it will cost jobs.

just can't find the info I need without getting lost in a muddy swamp like QfG4. Any suggestions on where I start looking?

I was thinking more of general hints like this thread. So, think about how you can break down the problem and work on each part individually, and how you can iterate from a very simple version to a complete system.

For your case, I would start by setting up the GUI with the essential buttons. Then the functions and variables to keep track of the combat. All the rest could be hardcoded for the first version. Now you'd have a placeholder you could plug into the game, to work out for example how to trigger it from a dialog.

Once you have that working, you could start to write the structs that will store the data for each fight, and write the functions to fill the template you've set up with that data.

Also, I now find myself confused... The "Battle Screen" collection of buttons and sprites... Should I build a room to overlay with button templates? Or build a pop up window over the screen? Or try to build a full GUI overlay for the room that only appears for combat? Would one work better than the others?

You will probably want to make it as a GUI with Buttons and perhaps Labels. You can make it full-screen and with a transparent background. To display character portraits, you'd again use Buttons.

[John Dickson Carr, The Burning Court]

John Dickson Carr, The Burning Court
Carr was a master at locked room mysteries/impossible crimes, managing to provide rational explanations of events that at first seem like they must require a supernatural cause. And he was also excellent at creating a spooky and terrifying atmosphere, so that some of his mysteries almost cross over into horror. The Burning Court is probably his finest achievement on that score, and the solution is audacious.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Given its familiarity, it can be easy to forget that Marlow's confrontation with Kurtz is a twist: all along, Kurtz has been presented as an idealist, and contrasted with the corrupt and brutal company men whom Marlow despises.

Charles Palliser, The Quincunx
A labyrinthine dispute over a will tangles up five families and causes the protagonist to endure all kinds of Dickensian hardships and dangers in this brick of a novel, which makes sure to keep its readers in uncertainty, ignorance and confusion as much as the main character. And once everything finally seems to be revealed, two final twists—one in the very last sentence of the book—force us to reconsider the meaning of it all.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
To me, the impressive twist in this book is not the early one that got all the attention, but the ending, because I think it's one of the very few original endings in the mystery/psychological thriller genre in decades. Of course, it's possible that it has been done before in some story I haven't read, and it has some similarities with a book I'm currently reading but have already been spoiled for: Before the Fact by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox), the basis for Hitchcock's Suspicion. A variation of the same was also used in another movie I liked...

Spoiler

Phantom Thread.

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Personally I only find the twist in I See Dead People as being of note.

The movie is actually called The Sixth Sense.

I also don't seem to get notifications on threads I follow any longer.

Edit: Yes, I do not get notification on threads I watch/follow.

What do you actually want to happen?