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I have no idea what's going on too, but are the possible outcomes mostly a text, except in some specific cases? Because then, maybe you could use a custom property to store this text, and then handle the exception cases where something else is required using if/else. Essentially, you would check the text of the custom property you assigned through the editor and run it through your own function, and then be doing the same if/else, but just when the text is not sufficient.

One thing to test for custom text properties is generating a translation file - I think they are there, but I don't remember since which AGS version.

I don't really understand what you are trying to accomplish here. You want the movement to be tiled too? If that's the case you can just "round" the x,y destination points to be in the middle of your tiles and I think it would accomplish what you want.

Do you have a game that you are trying to emulate the movement that you could share a video?

I suggest using names like ach_mus and aMusic for audio channel and the audio clip respectively to improve readability a bit.

Pretty cool! Congratulations!

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I am pretty bad at this, I can't figure what's wrong with Baxter's story.

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CW, do you think mentioning in that article that rep exec and other calls from script also happens top to bottom from the script list?

Edit: also, I never could understand how the KeyboardControl module should work (it comes with some templates I believe), I have a script module called Controlz, I use it instead.

AGS doesn't provide keyboard controls, so you can do this yourself in your own script, by just updating the position later.

Are you using a script for this? Can you share the script code?

If you want to do this with the pathfinder that is part of the Walk functions, the best way is to use a dummy character and move the character you want to move later based on this dummy character position.

I wonder whether we should earnestly try to devise our own puzzle game as a community and see if we can't sell it to a newspaper for millions of dollars.

I feel like crosswords and other puzzles normally associated with newspapers, there's a certain feeling of getting some utility from it as you learn something.

I have an idea of an updated version of Encarta Mindmaze, where the rooms you get access has some date restrictions and we use the British Museum collection archive as the place to mine the questions. Unfortunately this is much more trouble than Wordle in implementation wise.

The article is really interesting, thanks for sharing it!

I observed the "find the next X" pursuit is seldomly successful. There's a lot of factors that makes certain things work.

I think the greatest strength in wordle was the sharing functionality, the single word a day that is the same for everyone and the fact it came out during the pandemic and people wanted ways to connect with others - you could share your game to someone or a group and this would lead to social interactions.

Congratulations on the release!

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also, you should add the trailer from YouTube here on the top post!

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That's a cool gift! How big is it? Like a real cup/mug?

Sorry, I missed the reply! It's the size of the a really small computer mouse that one!


Here is a small one (it's on top of a Galaxy Buds charging box for size comparison)

This was a great month for MAGS, nicely won @ddavey1983 ! Curious for the next theme 

Happy holidays everyone, hope you all are well during this time!! 🎄

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Harvest Moon meets Dragon Quest vs Rock'nRoll Racing?

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So, Dave was really kind to make the game available for me and I (and CW) have been playing with it.

This message is more to start writing a bit on the Engine side to try to figure how to document the things I have been trying so far.

I did find a way to reproduce a different OoM error (different EIP) locally by having the spritecache been set to 2GB limit. Because AGS is a 32-bit application in Windows, the memory is limited is 2GB total for the application, so it will eventually try to allocate a new sprite and crash. One recent idea that I had, is to see if there's some way to know the memory limits we have (Maybe this?) and dynamically lower the memory available in spritecache, but this may be to exagerate and also too Windows specific. And the possibility of simply making AGS 64-bit in Windows, is indeed a thing that would fix.

Now, I tested a bunch of tools in this meantime trying to find memory problems in AGS leakwise, and so far there is no problem that I could find that happens at runtime. I did found out a bunch of things AGS doesn't clean up after it has quit, but this is not necessarily a problem - at least when running in a plataform that has an OS. The bellow is from Memory Validator (I got an evaluation license).

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Now, I used MS VMMap to try to make sense of the memory. In this case, I set the spritecache to 512MB, which looks like enough to run the game smoothly - we have 138 MB of locked sprites, so this gives us some room to work with, but also keeps consumption low.



Now, you can see that the task manager shows the process is using 793.1 MB, but VMMap shows a different memory story.



Here you can see that the Total Working Set in the Heap memory in VMMap is closer to the memory shown in the Task Manager, but there is some additional memory going on.



By keeping the spritecache at 512MB, I managed to play the game with at most around of 1.2GB in total memory consumption. I couldn't play it for a really long time with it, because it, ironic, VMMap itself uses RAM instead of writing the logs on disk, so at some point VMMap will complain of lack of memory, but after closing it I can switch between rooms in the game for seemingly forever time.

Any additional ideas reggarding memory or tools ideas are welcome. So far I tested Intel Inspector, AMD uProf and Very Sleepy, beyond Memory Validator, VMMap and also the default debugger in VS.

@Kitty Trouble , I played with ChatGPT knows AGS Script but it often mixes syntaxes from JS or C, so you need to clean up, and also it likes to use the deprecated non object oriented API from AGS. I played around with it, and it takes some time putting the context in. It generated often terrible code, but it's good at explaining how a piece of code works. It also knows my AGS Script modules and other open source stuff I had, so I did manage to get it to explain me code I didn't sent.

If the result it's outputting is too long, it often dies in the middle, and I didn't had much luck getting it to continue from where it's stopped.

Erh, on the AI topic I recently tried ChatGPT. I didn't expect much but it's a pretty interesting language model, it can do lots of different sorts of language transformations, you can make it tell you back a story you tell it but with specific writing characteristics, like language, manner, form (letter, poem, ...).

It also keeps context in the "conversation".

I asked it about Adventure Game Studio and later AGS Script. Then I asked it to write code for specific things. Now, it doesn't know AGS Script very well, and often mixes it with either JS or C, but overall cleaning up it's produced code can give some interesting results. I tried a bunch of things and one that it did get it mostly right was a code to make confetti on screen.

It was an interesting experiment.

The art is beautiful! I loved the interior of the train with the alternating colors in the seats! Great work!

Scaling for Characters can be done mainly in two ways, by using manual scaling or by using a walkable area which has a specific scaling set (or a range).

Manual Scaling means using the cBird.Scaling directly after setting cBird.ManualScaling. This would mean you have to handle the scaling.

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Character.html#characterscaling

Depending on how the room actually is, graphically and where the bird passes, it may be possible to use the walkable area alternative.

A third option is to use the Tween module and then Tween the character scaling at the same time.

@Snarky , fun stuff, I went to look and the SDL release assets don't come from their (SDL project) CI system, so I have no idea how it's actually build and I can't seem to match it exactly when building locally! I asked them about it, I will update you once I have an idea.

I managed to reproduce the above (thanks @vga256 !), I opened an issue here:

https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/1847