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Thanks for the great response! If you have any problems using it, please let me know here! 

Ah, an additional inspiration for this month, a ghost has an interesting meaning in character design.

The ghost is important because it relates to the protagonist's character arc, and therefore, the theme.

Most protagonists start with a flaw, weakness, or misbelief that they must overcome by the end of the story.

The ghost is the event (or events) where that flaw, weakness, or misbelief took hold in the first place.

more on here...

Anyone else trying something this month?

Ah, it's also GitHub Game Off, not sure I will be able to fit it's theme too, but they have a curious top image

Just chiming in that for me the posts are working normally when I am on VPN.

Oh, I really like the last scene and that little bird! Curious on the music for these scenes!

I have a RTX 2070 and it's still good for a lot of games today. I almost few the AAA studios are holding back a bit.

If you are buying a new NVidia card (you mentioned rendering so I guess you want CUDA), my guess is figuring out what you can find at a reasonable price near you and just getting it. If you play or plan to play a particularly demanding game it may be useful to check how well it works.

Thanks @lorenzo ! 

I wonder if they would work at higher resolutions.

Probably not on the whole screen, but it may be useful for smaller things. If you do try something bigger, I would suggest experimenting with bigger sizes of TileWidth and TileHeight, and see if doesn't screw the effects too much. Usually you need a bigger width than you need a bigger height.

I got the start of something but I haven't made a very useful game loop yet. Not sure I will be able to finish... If someone wants to help me test, send me a dm!

First, the scm is the way to import in a new project. Second, I have not tested it with the new compiler, maybe it doesn't need the individual get_ and set_ additional import qualifiers. Open the header and comment the two lines with get_ and set_ below each attribute definition, does doing so works?

I have only tested this and all my modules in 3.6.0.X, my guess is things are different in AGS4 and will possibly break there - same for all my modules.

Thanks @Mehrdad and @newwaveburritos ! This one is more useful for low resolution games - or if you just want to effect a smaller area, say a TV screen in BG, a part that is underwater, or random abstract stuff.

I have some stuff I had sketched in the past and abandoned before releasing, and plan to revisit and see what I can finish. 

[DistFX]

DistFX version 0.2.0

Get Latest Release distfx.scm | GitHub Repo | Project with Demo!

AGS Script Module for Distortion Effects, based on Earthbound Battle Backgrounds.



Play with the demo!

Usage

In a room script, link before fade in and repeatedly execute, and try the example below.

Code: ags

DistFX fx; // somewhere with the same lifetime as the surface owner while distorted
Overlay* ovr;
DynamicSprite* spr;

function room_RepExec()
{
  fx.Update(Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground(), spr.GetDrawingSurface(), 2 /* effect */);
  ovr.Graphic = spr.Graphic;
}

function room_Load()
{
  if(ovr == null) {
    spr = DynamicSprite.CreateFromBackground();
    ovr = Overlay.CreateGraphical(0, 0, spr.Graphic, true);
  }
}

Original Earthbound effects used a per pixel approach, but due to how AGS Script drawing performs and works, this module uses a tile based approach.

Script API

DistFX.Update

Code: ags

void DistFX.Update(DrawingSurface* source, DrawingSurface* dest, int effect);

Draws from a source surface to a destination surface using a distortion effect, from the effect bank. Currently, the available effects range is 1-135. Effect 0 appears as no effect but still goes through all the effect pipeline - and will use CPU resources the same.

DistFX.Reset

Code: ags

void DistFX.Reset();

Reset internal state, use on state change.

DistFX.DrawingTransparency

Code: ags

attribute int DistFX.DrawingTransparency;

Drawing Transparency, use for blurring the effects. Default is 0, range from 0 to 99.

DistFX.TileWidth

Code: ags

attribute int DistFX.TileWidth;

Distortion Tile Width, factor of source width, bigger is less resource intensive. Default is 64 pixels.

DistFX.TileHeight

Code: ags

attribute int DistFX.TileHeight;

Distortion Tile Height, factor of source height, bigger is less resource intensive. Default is 1 pixel.

License

This code is licensed with MIT LICENSE.

@OneDollar were you able to figure how to reproduce the grayed GUI thing you mentioned?

Edit: turns out I managed to reproduce it, opened an issue, thanks for reporting.

One thing I've spotted - if I run a game in fullscreen using the Direct3D 9 driver and switch applications (either by alt+tabbing or by clicking on my second monitor) the game goes not responding and has to be forcibly closed through task manager. This doesn't happen with OpenGL or the SDL 2D Software renderer. It's also fine in windowed mode or when I use the 'Fullscreen as borderless window' option, so it seems specific to how Direct3D 9 is doing dedicated fullscreen. AGS 3.5.1 also doesn't do this, so I guess it's something to do with the move to SDL2?

Hey, @OneDollar , this bug has been encountered and solved (?) a bunch of times, I thought it was gone, can you reliably trigger it in this version too? Also, if you hit it Fullscreen, Windows+Tab (Win10/11), create a new workspace, go there, and use the task manager in the new workspace to kill AGS. Edit: nevermind, I managed to reproduce, if I alt+tab a bunch of times, it eventually enters in a hanging state here too.

The story of the first game could have some meta elements, like the main character could be a person that wants to be a game developer with a released game, and they struggle with scope, design, ...

Congratulations on successfully getting funded!! 

Hey, I started the iOS port here in this branch. It's not finished yet, I noticed there are some caveats to build for iOS without a developer account and without at least one iOS device registered in your account.

If you are an iOS developer and have an iOS device, let me know, your input would be important.

It looks like the iOS port was in recent years focused on porting your own games to iOS, probably with intent of making them available in the app store, so I am approaching the port from that angle.

Happy birthday Cat! 😺

I just watched the first season of The Wire. It's very good, I really enjoyed it, and now I am trying to think of a tiny game where you are like Pryzbylewski, doing some mechanical office activity to record audio conversations and occasionally having to mark what is relevant and what isn't to piece together a case without going outside.

I noticed in the previous posts on the signing topic it mentions the altool, but it's been deprecated in favour of the notarytool - more info in here. I may have an additional update to the macOS instructions to include a minimal guide on signing and notarization for app releases.

I suppose this is what Nick Sonneveld started to write in one of his experimental branches few years ago.

Uhm, not sure, you mean this branch I think: https://github.com/sonneveld/ags/commits/ags--script

Are you speaking of a virtual inheritance?

Yeahp, that was my thought!

I think the new compiler is a good step in the right direction, and perhaps in ags4 realm there's something that could improve breaking bytecode compatibility, but unfortunately I don't understand that well enough to be able to participate in such discussion. Maybe in the future.

I was looking at this: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/Engine/script/runtimescriptvalue.cpp

I had an idea for refactor here, instead of the type being a thing, having different versions of this class from the same interface that each implemented their own behavior instead of all those IFs per type. I don't know if this helps yet, but was looking at it and in theory this would reduce the branches.