Adventure Creator release thread

[Tao Dude]

That's an interesting approach that Norton is using. I don't think it really works, though. By the nature of what they do, Virus writers need to infect a large number of machines. But an indie developer can realistically have a very small number of users. It feels like Norton is only going to get false positives with this. At the very least, the "false positive to true positive" ratio is going to be pretty high.

True. The only benefit I can see is that it catches potential viruses early before a lot of people have been infected. Presumably, the big developers either let the AV vendors know when a new release is coming out or have their digital signatures are registered somewhere that gets over the hump of the first few adopters having their software quarantined?

Anyway, AC2 doesn't require any kind of administrator privileges, so it shouldn't ask you to elevate. And, barring a zero-day attack, there's not much an app can do to you if you don't let it elevate. (That's the box that comes up and says something like, "Do you want to let this program make changes to your computer." If you ever have ANY doubt about a program, you should always say "No!" when that box comes up.)

Thanks for that, Tlaero. I am pretty good with computers in general, just new to writing games. I started out just after the last ice age writing embedded software in assembler when microprocessors had only 8 bits and a 64k codespace

[tlaero]

I've just released v1.9 of AC2. Included in this release is a new version of the jpgConv utility. It used to be purely a command line tool. I added a simple GUI UI for people who don't tend to use cmd anymore. Run jpgConv, set the quality level, choose whether to overwrite the files, and drag the files you want converted to the window. If you choose to overwrite them, they'll go in the same directory. If you choose not to, it'll create a directory called "Converted" there and put the converted files there. All the cmd line stuff still works the same way it used to, so if you have scripts that call it, they shouldn't be affected by this.

The GUI doesn't convert file resolutions like the cmd line does. I figured most people don't do that, so didn't write the GUI for it. If people really want that functionality, I'll add it. You can still use the cmd line. Same with recursive conversions and choosing separate directories for read and write.

As for AC2, while I was working on Pandora I found some rather egregious bugs. I also had a few small features that I wanted. I figured I should sharpen the axe before starting on the next game. The release notes are below. If anyone has any trouble with any of this, please let me know.

Link is the same as always. http://www.mediafire.com/file/itjgnqlo4170jw4/AC2.zip

Tlaero

v1.9
There were some terrible bugs when you navigated away from a page you hadn't saved and AC2 asked if you wanted to save the page. In many cases, if you said "yes" it overwrote the page you were navigating to. Those should all be fixed now.

AC2 will now do the right thing if you accidentally open game.js (or any of the files in the files folder). It used to inadvertently go into localization mode.

Added Ctrl-Shift-N to send focus to the Current Area Link box. This means less tabbing when creating a bunch of pages with a main area and no says.

Reordered the Area context menu to better reflect what I tend to do with it.

Changed it so that when you create a new area it stays selected.

[tlaero]

Quick recovery of the post that was lost when the lagoon got hacked. I've released AC2 2.0 on the same link as you see above. This version adds the ability to backup and restore your saves to text files, allowing you to move your saves between browsers or machines, and generally keep a backup of them.

It also provides an easy way to make a grid of save games 4, 9, 16, etc that show the picture of the place the game was saved.

Both features will be available in future games from me.

Tlaero

[JFR]

... It also provides an easy way to make a grid of save games 4, 9, 16, etc that show the picture of the place the game was saved.
...

I don't know if Wolf got this idea from you, you got it from him or - more likely - great minds just think alike, but this will be a very welcome addition to the games.

[tlaero]

Actually, the idea came from feedback from people who play my games. A few people usually ask for more saves. I figured if you were going to have more, you'd need a way to tell them apart, so I changed my code to make that possible. That said, Kexter helped me with the CSS for the way I did it. Also, for the often requested "backup your saves" feature, Kexter gave me code from BEW for getting a file into and out of a browser. So I'd call the features, "Player requested, BEW influenced." (-:

Tlaero

[tlaero]

By the way, there was a bug in my code that made the import feature not work on Chrome or Firefox. I just uploaded an updated ac2.zip to the normal location with the bug fix. If anyone is working with this at the moment, you just have to take the updated _helpers.js from the examples.

Tlaero

[Hindemith]

Is there a place to find tutorials about this program? I started creating a game with it, but after the 4 tutorials that come with it, I still don't know how to store the player's name

[tlaero]

I just uploaded AC2 2.1.
There are two major changes.

1) I found another "navigating away from an unsaved page" bug and fixed it. This one happened when you created a new page and navigated away before saving it. When it asked if you wanted to save first, if you said "yes" it saved to the wrong page. I HOPE I've squashed all of these, because the results of the bugs are terrible (you can lose content you wrote on a page).

2) I added functionality I'm going to use for my episodic content. I was thinking through the scenario where a EP1 of a game was out and had been translated to French (etc). Then I release EP2 in english and a French player plays it before the French translation is done and released. I thought through a number of solutions involving switching languages if a page was missing, etc. But I settled on the simplest and most straightforward solution. (Simple solutions are almost always the best.) AC2 now has an option File->Sync Locales. When you select it, it goes through every foreign language and, if there's a page missing the translated text, it copies in the English text. That way, if the player gets to the untranslated section it'll just show English text rather than crash or fail, etc. No way for that to go wrong. I suspect I'm the only one who will use this feature, but I'm one of the only people who use AC2 anyway... (-:

Tlaero

[moskys]

I just uploaded AC2 2.1.


2) I added functionality I'm going to use for my episodic content. I was thinking through the scenario where a EP1 of a game was out and had been translated to French (etc). Then I release EP2 in english and a French player plays it before the French translation is done and released. I thought through a number of solutions involving switching languages if a page was missing, etc. But I settled on the simplest and most straightforward solution. (Simple solutions are almost always the best.) AC2 now has an option File->Sync Locales. When you select it, it goes through every foreign language and, if there's a page missing the translated text, it copies in the English text. That way, if the player gets to the untranslated section it'll just show English text rather than crash or fail, etc. No way for that to go wrong. I suspect I'm the only one who will use this feature, but I'm one of the only people who use AC2 anyway... (-:

Tlaero

That's how BEW works, if I'm not wrong. When a player playing in other language reaches a non-translated string, the UI just shows the English text until locale file is updated. I don't really know how it works under the hood but it seems very similar to this new feature. Nice to see you keep improving your AC and thinking in non-English speaking players (I don't know how many of them are out there, but it's cool)