Adventure Creator original thread

[Pok23]

@Wolfschadowe Loving watching your progress, really looking forward to the checkpoints where the parts of the game are released (also looking forward to playtesting but that's neither here nor there )

Anyway, perhaps (just for playtesting purposes) implement something like Ariane did in Date Ariane? Where each ending results in a string (e.g. 0xd4) and the user can input that string into a textbox that then pre-populates all the necessary variables from that route?

Where I can see this falling apart is if you're conditions for one path vs another is meeting a threshold (i.e. Happy = 14-17)

[tlaero]

If there's only one or two places for the restore to send you, then you can avoid needing to encode the htm file. I don't suppose all of your variables are in the range 0-9 are they?

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

Anyway, perhaps (just for playtesting purposes) implement something like Ariane did in Date Ariane? Where each ending results in a string (e.g. 0xd4) and the user can input that string into a textbox that then pre-populates all the necessary variables from that route?

Hi Pok, thanks for your interest! You're in the next group of Playtesters btw.
What you are describing is exactly what I'm looking for, but hopefully something simpler for the player than just ramming everything together into a long string. BEW will have about 250 variables, if we count achievement related stuff. That's OK for a copy/paste, but not viable for pen/paper.

If there's only one or two places for the restore to send you, then you can avoid needing to encode the htm file. I don't suppose all of your variables are in the range 0-9 are they?

Don't really need to store a location at all. Currently I'm thinking more of an endgame string.

All the Achievement and their related subAchievements are effectively binary, either 0 or 1, earned or not earned. That accounts for about 150 of the total variables. That's not 150 acievements, but includes variables that track achievement progress. For example, there is an achievement for causing every love interest to have an orgasm. That's impossible during a single playthrough, so each of the 5 love interest is tracked in their own subAchievement variable. Once each of the 5 love interests has a sixth variable is triggered for the actual achievement.

All the game variables are effectively integers that can range from 0-999.

It is not necessary to export achievements and game variables together. In fact, that may be counterproductive anyway, since only the latest achievements export would be useful.

If there is some easy encoding/compression scheme for one or both sets of variables, then the preference is to just take all of them as-is at the end of the act and present them to the player.
If necessary, for the game variables I can probably prep and consolidate them down to one per scene, and three per love interest, so that's about 35 total for Act 1, give or take. There are 22 total scenes in Act 1, but not all carry variables (ie. the intro, the short home scene between the office and bar/club, the post club home/recap scene etc..)

Achievments are already processed every game start where they are revoked, and rechecked against the sub-achievement requirements. I coded this function to allow for adding new requirements for achievements during playtesting so that some of the mastery achievements could be earned based on existing content. So some consolidation there is possible as well.

I hope at least some of that makes sense.

Wolfschadowe

[tlaero]

All the game variables are effectively integers that can range from 0-999.

Would it be possible to limit them to the range 0-51? If you did that, it would be easy for us to encode one character per variable. That's still a 250 character string, but better than a 750 one. Bit packing the achievements is easy too.

Still, I think you've got too much state to effectively make a string for your users to cut and paste. Is there anything you can do to reduce it? From one game to the next do you really need every detail about the previous game? Realistically, couldn't you have a variable saying which NPC you're making progress with and how well the player did? Even Mass Effect didn't carry over all that much state from one game to the next.

And, if you're going to have 3 games, make 3 separate sets of achievements that don't carry over. It's really rare for you to need to have played game N-1 to get an achievement in N. I know you're thinking of this as one game told in 3 acts, but you really should think of them as standalone sequels.

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

I think the discussion of how BEW should handle the achievements and variables between games is getting off topic for this thread, so I will continue that discussion over at the BEW thread here: http://www.the-new-lagoon.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2920&start=236
For this topic, I think the two questions are:

1. How could I go about bit packing the binary acheivements and sub-acheivemetns to transfer some or all of them?

2. How could I encode and transfer the integer game variables? One thought I had was converting them to hex values and then stringing them together. That gives a fixed width of two characters per variable and a variable value of 0-254 or so, which is doable. Some variables can certainly have a value below 51 as well, so that method may work too.

I have no idea how to do either of those, but once I have the technique, I can probably figure out how to minimize the length of each output to something reasonable.

Wolfschadowe

[tlaero]

I've used Bit packing in every game since Keeley3. Keeley3 is the most extensive. Take a look at that game and see if it makes sense. If not, I'll explain it.

Tlaero

[tlaero]

Hey Wolf, I wrote two functions for you. These pack and unpack your achievements, so long as you have 31 or less of them. The code would be a bit more complex if you needed to do more than 31 achievements, and your users would need to enter more numbers. I advise against that.

Code: Select all

// only works for the first 31 achievements
function BitPackAchieves()
{
    if (typeof (gameAchieves) == "undefined")
    {
        return 0;
    }

    var maxNum = 31;
   
    var max = gameAchieves.length;
    if (max > maxNum)
    {
        max = maxNum;
    }

    var pack = 0;
    var mask = 1;
    for (var index = 0; index < max; index++)
    {
        var achieve = readAchieve(gameAchieves[index]);
        if (achieve != 0)
        {
            pack |= mask;
        }

        mask <<= 1;
    }

    return pack;
}


function BitUnpackAchieves(pack)
{
    if (typeof (gameAchieves) == "undefined")
    {
        return 0;
    }

    var maxNum = 31;

    var max = gameAchieves.length;
    if (max > maxNum)
    {
        max = maxNum;
    }

    var mask = 1;
    for (var index = 0; index < max; index++)
    {
        var achieve = pack & mask;
        if (achieve != 0)
        {
            achieve = 1;
        }

        setAchieve(gameAchieves[index], achieve);

        mask <<= 1;
    }
}


To get the pack, you just do:
var pack = BitPackAchieves();

And to set them from a pack you do:
BitUnpackAchieves(pack);

Tlaero

[tlaero]

Then again, I'll bet you've got more than 31 achievements, don't you? This covers that:

Code: Select all

// if group == 0, will pack achieves 0-30.  If group == 1, will pack achives 31-63 etc.
function BitPackAchieves(group)
{
    if (typeof (gameAchieves) == "undefined")
    {
        return 0;
    }

    var maxNum = 31;

    var groupOffset = group * maxNum;

    var max = gameAchieves.length - groupOffset;
    if (max > maxNum)
    {
        max = maxNum;
    }

    var pack = 0;
    var mask = 1;
    for (var index = 0; index < max; index++)
    {
        var achieve = readAchieve(gameAchieves[index + groupOffset]);
        if (achieve != 0)
        {
            pack |= mask;
        }

        mask <<= 1;
    }

    return pack;
}


function BitUnpackAchieves(pack, group)
{
    if (typeof (gameAchieves) == "undefined")
    {
        return 0;
    }

    var maxNum = 31;

    var groupOffset = group * maxNum;

    var max = gameAchieves.length - groupOffset;
    if (max > maxNum)
    {
        max = maxNum;
    }

    var mask = 1;
    for (var index = 0; index < max; index++)
    {
        var achieve = pack & mask;
        if (achieve != 0)
        {
            achieve = 1;
        }

        setAchieve(gameAchieves[index + groupOffset], achieve);

        mask <<= 1;
    }
}


If you have > 31 achieves but less than 62 you do this:

var pack0 = BitPackAchieves(0);
var pack1 = BitPackAchieves(1);

and this:

BitUnpackAchieves(pack0, 0);
BitUnpackAchieves(pack1, 1);

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

Wow! Thanks Tlaero. I'll take this out for a spin over the next week or so. It looks like it will take me a little while to wrap my head around it, but I get the gist of what it is doing.

I really appreciate all your support and effort!

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Yet another feature request for AC.

Just a nice-to-have for your next release list.

In the Game View, with the new filtering functionality, it would be nice to select an option or type a code that will filter for pages with broken links.

Thanks for your continued support of the tool!

Wolfschadowe

[tlaero]

That's a good idea. I'll look into it the next time I'm in the code.

Tlaero

[SlLePER]

Hi,
I've recently decided to give it a try, started creating a game and AC looked ideal for my purposes but I'm having rather serious trouble with it, as it's impossible to resize the window, which can be quite a nuisance (it goes beyond the borders of the screen, both vertically and horizontally).
This doesn't occur on win7 32-bit, only on 64-bit (both 7 and 8).

Is there some way around it?

[Wolfschadowe]

Hi SILePER,

I use Windows 8 (x64) and don't have the problem.

I have occasionally seen the problem that you describe, but in my personal experience it was my own fault.

I don't know if what I did is related to what you are seeing, but I had messed up the style sheets for image size and when I opened one of the game files AC ballooned to a huge size to support the image. It may have just been a coincidence for me, but changing my style sheets to use smaller pictures fixed the problem. That may be one thing to check.

Also, you may need to ensure your resolution is at least than 1280*1024. I'm not sure it will fit vertically on a 1024x768 screen.

Finally, it is possible to make the window bigger, even though it has a minimum size. I've had it go huge a couple times. Have you tried resizing the window by dragging the bottom right corner to make it smaller? If the corners aren't on screen, you can use the following series of keystrokes: ALT+SPACE, M, ARROW KEYS to move the window around the screen until the corner is accessible by the mouse, then dragging the window to a smaller size. I had this happen once or twice, but I don't know why. I fixed it by manually re-sizing with this method. It's happened to me maybe twice in the last year.

(ALT+SPACE opens the window drop-down menu that is accessible on any windows program by clicking the small icon at the top left corner of the windows. Surprising how many people don't know it's there. . M selects the move command which also picks up the application bar and locks it to the cursor. This works on any window that may have opened off-screen for some reason.)

I hope one of these suggestions helps you out!

Wolfschadowe

[Super]

Good luck SILePER on your efforts

As for me, I'm waiting for sy to finish the images/ some of the people who promised to beta to respond. I do have an idea of what to do for the next game, but I don't want to start on it in case there are any problems with the first game that I should take into consideration for future projects/ get even further ahead of sy when he's already got a bunch of images to finish up. Anyway, that's my status, just wanted to post something else beyond wishing a newcomer luck on his endeavor.

[SlLePER]

to Wolfschadowe:
Thanks for the response and for trying to help, but it happens with any new instance of the program and one of the problems is, that any attempt to resize the window results to something similar, which corrects itself after a few seconds, but still(this also happens every time I bring out the window from the minimized state)

to Superawesomemans:
thank you, and good luck with your projects too