Hello, I'm kind of new to this board (and to CS) and I'm working on a game. Right now, I'm bug testing, and there are some major problems...

1. The game will not start. It used to start, but some event got messed up, and it unexpectedly quits before getting to the splash screen. I have the 'StartGame' event which is supposed to teleport me to the screen, and start some music.

2. The game starts double. When the game did start, before I did something wrong, I would get through the name, class and race dialogues, and then it would do them over.

3. The fade effect is un-reversable. I have it so that there is an event where you go to a NPC's house for dinner. It is supposed to fade out, and fade back in, with you and the NPC in front of the NPC's house. It fades out, and not back in. I put the 'Stop Event' event after it, but it did not help in the slightest.

4. The Player Character's appearance does not change with class. I have four classes, and all of the characters look the same. How do I fix this?

5. I cannot learn how to place description dialogues. In the beginning of PoG, there are a series of dialogues which describe your quest. I would like to put these in the beginning of my game, but I do not know how.

Thank you for your patience with my incomptetence, and I hope to fix these problems.

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Early one morning, late one night, two dead boys arose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. The deaf man heard the noise and came, and killed the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

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Originally posted by Mr. Somebody:
**1. The game will not start.

2. The game starts double.

3. The fade effect is un-reversable.**

Take a look at Stark's debugging 101 for these three - particularly the "Message Flagging" tip. You'll probably run into similar problems every now and then during development, and Stark's tips are a very good starting place for figuring out where the problems are coming from.

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4. The Player Character's appearance does not change with class. I have four classes, and all of the characters look the same. How do I fix this?

This isn't a bug, it's a feature you haven't implemented yet. You'll need to code an event (probably part of your Main and/or StartGame event) that checks for the player's class and changes his appearance accordingly. (One thing that I would consider a bug is that you can't use the player's class directly in a conditional check - you'll have to store it to a global variable and then check the value of that variable instead.)

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5. I cannot learn how to place description dialogues. In the beginning of PoG, there are a series of dialogues which describe your quest. I would like to put these in the beginning of my game, but I do not know how.

I believe these are done as a sequence of Main-type locations that the player is teleported to one at a time before he is sent to the first map.

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
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1. I don't know how to help other than to say you could check the thread on debugging (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/ubb/postdisplay.cgi?forum=Forum48&topic;=001547")here(/url).

2. Sorry, I've never seen this. :frown:

3. To fully fade in and out you need two fade effects, the first tells it to fade to black and the second fade from black. Or did you do that and are still having problems?

4. Use the Player Map Icon and Player Portrait to set different sprites/portraits based on the character's class. You could either do this at the end of your Main.cet or as an initialization event in your first map.

5. I belive that the begining of PoG is just a series of Main Locations with the entire screen selected as an Event Link to transport you to the next slide. So all you need to do is make your graphics, put them in the Location Pics folder then make Main Locations with the same name as the graphic. Then make Locations of the type Event Link that teleport the player to the next screen.

(edit)Doh! Glenn beat me to it. :)(/edit)

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(This message has been edited by sanko (edited 11-04-2002).)

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Originally posted by sanko:
(B)3. To fully fade in and out you need two fade effects, the first tells it to fade to black and the second fade from black. Or did you do that and are still having problems?
B)

Did that. Is it because I have events between them? (aka moving the char and the NPC)

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Early one morning, late one night, two dead boys arose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. The deaf man heard the noise and came, and killed the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

Mr. Somebody,

You can have events between them. I have like 5 or so in my plugin i am making. Use starks debugging method. maybe remove the fade to black, add in some dialogs, and see if one of those events in between is freezing you up. Maybe you are moving the cahracter off the map (it usually just quits when this happens, but maybe not with NPCs). Hope you can get fixed.

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CI-I@()s

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Originally posted by Mr. Somebody:
Did that. Is it because I have events between them? (aka moving the char and the NPC)

Mr.Somebody,

First make absolutely sure that in your Fade from black event object that you did indeed check the "fade from black" button, and do not have the "fade to black" button checked. I do this constantly, and wish we just could have had 2 events instead of a selection within the one. Either that or default to "fade from black".

Having events in between the fades isn't generally a problem. If you call up an interactive window though(inventory, dialog, etc), I don't recall if you can see those with the fade in effect. You may have to hit "escape" to continue the event chugging along.

Also, you mentioned you put in an "End Event" object into your event. The End Event object will stop the current event in its tracks; not the event object that is being executed. So if you have a "Fade to black" then something else, then an "End Event" and finally a "Fade from black," the entire event will be stopped dead at the End Event and thus the "Fade from black" will never be called. Something to look for as well.

Good luck.

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The game now starts, but it skips the Splash Screen. Also, there is a big journal window on my map now. When I open the map in the editor, it's not there. Thank you for your help so far!

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Early one morning, late one night, two dead boys arose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. The deaf man heard the noise and came, and killed the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.

have you checked you layouts, it sounds as though through some oddity you have selected the journal layout as the map interface

if not that search through your new game, main, and any intial event for the starting map to make sure that you don't have an engine call action that's opening the journal.

also this could be an animation that lanches an event constantly you might want to check that as well.

skips the splashscreen i just blows right by the event without execution and doesn't display the event, assuming the image file is valid, and that your event start game is proper then i couldn't fathom that result...odd never heard of any of these problems before today...

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(list)
(*)(URL=http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html)I shot the sheriff, the deputy, the head of bank treasury. Some mounties in the ounty got a big bounty stressin' me.

Skips the splash screen... the only thing I can think of that would do that is creating a New Game call in you global/local initialisation event for that location, or that your teleport sends you to the wrong place.... make sure that your teleport is definitely taking you to your Startup screen, and then check those events for me....

-Andiyar

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"Any good that I may do here, let me do now, for I may not pass this way again"

Ok, update: I fixed many of the bugs, so thank you!
However, there are still some that bewilder me:

1. The fade effect is un-reversable. I have tried everything you said, and double checked that I clicked on the right bubble. I also put the events between it after it, and I increased the speed of the event. Nothing works.

2. The splash screen is skipped. Yes, it's still happening. It used to work, and I can't really get you details on this yet, but I will.

3. You (the Player Char) can walk through NPCs. Yes, it's sad. You can walk through NPCs. I think this is a layer issue, and I migh have it fixed soon.

My major concern is number one, seeing as how that starts the entire story line, but any help on the others would be appreciated.

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"Look, a distraction!" -Fletcher Dostie

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Originally posted by Mr. Somebody:
1. The fade effect is un-reversable. I have tried everything you said, and double checked that I clicked on the right bubble. I also put the events between it after it, and I increased the speed of the event. Nothing works.

Can you give us the complete list of actions in this event?

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3. You (the Player Char) can walk through NPCs. Yes, it's sad. You can walk through NPCs. I think this is a layer issue, and I migh have it fixed soon.

Check to make sure that your PC and NPC animations all have collision spheres assigned to them in the animation editor.

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I don't know what I'm talking about.
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Y'know i turned off collisions for one of my games and it really didn't seem to matter, for instance start a medieval game, and uncheck the collision sphere for the player, now walk around andd wait til something; spiders or the wyvern attempt to jump you, they'll attack bt cannot get to your collsion point , however try to walk into the NPCs and you'll eventually be struck down(i dare you to walk just inside the wyverns LOS and just stand, you'll see).

beyond that i was unaware that hars could be rendered in any other layer aside from being placed as a stamp, i think that your chracter might be offset from (0,0) .

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• (url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html")I shot the sheriff, the deputy, the head of bank treasury. Some mounties in the ounty got a big bounty stressin' me.(/url)

Um... specifics
The list:

• ((LOTS OF DIALOG))

• Fade to Black

• Fade from Black

• Teleport PlayerChar

• NPC control

• Dialog

• Quest Editor

Char Class Appearance: I added a global variable, now how do I define it?
Char Speed: My player char is way too fast. Where do I fix this?

Once again, thank you and sorry for my incompetence!

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"Look, a distraction!" -Fletcher Dostie

answers to last two questions:
your variable by default has a value of 0
you must use an action of type change global to set its value to something other than
speed use an action of type attribute wizard you should find speed in the drop down menu

curious why would you do your teleportation actions after the lights come up on stage only to expose the little men in black clothes...?? ?żż ż anyhow according to your list that shold all happen without any problem, one thing that would be even better is if you would send a copy of the event itself to someone(your other files shouldn't be necessary to debug it)...but honestyly that event appears to be in order, but if its getting in the wy of testing then disable the fades from the game options apple+i --->misc--->'disable screen fades'

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• (url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/ellrx/index.html")I shot the sheriff, the deputy, the head of bank treasury. Some mounties in the ounty got a big bounty stressin' me.(/url)

Ok, I've fixed that map (the start map) which should be the hardest, as you have to add all the junk about starting in there somewhere. Thank you for your helo with that! However, my last concern is a certain class known as "DS_Store". How do I get rid of that? Sorry if I'm really annoying...

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"Look, a distraction!" -Fletcher Dostie

DS_store i'm not clear on the definition of the name, but it is a resultant resource file that a number of Carbon apps create, if you were to open it up in BBBEDIT you wuld find a series of file names probably .png files, and a wad of charactyers, there definitions....in short, you don't delete it.

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I don't want to delete it, I want to get it off your choice of classes.

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"Look, a distraction!" -Fletcher Dostie

Just a passing note about the pog storyline dialogues at the start; I think pog did it with a picture and a bit of blank paper on the top as the background, and put the text on with stamps. Space-saving gone to extremes.

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Poor little Johnny, of whom we'll see no more, for what he thought was H2O was H2SO4.

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Originally posted by Mr. Somebody:
**I don't want to delete it, I want to get it off your choice of classes.

**

Are you saying that when you start a new game, DS_Store is listed along with Fighter, Ranger, and Thief as a class choice?

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Is if evil? Well then, it is evil and yet I do it. - The Crucible, Arthur Miller.

I have an idea about your fading event. Is there ONLY a teleport event, or do you have a "map position" command in front of the teleport. For instance, it should look like this:

-Fade to Black

-map position
(-75,75)

-Teleport
(Map 1)

-Fade From Black

I'm not sure if not having the map position has anything to do with it, and it probably doesn't, but theres a tip. Try it anyway. Hey, you never know with coldstone, right?

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