If you get an error message, just refresh. Usually, that works.
For one thing, since demo 2, I've gone back and expanded some of the early sections of the game, particularly as it relates to Jennifer and her parents. I decided to take some advice from a review of my game that I read on Brian Provinciano's Ultimate AGI & SCI site and put in some character development in the early parts that previously served only as distractions. Unfortunately, the new sections are pretty graphically rough right now. I want them at least presentable if not polished before the demo.
I also need to go back and make some adjustments to the introduction to lead into the new development. Again, the dialog for this is already written, but there are some rough edges that need smoothing out. For example, one of the changes to the introduction makes it so that you see Jennifer's parents entering her dorm room. Before, the introduction showed them in Jennifer's dorm after they've already made a phone call to make a reservation to the hotel. Trouble is that after the change, the intro was still showing a "Ten minutes later..." screen. Obviously, it doesn't take them 10 minutes to turn around and walk in the door. Those are the kinds of things I'm having to smooth over in the early game before a release will be possible.
You'll meet more characters in the upcoming demo, as well, and I need to ensure that all of their day 1 dialog is implemented. I want to make sure there are a few solvable puzzles that are fully ready, because day 1 is pretty dialog-heavy (more so than the subsequent days), and I don't want that to be all there is in the demo.
I also plan to remove quite a few things from the demo, so that you really can only play day 1. I intend this to be a real demo, not merely a work-in-progress release, and to the extent possible I want it all to be pretty polished. One thing that will unfortunately not be getting the attention it deserves is graphics. While some of the graphics have been improved from the demo 2 release (in some cases substantially improved), there are some graphics that really need to be reworked. They will likely not be reworked in time for the demo 3 release. I'm not saying we're going to be seeing stuff that's just thrown together, only that it is probably going to change even more before the game is done.
As for a release date, I don't know for sure that it will be in November. I said I was aiming for around November 22-23, but I'm not treating that as set in stone. The demo will be released when it's ready, and that may possibly be a few weeks after my initial target. But it is coming, and it will be fairly soon.
I'm pretty pleased with what I've got. I went back and played the second demo a week or two ago, and I was amazed by how much the game has improved in the last few years. I think you'll be pleased.
Well, it would be untrue to say that I haven't worked on the game since March, when I last posted an entry here. But I have been working on it on a fairly low level - in other words, I haven't been making the kind of progress I would like to have made in that time.
Ok, so where am I? All right, day 4 is not yet finishable, not even as a skeleton implementation, though that isn't so bad, really. This is one of the more significant parts of the story, so a bit of extra time to think through it carefully won't hurt a bit. Right now, I'm easing myself back into more serious development efforts by filling in some dialog that's been left blank and revising some of the stuff that's already there.
When I'm first implementing dialog, I tend to get verbose, and then I have to peel things back a bit. That's largely because I want to make sure all the information is there first, then I'll worry about all the pacing and other crap like that.
In any case, I don't want to spend a whole lot of time writing this. I want to get some work done on the game itself, so I'm closing this out. Just thought I'd post something to say that I'm still at it.
Ok, so quick update on the game...no, I have not stopped working on it. I'm in one of those "collect my thoughts" phases again where I'm thinking through a more concrete framework for how I want part I'm working on to play out.
By the way, just so it's clear, I do know exactly what's going to happen at the end of the game. I'm hardly stumbling around blindly here. There are a few details of the ending I haven't thought through yet, because they aren't essential to it, but the major points are known to me and have been for some time.
And, no, I have no plans to leak any information about it. I have intentionally been keeping story details to a minimum for a long time now. That's also why there will be no demo 3. Too much of the game has been implemented now, and I'd have to put in a lot of work to come up with a demo that gave more of a taste of the game than demo 2 without giving too much of the game away.
I also worked a little bit on the website and finally got my demos available for download here. There's also a never-before-released new screenshot, as well as some small tastes of the sort of improvements that have been done to the early parts of the game since demo 2.
Anyway, I don't want to spend a lot of time writing at the moment...I want to get some work done.
I've gotten the skeleton day 3 implementation finished and have started on to day 4. Of course, I can't emphasize enough that this is framework stuff - putting the stuff into the game that I know for a fact needs to be there without fully developing it until later, but nevertheless I'm getting into parts of the game that seemed a long way off not that long ago. As I hoped, that is keeping my interest in working on the game going, because I'm not getting blocked by temporary problems. I've also been adding a few improvements to earlier parts of the game.
It occurred to me today while I was working on the game that it should be fairly easy to create optional voice packs for AGI games with some adjustments to NAGI - I don't really remember why I was thinking about that, but I was. Supporting voice does require interpreter changes, of course, so it can never be done with the original DOS interpreters, but it does not require changing the meaning of any AGI commands. The way most interpreter extensions created to date have worked is that some rarely-used command is replaced with the extended functionality. This is how both the mouse and palette hacks worked.
To do a voice pack, though, all you need is a separate voice resource file and something telling the voice-aware interpreter to look for it. This is a key point because it means that you can actually do voice packs for games that have already been released without modifying the game at all. A game with a voice pack would run fine on a voice-unaware interpreter - it would just be a text-only version of the game. The game itself would never know the difference.
The way it works is fairly straightforward...you modify the interpreter's implementation of the print command (and its variants, like print.v and print.at) so that when it prints a message it looks up a corresponding audio file and plays it. You could even set up the interpreter to play the audio file and not print the text at all.
I went ahead and created a proof-of-concept implementation of this in less than an hour, and a good portion of that near-hour was spent downloading the NAGI source code, getting the SDL and unixem libraries that it uses off the Internet, and downloading and installing the ~450 MB DirectX SDK so that the SDL library would compile in Visual C++ Express, then setting up the Visual C++ environment just so I could build NAGI without modifying it.
Once I had the code up and buildable, it didn't take long to find what I was looking for: NAGI's implementation of the print command. I went with a simple scheme. To print a message, you have to know the logic number of the message and the message number within that logic. So, I used a basic naming convention...the audio file for a given message would take the form "MsglogicNumber_messageNumber.wav". So the audio file for message 4 from logic 30 would be named Msg30_4.wav.
I then put in some code so that every time a print command was issued, NAGI would check to see if a corresponding WAV file existed in the folder and, if so, it would play it. I was surprised at how easily I succeeded here, for a few reasons - including the fact that I'm not very familiar with the NAGI code and that I was using a Windows API call to play the sound instead of using the SDL library like the rest of NAGI, so conflicts could have happened easily (in fact, the first few runs I was afraid it wasn't going to work, because NAGI exited immediately after playing the audio file, but it turned out that I had passed the parameters to the Windows PlaySound function wrong and some startup thing in NAGI wasn't running the way it was supposed to).
I recorded about 50 WAV files, most of them short messages like "You're not close enough.", and they all played without problems exactly when they were supposed to. The text "You're not close enough." would appear on the screen and you would simultaneously hear my voice say "You're not close enough."
If anybody is interested in this, I might release a reference demo, but I have no plans at the moment to release the code that I wrote today, because it really is not fit for use until somebody comes along and writes a proper SDL implementation and does a lot of testing to find out all the little problems that might arise.
I did learn some interesting things, though: recording voice stuff for a game is really tedious. Those 50 messages that I recorded were select messages from about 3 Chimera Angel rooms - I recorded most of the narrator lines from rooms 2, 3, and 6, but because it would have just sounded silly, I didn't record any lines that I have Jennifer speaking, which is quite a few. And this says nothing of Jennifer and her parents, or the dozens of other logics in the game.
These short 50 messages also wound up taking about 40 megabytes of disk space as WAV files, so anybody who wants to create voice pack ability for AGI will need to provide some support for lossy audio like MP3, just to keep the data down to a reasonable size (it's pretty easy to envision all recorded messages for my game reaching over 1 GB).
However, the fact of the matter is that if anyone were interested in the ability, it is definitely possible to have optional voice packs for AGI games, and you don't have to modify your code to do it. You just have to record lots of lines, perhaps find some voice actors, and find out all the message numbers that you're recording so you can name your files appropriately :)
(More blogging gripes: I put my < code to do a < symbol and it still got ripped out when I was looking at it. I don't feel like explaining that for anyone who doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about. This has been a pretty technical entry anyway, so I'll leave it at that. To top it off, the stupid "edit" function doesn't work, either. If I make an error in an entry, I have to delete it and repost it in its entirety. What a freakin' pain).
