Ghost Story - Questions, possible Hiring Call

[CreativeEmbassy]

Hello Everyone! I'm currently writing an adventure game that deals with the supposed haunting of a local building (I won't give TOO much info away here). I've tried Adventure Maker, and I like the simplicity it offers. However, I have just a few questions before I dive too deep into this project. There are several features I would need, but I'm not sure if AM supports them:

- Video Cut-scenes. Fairly self-explanatory, am I able to force a video to play after A) a variable has been triggered and B) The player goes into a scene?
- Video Dialogue. I want to have several dialogue options available, and the choice the player makes determines the response the character gives, in a video, possibly including subtitles.
- Video Transparency. I have the capability to make parts of a video transparent; can I overlay video on a still frame? For example, I would like to have video of people walking in front of a green screen, chromakey it (in a different program, obviously), then overlay it on the background of a scene.
- Non-player driven events. Example, the character comes up to the player and initiates a dialogue with the player. Or, a player has to succesfully combine two items before a timer runs down. Is this possible?
- Multi-layered video. What if I want several different videos running at the same time? For instance, I have the static background of a NYC street. Above that, I have video overlaid, with transparency, of people walking on the street. Then on a third layer, I have a character who's talking to the player.

I know you guys don't like answering a question like this (or maybe you do, I shouldn't judge so quickly), but if AM is not up to the task, is there another game creation software package that would be better suited for the task? We're not afraid of programming...

Finally, if Adventure Maker can do all the things I'm hoping, then I will both buy a commercial license in order to make money off the game, and ask for people to help with writing the game for pay. I'm VERY serious about this project. I have a storyline, characters, and some NEW ideas for this project, and regardless of how I make it, it WILL be finished. Thanks for your time!

- Clinton Judy
Clint@TheCreativeEmbassy.com

[Candle]

I will move this to the Adventure Maker Technical Support and Bug Reports
Forum.

[CreativeEmbassy]

Thanks Candle. Again, can anyone help?

[Imari]

Hi Clinton,
The Video CutScenes, Video Dialog, and Non-player driven event scenarios that you describe should all be doable in AM. Most of the uses of looping or multi-play videos are standard in AM using hotspots. You can also specifiy the location where your player sprite begins in each frame, and you can generate events when the frame loads.

As for the transparent and multilayered videos, I'm not sure. You can have several videos in a frame and they can overlap, though I've never used a transparent AVI. You can definitely have static foreground elements, an AVI with your NPC, your character sprite, and looping AVIs in a single frame.... though at some point, I suspect performance might become an issue.

Check out Shadow Hunter's excellent plug-ins, which will give you greater flexibility in AM. VB scripting will also allow you to do a great many other things. If you're planning on making a large project, you'll also need an organizational scheme. Check out Skye's tutorial for that.

Hopefully one of our coder-types will respond. In the meantime, you might download the free version and check it out.
~Cleo

[CBSection31]

As stated above, all elements except for transparent video are easily doable in Adventure Maker.

As for transparent videos, I don't think they will work "out of the box", BUT I believe you can instead use the free GIF Sequence Plugin to simulate this.

Gif Sequence Player allows animating hotspots by playing sequences of GIF files inside the hotspots. It supports GIF transparency. (This has an advantage over animated GIFs, because in Adventure Maker they do not support transparancy.) You can easily modify its source code to allow it to play sequences of files of other types, like JPG, WMF and EMF, as well, should you not want to use GIFs. You can specify the interval between each picture (in milliseconds).

You can download it here: http://www.arnoldsconcepts.com/am/plugi ... r_v1_0.zip

I hope this helps!

[DarkWizard02]

From the problems I am facing with hotspots enabled during video playback, I would
say it is very possible. You have to look at it this way. You can play a video by
script and then enable some hotspots that support either looping video or animated gifs.
That way what you will see are the scenes you described enabled in the foreground
of the video. The animated gifs would have transparencies to overlay on top of the
video. You can acheive video within video through any video editing program, but
know that you will not be able to change the overlapping video during runtime.

Dialog wizard supports all of the functions you describe for enabling/disabling dialogue depending on responses to questions.

[CreativeEmbassy]

Thanks for all your great replies! I've been messing around with the Wintermute Engine, but have felt that AM would be a much easier solution, and really didn't want to have to convert all the work I already had to WME. I'll be sure to post more here in the future. Thanks again!

- Clinton

EDIT: Actually, if you'll let me ask a few more questions... Imari, you mentioned breaking up a large project into several smaller ones. I can already tell you that this is going to be a MASSIVE project already. I have maybe a quarter of a chapter mapped out already, and it's already up to around 200 frames. So that's about 800 frames a chapter. I'm planning on 5 chapters right now (the story is already written, details are going in here and there), with the last chapter being half as short as the first 4.

So that makes about 3600 frames, mapped, coded, dialogue writen and all that. I'm also planning on having full video-made conversations with characters, as well as major cutscenes to segway parts of the story. We already have a composer and several actors, alongside myself (wrote story, mapping, vbscript, dialogue... this is why I'm going to be asking for help soon.) SO, to get to my question: How many people have made games this big with the AM engine? I read the article on dividing a project up into segments; is the AM engine capable of handling that much data at once? I want to make sure we don't get halfway into this project and watch the engine fall apart...

[Candle]

I don't think you will have a problem with that size but someone else may know more about that as I haven't got anything that big.
You may want to have folders for each part of your project as that helps a lot .
In the frame window you will see at the bottom to show folders and then you can add folders to the game .
Feel free to asj for help anytime. Sometimes it takes a bit to get help but this is a small forum and GM is busy too so things do take time but you will get help if ask.

[Imari]

Though I cannot speak to the actual number of frames involved, there have been full length games with video and sound made with AM. CBSection and Cherokee have released completed professional games. Skye is nearing completion of her game, which is massive. Skye's mentioned having a few problems, but I believe that most of them stemmed from having a bezillion variables.

BTW, these have all been first person games.

[CBSection31]

Both of my previous games, along with my upcoming game, have had hundreds-to-thousands of frames and hours of dialog and cutscenes. Adventure Maker can definitely support it.

I do recommend breaking the project up into smaller chunks while you work with it, just to keep your sanity. The more frames you have in your project, the longer it takes to switch folders when working with frames, along with some other actions. But breaking up the project is quite easy!

The only problem that Adventure Maker can have with large projects (1000+ frames) is that the installation process takes longer than it should. What I mean is, when it reaches the 99% point of installation, it takes a LONG time to reach 100%. Sometimes minutes, whereas it reaches 99% pretty quickly. Skye can give you more details about this than I can.

To work around this, you could always create your own installation program instead of using AM's default one. It isn't *too* hard, but does require a bit of technical knowledge.

I hope this helps!