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Chris H.'s Ultima / ACS-style game development system!

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Garth's Equipment Shop
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Joined: Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:55 pm
Location: Festering Foothills
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Post by Garth's Equipment Shop »

Hi Sca, welcome back to ACK! ;)

I've been waiting for some more activity in here since last year. As you can see things have slowed down a bit in the ACK community. Everyone's been busy, probably just trying to make ends meet at home. Well, thats what I've been doing anyway.

You can see from my posts from last year that I too have a few projects going at once and some are nearly finished. It can be pretty frustrating when you have a project 90% completed but find you have no time to finish it. Thats about where I am at right now and have been since last year. Just wanted to welcome you and encourage you to keep working on your ACK projects whenever you can find the time.

There is always time in my busy schedule to playtest a fellow ACK enthusiast's new designs. I too don't like to leave things unfinished and I will eventually complete my designs, no matter how long it takes. I won't give up on them, nor on ACK. I hope you will not give up either. I and a few others here can help you with the problems you've been having. There are usually more than one way to do things in ACK especially with some clever macro scripting. I have had problems with Activate All as well, but I never let it stop me from doing what I wanted with macros.

I advise you to study the manual some more, and do some experimenting with all the different macro commands until you get a better idea of what you are able to do with it. Read every post here you can find that has anything to do with macro scripting in ACK. You will learn alot and probably wont even need our help if you do all that. But if you are feeling lazy dont be afraid to ask the forum.

As for the problems you mentioned I will need to try and recreate the problem in my own test adventure and see what i would do. It has been a while since I've worked in ACK's editors so off the top of my head I cannot think of a dependable answer. Your problem sounds familiar, like I've encountered it before [your vanishing wall - vanishing floor switching setup] but without going back in and testing I wouldnt trust my shakey memory to help matters. I will try to look into it this weekend sometime though. No promises ok? Just keep at it, do like I said, research the ACK forum here, study the manual, experiment. You'll finger it out. ;)

Garth

EDIT: BTW - The Manor looks like its going to be a fantastic ACK adventure. Cant wait to try that one. I've always been more partial to adventures in a modern horror setting than pure fantasy or pure sci-fi. I like it all, but thats my preference. Also I am much more interested in good writing and story telling than in combat or leveling.

In fact, I say leave combat and stuff out completely unless you are going to put alot of work into making it well balanced with the other aspects of the game and strike a tolerable balance between character/weapon/magic power and monster powers/difficulty as well as how much xp gets rewarded, and under what circumstances, how easily obtained different types of objects are, how plentiful or scarce wealth is in the game world, etc.

There is really ALOT of work that must go into a combat intensive game to make it work well. Since most designers are not really interested or dont have time to put that much work into a game they are making just for shits and giggles I think it is good practice to just always encourage all designers to focus mainly on putting a well written, or atleast entertaining story together. With some cool custom tiles we havent all seen a million times before. If you just do that much I and many others will praise you and your design, i promise.
Which of you is interested in my fine wares?

Admiral Ackguh

Post by Admiral Ackguh »

From SCA:
What made me give up on them was a bug I ran across that caused problems when there were more than 16 regions; trying to enter a region above #16 crashed the program with an "INVALID REGION" message.
That is a strange one. The manual says 99 is the maximum number of regions. Right now I am working on a game with 20 regions (and more to come), and had no problems.

There could be a limited amount of map space, and you could have reached that limit, no matter how few regions you use. Are they really huge?

Another possibility is that deleting a region does not free up all the space. If you create then delete regions, then create new regions (or parts such as rooms, cells) that could be taking up space.

Just some ideas...

A.A.

Admiral Ackguh

Post by Admiral Ackguh »

From Sca:
Also, not a bug, but a question: Is there any way to have a macro add money to the map? I've tried it (using MAPADD), and it does create a unit of money, but one with a quantity of 0, which doesn't seem terribly useful. I tried setting the quantity with MAPSETD, hoping that would correspond to the quantity for money, but it didn't seem to work. Is there some solution I'm overlooking?
I have also tried and given up. The only thing that sometimes works is 10 or more MAPADDs to the same square, which will add 10 units to the map, and sometimes also destroys the terrain in that square.

In most cases, there is no need to use a macro to add money to the map. If the user needs to search something, and find money - the macro can simply display a short message saying "You found --- units of money", fill in the blanks with a number, and add that amount to MONEY.

If you really need to programmatically add money to the map, create a few token objects (misc. items), perhaps using the same graphic as your money. These objects, of various denominations, run a macro adds that amount of money. You could use names such as C-Note, wad of money, bag of gold, cash-filled briefcase.

(Set Disappear to Yes, or you could have an endless source of cash!)

A.A.

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