Jolt Country

Hey all,

Season greetings.

I have stumbled upon ACK and its been something ive been looking for a creator to be able to make something along the lines of the original Wasteland.

I've been tinkering around with ACK and worked out how to start creating a game from scratch, just in the basics.

I suggest a video tutorial would help newcomers and also attract new players/creators.

I was having problems with my PC moving a couple of squares and then unable to move at all.

**Update**
I discovered that my PC was in a car, in the office. I pressed X to exit, and low and behold there was a car.
Why the car wasn't visible i don't know.
However, now i am able to move around the office, but the wall is one tile away and i cannot move to the wall, as if there is an invisible wall all the way around.


Cheers

Daza

Daza wrote:My character can move up a few times and then seems to get stuck, there is a two block gap between the tables so i should be able to move there and the doors on the adjacent squares are portal doors which ive already selected the destination to other rooms i have created.

When you first wrote that your PC got stuck, I thought you meant the game was freezing your computer!

Now I'm not familiar with ACK, but I can give you my advice from other things and from over 3 decades of programming in more than a dozen languages.

But i cannot work out why the PC gets stuck and i cannot move at all, but the game hasn't frozen because i can still look into my inventory or look etc.

I'm going to repeat/rephrase back what I think you said, and if any of my points are incorrect, point it out; it might help someone better experienced in this to debug your problem.

Right now you have the premise that your character is stuck, because once you get into the spot, you can't get it back out.

Since I don't know the game or the programming environment I'm not familiar with it, so I have to ask questions or make suggestions.

1. Is there a 'sticky bit' or capability of making a square such that you either can't get out of it or it's one way, you can go through in one direction but not back? Could you have somehow set that on both entrances so that both are one-way in, and thus you can't exit?
2. Is the space large enough? When designing maps in DOOM, you had to be sure the distance of a floor from top to bottom was at least, I think, 64 inches or you couldn't enter that room, or you'd get stuck. Are you sure the width you're using is enough?
3. Could there be a hidden or not obvious 'bottleneck' problem if the path is only 1 or 2 squares such that attributes (such as impassibility) could 'bleed' into a nearby square? Maybe the square must be clear on all 8 sides or it has some blocking effect?
4. Try creating a new room similar to this with excessively wide spaces for the pass-through route, start with 8 squares wide, then 7 wide and so on down to 1, and see if the problem reproduces. Maybe it looks like you only need 1 or 2 spaces but for technical reasons you need 3.
5. Or the alternative that the default is you can't move through that square and you haven't enabled it? That's why I suggest doing a fresh one (in item 4) with several exits of much larger spaces and see if the problem is repeated.
6. Perhaps the square pattern looks like it's passable but its value indicates its impassible. In Duke Nukem 3d, one texture is used for an electrified area (like the electric chair or a subway train path), step on a sector using that texture on its floor and you get a health loss every second as long as you stay on it. Another texture was the lunar surface, step on a sector using it with a parallax ceiling and you die instantly. Perhaps there are blocking squares that look exactly the same as some non-blocking ones.
7. Maybe the door square requires a minimum 2 square open space in front of it because the (imaginary or invisible) door swings through that area, and the door is blocking the path because there's not enough room to get by, and your character gets (invisibly) caught in the door and can't get out?
8. Same idea as I expressed in #4, but this time for #7, make the space between the exit door and the path two squares high instead of one.

Perhaps this will help until someone more familiar with ACK can offer you more advice.

Thanks Tdarcos for taking time out to make some suggestions.

I got it sorted once i realised my player character was infact inside a vehicle, even though you couldnt see it. You only saw
the character itself.

I sort of figured this out by accident.

All good now.

A general question for those that have used this program extensively.

When you have objects stacked, how do you get it to show the one you select? I've noticed by pressing the Pgndown or up you can sort of cycle the colour icon. But it never seems to alter the object image, no matter what you choose.

In the case of the vehicle how do you get that to show, instead of the character?

Thanks

Daza

I believe there is a setting for the vehicle object that determines what icon will be used for the player when the player is inside/riding the vehicle. If you set this, then the PC icon will change appropriately when the vehicle is in use.

Daza wrote:Thanks Tdarcos for taking time out to make some suggestions.

I got it sorted once i realised my player character was infact inside a vehicle, even though you couldnt see it. You only saw the character itself.

I sort of figured this out by accident.

I'm kind of surprised since I more-or-less got it right with my suggestion #6, the vehicle was invisible.

Tdarcos wrote:

Daza wrote:Thanks Tdarcos for taking time out to make some suggestions.

I got it sorted once i realised my player character was infact inside a vehicle, even though you couldnt see it. You only saw the character itself.

I sort of figured this out by accident.

I'm kind of surprised since I more-or-less got it right with my suggestion #6, the vehicle was invisible.

I'm kind of surprised, since you listed a hundred things and then when he told you what it was you scoured your list to find ANYTHING that looked remotely like what he said, decided on #6 (which was about as close to what his real problem was as a rotting ham sandwich) and then acted like you had it all figured out the whole time.

I'm kind of surprised.

lmao - Pinback says what everyone thinks but are too polite to say aloud. While I agree that Tdarcos's posts in the ACK subforums often appear at first glance as if they are written by some kind of spam-bot who's AI reads a thread and attempts to put together a post utilizing it's extensive database of 80's computing knowledge - I do still read them and sometimes find a few little nuggets of interesting information in them.

But yeah, Tdar maybe it is time you actually loaded up ACK and played around with it a bit so you don't have to try so hard to put together a pertinant post. From all your posts I've read I can imagine you becoming an ACK master in a matter of days or perhaps even hours if you wanted to and your extensive retro background would be an awesome source of game content/humor. But more importantly you could actually post relevent on-topic opinions and responses here without having to resort to trolling around in word-ninja pj's. ;)

Daza wrote:I suggest a video tutorial would help newcomers and also attract new players/creators.

Cheers

Daza

Excellent idea Daza. If you are experienced already in narrating your own videos [with voice i mean], as well as video editing, I would very much like to see what you come up with.

I've done only the bare minimum of dabbling with Sony Vegas and video capture progs and such. Video editing is extremely complicated I found out. Sure I could whip up something with very little editing but it would suck like so many others that litter the youtube landscape.

I'm not a very good public speaker so I don't really see myself narrating which I think is the most important part of any instructional/informational youtube video.

But I would love to help out if anyone wants to do this. I could help script it or simply proofwatch the video while its in production and offer my suggestions, criticisms, ideas, corrections, etc.