What was the most challenging part of development?

  • #1, by ke4Wednesday, 18. January 2017, 14:47 7 years ago
    Hi there,
    i was wondering what was the most challenging/difficult/tricky thing you have done in Visionaire so far? Was it a custom dialogue system? Maybe some kind of particles or a puzzle minigame?

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  • #2, by afrlmeWednesday, 18. January 2017, 14:59 7 years ago
    I think for me the most pain in the arse part of development has always been sorting out the main menu & options menu. There's always tons of conditions & values & fallbacks you need to create besides sorting out the Lua script stuff for the config.ini. At least for me it's always the thing that takes the most amount of time - as for writing scripts for puzzles & coming up with workarounds I enjoy more as it gives me a challenge as opposed to the config.ini stuff which I've scripted plenty of times by now for various people.

    One thing I have difficulty with is coming onto a project in its later stages & having to workaround existing scripts & conditions as they can cause issues with what I've been asked to help script, implement or debug. I had such an issue recently & in the end the feature they asked for had to be dropped as it would have meant going through the entire project to remove all traces of an existing script & completely rewriting a new script from scratch & implementing the required conditions & values which wasn't very viable as the game is due to be released soon.

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  • #3, by ke4Wednesday, 18. January 2017, 15:05 7 years ago
    Interesting, menu didn't come up to my mind. My menu is quite simple at this moment i did enjoy making sliders for volume though, but it wasn't that hard in the end.

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  • #4, by sebastianWednesday, 18. January 2017, 15:26 7 years ago
    for me the most challenging stuf were 

    a) creating an own savemenu with nameable (40) save slots +writing a function to display tge desired names on screen per page

    b) a full customizable multilayered dialog options interface which reads the possible options out of a "file" (internal lua script but with own syntax),  supporting multiple conditions (condition true/false, value = > < !=, item in inv)  for an option to be displayed instead of one true/false condition. Also Supports animated slide in. 

    c) Controller support was a bit hard to implement because of my required behaviour i need for my actions

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  • #5, by LebosteinWednesday, 18. January 2017, 16:23 7 years ago
    I think for me the most pain in the arse part of development has always been sorting out the main menu & options menu. There's always tons of conditions & values & fallbacks you need to create besides sorting out the Lua script stuff for the config.ini.
    Yeah. If you have tried to create an option menu with Unity or Godot (with simple GUI-classes for buttons, sliders, checkboxes, textboxes and so on) you would never want to go back to Visionaire... For example: Why there is no simple button object in Visionaire with active, inactive and mouse hover graphics and optional button text, that I can create on Interfaces and Menu-Screens in the same way?

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  • #6, by ke4Wednesday, 18. January 2017, 16:43 7 years ago
    The dialogue system sounds pretty cool Sebastian do you thin you could post here some example of how it looks? I like the slide in idea.

    Btw i often stuggle with optimalization.  Trying to achieve what i want and keeping the game smooth is sometimes an issue for me.

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  • #7, by sebastianWednesday, 18. January 2017, 17:31 7 years ago
    The dialogue system sounds pretty cool Sebastian do you thin you could post here some example of how it looks? I like the slide in idea.
    i posted the concept a while ago here in the forum. I'll also try to make a video about it (and add it to a tutorial book for the site) as soon as the new version hits and i tidied up some code

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  • #8, by ke4Thursday, 19. January 2017, 18:18 7 years ago
    Yep that's what i meant. Some visual example. I'm looking forward to it smile

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  • #9, by darren-beckettFriday, 20. January 2017, 15:50 7 years ago
    For me the following 3 things were a must have.
      
    Handling Click / Double-Click / Click-Hold
    I found that double clicking an object when you are already standing by it, would not fire the Double-Click event. I therefore implemented my own system to handle this. It basically waits for a fraction of a second to give the interface enough time to recieve a second click, it would then call the Click or Double-Click actions accordingly.
    This took quite a few actions and lua coding to sort out.

    Lip Sync
    Making the character animations match the words being spoken took lots of research into Visemes/Phonemes, an external tool to convert the seperate words into Phonemes and some lua to kick off each character animation in sequence.

    Character can chase/follow accross multiple scenes
    Every adventurer needs a friend with them on their long journey, so it's a must for them to be able to move between scenes with the main character.
    Took a lot of thinking about, but the implementation was easy in the end.

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  • #10, by ke4Friday, 20. January 2017, 18:34 7 years ago
    Lip Sync? Does it work dynamically or you are manually setting the lip sync for each audio?
    This sounds pretty complicated but pretty cool though.

    I'm also dealing with chasing character. Still didn't sort it out. However i'm trying to achieve so the playable character could come to the chasing character and have a dialog with the charater. It means to get them standing next to each other with the right distance and angle based on the current scene/way system. One script for all cases.

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  • #11, by TinTinFriday, 20. January 2017, 18:55 7 years ago
    Lip Sync? Does it work dynamically or you are manually setting the lip sync for each audio?
    This sounds pretty complicated but pretty cool though.



    AGS engine support lip Sync with word method. find it here:
    http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Other_features_(manual)

    I think so it's OK if VS team consider it for next build.

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