Monday 21 December 2009

Awakener on a Mac

As I'm not nearly rich enough to own an Apple Mac myself, I've not yet been able to test XAGE at all on that platform. This morning I was sent some screenshots of the latest Awakener Silverlight build running on an Intel-based Mac:

awakener mac xage

I was worried that there'd be some unforeseen complications so I'm pleased that it works (incidentally, Ben has released his latest AGS game, which has an agreeably silly ending).

I've almost finished a series of structural improvements mentioned earlier. Previous versions of XAGE had different action types depending on whether you wanted to set a variable (say, PLAYER's X position) to a specific value (100) or to another variable's value (Enemy's X position). This worked but was inflexible.

Now these action types have been combined into a single action, where the variable itself can be set to a value or variable via a checkbox:

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As variables are now all loosely typed, we are also able to do more things complex things, like use a variables for a line of dialogue rather than explicit text. That way we can make a character shout out his X Position, for instance.

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Likewise, the IF Value/Variable actions have been combined, and can now have multiple conditions. Additionally there's a new WHILE loop structure and new standard variable, Transparency, that is mostly redundant but helps us sidestep the ColourAlpha issues detailed in a previous post.

All these improvements mean that, Awakener's introduction and menu now work more or less as expected, with zero manual changes. Conversely, the improvements utterly break the existing scripts for The Fourth Wall, so at some point I'll have to make some sort of update process.

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