Adventure Creation Kit

[Chris H]

Hi everyone,

The download link on the mozomedia site is now serving up ACK 3.00!

http://www.mozomedia.com/ack/download.html

JJ will be updating the text on the site soon, but the download link itself is serving up 3.00 as of now. This version includes JJ's launcher as well as the most up-to-date manual and the totally reworked kits.

Expect a strong possibility of updates or hotfixes over the next few days -- watch this space for details!

Hearty thanks to JJ for his last-minute help getting the kits ready, as well as of course everything else! And thank you Sargh, for the last-minute motivation. :)

[Chris H]

Yes, minutes after posting it, I found the first bug:

The new "touch macro" creature feature (a new 3.0 feature where a creature can run a macro if they land a melee attack on the player) wasn't properly initialized for all the kits and games, so they were running touch macros when they shouldn't have been. Fixed. And if you have a game where you need to apply the same fix, entering "000" for the touch macro number for any creature will reset it to 0 for ALL creatures.

(You'll see the touch macro used in the ULTIMA kit: snakes and spiders use it to poison you, gremlins use it to steal your food, ghosts use it to steal your MP)

So, the download link is now serving up v3.01. You can check the Release Notes.txt file in the ACK folder to verify that what you got is indeed 3.01.

[Sargh]

No Chris, thank you! I remember many years ago, trying to find your program, and the passcode was donated to a Q-Basuck website, called Alpha-Omega Systems... I was stoaked as usual! I entered the code, and I was in ACK Wonderland! This was 2.2 at the moment... Then when I came upon Jolt Country about some time last year, they were speaking of the ACS(Adventure Construction Set), then I told everyone that there's your program, which is awesome that JJ made website, and somehow you became involved... It is actually all of us who would love to thank you (at least the ACK fanatics like myself) for contributing after all of these years of waiting, for the ACK savior to come, from those dunie hills of silicon and binary transcript of Turbo Pascal programming....

Keep up the great work, for ACK is a damn good one!

Sargh

[jjsonick]

OK, now both the Windows and the OS X versions of ACK are up on the download page, and I've folded the whole ACK site into my main Mozomedia site, where it'll be much easier to update it.

This is the new main ACK link, but the old mozomedia/ack url redirects there, and the old download url redirects to the new download page as well.

For anyone playing with ACK, two systems I haven't tested the Launcher in are OS X Leopard (should be fine) and Vista (might need to run as admin), so if anyone running those OS's could let me know if the Launcher behaves in them, that'd be great.

Huzzah for 3.0! Maybe now I'll actually get to making a game...

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Congrats, Chris!

I will post a note in the Interactive Fiction MUD, as I assume there is some overlap in interest. I updated the main page of JC last night as well.

Believe me, it is killing me to be wrapped up in this text game that I am halfway done with. The ACK interface looks great, and I love that character portrait thing you have going as well.

[bruce]

For anyone playing with ACK, two systems I haven't tested the Launcher in are OS X Leopard (should be fine)

Seems fine.

Bruce

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think making some stupid (on my part) D&D quest would be the best way to go. Something that would take like 10 minutes to play. It won't be art, but man, am I getting nostalgic for ACS/Ultima gameplay.

[jjsonick]

For anyone playing with ACK, two systems I haven't tested the Launcher in are OS X Leopard (should be fine)

Seems fine.

Bruce

Rockin'. Thanks, Bruce.

I think making some stupid (on my part) D&D quest would be the best way to go. Something that would take like 10 minutes to play.

Do it. DO IT. :)

[foody]

Well guys I have finished my ACS game...this foody. I have send it to: http://www.adventureconstructionset.com ... efault.asp

I am hoping they will upload it to be downloaded. The name of my game is called Mysterious Invasion it is for Apple II.

[Chris H]

Very cool news. Can we look forward to a port of it to ACK? hehe :) Or perhaps we can tempt you to make your next composition in ACK... Coming from ACS, I think you'll find it familiar ground.

[foody]

That is what I am doing actually (not porting the game I mean). I am making my next game in ACK and forgetting ACS...it is too limited now for my own good and I find ACK is everything ACS and more. So all my games will be in ACK mode. There are so much to do...so much to do.

I still don't understand why though he have not posted my game into his webpage. I want you guys try it out O_O Weird.

[carrost]

I'm interested in using ACK to make a game (or to dabble at least), but I'm not on the ball regarding of its limitations. Is running out of memory an issue? Generally how complex can an adventure be made before the program is at risk of crashing?

[Chris H]

About the only place I can imagine ACK actually running out of memory during play would be with custom sound effects (there seems to be a narrow window where a sound is too big but ACK doesn't realize it's too big). (That seems to happen with VOC files around 15 seconds long; longer and it simply ignores the sound, shorter and it seems to work fine)

In the editors, I'm not sure what the macro editor does if you try inserting lines to make a macro editor longer than 99 lines (I'm pretty sure it won't do it) and I'm not sure what happens if you try making a dialogue more than 1000 lines (I should check that out, and add something that tells you how long you're getting.)

But for planning purposes I'm sure it would be good to know at what point ACK won't let you add any more, so here are the basic limits:

Regions (Maps)

You can have up to 99. Each region can either be:
* an ACS-style room map (up to 16 rooms, each of 16x11 size). You can stack terrain, but not without limit: I believe a single room-type region can have up to 6400 objects total.
* or an Ultima-style scrolling map (nominally up to 256x240, but you can cheat and fake bigger ones if you're willing to have gaps like empty ocean within them, in which case you can fake your way to 512x512)

I believe there's also a max of 32 creatures (people, etc) actively running around per region, but it might be 64; I'll double-check this. Also, a limit of an additional 32 creatures in the "wandering monster" list.


Graphic tiles

You can have up to 480, but the second set of 240 is only used for the additional tiles for animating certain objects and creatures.


Objects and creatures

Up to 254 of each. (I'll have to double-check and make sure it won't let you add a 255th)


Messages, dialogues, macros

Up to 255 of each. Messages are fixed-size. Macros can be up to 99 lines, and a single dialogue can be up to 1000 lines (total of all topics in the dialogue). The total size available for all dialogues put together is about 64,000 lines.


Custom content (BMP pictures, sound effects)

Up to 64,000 of each, although pictures above 255 and sounds above 71 can only be used in macros.


Other:

A lot of ability scores max out at 255. (They're all described in the manual)


I will add that the sample adventures come nowhere near the size limits. The ULTIMA kit gets a little close to the object limit (I think it has just over 200) and uses all the graphic tiles, too.

Hope that helps -- if you had a more specific question let me know. (Likewise if it crashes doing something it seems like it should let you do, let me know)

-Chris

[ChainGangGuy]

I think making some stupid (on my part) D&D quest would be the best way to go. Something that would take like 10 minutes to play. It won't be art, but man, am I getting nostalgic for ACS/Ultima gameplay.

Maybe it's finally time to breathe new life into the Magic Jar project...

[carrost]

Thanks! Time to get out the graph paper and pencils.

Also: is there a way to import an entire tileset BMP instead of acquiring one tile at a time? (maybe I missed it in the manual)

[Chris H]

No, the BMP import is one-at-a-time. I didn't try to touch the idea of importing multiple tiles at once from a BMP, because of all the unknowns involved (where are the tiles placed, are they padded with blank space between them, etc.) The solution would end up involving a template BMP, and cutting/pasting onto the template would be about as much work as importing tile-by-tile is now.

A much quicker tile import can be done from other ACK adventures or from certain other games, using the tools in the "import/export" module, though. (This was how I brought in most of the tiles for the ULTIMA kit)

[Wannabe Game Maker]

Hi all, I downloaded ACK and started making a game and believe I found a bug. I tried to import the ultima kit and got a "file copy errors: 2,2,0"

Most os the program seems to continue working except you lose the ability to make long messages. If you try to edit long 1 you get"Run time erroe 100 at 000:32B1"

The other Long messages are not accessable.

If I try to make a new long message, I get "runtime error 100 at 0000:314F.

Tried this on window me, vista and xp. same thing for all three.

Sorry to report this, just wanted to give you a heads up.

Also, I went through the tutorial and it said to print the ACKTUTORIAL.DOC to view while going through it to see how thngs were done, but I cannot locate the file in ACK. I am interested in how the script that appears right after you kill the two roaches.

[Chris H]

If I can't locate that DOC file, I'll make up a new one, but that trick was done by setting a death macro on the bugs: each time it runs it increments a variable and checks if it's reached 2 (meaning you've killed both) and then does stuff if you have. The Caravan adventure uses that a couple times as well (like in the bandit raid, where once you kill all the bandits it allows you to go through a door and exit the encounter.)

I'll also check out that bug you mentioned, but I think I know a workaround: in your imported adventure, look for a ".LMS" file, I'll bet you'll find one but it will be 0 bytes in size. Delete it, and that should fix the problem (it will re-create it properly the first time you try to edit a long message).

I'll put together a 3.02 version in the next couple days with these problems fixed.

- Chris

[jjsonick]

Also as a temporary workaround, instead of importing the Ultima kit into an already created adventure, if you choose Create Adventure and choose the Ultima Kit at that time, the kit seems to get built correctly and you can edit long messages normally, etc (at least for me in XP and OS X).

JJ

[Wannabe Game Maker]

Hi all, I downloaded ACK and started making a game and believe I found a bug. I tried to import the ultima kit and got a "file copy errors: 2,2,0"

Most os the program seems to continue working except you lose the ability to make long messages. If you try to edit long 1 you get"Run time erroe 100 at 000:32B1"

The other Long messages are not accessable.

If I try to make a new long message, I get "runtime error 100 at 0000:314F.

Tried this on window me, vista and xp. same thing for all three.

Sorry to report this, just wanted to give you a heads up.

Also, I went through the tutorial and it said to print the ACKTUTORIAL.DOC to view while going through it to see how thngs were done, but I cannot locate the file in ACK. I am interested in how the script that appears right after you kill the two roaches.