Help getting started
Hey, first day using LASSIE and so far it looks spectacular, but I ran into a few snags. First of all I just cant figure out conversation... sure I can add a brief description and all that, but I cant figure out actual conversation with choices and everything. Along the same lines, i couldent figure out voice samples for dialog... I have the .mp3's imported but they dont seem to be recognized. I feel really dum here, it seems nobody else had these problems when they started.

Are you using Lasssie AS or the the Director version?
Are you using Lasssie AS or the the Director version? The Director version is more stable but your final games won't be playable online or on some systems like Intel Macs. Lassie AS is more flexible but it still has a couple of hiccups - certain features don't work completely. Importing mp3's is one of these problem areas. All sound must be embedded in a flash file to work. Usually, there's a way to work around these bugs using sprites and phases, which are solid. For voice sampling you could create an invisible sprite, with each phrase triggering a different snippet of dialogue. However, I'd only recommend this for downloadable games, as it will take a long time to load something like this if the game is playable online. Dialogue trees are another problem area. With some trial and error you can get them to work but certain features will throw the whole thing into chaos. I recommend you start with a simple one room game to get your feet wet. Nothing too complicated. Follow the tutorial that Nige put together. Once you get the hang of LASSIE, its quite easy to use...but there is a learning curve. Good luck!

:oops: Tucker throws the short comings of LassieAS into sharp relief. But he's not wrong...

Benefits
Any shortcomings are far outweighed by the benefits. It's still the best adventure game creator for non-programmers out there! :D

Thanks Alot for the help, I switched from AS to Director and since I've had only one problem. That being Alpha My first day of using director was fine, every image i imported had proper alpha on it. I installed a new hard-drive and now nothing works. I'v even tried taking the player character template and exporting it as it was, but I still get no alpha on anything. It dosent make any sense that changing a hard-drive would do that, but I cant see anything else that I'm doing differently.

I believe Greg will agree to this. While he said Tucker isn't wrong. I do believe that Lassie Director also has a few more shortcomings that will never be fixed. For the most part (if not totally) Lassie Director is dead. Besides the game can not be published on your own with Director, you need Greg's help with that too. Point is, you should probably still stick to AS. Not to mention the end user errors that have occurred with the Director version (see WMYT)

For the level of work I'm doing, director is fine. the only amount of publishing would be to a few friends. but end-user errors you say? hmmm, well if theres ever FULL conversation in AS... then I will switch. anything else I should know about director? EDIT: Figured out the alpha problem

Yes there is one little thing. Maybe you don't mind, but director does not yet run natively on an intel mac. It should work though. But you can never know. I for example have an intel mac and I couldn't start "what makes you tick" or "Building a robot". Although I'd love to...

And I think there were some windows errors resulting from Japanese characters and the like. Also, Director is highly unlikely to run on Intel Macs, because as far as I know (and I could be very well mistaken) Director is dead in the eyes of not only Adobe, but also by a lot of multimedia programers that use the package formerly known as Macromedia.

Macs are no problem at all. like I said, i don't plan to make much or publish much... Yet.

but my point was it's not only a problem on Macs, it can also be a problem on PCs with chinese or japanese characters set up. See: forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=439&highlight=japanese" target="_blank">http://lassie.10.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=439&highlight=japanese

I see. Hopefully that wont be a problem. One more note: I recently got an error when trying to either open or play my project file, forget what it was about exactly but the fact is no matter what i did i couldent open that project. Thankfully I had a back-up so its no big deal.

Yeah, that happens with the director version too.... I would say that Greg could possibly fix it with the file, but he's out of town right now, and then going to Germany. It has to do with some invalid variable, and seems easy for him to fix.... but your best bet is to back up often.

...
I think in director it was the quotation marks that shouldn't be used in text input because they mess up the script ... once you know it it's not that annoying.