Topic: AGS: Can I Make an RPG with AGS?

[Khris]

You can have 299 state-saving rooms per game.

There are several ways to overcome this limit though. As you mentioned, rooms that are basically just scenery are best for non-saving ones. They can still have random events and the like.
Just to clarify, non-saving means that room variables' values are lost, and the state of objects, hotspots, regions and walkable areas. So if a room only has an NPC's shop (and no locked doors or the like), it's fine to use room 300 and above. Even if it did though, you could use global variables to store the state and re-init the room in its before fadein event.

[DBoyWheeler]

Cool!  Thanks.  It's a good thing this thread is in my bookmarks, so I can hunt for something here when I need it.  It may be a long time before I do such a game, but when I'm ready, I'll have the info I need.  Thanks again! 

[VVK]

I'm pretty new to this, but I've been playing around with the idea of something RPG-ish too, and there's one thing sometimes done in RPGs about which I'm not sure whether it could be done in AGS. I haven't quite found a proper answer to this anywhere. So: Is it possible to customise a character's appearance by combining different elements, like hair style and eye colour and such? Like when creating a custom player character, but it could also be used for creating stock NPC appearances and changing the clothes or armour someone is wearing. Even if customisation is just limited to the initial character creation, there would obviously be too many combinations of even just a few different options for it to make sense to make a different collection of sprites for each.

I suppose there are two separate questions here: whether it's possible to combine pre-made pieces within the game to (effectively or actually) create a new sprite, which is more important; and whether it's possible to colour the "pieces", eg. just create and import one image for a specific hair style (or, well, you know, one per needed frame of animation or whatever will be needed for other reasons) but then tell AGS to recolour it when needed.

[Crimson Wizard]

I suppose there are two separate questions here: whether it's possible to combine pre-made pieces within the game to (effectively or actually) create a new sprite, which is more important; and whether it's possible to colour the "pieces" , eg. just create and import one image for a specific hair style (or, well, you know, one per needed frame of animation or whatever will be needed for other reasons) but then tell AGS to recolour it when needed.

This is most possible. There's a concept of "dynamic sprite" in AGS, which allows you to create a new sprites at runtime and draw what you like on them (including painting other sprites over).
Manual topic: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/DynamicSprite_functions_and_properties
Also this: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/DrawingSurface_functions_and_properties

After the sprites are created, you may assign them to character View frames.
The Character's Tint property may also be useful to some extent:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Character_functions_and_properties#Character.Tint

[Khris]

About recoloring sprites: tinting only works for the entire character's appearance; however one could dynamically recolor sprites on a per-pixel basis.
Say you imported a pants sprite; if you only used greyscale colors for the pixels that are supposed to change color, you could iterate through every pixel and recolor it based on the brightness value.

[VVK]

Excellent, thank you. I'd actually wondered if dynamic sprites were suitable for this earlier, but I couldn't really see the forest for the trees when I looked them up in the manual, so I wasn't sure whether they worked that way.

So... if you wanted to combine several elements to make a sprite, would the way be to import them as separate sprites, then create a dynamic sprite and draw the elements onto it with DrawingSurface.DrawSurface?

And could you use Tint anyway by creating a dummy character with a sprite only consisting of parts that are going to be the same colour on a given character, tinting that (with saturation 100, of course), and then somehow taking the result and adding it to the finished sprite similarly to the above? Sounds more complicated, though, since if I read this right, it doesn't affect the sprite, just the character, so the only way I can see right now to accessing the result with these commands is through DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenShot (plus DynamicSprite.Crop). And if you used that, could you have transparent parts in the resulting sprite? Okay, so maybe that doesn't work.

[Khris]

I'm pretty sure that if you take a screenshot, areas colored in "magic pink" (255, 0, 255) will end up transparent, yes.
The problem is that this process is going to be visible to the player, if only for a fraction of a second.

What you could try is use a room that's bigger than the screen so you can have an object off-screen, set the sprite as object graphic, tint the object, then merge the object into the background (this should retain the tinting). Now you can grab the off-screen part of the background.
The problem here is that the object will "physically" disappear from the game, so you can only do this once for every object.

[VVK]

Oh. I always wondered what "magic pink" was. (I've been lurking here for months.)