Some advice on deciding wether to go with AGS or not....

[Frikker]

Ok so Im not entirely sure if this Is the right forum, as my question is more generalised but is still technical so here goes.

Ive been part of this forum for two years now, and Ive not posted a lot since I have been writing the story for my game so there has not been much to say and Ive not produced anything yet that would make me qualify for a GIP thread.

Anyway, my game has been ongoing for three years, I have the story written 100% and A lot of the artwork done. Im now at a stage where I need to start actually creating the game. Now over the years, Ive read a lot of posts on here, but there are still a couple of questions that I need answered before I can commit to using AGS to make my game. Without these answers I could potentially put a lot of work into AGS only to have to jump ship at a later date, so Im hoping you guys can help me out.

There are a couple of ideas that I really want to get into my game, but just to be clear, Im not a programmer , And I will be recruiting a competent one who knows AGS well. So my questions relate to wether or not the ideas I have can actually be done in AGS , not wether a noob like me could do them. Because I wont be.

First of all, my backgrounds will be rendered in Blender. I have actually created the whole game world so that each location is relative to the others in every sense. This means that If I want , I can render out camera flythroughs from one location to another as animations. In an ideal world, It woul be great if I could play these between locations the first time you visit each one, to get a better idea of the game world. This would be really cool but would have to be pretty seamless to have the desired effect. So when you walk out of one location, the camera instantly flys to the next and settles in position as the player walks in. Ive seen this sort of thing done before, I remember that Lumino island does it, but can AGS?

Next up, i have a game mechanic that is very important as I will have to rewrite a LOT of the story if I cant include it. A lot of my game takes place in sepia tone, as it is based in a world without colour. At one point however, the player discovers a tool that can reveal colour wherever he points it (he needs it to solve a very important puzzle) . The tool works similar to a flashlight, so in the same sense that a flashlight lighens dark areas in a circle that you point it at, the tool brings colour to sepia areas that you point it at. But obviously once you point it somewhere else, the colour is lost where you have just pointed it.
From an artist point of view, I would overlay a sepia layer on top of the exact same image in colour and rub through the sepia image to reveal the colour, only have it go back to sepia when you move it. But could this idea be done in AGS?

My final question is similar to the first,
The menu screen for the game will actually be a screenshot of the first frame of the beginnging animation of the game. When you click the new game button, I need the animation to ideally begin as if it was playing from the menu screen. So, no change in size, big jump in resolution or a blank loading screen. Basically, you click play and the full screen still image on screen begins playing. My thoughts would be that the video is already loaded up , and the start new game button is actually just a play button for the video, so clicking it will instantly begin the video, but again, im no programmer.

I would really appreciate some help with my questions, so I can get started on my game. In an ideal world, I would love to mske it in AGS as I love this community, but if not, can anybody suggest a suitable engine to use?

Btw game resolution will be 1280x720 as reccomended by Khris a while back.

[Cassiebsg]

I don't think the problem is with the coding and what you want to do. If the coder is good enough he/she will be able to do it, and otherwise, then it's a matter of learning and asking for help on the forum. From what I can tell you can code most everything with AGS.

I think what you should ponder is: Will your project reach a size that can hit one of the limitations of AGS? More specifically the sprite's/project file size, that as far as I know it's still 2Gb.

[Danvzare]

Firstly, the animations between locations, and the movie that plays when you press the play button, can easily be done in AGS. There might be a slight noticeable pause before the animation starts, but then again, I've seen such noticeable pauses like that in commercial games, so I'm sure it'll be fine.

As for the whole sepia tone being turned to colour thing, that can also be done. Although I'm afraid it might not be able to color in characters. Then again, maybe a good enough programmer might be able to figure that out.

As a matter of fact, I've actually seen both of these problems (at least similar problems) addressed in other projects recently.
This one and this one.

[Khris]

For the color thing, including Characters and Objects should be possible. One has to recreate the current scene on a Dynamic Sprite using the colored background/sprites, then crop it. Putting it on a GUI with low z-Order should work for this effect.

As for the videos, Pilot Light did this very beautifully. However, afaik the game used 256 colors and flac videos.
OGV Theora should work fine though; just do some tests before deciding to use AGS.

[Frikker]

Thanks everybody for your advice , it is much appreciated and made me quite confident that I may be able to use AGS for my project .

A couple more questions in light of the last answers:

Do animations count to any sort of limit? They will be the biggest assets in terms of file size and although they will all be very short, there will be a lot of them.

Can anybody detail, or point me in the direction of info regarding limitations on the latest version of AGS. Ive seen a lot about this but it is usually dated information that may not be for the latest build.

What exactly does the term "sprite" and the sprite limitation include? I was always under the impression that sprites were visual assets such as characters and objects in the scene or does it include other things (you can see why im going to get a coder on board, this game is well underway but I have no chance at coding on my own )

Anyways, yes, the reason for all my concerns is that my game will be more modern than nostalgic in a visual sense (machinarium is the closest visual example I have seen so far to my style) and there will be voice acting, animations, hi-res backgrounds and a fair few locations, so I dont want to commit to AGS and get help onboard only to have to change and mess anybody around , not to mention waste lots of time and effort only to have to start again....Although if project size is the only limitation that causes an issue, I could always make the game in two parts.

[dayowlron]

You can have unlimited numbers of views (animations) however there is a 30000 limit on sprites. (thats a lot of sprites, but if the average animation is 10 sprites that would be about 3000 animations)

The limits I know of (and it may be out of date) is http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/manual/   then expand "Reference", then select "System Limits".

A Sprite is any graphic image other than room backgrounds. This includes images of inventory items, graphics used in gui's, animation frame graphics, and even mouse cursors.

[Cassiebsg]

I think they say sprite (images), cause it's what fills more. Text doesn't fill that much.
As far as I know, you can use the videos as external files to the project file (not sure if they even can be imported in), so they would not add to the problem. Also, there's a workaround for the sprite size, that is to use external dynamic sprites instead of importing them into the game project.

Also, some of those limits that dayowlron refers to, have recently been removed on the latest release of AGS (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=53510.0).

[Khris]

If you implement the animations as videos (as opposed to playing a view made of imported sprites) you can have an unlimited number of them, in theory. OGV get's compiled into the game exe though, and you probably don't want a 5GB exe (although you can split that, so even that isn't an issue).

[Frikker]

Ok thanks again everybody !, seems likely to me that I will be able to use AGS after all. Ill take your advice Khris and do some experiments. Ill render out the first video that plays from the menu screen as an OGV, and then ill try to learn AGS enough so that I can make the menu screen with the start new game button that will play the video. If I can do that then the rest of the videos should work as they will be exactly the same idea, only between locations rather than the menu screen.

Oh but Kris, can you confirm that the videos wont cause issue with the limit. I just got a bit confused now because 2Gb was mentioned earlier, but you said about not wanting a 5Gb exe which implied that 5gb WAS possible, and also Cassiebsg said about videos not counting towards size limits because they are external but you said OGV gets compiled into the exe.
So for example, just say my overall OGV size was 2Gb, and everything else for the project was 1Gb , then would that be ok or not? Because it would exceed the 2gb limit combined, but not if the OGV's dont count.
At the end of the day, it is the animations that are going to kill the file size, but I am confident that the rest of the game will be less than 2gb. however, to make the game the way I want, I really need all those animations so I need to be sure it is going to be ok before I start making it.

Thanks again everybody. Much appreciated

[Khris]

Afaik, the 2GB limit doesn't include OGVs. They do get compiled into the exe though, which means you'd get a 3GB exe. You don't want a 5GB exe because of FAT32's 4GB limit, but you can split big exes into parts (via AGS's General settings).

[Frikker]

Great thanks again Khris. Going to download AGS and try to learn enough to maybe make a room with one of my renders, with a character and the camera flythrough to the next scene. If I can get that working then from what you have said, I cant see any other issues that would prevent me from using AGS aslong as I can get somebody onboard who really knows what they are doing, to do the tricky stuff.