AGS 4.+ Roadmap discussion

[Crimson Wizard]

Since this was mentioned in another thread (not sure if this feature is too specific or fits a roadmap):

The possibility to specify movement per frame of a walkcycle (this is to avoid sliding or showing characters with a limp)

Yes, I believe that's too narrow and it's better to open a separate discussion for this, or just open a ticket.
But I'd be interested to know an opinion on its design, and which use cases there may be. In the most primitive sense this may be done by flagging a frame as "moving" or "non-moving", but the question is whether will that be enough or not.

There are other animation-related issues that may be discussed separately (or altogether) as well:

- Having a script callback for particular frames. Alan Drake has this in his experimental branch (although not done completely right in my opinion), where he uses this specifically for substituting footstep sounds. I've been thinking more about frame "tagging", where user may mark a frame as "trigger event" regardless of whether it's for a sound or not.

- Having a customizable view schema/template which defines loop roles (directional facing/movement, and anything else). This may come useful if we develop the transitional animations (see this comment above).

[eri0o]

Oh, I only mentioned the Steam Audio Library there because it appears to be similar to OpenAL-Soft (the positional audio, hrtf, filters, ...) but with Apache instead of LGPL license. It appears it comes with additional features too (the proprietary compatibility stuff), but the backend not being SDL (it would be the system ones directly, so the mechanism to select which per platform would change).

I also noticed that it was mentioned something like ags script package management here before

8. Find and manage modules and plugins from the editor instead of having to come to the forum.

So I tried this before

https://github.com/ericoporto/agsmodulelist
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/editor-plugin-agsget-version-0-1-0/msg636615733/#msg636615733

It's just really a ton of boring work to archive and update all the AGS modules whenever someone releases something.

I made a plugin for the Editor too - it's broken because I need to rebuild with newer AGS.Types. But you can see how it worked in the gif.

It used a lock file similar to npm

https://github.com/ericoporto/agsModuleList/blob/master/agsget/agsget/EditorPlugin/AGS.Plugin.AgsGet/AgsGetCore/ManifestAndLock/PackageLocker.cs

I documented the logic here - the lockfile specifics I explained in the forums plugin page.

https://github.com/ericoporto/agsModuleList/tree/master/agsget

Anyway, it's actually fully written, the problem is keeping the module list updated. The list can be browsed here

https://ericoporto.github.io/agsModuleList/

I tried to create an issue to then update Everytime a module was released but soon I ran out of steam.

Yeah it could be a website with database and all that but I think it will be an even bigger pain to maintain - the amount of attempts to hack the few sites I maintain is just ridiculous and I had to scale down and give up on a ton of db based things I had through the years.

Anyway, if someone else wants to take on this I have a ton of information to share xD

[Laura Hunt]

I forgot to include this in my list of suggestions; In fact I keep forgetting to mention it and it probably would have been a good suggestion for AGS 3.6.0 or 3.6.1, but it's probably too late for that: the possibility to set the width of the textbox for the Say command, just as it's possible to set the width of the Think text with game.speech_bubble_width. It's just weird that Say doesn't have an equivalent function.