The Game Settings pane contains a list of all the various overall options that you can set for your game.

Note that some things listed here are explained later in the documentation, so if you don't understand one of the items in this list, come back to it later.

Most of these options can be changed at runtime with the script command SetGameOption.

• Debug Mode - whether the debug keys are active. When debug mode is on, you can press Ctrl-X to teleport to any room, Ctrl-S to give all inventory items, Ctrl-A to display walkable areas on the screen, and Ctrl-D to display statistics about the current room. When debug mode is off, these do nothing. See the Debugging features section for more.
• Play sound on score - controls whether a sound effect is played when the player scores points. If so, you can set the sound number, which will play SOUNDx.WAV (or SOUNDx.MP3), where X is the number you set.
• Walk to hotspot in Look mode - controls whether the player will walk to "walk-to" spots when the player looks at the hotspot. Normally he only walks on use, speak and use-inv.
• Dialog options on GUI - controls where the player's options for dialog are displayed. If this option is not checked, then in a conversation, the options will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you check this box, then instead the options will be displayed on the GUI you specify.
• Use "anti-glide" mode - you may notice that, as the character walks, it can seem as if he is gliding, especially if you have a slow animation speed setting. When anti-glide mode is on, the man's position is only updated when the frame of animation changes. You will need to increase each character's walking speed if you use this option.
• Text windows use GUI - allows you to customize the standard text window appearance in the game, using the specified interface element. See here for more information.
• Pixel gap between options - defines the gap between the options displayed to the player in a conversation. Normally this is 0, which means the options are right below each other. Changing it to 1 or 2 can make the option display look less cluttered; it's a matter of personal preference.
• Skip Speech - determines how and whether the player can skip speech in-game. This can be set to allow the mouse and/or keyboard, or neither, to skip speech in the game.
• When interface disabled - determines what happens to buttons on your GUIs while the game interface is disabled (eg. during a cutscene).
• Always display text as speech - if you select this option, then all normal text in the game will be displayed above the main character's head as speech text, much like the way the Lucasarts games worked. If this option is not checked, then normal text appears in a pop-up message box, like the way that the Sierra games worked.
• Speech style - in the default Lucasarts-style speech, when a character talks, the speech text is displayed above their head in the game, and the character's talking view is used to animate the actual character.
  However, if you set this option to Sierra-style then the talking view is used to display an animating portrait separately in the top-left of the screen, with the text to the right of it. This is similar to the way that Space Quest 5, King's Quest 6 and other later Sierra games worked. You can also cycle to another option, "Sierra- style with background", which is the same except a text window is drawn behind the speech text to make it easier to read.
  "QFG4-style speech" uses a full-screen character portrait, like the way that QFG4 worked.
• Speech portrait side - if you're using Sierra-style speech, then this determines whether the portrait appears on the left or the right of the screen. The "alternate" setting means it swaps sides whenever a different person talks, and the "Based on X position" setting means that the side of the screen is chosen depending on where the characters are standing.
• Room transition style - defines what type of screen transition is used when moving from one room to another. Various options are available.
• Save screenshots in save games - Saves a mini-screenshot of the player's current position into the save game file. This will create larger save game files, but it will mean that you can use a save game thumbnails GUI to make the save/load interface more professional.
• Enforce object-based scripting - Puts the script compiler into strict mode, where it will not accept the old-style (pre-AGS 2.7) script commands. This should preferably be ticked, since you should no longer be using the old commands.
• Left-to-right operator precedence - if this is ticked, then operators of equal precedence in the script will be evaluated left to right. For example, 5 - 4 - 3 could be interpreted as (5 - 4) - 3 or as 5 - (4 - 3), thus giving different results. You should always use parenthesis to clarify expressions like this, so that the operator precedence doesn't affect the result.
• Pixel-perfect click detection - normally, when the player clicks the mouse, AGS just checks to see if the cursor is within the rectangular area of each character and object on the screen. However, if this option is checked, then it will further check whether the player clicked on an actual pixel of the object graphic, or whether it was a transparent part of the graphic. If this option is enabled and they click on a transparent pixel, then the hotspot behind the object will be activated instead.
• Don't automatically move character in Walk mode - normally, when you click the mouse in the Walk mode, the main character will move to where you clicked. However, if you want to create a game all viewed from a 1st-person perspective, and so don't have a main character, then selecting this option allows you to use the Walk mode for other things. If selected, then "Character stands on hotspot" events are instead triggered by clicking the Walk cursor on the hotspot.
• Use letterbox (320x240 / 640x480) resolution - this option is only available if your game is 320x200 or 640x400, and it will tell AGS to run the game at 320x240 or 640x480 instead. The screen will be "letter-boxed" - that is, there will be a black border top and bottom. You may want to use this option if you need a square pixel aspect ratio for your graphics.
• Don't use inventory graphics as cursors - normally, when you select an inventory item the mouse cursor is changed into that item. However, if you want to create a Lucasarts-style game (where the inventory cursor is always a cross-hair), check this option and it won't be changed.
• Don't scale up fonts at 640x400 - normally, if the player chooses 640x400, then the fonts will be scaled up to match. However, if you have drawn your fonts for the 640x400 resolution, use this option to stop them being stretched.
• Resources split every Mb - see here for information.
• Characters turn before walking - specifies that when a character starts to walk somewhere, it will first turn round to face the correct direction using available animation frames, rather than just suddenly switching to face the right way.
• Handle inventory clicks in script - normally, if the player clicks on an inventory item, it is processed internally by AGS. However, if you enable this option, then clicking an inventory item will call your on_mouse_click function with eMouseLeftInv or eMouseRightInv, and you then need to process it yourself. You can use the game.inv_activated variable to find out what they clicked on.
• Enable mouse wheel support - if enabled, on_mouse_click can be called with the values eMouseWheelNorth and eMouseWheelSouth, which signify the user scrolling their mouse wheel north or south, respectively.

  NOTE: Not all mice have mouse wheels, and the DOS engine does not support the mouse wheel at all. Therefore, your game should never require the mouse wheel in order to be playable - it should only be used as a handy extra.

• Number dialog options - adds an index number before each dialog option when they are displayed to the player. For example,

  1. Hello there!
  2. Goodbye
  

  This allows you to visually show the player which option the shortcut keys will choose, as well as seperating the options if you don't use a bullet point.
• Dialog options go upwards on GUI - Normally, if you select a non-textwindow GUI for the dialog options, they will be printed from the top down. However, if you select this option they will go from the bottom of the GUI upwards.
• Crossfade music tracks - This allows you to tell AGS to crossfade between your background music tracks. Crossfading means fading out the old track while fading in the new one when the music changes. You can select a crossfade speed from the drop-down list. There are some disadvantages to using this option - firstly, it's fairly slow, since AGS has to decode two music files at once. Secondly, it only works with OGG, MP3 and WAV music. You cannot crossfade MIDI, XM, MOD, S3M or IT music.
• Anti-alias TTF fonts - If enabled, any TTF fonts you have in your game will be rendered to the screen anti-aliased. This can make them look a lot better, but it has two drawbacks - firstly, anti-aliasing is significantly slower than normal rendering, so you might want an option to allow the player to turn it off. Second, anti-aliasing only works in hi-color games (in 256-colour games, the output will look blurred and unreadable). NOTE that anti-aliasing is not currently done on lucasarts-style speech due to technical reasons.
• Thought uses bubble GUI - Determines which text window GUI is used for displaying thoughts with Think.
• Characters turn to face direction - if set, then when a character turns round with the Character.FaceLocation or Character.FaceCharacter script commands, they will visibly turn around using their available loops. If this option is not set, they will immediately appear facing their new direction.
• Write game text backwards - in-game text will be written right-to-left, ie. line breaks are worked out from the end of the sentence going backwards, and the last words are displayed first. This is used by languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
• Display multiple inventory items multiple times - normally, if the player has two of an inventory item, the item will still only be shown once in the Inventory window. If you check this option, however, then all the copies of the item that the player has will be displayed. Useful for RPG-style inventories.
• Save games folder name - if this is blank, then the player's saved games will be saved to the folder where the game is installed. This is not a good idea, because it forces different users on the same machine to share save games, and Windows Vista discourages games from writing to the Program Files folder. Instead, if you supply a folder name here, then AGS will automatically create it within the user's Saved Games (Vista) or My Documents (XP and earlier) folder, and their save games will be saved there.

See Also: Enhanced Saved Games
See Also: Windows Vista Game Explorer