AGS 3.0 Final - it's been a long road

[Pumaman]

When you compile your game (either through Build EXE or rebuild all files) it only seems to compile the music.vox file the first time. The next time you compile the file is not deleted, but its not overwritten with a new version either. I've tried adding new music files, changing whether a piece of music is used, saved, run, compiled, deleted the compiled files, but the only way to get a new music.vox file seems to be restarting the editor, then compiling again.

Hmm, I'll look into this.

It only seems to happen when I use it with: fullscreen and DirectDraw 5 and the "Force alternate letterbox resolution" is checked. Now I use the Direct3D 9 and it works fine. The resolution is 320x200 and the depth is 32bits(true color).

Hmm, there seems to be a couple of issues with DDraw 5 in letterbox mode. I'll look into it.


In the meantime, RC 2 is now up. This includes various fixes as we draw gradually closer to the final release.

[Ghost]

Sweet and silky. RC2 swallowed the 2.72 code for Once Upon A Crime with ease and has none of the issues I reported beforehand. Screenshots with both drivers work fine, too.

Can we hope for a chrismas present with a 3.0 in the name? 

[subspark]

Hmm. Now that animated cursors are fully operational there seems to be no option to specify the actual animation delay for cursors in runtime.

The view preview has an animation delay spinner that when set to 0, excluding manually delayed frames, animates desirably quickly. I think this animation delay spinner should be outside of the view preview section and it should govern general animation speed for mouse cursors and character animation.

Simply less confusing and more unifying.

Cheers,
Paul.


Edit:

Can we hope for a chrismas present with a 3.0 in the name?

Wait! Not before my Christmas present to all you SCUMM fans! 

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I'd just like to draw everyone's attention to the following.

AGS can as of now use external paint programs for editing sprites.

AGS can now, thanks to the brilliant new audio plugin by smiley (which could reasonably be included in the AGS zip), fully manage sound, music and speech files.

Am I the only one to be flabbergasted, blown away and simply amazed by these recent developments? Probably. It's just so great not to have to multitask so much anymore - anything I need to edit I now reach WITHIN AGS.

Well, except fonts.

Heh. Still, now you can easily even use the sprite manager as a repository for BMP fonts, later to be converted with FontEdit.

[Ghost]

Am I the only one to be flabbergasted, blown away and simply amazed by these recent developments?

You're right Rui, it seems that it's somehow taken as a "given feature", but it's really a nice addition. And I bet some plugin or another will pop up eventually that includes font edits, too.


Also, as irrelevant as it may sound, I totally love that new exe sprite. It's... sexy.

[subspark]

I think we should take this oppertunity to thank Chris for such a loveley new editor. His work is certainly something you cannot take for granted.

Hip hip horray! 

Paul.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Nice work with the sprite import, CJ.  Works perfectly now!

[monkey0506]

* You can now double-click a sprite to open it in your default image editor; new Preferences option to allow you to specify your image editor

At first I wasn't sure how AGS would know when to update the sprite, so I tried it out. I must say Chris, I nearly crapped my pants off. The sprite is saved to a temporary file, I use my image editor to modify and save it, then when I close my image editor program, AGS automatically updates from the now modified temporary file. Absolutely brilliant.

* Added Replace option to Find dialog in script editor
* Welcome screen now allows you to scroll right to read the full path of the recently edited games
* Fixed double-clicking a root node in the project tree opening a child as well as expanding it
* Fixed DrawingSurface.Release to update GUI if the dynamic sprite was being used a GUI background

Yes, yes, and HELL YES. Chris I may be straight, but I am totally gay for you right now.



...hmm...I somehow envision that ending up in someone's signature...

[Electroshokker]

Chris, I noticed you still included v1.1 of my verbcoin template.

I'm updating it to v1.4 this weekend (minor bugfix and further code cleanup compared to v1.3), so you can include that version in the next release candidate. (or AGS 3.0 final)

Wouldn't want people to be bothered by the bugs that existed in v1.1

[Pumaman]

Sweet and silky. RC2 swallowed the 2.72 code for Once Upon A Crime with ease and has none of the issues I reported beforehand. Screenshots with both drivers work fine, too.

Glad to hear it!

Can we hope for a chrismas present with a 3.0 in the name?

Well, I guess that depends on whether you guys have been good boys and girls this year...

Now that animated cursors are fully operational there seems to be no option to specify the actual animation delay for cursors in runtime.

This has always been the case -- if you want to adjust it you need to change each individual frame speed. Yes this needs to be implemented, but not for 3.0.

Also, as irrelevant as it may sound, I totally love that new exe sprite. It's... sexy.

If you're running Vista, set it to show the Extra Large icons -- now that version is sexy.

I think we should take this oppertunity to thank Chris for such a loveley new editor. His work is certainly something you cannot take for granted.

Why thankyou! It's a pleasure, of course.

Nice work with the sprite import, CJ.  Works perfectly now!

Thanks for the update, I'm glad it's sorted.

Yes, yes, and HELL YES. Chris I may be straight, but I am totally gay for you right now.

I guess I'll have to hold you to that at the next Mittens.

Chris, I noticed you still included v1.1 of my verbcoin template.

I'm updating it to v1.4 this weekend (minor bugfix and further code cleanup compared to v1.3), so you can include that version in the next release candidate. (or AGS 3.0 final)

Ah yes, thanks for that. Is your latest version based off the modified version of 1.1 that was included with AGS, ie. having the new template icon?

[RickJ]

Win98/ME
In previous betas AGS 3.0 took a long time to load and was barely useable.  I'm not sure when it happened but now with RC1 it works great, no performance issues as far as I can tell.   Just so you know...nce work.

Sprite Manager
I miss being able to reorganize sprites by selecting and dragging them to other folders.  I hope this feature makes a come back in a future release.

GUI Editor Delete
When you have a GUI tab open the Delete key will delete the selected control, makes sense so far.  However, if an editable field in the property or event pane has focus it is easy to get the idea that the delete key will delete whatever is selected in that field, rather than deleting controls from the GUI itself.   I suppose it's something everyone will eventually get used to but I can also see this as being an endless source of "How come stuff keeps disappearing from my GUI?" type questions in the Beginners Tech forum.

GUI Editor Lock Control Position
Being able to keep controls from accidentally being moved around (usually from just selecting them) is another lost feature that I hope finds it's way back home soon.

GUI Editor Ctrl-Up/Dn
Being able to index to the next or previous control is very useful.  However, I haven't been able to figure out how to use this feature while editing properties.  For example, if you are editing a control's script name, it would be nice to hit a hot key that increments to the next/previous control and keep focus in the same field.   It's a small point and perhaps I just haven't figured out how to do it yet

Anyway, these are the only comments I have so far, other than to say great work and thanks.

[edit]
Sorry about that I didn't mean to shout, just forgot the "/" in the closing bold tag 

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I miss being able to reorganize sprites by selecting and dragging them to other folders.  I hope this feature makes a come back in a future release.

Yeah, several people (including myself) have mentioned this and I think it will happen in the future.  I hope this functionality gets extended to views as well, since I have upwards of 120 views already and can't take advantage of the new folder structure of ags 3.0 otherwise.  At least with the sprite folders you can delete a sprite and re-import it in the folder of choice right now .

[NiksterG]

Just small thing, really doesn't affect anything at all... but I've got to do my part for AGS, however small. 

When you open acwin.exe without a game running, you get this message:

You must create and save a game first in the AGS Editor before you can use
this engine.

If you have just downloaded AGS, you are probably running the wrong executable.
Run AGSEDIT.EXE to launch the editor.

However, the correct program to open is actually AGSEditor.exe.

Hehe. 

[monkey0506]

Yes, yes, and HELL YES. Chris I may be straight, but I am totally gay for you right now.

I guess I'll have to hold you to that at the next Mittens.

Ahh...I'd better start saving now so as to be able to make it then.

On a more 'on-topic' note, I was just thinking regarding the external sprite editing, would it be possible for to implement a sort of 'Update now' button instead of waiting for the program to be exited completely? The reason I ask is (though it's overkill to the extreme), I primarily use Photoshop (due to familiarity) which takes a while to load up. If AGS could just tell Photoshop to open the file and then I could click an 'update' button back in AGS, then I could leave Photoshop open whilst doing any sprite editing.

I understand if it's too much to ask for this release, but if it's possible I would much appreciate it.

[subspark]

I could click an 'update' button back in AGS

I have to agree entirely with Monkey on this. If we're making a lot of sprite edits with many files we tend to save a lot.
Perhaps AGS could update when this 'temp' file has changed due to a save from Photoshop. This way an update button wouldnt be neccesary and AGS could remain as is.

Cheers,
Paul.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Like any good tester I've been trying to intentionally break AGS 3.0, and this is what happened when I removed all the frames from a loop while it was animating in the view window:



Should probably auto-disable animation I guess to prevent this?


Also, I found an intermittent issue with FaceLocation not working properly, though since I've proven it to be intermittent I can't really provide any cause for it, but here's an example:

Code: ags

cAuggie.FaceLocation(cAuggie.x,cAuggie.y+10,eBlock);

This is supposed to make Auggie face down so he'll use loop 0 for talking.  It works fine in 2.72, but when I compiled under AGS 3.0 he was using loop 1 instead.  For some reason, when I commented out the line, compiled, uncommented the line and recompiled it worked just fine.  It could just have been an import bug, but I think it's worth mentioning!

Edit:

The preferences setting for selecting transparency color doesn't seem to actually do anything yet.  I thought it was working until I imported a gif animation that showed up as black again, so I tried switching from palette 0 to top-left and it still loaded a black background.  When I chose 'import new sprite from file' and set it to use top-left transparency it imported properly, as did the gif animation import afterwards.  This would also indicate that palette 0 still isn't working reliably, however ;(.


Edit 2:  I notice that the paste option does not show up initially in the right-click menu for scripts, though it does work from the menu, and once you've pasted once it seems to work fine afterwards.

[Recluse]

Sweet and sexy hotness!!! I downloaded it twice!! 

EDIT: Would there possibly be a way in the next RC to load and edit room backgrounds as well?!? It would seem that most of the implementation is there, the focus just needs to be changed.

Just an idea.

[RickJ]

There seems to be a bug when renumbering rooms where a message pops up saying that the room.asc file can't be found and then it copies in a blank one.  The original is completely gone, so I would imagine that it probably got overwritten with the blank.

There also is a problem importing non-standard room names such as  _blank.crm.  This used to work and was a workaround for "new room" not having  the ability to select a template to create the new with.   A couple of times the editor hungup and I had to kill it from the task manager.  It also locked up when trying to import a room that had no room.asc file (actually it was mis-named by accident). 

The _blank.crm templating feature seems to be missing so all the above were attempts to find a work around.  Perhaps in the next version we supplement "new room" and "new script"  with a simple template selection scheme. 

[Scorpiorus]

By the way, is there any way to disable auto-indentation in AGS 3.0?
I use my own custom formatting of script which always interfere with it.

Also, I noticed pressing Ctrl-T in script editor swaps two lines around. I suspect it can now make people mess up their codes if they accidently press it instead of F5 trying to "Test game". Personally, I do that mistake now and then as I'm working in both AGS 3.0 and 2.72 versions. I think that's because formerly you have to close the script editor window to test a game but now it is part of the AGS main GUI and so I see treeview on the right and spontaneously think I can test it from here.

Another thing about the frame SPD setting, would it be feasible to also display that under each frame in a loop as it used to be? It's now harder to estimate how loop will run: need to click each frame to see the delay value. And by estimate I mean it in a bit different sense that just view preview, as I, for example, need to see the exact values for each frame at once.

p.s. And where is the loop counter in debug mode gone? Again it's maybe personal by I always found that a nice built-in feature to have, especially for quick test games


EDIT:

Out of curiosity, what control component does the AGS Editor use to display tabs if I may ask?   

[Electroshokker]

Chris, I noticed you still included v1.1 of my verbcoin template.

I'm updating it to v1.4 this weekend (minor bugfix and further code cleanup compared to v1.3), so you can include that version in the next release candidate. (or AGS 3.0 final)

Ah yes, thanks for that. Is your latest version based off the modified version of 1.1 that was included with AGS, ie. having the new template icon?

Yup, v1.4 is available now. There should be no errors whatsoever anymore in it. I'll probably write some documentation you can include in the help file soon.