AGS 3.02 Wishlist

[Dualnames]

CJ, I'd like to ask of a favor(hope you see this), well ok I've been using sprite manager a lot. A lot. So well I noticed sth that would help me greatly(if it's already there please do say). I want to be able to select some sprites and when i right click on them i can have a selection like export selected sprites. That would be ultimately useful.

[Alarconte]

Well, I have a constructive idea, and I will defend it to the dead (well, to the finish release of the idea in the AGS xD)

Customizable Sierra-Style Portrait Location in each character. I'm not saying nothing to dificult as X,y positions, not, Only Left or Right. This is because Neither of the Sierra-Style Portraits Locations in the General Settings is useful to me (more than twenty) speech views. Some characters have the heads towards left, rigth.. and when are dialogating, not ever the "Based on character Position" works (or even be tottaly wrong. And Alternate the same, When the character has a head towards the rigth, the portrait is in the rigth, and viceversa. xD

A Simple Checbox in every Character Speech View section with "left" or "rigth" will be a great improve to Dialogs based in SierraStyle, Best (sometimes or for some programmers) than a General Settings selection

^^

[SSH]

Another thing that would be handy:

Translucent Overlays

[JpSoft]

Dinamically use existing .png or .bmp files as walkable areas, or even better, change walkable areas directly from the script (i dont found nothing of that and it could be very usefull to be able to create random rooms).

Jp

[bicilotti]

Function prototypes like in C.

I'm writing a tiny tile based platform as a tutorial: function prototypes would help me much to get easily through my code / to show others what's all about.

[Gold Dragon]

I was reading the thread "Topic: Scripting for objects in separate rooms" and I found a work around solution in it thanks to Monkey _05 but I was wondering

could it be possible to make this really easy (controling room objects,hotspots, ect) in globalscript files like this...

Room[ID].Object[ID].Visiable = false;
or
Room[ID].oObjectName.Clickable = true;

I hope you get the idea. The reason why I would like this is because I'm interacting with an animal that I made a character so it can be in several different rooms. But 'Character' interactions go in the globalscript. Thus makes it difficult for script in the globalscript Files to have an effect on Room properties, objects and what not.

Is this possoble to code for future versions of AGS?

[Gilbert]

That has been requested for several times. But it's not easy to implement as it seems.
The problem is, when it's not the current room, the engine won't know if there's such an object in that particular room. Especially for oObjectName, which is specific to a room file.
Unless the editor will compile an room-item list while saving a game, which will cause the editor to scan all the room files and may hinder performance, this is not easily done. Moreover, in this way we will lose the expandability of the compiled games (currently you may add room files or update a room file by simply dropping a .crm file into the game's folder, which is possibly impossible if that above feature is adopted).

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

If objects were room-independent that would fix the problem, but this too seems like a considerable effort to implement.  The easiest way to work around it is to use variables to track your changes and then before fading into a room check those variables and do whatever you need.

[GarageGothic]

After all the discussion about automatic lipsync (and hopefully its implementation in smiley's audio manager plugin), I'm wondering how much work it would be to allow lipsyncing for LucasArts speech.

While I agree that mouth movement doesn't need to be very accurate with the distant characters of classic LucasArts style, the mode is a useful workaround if you want character portraits to work differently from standard Sierra style. For instance I use LucasArt speech to emulate the Gabriel Knight dialog interface (hiding the actual speech with an invisible font and displaying the same text on a GUI). And now that true lipsync will hopefully be much easier to implement, I'm sure we'll see lots more people taking advantage of it.

[subspark]

I will be taking full advantage of it. No doubt in my mind there.

Cheers,
Paul.

[Goldmund]

As I mourn the demise of indication of the scaling level under mouse in the editor, I still dream of something that would be even better: a dummy character/object that could be placed on a walkable area in the editor to see how it obeys the scaling/lighting settings without having to "test game" all over again, apply corrections, "test game", apply more corrections etc.

[GarageGothic]

DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile support for PNG files would be very much appreciated since it's the only format that allows alpha channels. I'm coding a small paint application and it would be great if the user could use his own custom brushes with alpha channels without having to import them into the sprite file first.

PNG support for SaveScreenshot and DynamicSprite.SaveToFile would also be nice, because PCX isn't that widespread anymore (Windows' Paint application can't even open it!) and BMPs tend to be huge, but it's not as essential.

Edit: Speaking of alpha channels, is there any chance for DrawingSurfaces with alpha channel support? As it is now, if you use DrawImage with the transparency setting or alpha channel sprites on a DrawingSurface set to COLOR_TRANSPARENT, it will show that lovely magic pink color through or around the edges of the sprite.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

As I mourn the demise of indication of the scaling level under mouse in the editor,

That's gone?!?! I didn't notice it because I haven't been using scaling, but I do recall a project in which that was an INVALUABLE help, needed all sorts of complicated scaling to get things right. I'd love to see this back, please!!

[Adamski]

I will happily get down on my knees and beg you for this one, but please please please can we have scroll arrows or a scroll bar or something in the dialogue options gui?

[Alarconte]

Mmm

since 3.0, I have problems to select the Talkie animation sprite cause they're more little in sprite screen xD Can you adjust the resolution without we need to change the resolution of our screen everytime we would to select talkie animations, or hurt our eyes? xDD

thanks xD

[SSH]

Perhaps a mouseover for a few seconds of a sprite in the sprite viewer could show it actual-size as a tooltip?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

That'd be great. I miss double-clicking them and getting a preview.

Well, I don't miss the double-clicking, of course. I miss the preview.

[GarageGothic]

Actually I would prefer double-clicking bringing up the preview and perhaps Shift-Doubleclick opening it for editing. I often forget the new functionality, doubleclick a sprite to see it larger and end up having to wait for Photoshop to load before being able to get back to editing my game.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Serves you right for not picking a much lighter program for fast editing like M$paint.

(just joshing, btw)

[skuttleman]

Is there an important reason why you can't pass a zero to the run-script command in the dialog manager?

Also, how hard would it be to get something like a readonly int dialog.ID (which is the topic number, I know, but it would help me with me with a module I'm creating)?

EDIT: Also, must run-script only allow me to pass a 16-bit number? Could it be a full 32-bit integer? Not trying to nag, but I guess that's what this thread's for afterall.