suggestions'n'stuff

[InCreator]

Ok, I at least HOPE that someone actually READ what I'm tying to say . There's some things CJ could improve in future releases of this magnificent engine.

* Better GUI management -- I just made a new GUI
for my half-3D adventure (which will soon give a good competition to all others uploaded here) and when
I tried to make a new GUI button, my finger slipped
on mouse button, released it, and now i have 3x30!
size button on my gui. Too bad I can't select it, so
resizing or deleting is impossible. Think it's just too small for AGS to be selectable. Good that we can erase GUIs now, at last.

* Less confusion with relative sizes when creating GUIs and rooms. Why couldn't everything be in it's ACTUAL size? It can't be THAT hard to achive. but 320x240 instead of 640x480 makes things really messy.

* This is more a question than suggestion --
ok, maybe not now, but in future - will AGS ever
have option to place/render LIGHTS? and SHADOWS?
Y'know, Pain(t) Shop Pro can do that. Why not AGS?
It could be soooooo nice to have some shadows under my characters. And light relative shadows -- this could be even nicer. I think i spotted a word about shadow plugin somewhere here -- am i wrong or there actually
IS that thing? I couldn't find this from plugins page, though.

* Bug? S3M files just don't get along with AGS-s Windows engine. What's wrong? I've heard messed up channels, instruments that even aren't in the song and other stuff like this. Usually, songs won't play at all! Just some quiet ticking is all i can hear.  

Anyway, AGS is unbeatable leader of adventure game
designing world, so me and (thousands other people)
will always admire Chris's work and hope it'll be free forever.    

[scotch]

I don't think the coordinate system is that confusing.. although higher precision would be nice at righer res, so it would be nice.

Rendering lights and shadows?  PSP does that?  I know it has a light rendering effect thing.. but you could just paint the light into your bg and use regions for lighting to a similar effect.

If you want accurate shadows cast from lights, well that's impossible, since the characters arent actually 3d and the engine wouldn't know what to cast shadows on to unless it was a an actual 3d scene.  A simple static shadow under foot is probably possible though without too much tough scripting.

Anyway, good luck with your game, I hope it is as good as the best, as you say

[Pumaman]

* Better GUI management -- I just made a new GUI
for my half-3D adventure (which will soon give a good competition to all others uploaded here) and when
I tried to make a new GUI button, my finger slipped
on mouse button, released it, and now i have 3x30!
size button on my gui. Too bad I can't select it, so
resizing or deleting is impossible. Think it's just too small for AGS to be selectable. Good that we can erase GUIs now, at last.

I just tried creating a 3x30 GUI Button and I can select and delete it no problem. I'm unsure as to why you're having this problem.

* Less confusion with relative sizes when creating GUIs and rooms. Why couldn't everything be in it's ACTUAL size? It can't be THAT hard to achive. but 320x240 instead of 640x480 makes things really messy.

The co-ordinates are displayed in relative sizes because that is the co-ordinate system used by the script and so forth, and therefore is designed to make it easier to see what sort of co-ordinates you need to use in the script.

* This is more a question than suggestion --
ok, maybe not now, but in future - will AGS ever
have option to place/render LIGHTS? and SHADOWS?
Y'know, Pain(t) Shop Pro can do that. Why not AGS?
It could be soooooo nice to have some shadows under my characters. And light relative shadows -- this could be even nicer.

As scotch says, this is impossible to do in a 2D environment. You can implement shadows manually by moving a second character around though, but it would be a lot of hassle to get fully working.

* Bug? S3M files just don't get along with AGS-s Windows engine. What's wrong? I've heard messed up channels, instruments that even aren't in the song and other stuff like this. Usually, songs won't play at all! Just some quiet ticking is all i can hear.  

I don't know, nobody else has reported a problem with it before. AGS uses a third-party S3M player and I'm not an expert on mod/tracker formats, so I don't really know I'm afraid.

[Scorpiorus]

Why couldn't everything be in it's ACTUAL size? It can't be THAT hard to achive. but 320x240 instead of 640x480 makes things really messy.

Also I wouldn't like for pathfinder to search a path in 640x480 or 800x600 co-ordinate resolution.

-Cheers

[Synthetique]

when CJ allows us to bend and manipulate sprites in-game, then i have the perfect sollution to the shadows thingy...

[BOYD1981]

the bad playback of s3m (and other mods) is down to JGMOD, i've asked for a BASS plugin to handle playback of mods (i can't code otherwise i'd make one myself), i think it would be too complicated a thing to do to just completely replace JGMOD with BASS, plus you need to pay money if you sell a game that uses BASS so a plugin would be ideal if AGS started using JGMOD again if the bass.dll wasn't found, but no coding ability means that i don't know how hard or easy that is to achieve, plus not many people actually used tracked music in their games anyway so i don't suppose it's going to be made high priority...

[Ben]

Yeah, using BASS isn't a good idea since it would complicate distribution. Another alternative would be to use the Modplug browser plugin (it has its instructions availible to developers), which doesn't have any license fees. Only drawback is it's no longer supported by the person who wrote it, but then again, neither is JGMod..