SUGGESTION: Raise system limits.

[Moribunny]

I've begun work on an adventure game-RPG hybrid, and some of the system limits are a real pain!
Above all, serious RPG's carry LOTS of "global" data around, including numeric and textual stats for multiple characters. Now, 500 GlobalInts and 50 GlobalStrings are extremely limiting.Ã,  :'(
This goes for inventory items as well - 300 is very little to work with.
Thirdly, I am creating a bestiary of many hundreds of monsters. Just for this I will need hundreds of possible views (not characters, because I can insert views into just several characters positioned in the "battle" room).
Then ofcourse RPG's feature humungous gameworlds, so I'll also need way more than 300 rooms and 300 characters.Ã, 
Finally, more global messages would help a lot, too.

I realize that AGS is geared towards pure adventure game creation... Still, it has excellent potential for RPG's, better than any RPG creation software I've tried. So why not?
Besides, generally speaking, why have any such limits whatsoever? Who says my game shouldn't exceed 500 dialog topics? Is this a problem technically?Ã, 

[GarageGothic]

GlobalInts are basically unnecessary as you could write a function to get/set normal int's defined in the global script. You'd be better off creating a few structs of your own and then writing a function to access it from room scripts.

[Theme]

Is there anyway to make some kind of dynamic allocation before compiling the game?
like the malloc command on C
So the numbers of hotspots, rooms, characters vary accordingly to the number specified     

o/

[Kinoko]

I'm working on a rather large RPG myself and I'm working well within the limits. I was worried about runing out of ints and views at first, but after a recent(ish) increase on CJs part, I really have more than enough, and my game is huge.  As said, GlobalInts aren't a problem because you're better off using normal ints anyway. I only use globals for engine-related things.

Views... are you using 4 directions or 8 for each character? If the former, you can use up all 8 within a view for many different things.

Rooms, well, if you -really- think you're going to go over, you can consider making one huge map and putting several rooms on it (this is good for inside houses/rooms because they're usually small and you can space them out so that no matter where a player is within a given room, he can't see the edges of the others.

[strazer]

If the former, you can use up all 8 within a view for many different things.

Note: The current limit is 16 loops per view.

[Kinoko]

Really? I had no idea!

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

And with strings it's the same as with ints - you just create a String, then export it. Repeat as many times as you like.

300 unique inventory items isn't all that limiting - especially since you can give the player more than one item. I mean, you could give to the player the arrow 27 times instead of giving him 27 arrow bolts.

Same with Global Messages...

...hmmm, I'm picking up a pattern here. Have you gotten around to scripting? Strings, ints and global messages are all things that scripting makes obsolete.

And in response to your last question, AFAIK the limits are just there for reference, especially since no one has yet reached them. CJ has oft told us we need but ask if we want to see the limits raised - IF it's really necessary. So my advice is, wait until you reach one of the limits - or get too close for comfort - and come back and suggets raising that particular limit.

[monkey0506]

And as for the dialog system...you shouldn't use the built-in system anyway.  It's deprecated.  Obsolete.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=22526.0

Okay, maybe it's not...but the above link will direct you to the ScrollingDialog Script Module page, where you can find a system for a custom dialog which will allow you to increase the limit to several thousand (I'm pretty sure) because you set the maximum.  Unfortunately, you do have to set a limit, and I'm pretty sure that if you try to make the limit too high it will crash the game because it's too insanely huge.  But the upside is that you can set it much higher than you could possibly count in your lifetime.   And plus I need some testers for my module!

[Gregjazz]

And as for the dialog system...you shouldn't use the built-in system anyway.  It's deprecated.  Obsolete.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=22526.0

Okay, maybe it's not...but the above link will direct you to the ScrollingDialog Script Module page, where you can find a system for a custom dialog which will allow you to increase the limit to several thousand (I'm pretty sure) because you set the maximum.  Unfortunately, you do have to set a limit, and I'm pretty sure that if you try to make the limit too high it will crash the game because it's too insanely huge.  But the upside is that you can set it much higher than you could possibly count in your lifetime.   And plus I need some testers for my module!

+1 for the homemade dialog system.

And if you don't like using modules or other people's code, you can always make your own... but be sure to give Monkey's script a look. There's some clever stuff in there!

[Moribunny]

Thanks to all of you, especially the dialog system - I haven't looked at it yet but it sounds promising and, well, indispensible.
I haven't been exporting/importing variables so that kinda helps  :
This leaves me with inventory. The problem is this is no "zelda", I want "pen&paper" depth for this one. Consider this: I'm looking at a system of let's say 10-15 categories of weapons (category being sword/axe/polearm/etc.),  each containing roughly 20 types, and then within each type I'll want to make tens of individual variations including magical/otherwise special items. And that's just the weapons. Then there's armors and shields and wands etc. etc. etc. If you do the math that's a lot. I really don't know how to work around that. And the views are still bugging me. I didn't want to wait until I actually reach these limits because then it would take another version to implement and I'd be stuck, obviously 
Anyway, thx again.

[Kinoko]

The thing is that inventory doesn't need to be handled with `inventory` at all. Unless I was making an adventure game, I wouldn't even consider it.

My RPG, for example (thought this probably isn't a solution for you) only has say 20 items, 20 weapons, etc. I have a graphical interface with an icon for each item/weapon/etc and an int for each that keeps track of how many I currently own. When say, an int = 0, the icon isn`t there and the description for the empty slot on my GUI is `You have no blahblahs`.

So what you want to do should be very easy to keep track of using ints for each inventory item, then it just depends on whether you want them represented in your game visually or textually, and how.