SUGGESTIONS galore

[HeirOfNorton]

I have a couple things I'd like, and I didn't see 'em in the tracker yet...
First, the ability to use voice speech with a character's THINKING action/view. (I'm making a game in which I want character.Think to be the usual response to looking at objects, etc. I would just use Display with always display text as speech enabled, but the way the characters are in this game they would have to point out EGO talking to himself.)

Also, any way to make the "mouse Y-pos" pop-up GUIs work with OTHER direction? That didn't make much sense, let me rephrase. I'd like to make a GUI that pops up like the basic Sierra one, but at the bottom (or side) of the screen. The ideal would be the ability to set X-min, X-max, Y-min, and Y-max, so you could set EXACTLY where you move the mouse to get the GUI to pop up. It wouldn't be TOO terribly hard to work around this with scripting, checking the mouse position in rep_ex, it's just that this would make things easier for someone who wanted to do this.

HoN

[Gilbert]

Also, any way to make the "mouse Y-pos" pop-up GUIs work with OTHER direction? That didn't make much sense, let me rephrase. I'd like to make a GUI that pops up like the basic Sierra one, but at the bottom (or side) of the screen. The ideal would be the ability to set X-min, X-max, Y-min, and Y-max, so you could set EXACTLY where you move the mouse to get the GUI to pop up. It wouldn't be TOO terribly hard to work around this with scripting, checking the mouse position in rep_ex, it's just that this would make things easier for someone who wanted to do this.

Actually I really agree on this one, such kind of automatic popup feature should either be nonexistence or at least supports more edges.

Edit: just added this to the tracker.

[strazer]

Actually, there's already a tracker entry for this:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=416

Edit:

I have updated the existing entry and removed the new one.

[Pumaman]

I see where you're coming from on this one; but as it's so easy to do with scripting it's by no means a priority to implement.

[SSH]

Our Product Change Request (PCR) system here at work has a number of improtant fields that might usefully be added to the tracker:

1. Customer priority: how important the suggester thinks it is
2. Developer priority: how likely CJ is to do it soon
3. Workaround: a place for people to suggest workarounds for the problem

[SSH]

ANother suggestion: split-screen mode

Since we can now have two character invetories on screen easily, how about having two rooms on screen simultaneously. Obviously, they would have to be half-height or half-wdith rooms...

Oops double post. SOrry!

[Pumaman]

Our Product Change Request (PCR) system here at work has a number of improtant fields that might usefully be added to the tracker:

Yeah, the tracker does need some serious work done to it, it's very basic at present. One day I'll get around to it.

ANother suggestion: split-screen mode

Since we can now have two character invetories on screen easily, how about having two rooms on screen simultaneously. Obviously, they would have to be half-height or half-wdith rooms...

Alright mister, on yer bike! 

[JLM]

About future suggestions...

Will there ever be an option in AGS to define different colors for dialog options depending on if player has chosen a certain topic earlier? It would be a very, very important feature for my game.

Please, tell me, if it is ever going to be implemented...

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Dialogs are tricky ground in AGS at the mo - probably the most underdeveloped right now. CJ has let us now that he plans to revamp the whole shebangs, but I don't think it will be anytime soon.

There are many, many workarounds, however. Like using inventory items instead of topics, or listboxes, or labels, or whatever. You'd have to hardcode, but if it's that vital to your game...

[Redwall]

Creating your own dialog system isn't too difficult provided you have a decent grasp of programming, and if you tend to put a lot of script in your dialogs (animations and such) it's sometimes easier to foresake the built-in dialog editor anyway. (although it is nice for organizing stuff)

[strazer_away]

Will there ever be an option in AGS to define different colors for dialog options depending on if player has chosen a certain topic earlier? It would be a very, very important feature for my game.

It's on the tracker already, so I guess it will eventually happen.

[SSH]

Just wanted to check if the various suggestions in this thread  have been tracker'd... I think some are missing even though CJ said theyd be useful. Of course, CJ has already implemented some of them.... 

[strazer]

I think some are missing even though CJ said theyd be useful.

What suggestions are you referring to, specifically?

[SSH]

General prupose item list of which inv items would be a special case, as I said in my first post...

Also this one from the beta thread:

being able to open other scripts read-only while editing a script? I'm often needing to quickly check something in the header, for example...

Rick has already seconded this

It maybe would be worth revisting the beta thread to make sure there aren't any suggestions hiding in there that need going in the tracker. I'd volunteer to do it myself, but then I'm not a tracker moderator    The 2.7 beta thread is now in the top 10 threads for lenght in the whoel forums, btw...

[RickJ]

being able to open other scripts read-only while editing a script? I'm often needing to quickly check something in the header, for example...

I would even go so far as to suggest that whenever a script is opened for edit the corresponding (i.e. in the case of a module script) header file also be opened for write. 

[strazer]

Ok, I have added them:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=503
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=504

Be sure to let me know if you find anything else CJ-approved that I've missed.

[Neil Dnuma]

Another suggestion (I've searched the forums, read TFM, but still might have missed something, so please bear with me... )

Sometimes you have a character which behaves in most strange ways, jumps, falls and what not. To make sure it would stay in position, I made all it's sprites the same size, allowing room for all those actions. Silly! Eats space.

Would it be possible to include a "crop sprite at top only" feature? This way it'd still stay in position (to my limited knowledge), but it would be an easy and fast way to decrease gamesize (and increase performance speed...?).

[Pumaman]

Well, characters are pivoted at the bottom centre of the sprite, so if you ensure that your images are centered within the frames, you should be able to use the normal Crop feature on a group of frames to reduce them to an animatable size.

[Neil Dnuma]

Sure, and it's okay with "normal" characters, but I had this guy panicing, jumping up, hitting the head and falling down, resulting in his artificial limb detaching and rolling a bit away. After cropping, he would slide a lot back and fro on the spot, naturally, since he sometimes bended over to the left, sometimes to the right, and the lying sprite was much wider. To have it animating properly resulted in a lot of character[EGO].x/Wait combinations. Same problems I had with cropping a kangaroo, as the tail stuck out in side-view. Bottom line is, the "natural center" of a character isn't always in the middle.

The solution as of now is either keeping larger sprites or calculating a lot of movement for each special animation (thus avoiding the AnimateCharacter(Ex) function(s)).

Being able to crop only the top of sprites wouldn't affect the sprite's bottom center. Another possibility would of course be to be able to always crop the same amount on each side (with AGS calculating how much to crop without changing the center). That would be a dreamÃ, 

[Pumaman]

Ah ok, I see what you're saying.

Well, what about if the Crop feature always cropped the same amount off the left and right sides, thus leaving the centre intact? Would that solve the problem?