The Not-so-small List of Unanswered Technical Questions

[fabittar]

FOREWORD: Knowledge Base seems to be offline. The 'Features' page won't elucidate most of my questions. Searching the forum proved somewhat difficult because I'm unfamiliar with the different versions of AGS.

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Programming is the least interesting of all activities I've ever got myself into, but over the years (I'll be 30 in two months and one day, sadly) I learned some C, some Python, and a load of MEL script. My real interest, and I'll assume it's the same for most of you guys, lies in creating an adventure game the like of the good old Sierra's and LucasArts's point-n-click gems. It's something I've dreamed of in distant 1990, and the dream persists. You probably feel the same and come from a similar background, give or take a few years.

My background as an artist, both in 2D and 3D form, and what experience I've garnered over the years as an animator have given me the courage to make up a story, mull over ideas for puzzles, consider the wide range of options and what can be done with the medium itself. Regrettably, this is not my first try. A very, very long time ago, I tried to create my own little world on the screen, but I failed. Not for lack of time as I had plenty back then. I failed because I was imature and mostly because it was a LOT of hard work. And I quit the dream projet to play Parasite Eve (or Chrono Cross, I can't remember). AGS was in its infancy and from a professional point of view, so was I. My drawings and sketches were pretty neat, but otherwise unimpressive.

A few years later I'm back with the same old intent, AGS has grown into a behemoth of adventuring prowess, amateur games are a-plenty, and some people aimed for commercial sales and pulled it off. Not too shabby, Mr. Chris Jones. Maybe it's about time I do something with my dream, too. Now I'm a little bit wiser, I know better than to rush into things without planning, my artistic abilities are sharper, and I feel much more confident to see this through. What am I doing with AGS? Don't know yet, don't much care at this time. I'm a big fan of Poe and Lovecraft, am in perpetual love with Monkey Island and Quest for Glory (who isn't?), and throughout the years made up a lot of characters and situations in my mind that should prove useful if only as inspiration to come up with something new.

YET ANOTHER PREFACE: To make things easier and slightly more manageable, I divided my project in logical steps. This ridiculously long post is my attempt to cover one of these, and the thought occured to me that it might end up being useful to somebody else, i.e.: an updated/elaborated 'features' Q&A.

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Q1) By 'Standard Sierra' or 'Verb Coin' GUI, do you mean AGI/SCI and SCUMM GUIs are available out-of-the-box? If so, does AGS feature a command parser similar to SCI0 and early SCI1.0 games? Also, it is mentioned that a LucasArts-styled conversation system is available by default; is the same true for Sierra-styled conversations, with zoomed-in talking portraits and what-not?

Q2) AGS now is a WIN86x-based application, but its games & byproducts (I've seen platformers and simulators done with AGS which are nothing short of amazing) run on an engine that's been ported to Linux and OSX; how well and what features will not work with each ported engine? The WIN86x engine works on top of DirectX; Linux and OSX engines are running on software mode, then? Should we expect future support for a 64-bits architecture?

Q3) In the 'features' page it's mentioned a range of color palettes or no palette at all with support for 32-bits Alpha; out of curiosity, if I chose to emulate an enhanced graphics adapter (EGA) palette of 16 simultaneous colors out of 64, does AGS come with the appropriate 64 color spectre? If not, can I import a new palette?

Q4) Again in the 'features' page there's mention to proprietary file extensions such as the MP3 format and AVI. Shouldn't these be avoided? I don't mean to insult the Americans, but how come people haven't been sued for sharing or selling games that make use of these formats without paying royalties and such? Take this in good humour, please. Oh, the question itself is serious.


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Thank you for reading this! I'll be much obliged if you answer these questions.
Cheers.

[Gilbert]

Q1) By 'Standard Sierra' or 'Verb Coin' GUI, do you mean AGI/SCI and SCUMM GUIs are available out-of-the-box? If so, does AGS feature a command parser similar to SCI0 and early SCI1.0 games? Also, it is mentioned that a LucasArts-styled conversation system is available by default; is the same true for Sierra-styled conversations, with zoomed-in talking portraits and what-not?

There are only basic functions provided for these GUIs. To get them really going, you'll need to use scripting and nearly every kind of GUIs you can think of can be done with scripting. People have made script modules for some of the more popular GUIs though, so you don't always need to do everything yourself. For SCI0 parsers you need scripting also, but it is definitely possible (Cornjob had already done that before). For the Sierra conversation portrait thing, there is actually an option to enable that in the editor.

Q2) AGS now is a WIN86x-based application, but its games & byproducts (I've seen platformers and simulators done with AGS which are nothing short of amazing) run on an engine that's been ported to Linux and OSX; how well and what features will not work with each ported engine? The WIN86x engine works on top of DirectX; Linux and OSX engines are running on software mode, then? Should we expect future support for a 64-bits architecture?

I've never tried the engines for any of the other platforms (for obvious reasons) but I think they're mostly complete so most things work, but games that use plugins definitely won't work. The problem is that they're not quite actively worked on, so their versions aren't in par with the newest Windows one. Other solutions such as using WINE or virtualisation to run the native Windows engine directly may work too.

Q3) In the 'features' page it's mentioned a range of color palettes or no palette at all with support for 32-bits Alpha; out of curiosity, if I chose to emulate an enhanced graphics adapter (EGA) palette of 16 simultaneous colors out of 64, does AGS come with the appropriate 64 color spectre? If not, can I import a new palette?

The AGS engine does not support 16 colour modes but you definitely can just use the EGA colours in your games. For 8-bit games you can of course change the colours of the slots to match the EGA palette (if it isn't obvious enough that the first 16+ colours of the default AGS palette are already the basic EGA colours ). For 16 or 32 bit game there is no point in importing a new palette as these are not indiced modes, so you can use every available colour at any time you want.

Q4) Again in the 'features' page there's mention to proprietary file extensions such as the MP3 format and AVI. Shouldn't these be avoided? I don't mean to insult the Americans, but how come people haven't been sued for sharing or selling games that make use of these formats without paying royalties and such? Take this in good humour, please. Oh, the question itself is serious.

Seriously, if you don't feel comfortable with these formats, just don't use them. I don't know much about their licenses, but I think MP3 licensing is required only if you sell your games beyond a certain number of copies or something like that and it doesn't matter much if the games are free. I'm not quite sure about M$ AVI though. Anyway, if you really want to include sound files and movies, just use a safe and free (and better) substitute, OGG, and AGS DOES support it.

[Khris]

Welcome!

1) AGS comes with several templates now; it used to have only two: default game and empty game.
The empty game doesn't have GUIs or sprites while the default game has a character and cursor sprites and a very basic user interface in the style of VGA Sierra Games like Larry V, i.e. there are several cursor modes (walk, look, interact, talk, use inventory). This is what we refer to as "Standard Sierra", I guess.
In recent times, a LucasArts 9 verb GUI and a Verbcoin template were included.

In theory there's also a variety of other templates available, most of those are outdated though.

Since AGS has basic dictionary and parser support, it's perfectly possible to build a parser driven game.

AGS has several different speech styles built-in; Sierra-styled conversations are among them. You can always build your own method of showing conversations though; there aren't strict limits like with many other game creation programs; with AGS you can pretty much do what you want.

2) There are ports of the engine for Linux and MacOS, those aren't maintained by Chris Jones and not officially supported though. The latest MacOS version is 2.71 i.e. severely outdated. If you plan to release stable games for all three OS's, switch the engine.

3) I don't quite understand the question; if you don't want the hassle of having to manage colors you'll want 16bit or 32bit; to emulate EGA you don't need to set the game to 8bit; just use only 16 colors. The advantage of 8bit is complete control over the palette entries i.e. color cycling effects like the water in Indy4 are possible then.

4) AFAIK:
Only if you sell a game need you worry about licensing issues; my guess is that people who sell their games use OGG.
Videos are in general used pretty rarely, plus AVI is just a container format and can contain pretty much anything, proprietary or not.