Ben304's 'Awakener' - Now a Facebook App (XAGE)

Snarky · Wed 03/03/2010 05:12:12

This ranks very high in the list of coolest AGS things ever. Dave, didn't you just say that lack of portability was the biggest drawback of AGS? Hire this man!

SSH · Wed 03/03/2010 05:29:52

Of course, currently this only actually adds Mac compatibility...

Anyone tried this with Moonlight 3 beta? I will give it a go soon...

mouthuvmine · Wed 03/03/2010 05:30:16

Not that Awakener wasn't fun, cause it was, but I never thought I'd play through a second time! This is so awesome! This is great. I just got two facebook friends who had never played an adventure game to play Awakener, and they loved it. Great way to spread the love!

Vince Twelve · Wed 03/03/2010 15:24:22

So cool!

Clarvalon · Wed 03/03/2010 17:34:15

@Tuomas / mouthuvmine: It's true that Silverlight lowers the barrier of entry quite significantly (in terms of getting started, if not hardware). The idea of using Facebook only occurred to me quite recently, so it's pleasing to hear that it's useful as a way of disseminating the game. Essentially that's what it's all about - bringing adventure games to a broader audience.

@monkey_05_06: Yeah, it's true that the Silverlight performance isn't fantastic. The game stutters here and there on my Atom-powered laptop, though the quality settings mitigate this somewhat. The native implementations (Windows PC exe & xbox) run a lot better on older or underpowered hardware.

This is pretty much a direct conversion. Only a handful of manual changes were required post-conversion. The main thing was adding walkboxes to mimic AGS's walkable areas. As there was only one room this didn't take very long, about 15 minutes. Other than that only a few things were tweaked, the equivalent of adding five or six lines of code.

It's difficult to predict how well any other game will convert without seeing the source code. I've been adding functionality as and when it's required, so the quality of conversion improves incrementally.

Scarab · Thu 04/03/2010 05:39:22

Clarvalon,
If one were to make a game with a XAGE port in mind, what considerations would you suggest for maximum ease of portability?

Peace
Scarab

Clarvalon · Thu 04/03/2010 11:41:43

That's a good question and one not easily answered. I've really just been adding functionality as and when it's required, so the bare minimum required to get Awakener running properly might leave a lot broken in another game. I really ought to document this somewhere.

AGS -> XAGE:
Character -> Character
Object -> Object
Inventory -> Inventory
Walkable Areas -> UNSUPPORTED (must be manually added as walkboxes)
Walkbehinds -> Object with a single frame
Hotspot -> Object with a single frame
Region -> Square Walkbox (not ideal, may change this at some point)
Edges -> UNSUPPORTED (I'll add this eventually, shouldn't be too hard)
Functions -> Scripts
Code -> Actions

Script stuff that is supported:
Manipulation of Characters, Objects, GUIs etc.
Global variables (and some deprecated global_int stuff)
Local variables.
Paramaters (for certain types, not all).
Return values (ish).
Script stacking (i.e. call one function from another and resume original on completion).
IF & WHILE loops with multiple conditions.

Currently unsupported:
A lot of script commands / statements.
AGS v3.2 style audio.
Sierra style dialogue.
Speech.
Plugins (.dlls)
Custom Modules.
LOTS of GUI functionality.
User input (hardcoded into XAGE for now)
Translations (.TRA)
Complex datatypes / structs.
Probably a lot of other things I've overlooked.

Other limitations:
Views must be all be stored in the base folder - the way the tool deserializes the game.agf xml means it cannot cope with nested folders.
Fonts won't ever likely be transferable, due to the way Xna handles spritefonts.
While text input will likely be added, it's unlikely things like keyboard control will be permitted as it will break platform independence.

mätzyboy · Mon 08/03/2010 14:17:55

This is very impressive stuff! If I ever find the time to get into point and click game making again, the ability to make them playable online would be a major source of excitement!

I'll make sure to check out your homepage and read about the limitations you have listed here to see how I would need to prepare in order to use this!

Very well done!

Clarvalon · Mon 26/04/2010 07:18:20

As Silverlight v4 has been released, I've updated XAGE Awakener to address some of the remaining issues:

Right mouse button support - no need to use CTRL + LMB anymore, you can also click both at once to skip cutscenes a la LucasArts games.
Full Screen Mode - Press 'F' in-game to play Full Screen.
General performance improvements - especially in loading times.

Try it here: http://www.clarvalon.com/XAGE/games/Awakener/

P.S. I originally forgot to also thank Denzil Quixode for his work on the AGS XML exporter.

Buckethead · Mon 26/04/2010 15:00:45

Opera crashes when I try to play the lastest version. I'm not 100% sure if I tested it on Opera aswell last time, but I am sure that it's not working now.

markbilly · Mon 26/04/2010 16:10:20

Got a similar problem in Chrome - Silverlight becomes unresponsive when it loads to 100%.

Pixelton · Mon 26/04/2010 16:16:53

Xbox 360? Does that mean you can build ags games to run in a kind of XBLA environment? That is awesome! It would be great to see the indie xbox live scene flooded with quality AGS games!

Clarvalon · Mon 26/04/2010 21:41:15

Hmm. I just tried it on another machine and it worked fine. I don't think Opera is supported, but Chrome should be. Did Silverlight v4 automatically install/upgrade? You might also need to clear your browser's cache for it to notice the changes.

@Mark Borg: Yep. XAGE games can be submitted to the Xbox Live Indie Games channel (basically XBLA-lite). I'm sitting on a small, silly game that will end up on the service eventually, though I keep getting distracted by more interesting projects.

Pixelton · Tue 27/04/2010 00:53:11

wow thats really nice, do you plan on eventually releasing the tools to get AGS content running on an Xbox or is this your personal little baby? I've worked on a few things that are on Xbox360 but always dreamed of eventually doing something thats come from myself rather than working to someone else's brief.

Great job all in all

Clarvalon · Tue 27/04/2010 05:32:33

The plan has always been to release the tools, though there haven't been any public releases for a while. There are several reasons for this. The editor code hasn't been refactored for about six months, and there's a lot of tidying up to do. Several redesigns and improvements have broken compatibility with previous versions - I don't want anyone to put a lot of effort into something that soon becomes obsolete.

It's getting there, though. I'm currently working on converting a much larger & complex AGS game that should, once done, substantially improve compatibility across the board.

Sslaxx · Tue 27/04/2010 13:57:29

Quote from: clarvalon on Tue 27/04/2010 05:32:33
The plan has always been to release the tools, though there haven't been any public releases for a while. There are several reasons for this. The editor code hasn't been refactored for about six months, and there's a lot of tidying up to do. Several redesigns and improvements have broken compatibility with previous versions - I don't want anyone to put a lot of effort into something that soon becomes obsolete.

It's getting there, though. I'm currently working on converting a much larger & complex AGS game that should, once done, substantially improve compatibility across the board.

Can you tell us which game?

Clarvalon · Tue 27/04/2010 21:34:50

It's not my IP so I'm not really in a position to say. It's super-special, mind you. Italics warranted and everything.

Dualnames · Tue 27/04/2010 21:44:04

Quote from: clarvalon on Tue 27/04/2010 21:34:50
It's not my IP so I'm not really in a position to say. It's super-special, mind you. Italics warranted and everything.

You got me curious what project is that?

Ali · Tue 27/04/2010 21:44:46

Hi,

I just checked this out for the first time - excellent work!

The mouse was a little laggy for me so I played around with size and resolution, which led to some display problems (Firefox 3.5). Changing the quality at triple resolution results in the screen being masked off to a 640x480 area surrounded by pink.

Hope that helps make this project even better!

- Ali

Clarvalon · Tue 27/04/2010 23:03:49

Hi Ali, thanks for the bug report. I've tested it in Firefox and the problem seems to affect all browsers. It looks like the silverlight canvas is resizing when the game is restarted, and not resizing the surrounding elements. As a temporary workaround the pink border can be removed by scaling the window down and up again. I'll look into getting this fixed for the final version.

As for performance, turning the graphical quality down should make it run a lot smoother, with the downside of some blurriness and slightly slow font drawing. High quality is more processor intensive due to the custom way in which the rendering works; currently the only method of avoiding the excessive anti-aliasing when scaling up. I've brought this up with a Microsoft MVP, so fingers crossed a native solution will turn up in SL5.

@Jim: Patience!