Question about the Capabilities of ACS's 2D Graphics

[mr crowley]

Before I devote myself to learning ACS further Im curious as to what quality of a game I can achieve with it. The area I am mainly interested in is how much quality it will allow me to achieve with 2D graphics (I am aware that it can get a pretty decsent resolution already) I'd rather the graphics I create be of a more moddern style of 2D games (the sort of visuals that World of Goo can accomplish despite being in simple 2D. I draw alot of pixel art in Adobe programs that is of a pretty descent quality and Im mainly curious as to if I could transfer much of this into this engine.

My main questions I want answered are:
How much quality can I put into animated areas,
Most demonstrations I see the animation is more reminiscent of older scumm engine games, which I do enjoy but I've gotten pretty good now at animating decently in programs like flash. Can I achieve pretty good quality animations by exporting frames of work in flash and importing them into AGS. Is there a bad FPS rate? Or is there a limit to how many frams I can put into a sequence. I'd like my backgrounds to have a simple looping animation as well.

Can I put a transperant overlay over everything on screen to achieve simple lighting effects?
When I used to use the engine Rpg Maker XP, there was this technique where I took a screenshot of what was on screen, then in GIMP id make a layer over that and draw in alpha lighting effects, Id then remove everything except for the lighting effects export it and make it an overlay over everything on screen of the area I'd screenshotted, this way Id get nice looking light effects over the background and also over the characters. Can I do this in AGS as well? Can I get a transperant image over everything on screen?

Having a layer above everything?
From what Ive seen the method for having parts that are above everything (IE stuff you walk behind when you go on it) Involves just getting your background and putting blue over parts, these parts then turn into parts that are over everything. That method seems like it would clash a bit with some of the things I want to achieve, is there any way to just say import a transperant PNG image and make that like a layer that goes over the top of everything else.

Thanks, I want to decide if i should use this engine for what I wish to create

EDIT: Not related to graphics just a quick question, instead of just text boxes I could actually get audio recordings of speech if I wanted to right?

[Wonkyth]

Yes to all, I'm pretty sure.

[barefoot]

Some bits of answers...

AGS supports various resolution options (320x200 to 1024x768) you can actually import bigger backgrounds to allow scrolling.

Colour options from 8 bit to 32 bit

You can import quite detailed images into your game without losing quality.

AGS also supports transparancy.

As far as I'm aware You can keep adding frames until the frame/loop limit is reached (20, 40, or something).  There is a checkbox in the view editor that allows you to chain multiple animation loops together if more frames are needed.

Yes, you can import up to 5 backgrounds per room.

As wonkyth said,  pretty much everything you've asked..

The best way to answer most of your questions is to go ahead and try something in AGS and see for yourself..

Read the Manual and trawl these Forums for answers.

barefoot

[mr crowley]

Okay then Ill have to mess around with it a bit, the most important thing I need answered though is the one about the things that go over everything else (whether or not I need to use the method of painting on the background what I want forward or I can just import a transperant picture to use on top of everything)

[Khris]

You'd use a GUI as big as the screen for that. It will get displayed over everything else, even other GUIs, if you make use of its zOrder property.
You can assign any image to its BackgroundGraphic property; in theory you could compose a complex image in real time every loop and overlay that.

To make the whole thing transparent, you can either simply set the GUI's Transparency property to any value between 0 and 100 or use a PNG with an alpha channel (your game has to run in 32bit mode to do the latter though).

AGS isn't exactly built for speed, but you can do some pretty heavy stuff without major slowdowns.

[discordance]

As far as I'm aware You can keep adding frames until the frame/loop limit is reached (20, 40, or something).  There is a checkbox in the view editor that allows you to chain multiple animation loops together if more frames are needed.

The latest versions, unless I'm horribly mistaken, have no frame limit per loop and no loop limit per view. I used a 60+ frame animation in one loop once and it ran smoothly.