Could/Will AGS ever support dynamic characters? Think of the possibility there! You could create characters on a whim, it would be particularly useful for strategy/society games don't you think? It could support things like:
CreateDynamicCharacter(dynamiccharactername);
my_dynamic_character.SetDynamicCharacterView(int view)
my_dynamic_character.SetSpeechColor
etc, etc
I dunno, it seems like a good idea to me.
That would be useful - but probably not for normal adventure games. Anyways, you can work around this.
How would you sugest working around it? I've thought of several ways, using arrays and structs to keep track of variables that would change the look of currently created characters, but that still won't work if you want the player to have... say... 600 citizens under their control (I plan on maybe someday building a society game). (I can't use AGS for adventure games, I just can't do it)
You are right; there is no way to work around not having infinite characters that works for every game, but in most situations, you can still somehow get around this problem.
When I wrote "Troopers" (realtime-strategy game with AGS), I had the same problem of course. I just decided to limit the maximum number of units a player can have by adding an "energy resource", that all units cost in addition to costing money etc. This seemed perfect, because it would allow you to have a reasonably large amount of units, while at the same time the limit of units wouldn't feel to unnatural because popular games like StarCraft work the same.
In other situations, you could possible use the RawDraw functions and structs/arrays.
Right now I think I'll have to code around the RawDraw's and Arrays/Scructs to acheive the effect I'm getting at. Still, dynamic characters would help...