beta testers needed for plug-ins

[lemmy101]

Hi all, we're looking to start beta testing a few AGS plug-ins we have in development in the non-too-distant future, details of which can be found below:

AGS Particle Editor

Users will be able to visually create high quality particle effects ranging from explosions, rain, reflections, fire, smoke or anything else. Utilising hardware acceleration, if present, via Direct3D, the particle engine is capable of creating particles with full alpha transparancy using a range of 32bit blending options within a stand-alone editor. They will then be able to save these and load them within AGS to provide tailor made effects in your AGS games. You can make spot effects to trigger on game events using simple script calls within AGS, or set up room-based effects which will trigger automatically whenever the player enters a room.

aMuse

aMuse gives AGS users the power to create interactive music with more power and flexibility even than Lucasarts iMuse system. Using (free to download) Direct Music Producer alongside (or as) your sequencing program, you will be able to build up CD quality music content that can change and evolve based on player interactions in the game, alowing for chord changes, new instruments to kick in, or even entirely different tunes to blend in seamlessly. Whether you want your town tune to include the "bad guy dittie" as soon as he steps onscreen, or kick in the drums as soon as the player picks up an object, aMuse allows you much control over the audio in your game. You can time music events to game events, or even tie game events into music events. aMuse also allows you to easily create alternate downloads for your game with music quality varying from generic MIDI to high fidelity sampled instruments with effects such as Reverb, Flanger, Chorus and Compressor, simply by replacing a single file. It also ensures that MIDI music will sound identical on ANY sound-card.

Elemental Conversation / Cutscene Engine

A replacement for the AGS conversation engine, this tool will allow you to create conversations for your AGS game using a simple flowchart interface. By defining the path to take upon different conversation choices, setting logic flags, and even moving characters and controlling animation, this editor allows much more control over your conversations and is effectively a full cutscene system. Allowing you to specify different poses for your characters, along with transitions to make sure their animation is fluid and seamless, your characters will be able to gesticulate during speech, pound their feet, shake their heads, or point wildly, breathing more life into your characters. The conversation engine allows you to do full-screen talkies with characters composited onto different backgrounds, and all range of other customisations.

The Conversation Editor even has debugging support! Allowing you to set breakpoints on specific nodes to halt the AGS game, and allow you to look at logic flags and step through your conversation flowchart step by step to find any problems! Not only this, but combined with the aMuse system, the new conversation engine allows for musicians to control the music themselves, allowing them to cue music events themselves independently of the scripters making the game.

If you would be interested, please reply to our beta testing thread and we will send you download links as soon as they are ready for testing.

http://www.cgempire.com/showthread.php38

We need people to sign up to keep track of beta-testers and their mail addresses, but feel free to ask any questions here.

Thanks all,

lemmy

[Pumaman]

This all sounds rather impressive, good luck with the beta

[Besh]

Wow!!!! Very cool.
I'd like to be a beta tester but now I'm very busy  :'(

About the particle engine, how do you think to use D3D with AGS?

Good luck.

[Nickenstien]

With Magic and Trickery 

[Kweepa]

Yes, I'd be very interested in a plugin project shell that demonstrated D3D + AGS living in perfect harmony.
Are you planning to release the source code?

[Nickenstien]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your interest in this .

Unfortunately I will not be releasing the source code for the plug-in or the editor.

This is because they both rely heavily upon code that I have been developing for the last 4 years in whatever spare time I could muster, and I intend to use my engine components in future commercial products, as they have been developed to professional standards.

But I will be freely giving away these tools for Non-Commercial use (in a form that is exclusively compatible with AGS).

Doing things this way allows me to give something back to the AGS community whilst protecting my hard work

The particle editor and the AGS-Plug-in are built 100% upon my engine code base (memory manager, file IO system, texture-engine, sprite-engine, Input-control-system and state-machine powering the whole thing)

The AGS-Plug-in side of the system gives you access to screen modes that AGS doesn't natively provide, and all kinds of hardware accelerated rendering and full-screen effects plus a full blown particle system complete with forces/attractors/repulsion-effectors.

The particle editor provides a user friendly interface so that anybody can create these lovely effects and save them out for Inclusion in their AGS game. It gives users the ability to specify forces, velocities, rotations, colours, choose different textures and many, many more….

So Steve, I won't give you my source code, but I will tell you how it's done

This is basically how it works: -

Step 1.) Upon plug-in launch, create a direct3D surface (window or full screen).
Step 2.) Minimize/hide the AGS game window.
Step 3.) Now using the AGS callbacks you can copy the images that AGS generates every frame onto your D3DSurfaces and display them in your own window.

Additionally to this, you will also require your own input system to capture mouse-moves and mouse-clicks and keyboard interactions within your new window and pass them back to AGS in order to interact with the game (I currently am using my input system which is based upon DirectInput for this).


Hope this information is of some use to you

Cheers,
            Nick.

[Kweepa]

Poor AGS, relegated to being but a minor subsystem of your engine!
Thanks for the info.

[lemmy101]

tee hee

nah there's nothing sub-systemy about it. We're still relying on AGS for a hell-uv-a-lot . Although we could feasably write this game without the use of AGS it would probably take us so long that we'd never end up finishing it.

Just think of it as us trying to expand AGS' repertoire to do things specifically how we want them for our game, without bugging poor CJ every five minutes and hopefully providing others with that additional power.

That said we've managed to bug him a fair bit even so, tee hee.

[Nickenstien]

We are HUGE fans of AGS and what CJ has achieved, and nothing of what we have achieved would be at all possible if CJ had not done such a fantastic job of providing a system for the use of plug-ins.

The plug-in system for AGS is brilliant, and has provided a means for people to add their own modifications/enhancements to AGS' already extensive facilities.

We may be pushing to exceed what has been previously achieved with AGS plug-ins, but its only possible because AGS has been made in such a damn-fine way to begin with.

AGS Rules! Hehe 

[Pumaman]

I'd be interested to know what sort of performance you've managed to get mixing D3D with AGS. I once tried a quick experiment of using a D3D Primary Surface for the screen rather than a DirectDraw one, and it seemed to be slower than DDraw (not surprising really, since I was effectively just rendering one huge 640x480 texture each frame), so other than rewriting the whole graphics engine to use Direct3D I didn't see a performant way of doing things.

[Vel]

I wish I had the time to betatest, but these two weeks are rather hectic for me. However, this sounds really impressive, I am particularly interested in aMuse. I hope you guys finish it soon.

[Nickenstien]

Hello folks,

I would just like to add some more info about the FX plug-in.

Firstly, it is not just a Particle system; it is a complete graphics overlay system for AGS.

It allows you to have your game at whatever resolution the host machine can display. This means you can run your game 1024*768 if you wish.

Using this you can achieve several setups depending on how you want your game to look: -

1.)   You could re-scale the AGS display to a full-screen 1024*768 display and perform bi-linier filtering on the image.

2.)   You could use the graphic-overlay capability and make 1024*768 resolution backgrounds for all of your scenes, and let the plug-in composite those with the AGS sprite layer, (however your character sprites would still be rescaled to match the background proportions, but scaling from 800*600 to 1024*768 res with bi-linier filtering looks great to me).

3.)   You could ensure that people won't be forced to run your 320*200 res game in a window if their graphics-card does not support that resolution. This is achieved by the Plug-in detecting which graphics modes are available on the host machine, and using the closest match to your games desired resolution. Then the image is rescaled to keep the original aspect ratio.


The screen overlay system also allows for many other effects to be achieved. For instance a blue wobbly tessellated 3D mesh could be overlaid to give your scene the appearance of being underwater,

You could add extra transparent clouds, or create your own special screen wipes/cross-fades by overlaying various textures and blending between them.

The possibilities are ….. well ….. not endless …..  but you can do lots of cool stuff with it

Cheers,
            Nickenstien.

[modgeulator]

I'd like to help with beta testing or any other sort of assistance I can offer with "aMuse." I'd also be interested in doing any work/help with Direct Music Producer that might be needed, I have based some small projects around it in the past and know my way around the software.

Also, is aMuse at all based around the rough DirectMusic plug-in I released a while ago? Did you find a way to use DirectMusic and the AGS DirectX sound engine simultaneously?

[SupSuper]

Personally I'm more interested in the Elemental Conversation / Cutscene Engine, since I don't see myself giving use to the other plug-ins but still, it all sounds very promising.

[LimpingFish]

It all sounds very exciting and impressive. :o

I hope you remember us code-a-phobics and implement some sort of gobshite-proof way of accessing all these wonderful features during game development.

Even I can see that AGS has a fairly simple, user- friendly coding language, but I still find coding a pain in the hole. 

[lemmy101]

Yeah I do it for a living and I find coding a pain in the hole AGS scripting is extremely user-friendly, though in my experience there are those who are just too intimidated by coding in principal that their brain seizes up whenever they look at it our reason for developing it was purely to have more control of doing poses and gestures... our first idea was to have AGS script within the nodes, but as this was unfeasable it put us onto another train of thought, by trying to provide additional power to those code-a-phobes

99% of conversation + cutscene scripting can be done in a flowchart, where you add nodes and link them up with wires, so the game will take different routes depending on dialogue choices etc. In fact the first five minutes of our game has little more the following AGS script:

ELM_PlayConversation("HospitalOpening");

Whilst you will still need to use AGS scripting for doing most of your puzzles, I'd like to think that with the AGS interactions wizard + elemental conversation system you can do the majority of stuff you need to do... A few of the things, such as timers, which are script only, may be possible in prinicipal using our system without writing any code...

Due to this slightly different approach this system has, cutscenes and conversations are no longer blocking, and the game is ticking over all the time (GUI and mouse input is disabled by the system to give the same results) since the system is node driven, it offers an alternative to timers (newbies bane) since now you can stick in a "wait node" that will wait until a certain condition has passes before continuing. Since you can have numerous conversations running at the same time you can have these various "conversations" waiting for something to trigger them to continue... (note I say conversations as that is what they are called in the system but interactive cutscenes is probably more accurate as it's expanded beyond just conversations) 

I'd like to help with beta testing or any other sort of assistance I can offer with "aMuse." I'd also be interested in doing any work/help with Direct Music Producer that might be needed, I have based some small projects around it in the past and know my way around the software.

Also, is aMuse at all based around the rough DirectMusic plug-in I released a while ago? Did you find a way to use DirectMusic and the AGS DirectX sound engine simultaneously?

A little embarrasing I didn't actually know about your plug-in... may have saved us a lot of work That said an important aspect of aMuse is that you can script it to your game cutscenes external to the AGS project, so musicians are free to experiment with how the music is triggered and changes.

That said we went through quite a convoluted route to get there. We started, as I said, with having Scumm-VM running silently in the background... then we tried about 4-5 different free midi parsers and free soft-synths, each had one thing which caused problems... then I set about writing my own, before noticing one of the midi parsers I used worked with Direct Music, and in fact Direct Music was completely ideal for everything we wanted to do

Direct Music works fine regardless of settings in winsetup.exe as far as I can tell. Will have a play tonight see if any settings can break it cheers for the heads up!

Cheers for the interest!

lemmy

[modgeulator]

So does aMuse work by loading a DirectMusic Producer project and calling routines? (That's all I've tried.) Or have you found another way of working with the system? I like working with DMP but I find it a bit buggy and tricky to get it to do what I want sometimes.

As far as compatibility with AGS, the main problems I had were with using DirectMusic (by creating a new DirectSound interface) alongside the audio output of AGS in Windows 95/98/ME systems.

[lemmy101]

So does aMuse work by loading a DirectMusic Producer project and calling routines? (That's all I've tried.) Or have you found another way of working with the system? I like working with DMP but I find it a bit buggy and tricky to get it to do what I want sometimes.

Pretty much DMP's not the most user friendly program in the world, I have to agree, and I think Nikolas would too ... I'm considering writing a tutorial with the release of the plug-in.

As far as compatibility with AGS, the main problems I had were with using DirectMusic (by creating a new DirectSound interface) alongside the audio output of AGS in Windows 95/98/ME systems.

Very interesting! I'll need to look into this cheers for pointing this out may have screwed us over on release as I've not got access to 95/98/ME

[modgeulator]

My problem was that I couldn't figure out how to create the DirectMusic interface within the AGS DirectSound object, so I had two seperate things trying to access the soundcard. The way sound works in Win95/98 this causes problems. It really just means you can't use AGS sound output and DirectMusic together if you want compatibility with older versions of Windows. I wouldn't really consider myself a programmer so you may have found a better way to implement your plugin.


I wonder if it would be possible to get at the interactive functions of DirectMusic without using DMP? By this I mean by writing a plug that can load MIDI files and DLS sample banks and modify the playback with commands (for example: muting/unmuting channels, playing transitions, playing a second MIDI in sync with the first, etc.) I think DirectMusic offers many possibilities for playing back MIDI files that don't need the use of DMP. Working this way could free everyone from DMP however the programming required looks a bit too advanced for me to pull off.

[SSH]

Since Microsoft have just said that they won't fix the huge security holes in 95/98/ME and those platforms are now open season for hackers, anyoen with one of those machine will have bigger problems than not beign able to play a particular AGS game...