Dramatic Lighting effects possible in AGS?

[Greg Squire]

I wondering if some Dramatic Lighting effects were possible with AGS.  Here are two examples

Scenario #1 - Night Scene. 
Everything is dark except around a street light. Two shadowy figures step out of the darkness and into the light for a conversation.  They are fully lit under the light, but then as they walk away they get dark.

Scenario #2 - Scenes get progressively lighter (and possibly more colorful)
I have an idea for a game where all the rooms are very bleak and gray.  Then as you help characters and brighten their mood, the surroundings slowly change from dull to bright (perhaps even adding color).  This is kind of like the movie "Pleasantville", where the world the main characters are trapped in, slowly starts to have color the more they change their surroundings.

I know AGS supports alpha blending for sprites, but I'm not sure a mask could be applied to the whole screen.  Is that possible to do?  I was thinking that scenario #1 could be done using a screen mask that grays everything except around the street light.  Also scenario #2 could be done with several progressively lighter masks, or even better it might work using the global gamma property and progressively make it brighter.

After looking in the documentation there appears to be a way to set the light level for "room regions". It might take a few regions to make the light effect more gradual and I believe it would apply to the whole sprite instead just the part that's in the light.  Depending on the scene that might be okay, but there might be times where you just want the head lit, and not the rest of the body. Would an alpha mask work in that case?

[Matti]

For scenario 1 you could use region lighting (as you yourself noticed). If you want just a part of the sprite to be lit, use regions and draw the special sprites for the characters.

For 2 you could use tint screen.

[Khris]

Or the five available background frames.
If five isn't enough, you can use sprites as big as the background and draw them onto it.

[cosmicr]

I have an idea for a game where all the rooms are very bleak and gray.  Then as you help characters and brighten their mood, the surroundings slowly change from dull to bright (perhaps even adding color).  This is kind of like the movie "Pleasantville", where the world the main characters are trapped in, slowly starts to have color the more they change their surroundings.

I too have a similar idea I'm working on, also inspired by Pleasantville. Just letting you know in case something ever becomes of it - so that you know I'm not stealing your idea!

[Dualnames]

I've also used tween transparency (with the Tween Module) and it works even better than setting regions with light levels. At least when the player is supposed to be invisible (thus dark in a very dark enviroment, and since dark on dark background can't be seen).

[Greg Squire]

I too have a similar idea I'm working on, also inspired by Pleasantville. Just letting you know in case something ever becomes of it - so that you know I'm not stealing your idea!

I'm not totally sure I'm even going to pursue this particular idea at the moment.  Just too many ideas and not enough time to do them all.  I was mostly thinking about feasibility for the idea at the moment. Good Luck with your project though!