It's a little complicated.
Okay, here goes. I first discovered AGS sometime in 2005 when I saw a friend playing around with it. It's a bit hazy, but I think that, combined with playing Cirque De Zale (got it off a magazine cover DVD), got me interested in it, and so I copied it from said friend (he had version 2.62).
At the time, I was trying to make an adventure game in Game Maker, a program I had been using for only a few months, and naturally, was having difficulty. So I decided to switch to AGS, to see if that would make things easier.
It did. However, and I'll be honest here, I HATED working with AGS. The mixture of function_names_like_this and OnesLikeThis, combined with the iffy room editor with three seperate sections, in addition to the global and local messages, as well as the whole process you had to go through with strings, not to mention that horrid interation editor and the old resolution issues made me despise every moment I spent working in it. Yuck.
Anyway, I went back to using GM for the game after a while, and scrapped it a while later, for entirely non-technical reasons. But that's not important.
In April last year I read about AGS 3.0 in
DevMag and decided to give the program another chance. Thank goodness I did.
The changes in version 3 are brilliant, absolutely marvellous. You (Chris Jones) have transformed a patchy, inconsistent, old-fashioned, clunky, illogical, and downright painful program into a streamlined joy. I salute you.