Limitations/Opportunities of AGS

Started by Aramog, Mon 24/12/2018 21:34:52

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Aramog

Hi,
I am a 2d artist and I try different engines to check their limitations.
After playing Quest for Glory, my attention was shifted by the engine such as Ren'Py or Unity to AGS.

Here's a fast thing I made in paint.exe with my questions visualized:

[imgzoom]https://i.imgur.com/p5rCTbB.png[/imgzoom]



I am not looking for instructions on how to do all these things, I am just wondering if all of these things are possible on this engine, so I can have an idea on what to draw and what not.

PS. I read somewhere that AGS can't handle large games? Is that true?


Thank you!

Snarky

1. No player character on screen: Yes, easily.
2. Incidental animations, walks: Yes, easily.
3. Cut-scenes: Yes, easily.
4. Map screen with looping animations: Yes. Depending on the animation it may be very easy or a bit more work.
5. Zoom to closeup: Not out of the box. It's possible to code it, but the transition probably won't be as smooth as in a dedicated VN engine. (VN-style dialog also requires special coding.)

Large games: Large games have been made in AGS, so it's definitely possible, but depending on what dimension you're considering, there are some limitations, where AGS either has a hard limit or things start to become unwieldy to work with. However, a lot of limits have been raised or removed completely in recent versions of the engine, so only a few things actually stand in the way of a game as large as you'd like. One example of a limitation is that AGS, last I checked, still only supports 300 state-saving rooms. If you have more rooms than that, you need to save the room state (whether objects have been picked up and stuff like that) yourself.

Also, although AGS does support games in higher resolutions, it's lacking some features of hi-res-oriented engines (such as smooth sprite scaling and rotation, sub-pixel positioning, font rendering at arbitrary sizes, and more advanced stuff like dynamic lighting or shader effects), so it's not necessarily well suited for games that strive for a modern look.

Crimson Wizard

#2
To ammend what Snarky said above:

- Regarding large games, until recently AGS had a limit of 2 GB for total size of sprites in a game (and maybe something else), but this file size limit is also removed in the AGS 3.5.

A lot of things may be done in AGS anyway, people were creating classic P&C games, VNs, arcade platformers, turn-based strategies, and so on. Some major P&C features are built-in, other things may require you to script from the "basic blocks" but are still doable.

But just to make a general warning: although various people tried to improve the engine in the past years, AGS is still a pretty old engine made having old-style games in mind, and you may bump into a weird limitation from time to time. Some people learnt to deal with these, for others they became eternal annoyance...
Other notable problems with AGS include somewhat inconvenient file structure that make it difficult to work simultaneously on the game for two or more people (as far as I know usually this is solved by designating a "project manager" who alone is responsible for importing assets into the game). While AGS games may be ported to other platforms including mobile ones, there are usually some hickups and this may need a technically savvy person to deal or help with. Also AGS uses its own script which is pretty old and somewhat limited compared to real ones like C# in Unity.

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