Messages

Congratz on official kick off!!! Looks awesome

Have you been inspired by Simon Stalenhags art for the visual style/setting of the game?

Really looking forward to following the progress of this game

Tim: Do you mean JJS' Android branch? I have no idea how far apart we are code-wise and I'm too busy with the launch of the journey down to check on that right now. Don't hesitate to dig into the code and play around with it if you have the time! 

In unrelated new, I friggin love the bluecup smileys 

Good job AJA, let me know if you want to merge your code into the SkygoblinAGS respository!

I just found a zip-archieve of the 720p build on our server, so if you don't want to bother with Gitorious you can download the editor and engine from here:

SkyGoblinAGS Download: http://www.skygoblin.com/AGS720p.com (4,75MB)

In other news (excuse me for going a little off-topic here) we just finished the gold master build of The Journey Down and will begin pushing it onto online-stores ASAP.
What online game stores do you guys prefer? Where would you like to see TJD available for purchase?

It would be great to know how to use this .git file thing (I am a complete noob when it comes to this stuff). If I can up the game resolution then that'd be great!

1 - Download and install Git for Windows on your computer.
2 - Start Git Bash from the start menu.
3 - Use cd to go to the directory where you want to put the repository.
4 - Type "git clone git://gitorious.org/skygoblinags/skygoblinags.git" in the console window and press enter.

You should now have the custom resolution version of AGS cloned to your computer. Just unzip bin/LatestEditor.zip and you're ready to go.

Good luck! 

Will this be released for other Ags game makers?

Hey dbuske!

The custom resolution patch is already available for AGS game makers to use, but it is not part of the official build so you will have to get it from https://gitorious.org/skygoblinags/.

If you're interested in the work we're doing with our cross-platform engine Gobby right now, you should have a look at Markus' article here: http://www.skygoblin.com/2012/wrapping-up-the-tech/

Hey Gurok, good job spotting this!

Any way I could commit this to your git thingy?

In order to commit this you can either create a merge request through Gitorious or we can give you direct write access to skygoblinags, either way you prefer.

I agree, the only reason why I haven't done it so far is that I don't want to piss off the AGS devs by doing something that might be mistaken for an attempt to hijack the project.
But I guess as long as it's clear we don't intend to do that, and it's just a staging ground for portability patches, we can do it. I'll create a project and post the URL.

Looking forward to it!

Well spotted, I've checked in a fix for this so please try again with the latest version.

Good job, that solved it!

There's one more problem with the current revision, version.rc fails to #include "afxres.h". A few minutes of googling hinted that this is because afxres.h is an MFC include which does not come with VC++ 2008 Express.

I fixed the problem by exchanging:

Code: ags

#include "afxres.h"

for:

Code: ags

#define IDC_STATIC -1
#include <windows.h>

That's it, I now have a freshly compile acwin.exe that works perfectly! Thanks again!

Wow that was a quick turn of events 

Edit: Have you looked into any solutions yet? As far as I understand, one of the main issues with making AGS cross-platform is its dependence on Allegro. Perhaps it's time for a more modern and platform-agnostic graphics library? I remember checking SFML out, but I can't recall if I came across any negative points to it - but I have a list somewhere with the observations I made about each of the 2D and 3D renderers I researched.

Allegro 5 is plenty modern enough. I suggest the first thing to do is get the code working with that maybe?

Agreed, I think we should stick to Allegro while improving resolution support. Let's dig into the code and see how complex this will be.

By the way, where will the development of the AGS engine and editor be discussed? Perhaps we should have another forum board to separate the technical discussions about using AGS from the ones about developing AGS?

Wonderful news! Now let's get this ball rolling!

I'm having some problems compiling the engine in VC++ 2008. First off there is a reference to dinput.h which is not included. This can be fixed by installing the Direct X SDK and adding the SDK's /include/ folder to the VC++ include directories (just like /Common/ and /Common/libinclude/).

Then in almp3.c there are hard coded #include paths to mpg123.h and mpglib.h.
I tried changing these to just "mpg123.h" and "mpglib.h" so that they include files from the libinclude folder. This doesn't seem to be the right files though, because it generates a bunch of compile time errors:

Code: ags

------ Build started: Project: acwin, Configuration: DebugWorking Win32 ------
Compiling...
almp3.c
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(22) : error C2079: 'fr' uses undefined struct 'frame'
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(23) : error C2065: 'MAXFRAMESIZE' : undeclared identifier
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(23) : error C2057: expected constant expression
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(23) : error C2087: 'bsspace' : missing subscript
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(24) : error C2061: syntax error : identifier 'real'
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(28) : error C2061: syntax error : identifier 'synth_buffs'
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(28) : error C2059: syntax error : ';'
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(28) : error C3409: empty attribute block is not allowed
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(28) : error C2143: syntax error : missing ']' before 'constant'
Y:\Dev\AGS\Common\libinclude\mpglib.h(30) : error C2059: syntax error : '}'
[and more]

The hard coded paths reference a folder named /almp3_205/decode/ but I have been unable to google anything like that. How can I find the correct files to include?

Thanks a lot for releasing the source code CJ, I believe this will open up for lots of collaborative improvements ahead!

Glad to see all the response in this thread

I think we have rather similar thoughts on how we want resolutions to work (i.e. fixed aspect ratio with dynamic customizable resampling and letterboxing) though we'll probably want to define a roadmap of some sort to coordinate future releases.

Calin & Dualnames: I understand your frustration but I believe you're viewing this from the wrong point of view. I did not start this thread to repeat feature requests but to offer help in implementing them. Try to see it from our point of view. We make our living making games and that means we work on tight schedules to meet our deadlines. Therefore we don't have the time to focus on things that will not profit our business, but we gladly share our work if it can benefit others. That said we'll probably not address your audio-stutter issue because afaik it does not affect our game.

Widescreen resolution support, on the other hand, is a deal breaker which affects our choice of development environment. We need to start working with this shortly in order to finish the game by the set release date and that is why we need to know if AGS will be open sourced soon. If we get hold of the source code then better screen resolution support will be implemented asap because it is necessary for all JD development. If not, we'll develop JD using other tools.

In other words we can't promise to implement anything except for what we need for our game. In case we want to reuse the rooms from the JD prototype version we'll probably implement automatic resizing of walkable areas and regions like Ali suggested, but if we decide to recreate the rooms we probably wont bother. But that's the beauty of open source. You just have to contribute the bits that you require yourself because the magic happens when we all fit our pieces together

Hi guys! My name is Mathias and I work with Theo at SLX Games. I'm new to these forums but have plenty of game programming experience and I've been playing around with AGS from time to time over the past couple of years.

There are a bunch of threads discussing new widescreen resolution features (for example here, here, here, here and here) and rather than reiterating the suggestions and proposals I'd like to present the problem, and a possible solution, from our point of view.

At SLX Games we're now busy working on the HD version of the first chapter of the Journey Down which is set for release in Q4 2011. In order to keep this commercially viable we need to target a wide range of platforms and resolutions. AGS has proven to be extremely powerful in placing creative control right at the fingertips of the main game designer (theo, that is) and thus cutting us coders out of the loop and freeing us up for other work. Hopefully, we can keep AGS at the center of the development process but in order to target more platforms and resolutions we have to consider other alternatives. Probably there's already a bunch of people and game studios on these forums who are stuck in the same dilemma when thinking about monetizing their AGS games. So how can we fix this?

Since AGS has freed some time for the programmers at SLX we have the capacity and expertise to extend AGS with new resolution modes and, in the long run, additional features that can open up for targeting more platforms. No matter what, we'll have to spend a lot of time and effort this year making the Journey Down run on different platforms but extending AGS is preferred since it allows us to keep our current production pipeline intact. In addition, if we contribute our work to the AGS community, it will also enable better ways for all AGS developers to capitalize on their work. This is only possible if the AGS source code (not just the editor) is released as open source, which has been discussed a lot recently. We're therefore hoping that CJ will decide to open source AGS so that we can join hands and implement further improvements that will benefit everyone. How has the development progressed since the 3.2 release, is there any new code in place for handling arbitrary resolutions? If possible, our company is willing to commit a great deal of 9-to-5 helping out and implementing new features.

Not a small request for a first post, I know