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Hello. It's nice to see someone continuing this thread, as it's always inspired me reading the ideas that people talk about here. 

I'm still pretty inexperienced with AGS specifically, so take all this with a grain of salt, and I don't know Persona, but I imagine all of that could be done, particularly as I've been planning how I'd do some things like that myself - especially adding a relationship aspect (not dating, but that shouldn't be a big difference) to a game that isn't all about it.

I can't give much coding advice, but as I see it, the basic idea of developing relationships with characters should be really simple at the core. As you interact with the characters, that interaction changes some variables (they probably need to be global) in the game - that gives you the "social link level" directly - and those variables change what interaction possibilities are available in the future. You'd check the variables in dialogues and scripts and have conditions for those to act accordingly.

Of course, this is basically the same advice I'd like to give to almost every query here about how to realise some general idea: there are some variables that determine the state of the game world, and you interact with the game by changing those variables within limits given by them, and then the game shows you a different state that you can interact with.

I also have an idea for how you might do the daily cycle thing: Make leaving some key rooms activate a script that offers you options based on what part of the day is going on. So, you might start in your own apartment in the morning. Then, when you leave it (walk to the edge of it, probably shown as a door), you're given a dialogue with options as to what to do next. You choose one thing and then go to a room or series of interconnected rooms. Then once you've been there long enough (determined by the game or your own choice) you can walk out of the front door or whatever and are given another dialogue giving you choices for what to do in the afternoon. I could see ways of making this differently and perhaps better, but this is one starting point.

Dates should be simple to keep track of using variables again.

That's where I'd start, the next step being figuring out how exactly to make AGS do it in detail. I'm sure the people who really know about this stuff can give better advice.

Just out of curiosity, and realising I may be missing something obvious due to not knowing stuff, why is the transparency a problem?

Unfortunately, I can't really help here; the closest I've done to what you want to do was to remove such effects after the fact in Paintshop Pro.

There were a couple of mentions of games of other genres back there, and it got me thinking how utterly different the situation can be elsewhere. Coming to the Diablo games (I've played the first two) from a traditional CRPG direction, I sneered at their oversimplified "click on everything to do the only thing you can" interface while at the same time enjoying them greatly. But if you compare an interface like that with what's been discussed here, it's actually absurdly complicated. You have dozens of special abilities, plus some items, for which you have to half build the interface yourself by assigning quick keys. And then you have to learn to use it, in combat, with a split-second reaction speed, while moving and clicking around at the same time. But once you get the hang of it, it barely ever gets in the way, and it's also pretty awesome.

I guess this reinforces the point that if there's something meaningful to do with the interface all the time, it can be arbitrarily complicated, at least provided it isn't pointlessly slow. However, there's probably a difference to adventure games in that in them, there's much less freedom as to how to overcome obstacles, because the obstacles aren't just enemies whose hit points need to be reduced to zero somehow.

I always found the puzzles to get in the way of exploring the world which was much more interesting to me.

I got the impression it was about exploring. It's highlighted in this article, too. That's the side I was wondering whether it would come back about. The article compares it to the Internet, which was an interesting take.

Hello, all.

So, I haven't been contributing on these forums much, but I've read some really interesting discussions here occasionally, and some people here seem to really know about adventure games, which is, of course, unsurprising. Well, I read this and was intrigued, even though I never played Myst myself (maybe I should now) and wondered if it could spark some discussion here. Any thoughts on this? Are games like this coming back, or could they? How about among adventure games specifically? Have any of you done it in your games?

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9713372/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary

Get NoScript, or AdBlock Plus, and block monkey's image host.  Simple!

Seems to work, thanks.

When trying to enter some of the threads on these forums, I get a message from F-Secure saying it's blocked a harmful website at http://meleepta.x10.mx/images/monkey_05_06/avatar.php and I shouldn't enter the page, ie. thread, in question. What could this be about? Some poster's avatar?

Incidentally, the numbers in the image above create an interesting illusion that they're moving sideways when you scroll the screen up and down. Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway.

Built-in walking doesn't support transitional frames; the first is the standing frame and the rest is used for the walk-cycle.
It's hard if not impossible to customize that without basically implementing the walking animations yourself (including path-finding).

The main problem is that there's no way of determining reliably in which direction a character will start walking.

Oh, rats. I was thinking I'd have to figure out this kind of thing at some point, but if you consider it so hard, well, it's got to be really hard. I have some nonstandard animations where things like transitional frames and figuring out which way the character will start walking matter more than in the usual case.

I'm not exactly an expert here, so I'm hesitant to give advice, but I think that could be handled by just switching the character sprite during inside-outside transitions (you can probably find how to do that in the manual) so that it shows the character from above on the map and from the side inside, and drawing the inside backgrounds and outside ones differently. In other words, the basic difference between the views would seem to be only cosmetic, so it should be easy, although there will probably be all kinds of minor details you can handle on the fly, eg. using walk-behinds only in the traditional view, or at least using them differently (for tree-tops above the character, say) in the overhead view.

While auto-translations have gone a long way and are generally quite good, as a non-native English speaker I would have to say that playing an automatically translated game would be pretty painful and (especially in adventure games) potentially misleading since often the finer nuances are lost in the translation. Still, using the auto-translate as a basis for a proper translation could possibly save a lot of time.

There are good machine translations now? Which ones? Google Translate certainly is still producing text that is rubbish by the standards of anything else (than machine translation) and often doesn't even preserve all of the straightforward semantic meaning. I agree that it would be painful to play a game translated with it.

I've never heard of competent translators using machine translations as a basis, and, as someone who does translation as sort of a hobby (actually I'm expecting to get a minor paid translation job in the near future too), I think I can guess why. A garbled version in your own language isn't easier to work with than the original in a language you understand. If the computer can get it right, it's probably trivial, and otherwise it's just better not to look at too literal translations lest they confuse you. I guess the thing is... real translation is anything but mechanic, you always have to think about it.

Machine translations, that I know of, are sort of passable for understanding a piece of text, but not fit to create a finished text of any sort. The method outlined above using Google Translate (well, Translator... presumably the same thing?) is technically clever, but I wouldn't use it in practice.

Oh, okay. Thanks for the information and clarification. I'm not surprised, though - I spent a while trying to figure it out a while ago, and this did seem like the only way.

I found the answer to a similar issue here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=36779.msg483049#msg483049 - It's old, but what's said seems to still be true.

Setting the delay for each frame of the idle view so as to compensate for the speed being character's Animation Speed +5 worked for me, but it takes a lot of clicking when there are a lot of frames.

Thesie, I'm not sure what you're saying you did. If you found another way that works, can you explain?

Oh. I always wondered what "magic pink" was. (I've been lurking here for months.)

Excellent, thank you. I'd actually wondered if dynamic sprites were suitable for this earlier, but I couldn't really see the forest for the trees when I looked them up in the manual, so I wasn't sure whether they worked that way.

So... if you wanted to combine several elements to make a sprite, would the way be to import them as separate sprites, then create a dynamic sprite and draw the elements onto it with DrawingSurface.DrawSurface?

And could you use Tint anyway by creating a dummy character with a sprite only consisting of parts that are going to be the same colour on a given character, tinting that (with saturation 100, of course), and then somehow taking the result and adding it to the finished sprite similarly to the above? Sounds more complicated, though, since if I read this right, it doesn't affect the sprite, just the character, so the only way I can see right now to accessing the result with these commands is through DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenShot (plus DynamicSprite.Crop). And if you used that, could you have transparent parts in the resulting sprite? Okay, so maybe that doesn't work.

I'm pretty new to this, but I've been playing around with the idea of something RPG-ish too, and there's one thing sometimes done in RPGs about which I'm not sure whether it could be done in AGS. I haven't quite found a proper answer to this anywhere. So: Is it possible to customise a character's appearance by combining different elements, like hair style and eye colour and such? Like when creating a custom player character, but it could also be used for creating stock NPC appearances and changing the clothes or armour someone is wearing. Even if customisation is just limited to the initial character creation, there would obviously be too many combinations of even just a few different options for it to make sense to make a different collection of sprites for each.

I suppose there are two separate questions here: whether it's possible to combine pre-made pieces within the game to (effectively or actually) create a new sprite, which is more important; and whether it's possible to colour the "pieces", eg. just create and import one image for a specific hair style (or, well, you know, one per needed frame of animation or whatever will be needed for other reasons) but then tell AGS to recolour it when needed.