Hello guys,
For the last two days I've been playing with AGS and especially one issue has cost me a lot of time: I wasn't able to draw walkable areas.
Ok, now after hours it's clear to me how to use that feature...
1. My experience
I was told by a tooltip that "You are currently using the eraser. To draw new areas, change the selection in the list above the Properties Pane." Well, in all other tools I know you have to click an eraser icon or select that command from a menu in order to enter such an mode. I hadn't done that. Also I wasn't able to locate the walkable area ID selection list
. This was probably due to the huge width of that control. I just wasn't able to identify it as a list control. Ok, maybe I'm stupid... 
But let me tell you that I've been a software engineer for seven years. And developing .NET user dialogs has been one of my tasks. The help or FAQ don't mention that problem. Finally, I was able to solve that issue by using the search feature of this forum: A post with a screenshot how to change the walkable area ID to something else than 0.
2. Why you have that problem following a tutorial
I was watching the youtube tutorial by densming. So I started a new project with the default game and switched the background. I was notified that the new background had a different size and everything including the walkable areas would be deleted. Ok, the first time I didn't read that message box, but that wasn't the problem. The problem is: After deleting the background image of the only existing room and deleting the walkable areas due to the new background size, the walkable area ID is set to 0 and remains zero unless set to something else manually.
3. Two suggestions to remedy that problem.
I'm looking forward to getting feedback for suggestion #2. However, suggestion #1 describes a bugfix and should be implemented
Regards
Marcus
For the last two days I've been playing with AGS and especially one issue has cost me a lot of time: I wasn't able to draw walkable areas.
Ok, now after hours it's clear to me how to use that feature...
1. My experience
I was told by a tooltip that "You are currently using the eraser. To draw new areas, change the selection in the list above the Properties Pane." Well, in all other tools I know you have to click an eraser icon or select that command from a menu in order to enter such an mode. I hadn't done that. Also I wasn't able to locate the walkable area ID selection list
. This was probably due to the huge width of that control. I just wasn't able to identify it as a list control. Ok, maybe I'm stupid... But let me tell you that I've been a software engineer for seven years. And developing .NET user dialogs has been one of my tasks. The help or FAQ don't mention that problem. Finally, I was able to solve that issue by using the search feature of this forum: A post with a screenshot how to change the walkable area ID to something else than 0.2. Why you have that problem following a tutorial
I was watching the youtube tutorial by densming. So I started a new project with the default game and switched the background. I was notified that the new background had a different size and everything including the walkable areas would be deleted. Ok, the first time I didn't read that message box, but that wasn't the problem. The problem is: After deleting the background image of the only existing room and deleting the walkable areas due to the new background size, the walkable area ID is set to 0 and remains zero unless set to something else manually.
3. Two suggestions to remedy that problem.
- After assigning a background image with a different size and deleting the walkable areas make sure to set the walkable area ID to non edit mode. Note: That buggy behavior does only appear in case there is only one room! (repoduction is quite easy with a new project and the default game) Also it might be of help for beginners to change the selection text from "walkable area ID 0" to "walkable area ID 0 (eraser mode)"
- Walkable areas and other regions are not object oriented. Instead, they are internally implemented by using image files and color codes to code the different regions. From that (developer) point of view it makes totally sense to have an eraser mode assigning color code 0 to pixels. However, there are users not familiar with that part of AGS history, instead, they are familiar with object oriented tools. So, they first try to treat walkable areas as objects. The editor supports that thinking as every walkable area has properties assigned to it. So it seems naturally to have walkable areas overlap each other. But that's not possible as each walkable are pixel is only able to keep one color code. Also from an object oriented point of view it doesn't make sense to draw into one walkable area in order to delete other walkable areas. My suggestion is to change the selection list to a color pallet to make it more obvious that it's a actually a drawing tool for a 2D image. The colors could be arranged in two rows each of them keeping 8 colors. This way each color would be big enough to keep the ID of its walkable area as text. Also the Properties Pane could still be used as it would show the properties of the color currently selected.
I'm looking forward to getting feedback for suggestion #2. However, suggestion #1 describes a bugfix and should be implemented
Regards
Marcus