Topics

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to think through if something is feasible / possible...

I would like to have a Character Creator for my Adventure/RPG hybrid. The most basic way I can think about this is defining certain views for each iteration, which would mean that, let's say:

- Character with long hair (char1)
- Character with short hair (char2)

I would need to create separate views for everything, so "char.climbing" also needs a "char2.climbing" "char.sitting" also needs a "char2.sitting".

As soon as I want to do iterations on skin tone, clothing colour, it becomes... a lot.

I was wondering if there was a way in AGS to combine multiple views? Or dynamically generate a sprite? Or recolour a given RGB value from a sprite/view?

That way skin tone could be mapped to a GUI-Button. And when you click button1, it reads all the RGB values to colour the sprite one skin tone. (I use 3 to 4 different colours for skin, for shading).

That would potentially work for recolouring a sprite. Does AGS have this feature?

For more dynamic changes, like hairstyles, it would mean I need to superimpose another view on top of another, which sounds like an impossibility probably.

Any ideas/suggestions on how to explore this a bit further would be most appreciated. Fully appreciate it might be an impossibility anyway. :-)

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I know I've been pretty radio silent again these past few months. The reason is that I started a new Master's study in September next to my full time job, so things have been... rather busy that way. But with Easter looming there's a bit more free time for a wee while, so I'm getting back into the swing of things.

And I just wanted to say, I got into Git and then installed Gitea on my Synology NAS (via Docker). Gitea is like GitHub, but self-hosted and private. So a great way for me at least to work on my game and ensure proper filenames, etc. I'm storing all my music, graphics, writings & coding in one place and easily tie it all together with Issues/Tracking in Gitea. The Projects/Milestones feature, along with the Wiki where I store my technical lists (Integers, RPG table elements) are a godsend. Why didn't I look into Git years ago???


Using the Project Kanban style board to move issues around to track game completion.


Easy way to oversee all files in my game's project, track changes, etc.


The issue tracker in its full glory.

The great thing about Gitea is that it's free, doesn't require much to run (apparently it runs great on a Raspberry-Pi as well) and is giving me piece of mind. With off-site backups set up for my docker data, I'm feeling pretty secure and confident I won't lose my hard work. And it's a great way to plod on with sprites, music compositions, writing & coding.

So it does raise the question: What tools are you using to manage projects?

I'm looking for an easy out-of-editor way to work on dialogs, for example. At the moment I'm using vim in the terminal, which works, but might need improvement... :-)

Hey everyone,

Niche case here! The last time I worked on a certain game, it was with AGS 2.62. I'm trying to upgrade to AGS 3.6.0 (or 3.5.1) but I'm guessing there's some intermittent steps involved. When I try to load into a recent version, AGS just crashes. So I'm trying to figure out which previous versions I would need to upgrade my game. Does anyone have any ideas? (I see upgrade paths for 2.7 versions, but this one's slightly older than that!)

Thanks for any help you can give!

Bit of a niche question! And perhaps only Mac-specific. Not sure, since I don't have a trackpad-enabled Windows PC to test with.

I recently played through Lamplight City on my Mac and one of the reasons it was such an enjoyable experience is that every single tap with my finger registered perfectly as a mouse click. This made it very simple to play, without having to force-press my trackpad down every single time.

Running the latest AGS Mac version on my Macbook Air (compiled with cmake) it appears to be very hit-and-miss. Most of the time I need to do a hard press to get a click to register. Very infrequently, a tap will suffice. I would love to have my game fully "tap responsive" similar to Lamplight.

Is this something that I should enable in the game settings somewhere or has something changed in how clicks are registered? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Dear all,

It took a while since it's been a very "quiet" /r place, but I've just been made a Moderator on the /r/adventuregamestudio Reddit.

It could be quite a nice way to help people promote their games in production / released games. I'd be happy to appoint other Moderators from amongst the active forum members here as well, so send me a message if you're interested.

Whilst I get to go by "Hobbes" here on the forums, I'm HobbesHK over there, just like on Discord (someone else beat me to my desired username on both haha).

[Introduction]

Introduction

Back in May 2021, I finished a short MAGS game called Fhaloness. That was my first time working with AGS again in a long while and rekindled my enthusiasm for this wonderful tool. I really enjoyed putting that game together and as many players figured out, Fabian and Sylvana's journey is far from complete.

Rather than starting "a second game" I've decided to add onto the original MAGS game. So I'll be re-releasing that game when it's finished. The MAGS entry will be rebranded to "Prologue" and the next new area will be called "Chapter 1". I've currently planned 5 chapters but may drop down to 4 if it turns out there isn't enough content to fill the game...

Onto some work-in-progress screenshots!

Screenshots

Inspired by my old-school love for Betrayal at Krondor, the game will come equipped with story-screens that either enrich the environment or offer a short mini-game (similar to what Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity have been doing).



Chapter 1 finds Fabian on his path to the city of Aeramor where he hopes to book passage to the Isle of Fhaloness.



In case you get lost, there's a handy map feature readily available in the menubar!



Travelling through the woods of Landerion is not for the faint of heart...



Yes, the game has a battle system!

Progress

Prologue:

- graphics 90%
- puzzles 100%
- scripting 90%
- music/sound 90%

I'm reworking some areas of the prologue to fit in with the wider narrative, so some work has to be done...

Chapter 1:

- graphics 30%
- puzzles 80%
- scripting 40%
- music/sound 10%

Chapter 2 - 5:
0% (Apart from some plot outlines and puzzle ideas!)

Closing notes

As I've been working on this game, it's evolved into a RPG/Point-and-Click hybrid game. I'm really quite proud of the fact that, being such an amateur scripter, I've been able to put together a fully functional battle system (with 12 character levels) using a simple variation of the d20 System, including a levelling up system, a skill-based system (for some interesting dialog options as well).

Since this is a passion project I'm only able to work on in my free time, I'm very hesitant to put any deadline on this one. By breaking the game up into smaller chapters I know it's much easier to hit milestones, which works very well for me. So Chapter 1 is manageable. Right now I've scripted the whole game sequence, but there's an awful lot of drawing, composing & writing still left to do. All core systems are in place, all room transitions work, puzzles function, but it's very, very bare bones.

If you want to help...

Please, please help me spread the word, in any way shape or form. If you want to tweet about this game, please do. The current version (Prologue only) is available on Itch.Io. Please follow me there, leave a comment, anything to help raise the profile of this little game. I'll be sharing more and more updates as we move forward.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on what I've cobbled together so far. 

Hi all,

Quick one - is it possible to easily slow down a screen transition? I know how to do it with Fading Out, but I'd like to slow down eTransitionDissolve for one particular scene.

Is there an option to set the speed for this single instance, which I call with SetNextScreenTransition?

As always, thank you again!!

Using some of the excellent suggestions found in the topic above (making an RPG system in AGS) I've decided to try and script a simple turn-based battle system. So far so good and I feel like I'm making progress.

I've decided to use a very, very simple derivative of the d20 system, where I use a selection of dice to calculate results. So 2d6 for example, would generate a number between 2 and 12. (2 x 6-sided dice).

To help keep these functions to a minimum, I've created a number of functions in the GlobalScript.asc document of my game. So for example, for a d4 I've scripted:

Code: ags

function roll_d4()
{
  roll_value = 0;
  d4=Random(3);
  d4++;
  roll_value = d4;
}

This is working fine and is giving me a random number between 1 and 4. It's generated first as the Global Integer "d4" and then moved into the global integer "roll_value". This because at some points I will want to combine odd dice together (a d4 + a d6 for example) so the overall "roll_value" is consistently called to provide outcomes.

So far so good and I've tested this and it's working fine when I call these functions from a GUI button.

Now we get to my problem. In my current Battle Room, I would like to call these functions from within the room script. The reason is that I "set up" the monster based on a monster_id which is set before the player enters the battle room.

So if monster_id = 1, then a certain monster is loaded (hit points, attack points, character view, attack view, etc). If monster_id is 2, a completely different monster is loaded onto the same character with different variables.

Now, my monster_id 1 has hit points ranging between 2 and 8 (2d4). I've created the function roll_2d4 in my globalscript file and would like to call it from within the room script: function room_Load()

When I try to call roll_2d4 (which isn't defined as a function in this specific room), AGS can't compile and gives me the error "Undefined token 'roll_2d4'."

Now I'll be using roll_2d4 in quite a few different rooms and scenarios (dialogue checks, difficulty checks, etc) so I don't really want to script my whole dice-setup every single time I want to call it somewhere in the game. I thought the GlobalScript was the best place for this, if I wanted to script custom functions that were accessible anywhere. Am I doing something wrong, do I need to import the GlobalScript function somehow into the room script before I can acccess it? Or should I store these dice-rolling functions elsewhere?

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated, as always. I fear I am getting overly ambitious with this little game, but I'm having a blast trying to come up with a battle system and building a bit of an adventure-rpg hybrid game. So any help people can give would be most welcome.

Thanks again!

Me again. With a crazy idea. Again. 

I'm absolutely in the dark as to how feasible this is, but would it be possible to build VULKAN support into the engine? It would eventually allow us to move away from DirectX9 (which is losing support and has been losing support for the past few years). On my AMD graphics cards, VULKAN performs much better than OpenGL and it also allows for some funky potential future features. Not that I think AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution should be anywhere near of a top priority! (I joke here, obviously)

The reasoning is that VULKAN is better supported on AMD than OpenGL & DirectX9, so it means a performance improvement (most likely) on the more graphically intensive games. Now that we see games branching into 720p+ resolutions, I think it's feasible to consider this.

Alternatively, as mentioned before, with MoltenVK there's then also the option to move towards native future-proof MacOS/iOS/tvOS development. For current alternative platforms (Nintendo Switch) I also think Vulkan holds more merit than OpenGL.

I would then recommend we keep DirectX9 as a legacy-supported feature (it'll go eventually), with focus shifting to OpenGL & Vulkan.

Does this idea have merit?

Thinking about Dualnames' post the other day in the Strangeland topic I was wondering if it were viable to overhaul the save game system for an upcoming release of AGS? The current way it works breaks saved games when games are updated, which I would love to see fixed. Now I understand people program loads of custom functions, plugins, etc into AGS, so I see why the saving-memory approach is used. But could we perhaps consider adding in a second save-game-system that people can choose in the editor? It could be started as a "basic one" that collects:

- Integers (Global & Room)
- Inventory Items
- Characters & locations
- Player current room, etc

I'm sure there's loads of other things that would need to be collected, but the more we can build a save system that creates version-independent saves, the nicer it'd be. My personal reasoning is that I'm toying with a modular approach (episodic structure) for a game and would be releasing multiple episodes within the same AGS game (similar to how Life is Strange 1 and 2 were released, for example, or the Walking Dead games). Currently, if I were to release Episode 1 and people would save the game and I'd then release an update a few months later with Episode 2, their saved games wouldn't work anymore.

Would there be any merit to such a design? The Editor could allow a "use memory-saving system (stable)" or "use modular saving system (experimental)" whilst we work on it, for example.

Looking forward to hearing some thoughts on this feature request/idea.

Hi all,

With some of the excellent posts going round as people are trying AdventureJam games, etc, and the past efforts of the Unofficial AGS Blog, the AGD Zine etc, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a new AGS blog news site review thing. The site would:

- Have news on AGS and its community as it happens
- Review games
- Preview upcoming games
- Interview AGS people

Nothing new, really, nothing that hasn't been done before. But I was wondering if there were people who would like to join me on the Editorial Team? I'm giving this some more thought over the next few days and will probably get a domain name to host this and invest in some Wordpress plugins to make it look nice. Something like NintendoLife comes to mind. Anyone else have any thoughts on the matter?

Me again!

So for this game I'm working on I'm really pleased with the world map (thank you to everyone who helped with that). Using a very similar approach, I've created a "book room". It's got an empty book graphic in there and I use a GUI with 3 labels + 1 Exit button.

The labels are BookTitle, BookLeftPage & BookRightPage. Then depending on which book I click on in the real world, I set GlobalInt "which_book" to change to integer 1, 2, 3 etc. My aim is to fit all text from that book on one page. I'm not looking for Skyrim-style nonsense where you can read 80,000 words in-game. Just short and snappy lore dumping. These books are optional, but can provide some more context/understanding for people who want to engage with it. Optional world building, so to speak.

The way I set these labels is using my Book Room and under "Room_Load" I've got code like this:

Code: ags

if (which_book == 1) {
  BookTitle.Text = "TESTING THIS BOOK";
  BookLeftPage.Text = "This is a big test to see how much text I can fit into this one little iddly bitty thing just right here. If it can't fit, it can't fit. So what will happen then?";
  BookRightPage.Text = "It's a big question to which we'll never know the answer! I do reckon we can set the stage for Atlantis by finding the three rings that will bring Sun, Moon and Earth together.";
  }

This produces the perfectly serviceable and functional output:



Two questions:

1. I would like to check if the coding wizards in this forum are now cringing in abject horror at how I'm doing this. Would you say there's a more efficient way?

2. Secondly, is it possible to have line breaks in there? Since I'm inputting it as one string, I'm not sure if there's a string command that would add a new paragraph?

Thank you again for everyone willing to spend some time pondering this!

So I've been wondering if ESRGAN would be a useful tool for some very specific use cases. For example, I'm drawing rooms for a game at 320 x 200. One of these is a map screen, which currently includes a lot of manual anti-aliasing and it's beginning to look pretty O-K, in my opinion. I would love to use portions of that map for an intro sequence (potentially) but I would need to blow it up to a bigger resolution. Hence, ESRGAN.

I first came across ESRGAN being used for LucasArts upscaling here. This was a great starting point because the person doing this work also offered their models for download. My understanding is very, very basic at this point, but these models (.pth files) include the mathematical computations used to upscale.

Next I went to the GameUpscale Reddit and clicked into a recommended Wiki. This helped me to install ESRGAN, Git Bash & I ended up going with nmkd CupScale.

So having installed ESRGAN, CupScale + using the blog's provided pathing models, I had a working upscale system in place (Windows at this point, using my AMD 5700XT graphics card and a swanky i7 10700K). So it takes about 12 seconds to upscale an image... obviously ESRGAN is a massive rabbit hole with many, many different options, pathing models, etc, etc. But as a first attempt... I think it's pretty decent!

[imgzoom]https://www.jaapmarsman.com/img/dusk_orig.png[/imgzoom]
The original 320 x 200 image. Obviously a very pixelated affair since that's the only way this one-man-show can have any hope of ever finishing anything.



My first attempt at upscaling with ESRGAN is now here. I went for a screen without characters in it and basic, big shapes and tried the CartoonPainting400000 model. I'm not too displeased with this image.

I'm well aware this forum post is almost a tutorial in itself (which I might write into the Wiki at some point ) but at this stage... I'm just curious to get some feedback. Has anyone ever played with ESRGAN before? How does this blown-up image look to you? I can see some usage for promotion/marketing materials (Itch.Io background wallpapers for example) but it's also just fun and geeky to play with this. So if I get bored at some point I might throw some more images in.

Character sprites are a different story, they all come out looking very misshapen, so some touch-up would be required there afterwards. But it does save on having to draw at 720p resolution which I would just not be able to do with my current skill levels.

Any thoughts / feedback / criticism, please drop a note below!

First things first: Sorry for yet another thread about the website.

The reason being is that I've started going through the Wiki. It'll probably be at a glacial pace, however, I think it's worth having one thread to collect all Wiki things. Then if I do something people don't think should happen, we can discuss that here instead of littering the "Broken Links" thread.

I'll add more posts as I update things.

I've taken the contents from the Community page on the AGS website and created a Communities Wiki page instead. This will enable the new site to just have a "Forums" link instead. The wiki Category "AGS Community and history" already existed anyway with quite a few pages, so it'll be easy to build from there and also link some more stuff in. I've added the Reddit link there now as well, since that wasn't on the main website. Snarky wanted a Discord link, but after checking the Community page, it already had a link to it, so I've just copied that across.

Since it's a wiki and anyone can edit, please, add more communities that you're aware of!

[The main menubar AGS page]

As an initial clean-up, I thought it might help to collect all broken links on the AGS website as they've been reported by Babar, with perhaps some more added in as we browse through together. This could be step 1 in cleaning up the site before exploring a potential redesign as discussed here.

Some of my suggestions might be quite brutal, but I really think from a new-person perspective, if the first "Help and Support" links you find after downloading the editor don't work/are broken/are outdated, then that's a massive barrier to entry.

The main menubar AGS page (here)

Help and Support
The menubar on the right, under Getting Started, Help/FAQs, Art Tutorials & For Developers:

• Video Tutorials - Don't exist. Let's delete this.
• Getting Started with AGS - These are now static webpages and outdated (AGS3.0). Could we please transfer these into the Wiki so they can be collectively maintained?
• Scripting Tutorial - Same as above. Last updated in 2007. Probably quite outdated but good to have. If it lives in the Wiki, we can make it a community effort.
• GUI Scripting - Same thing again. This tutorial is rather outdated. But by transferring into the Wiki, we can modify.
• Online manual - Please update the link to the current Github-one. This manual is for version 3.4.3
• AGS Wiki - This should perhaps be the only link here. Help and Support required? Check out the Wiki!
• Bug and Suggestion Tracker - This just takes you to the Forum? Should probably go to the Github Issues page
• Beginners FAQ - This just takes you to the main page of the Wiki. Delete this link, the Beginners FAQ is on the Wiki, but let people just go to the Wiki through the link above and they'll find more resources there anyway.
• Unofficial AGS blog - It's been quiet there for 7 years. Time to be removed from the website. I'm sorry SSH!! (All my love to the Scots, being married to one myself!)
• AGS FAQ (non-technical) - Nice! But again, let's remove from here and stick it in the Wiki instead.
• Kafka's Koffee - Delete. None of the links on that page work. Sorry!
• AGS Engine Plugin API - Last updated 2009. Move to Wiki where it can be updated.
• AGS Editor Plugin API - Can't see when this was updated... but again, let's move to the Wiki.

Now as cat said in the other thread I mentioned, AGS is a do-ology. I am MORE than willing to do these "move to Wiki" suggestions made above. I just want to make sure with AGA (or whoever needs to agree with this) that this will then mean the links on that page get edited/removed. Otherwise, it'll be a couple of hours wasted. So if whoever's in charge can give me the green light, I'll get the Wiki pages setup. And we can take it from there, update tutorials, etc.

Screenshots and Features on the same page
Simple suggestion, but could we add a Lightbox module? Right now, clicking on the screenshots opens them as bare pictures in a separate window.

Develop AGS
The only link there (the readme) takes you to Github. Perhaps just best to direct to Github anyway and make it clear that AGS is hosted there. I would "advertise" here as well that AGS falls under the Artistic License 2.0.

Resources
I question the need for this whole section on this page. It should live in the Wiki in its entirety. But not all of it, probably...

• AGS Resources - I would... get rid. This is from 2006 and seems to be last updated September 2006. These things also live on the forum (in a more updated version) and can live in the Wiki. This is old and confusing.
• Insta-Game - Whilst last updated in 2006, it's a collection of PNG files that people can use if they want to. Not confusing, I feel. But probably better linked to from the Wiki instead, on the Beginner / Getting Started Guide.
• AGS Font Editor - Does this program still function? Perhaps this Resources sub-section would be a good place for community-designed software. But again, Wiki is probably better for this.
• SCI Fonts - Again. Wiki, I feel.

The reason I keep saying Wiki-wiki-wiki should probably be clear by now. Community do-ology, it enables people who want to help out to help out. And we can easily take things further there together without it being a one-man responsibility when for all of us, time is precious.

So... I'm guessing this is a Beginner question, but it might be more advanced to solve it. I'm working on a map screen for my game and would like to do this as a GUI. The main reason being:

1. I have multiple player characters. So a Character.ChangeRoom & Character.ChangeView won't work, since the map screen is in the menubar GUI and might be used by different Characters at any time.
2. With the map screen being in the menubar, it's accessible from any room at any time. So if you're on the map, pressing "Exit"... there's no Character.ChangeRoom(PreviousRoom, previousX,previousY) function that I can see.

Let's say my map looks something like this (it doesn't, but it's not finished yet):



The finished map will have many things on it that, on hovering over them, I'd like its name displayed. It doesn't have to do anything with clicking on it, just hover over, show name.

If the map was in a room, I could easily add hotspots to it. With the gActionBar (I'm using the BASS template) it would then display the names of these hotspots. However, hotspots don't exist in the GUI toolkit that I can see. I've changed the Z order, so the gActionBar is on top of the gMapScreen GUI... so is there an easy way to make things appear on hovering over them? Like, invisible buttons that would trigger gActionBar?

The reason I would like to use invisible buttons (or something similar) is that this map screen will have many, many things. I don't want to use sprites on top of the map, I would like the map to stay as one big fat 320 x 200 sprite. Makes it easy for me to add/change things as the game grows.

Any help/thoughts about this would be greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank you!

(For those of you who played Betrayal at Krondor back in the day, that's exactly the vibe I'm going for. You hover over stuff and the name of the city/forest/river/ocean appears)

[https://new-site.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/]

A new website is currently in development. Check out the work in progress and give your feedback:

https://new-site.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

There is a temporary link in the community drop down called "TEMP: Redesign release notes", so you can see what has been changed since you last visited the page. Please keep commenting your feedback here.





Original message:

Having used AGS many moons ago when Chris Jones was the sole developer and now returning, obviously a lot has changed since 2004/2005. I briefly tried to dabble in Godot about a year ago and was impressed with their website infrastructure/design (for lack of a better word). In short:

• Patreon as a donation system seems to be a good idea. I just tried to donate to AGS, for example, and got refused. I can't donate from/to my/the country. I also don't know who EMAIL_ADDRESS_REMOVED person is (I trust that it works, since it's on the website, but it doesn't come across as professional as it could.)
• A more streamlined way of proposing new features might be useful, though I'm not sure if Godot's own 2019 idea really took off?
• A centralised News page on the main website
• Positive, open-source and free marketing and explanation on the front page

I fully, 100% understand that AGS is a labour of love. I am so appreciative of all the active moderators, developers, etc I see around here. The reason I'm raising this particular topic is that I'm more than willing to help out. I'm comfortable with WordPress (I know some people don't like it, but it's easy to use for non-technical people). I'm more than willing to pay for plugins, theme, etc, to help build up the main site there. It can incorporate a more streamlined approach to certain things are mentioned above. It can link more easily to the new AGS manual, etc, etc, etc.

So in essence I'm offering my help here, if it would be desired. I would be more than happy to start doing a redesign of the AGS website. I could host it on my own server for now and then it could be transferred across if/when people are happy with it? I just don't know who to speak to!

Quick one... I know I've got the option to build a custom GUI interface (which requires advanced scripting and scares me a little bit!). However what I just want is to put a sprite behind my dialog options, that's all. I like the default option which puts all dialog choices at the bottom of the screen, but I would like to change the text colours + use a full-width sprite behind it.

Is there a way to achieve this without programming a full custom GUI?

Thanks in advance!

I was wondering if it's possible to delete a game from the AGS Database? I added "The Strange Day" nearly 20 years ago. Since then I've lost the source code, the compiled code, the... everything. There's a blank page there with no useful information. I tried to remove myself as the Owner, but it needs one person attached to it. Am I being a bit obtuse or is there no "Delete" button on the page?

Any help would be most appreciated - thank you!

[Fhaloness]

Fhaloness
(MAGS May 2021 Entry)

From the guy who brought you Buccaneer (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/258-buccaneer/) errm... 18 years ago... and then... never did deliver on Buccaneer 2... he, ah, finally decided to enter another MAGS competition.



I'm proud to present:



It features 10 rooms (yes, I am counting the Main Menu   the End Screen). Six characters. Some wonky walk cycles (at least they're not gliding across the screen anymore). A few small puzzles (hopefully with enough guidance to feel like a game but not cause frustration!). And hopefully, plenty, plenty of melodrama.

The story is set in a fantasy world I once developed and never used for anything... so hopefully it'll all make sense. If time permitted there would've been readable books, a browseable map, etc, but hey, I can always promise a Fhaloness 2! (Too soon for that joke?)

Please find it on the AGS Games Database here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2543-fhaloness

---

UPDATE: I've begun working on the next part of Fhaloness, rebranding this game as the Prologue. For more information on Chapter 1, please go here!