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Hey everyone!

Having recently more time than usual on my hands, I've decided to indulge in some Point'n'Click game making.
I am primarily a computer/synth musician though, and one thing I'll be interested in is the BGM aspect of any game I may come up with eventually.

I'm pleased that AGS already supports MOD and XM formats (to my knowledge its only 2 options â€" other than MIDI â€" allowing a music piece to seamlessly loop all or parts of it, thanks to the power of these pattern-based formats. Something you can't do with any usual audio format).
However, I'd be EVEN more pleased if support for some more powerful tracker formats was available.

I'm thinking of the IT (as in "Impulse Tracker") format (very old too â€" about 25 years old today! â€" but still quite a bit better and advanced than the XM format), and the XRNS format from the modern tracker Renoise â€" which I use.

I don't know whether the IT format could be easily supported â€" I only assume that it shouldn't be much more trouble to add than XM was...?

As for Renoise's format XRNS, it might actually be the easiest to support, given its specs: an XRNS is a zip file.
Inside the zip file are the samples/instruments used by the music piece (themselves stored in WAV, OGG, or other traditionnal audio format) and an XML file (the actual musical "score": pattern composition and structure of the music) with info pointing to the samples. Pretty straightforward and open, so I imagine its support should be rather easy to implement, right? Let alone the Renoise staff & community are extremely active and would no doubt be willing to help in the matter.


Now, maybe these formats are already available through some plug-in/add-on that I'm not aware of? Please let me know about it if that's the case...

Otherwise, if that's okay, I'd very much like to officially suggest the support for any (or both!) of these 2 audio formats: IT (Impulse Tracker) and especially Renoise's XRNS (being the more powerful/flexible and modern of all pattern/tracker-based music formats).

These 2 formats (particularly XRNS) would allow state-of-the-art synthesizers to be used to compose music for AGS games, and as I said above, their pattern structure is a perfect fit for endlessly playing (=in a seamless loop) background music in video games â€" as opposed to MP3/WAV/OGG etc. which, as conventional audio, don't allow any complex looping.

I hope my humble request will prove worthy of consideration for the staff and devs.
Thank you all in any case for taking the time to read. Cheers!

I've started creating a game using the 640x480 res.
Not a real complain here, but I'm still wondering: while drawing the walk-behind areas can be done pixel perfect (for obvious reasons), how come it is only possible to draw hotspots/walkpath/regions in 2x2 pixel instead of at a 1 pixel precision as well? If I'm correct, the masks are stored as bitmap anyway, so there's no limitation due to storing vector coords or stuff like this.

Is it a limitation introduced on purpose, eg. to reduce the "pixel hunting puzzles" trend or sth? 

(Note: apologies for posting this in the technical part of the forum, as it was just the closest fit I could think of...)

I'm aware how presomptuous of me it is as a newbie  to dare making a feature request already :, I can just hope Chris won't mind and even will hopefully find it actually makes sense as I believe it does.

As everybody will have guessed by now from the title, I'm wondering here wether it would be possible to implement a support for the popular IT format (native of Impulse Tracker), seeing as there already is support for MOD and XM. I know that MOD and XM (from Soundtracker and Fasttracker respectively) belong to the same /family/ of module formats, while S3M (Screamtracker) and IT form a somewhat distinctive family, but I figured (in my naive non-coder way possibly) that implementing the other wouldn't be such a challenge anyway...
Thing is while it's possible to achieve the same effects and results with XM, the IT format often allows to do it easier and above all much less resource-intensive, therefore I think the support of this format would be valuable and benefit users (I'm making my music myself with trackers and would rather use the IT format if possible, since doing it with XM would often require to use much more channels for instance...).

Well, let me know what you think (wether I've got a point or my request is just silly ^^)!
-- DeisT

Well I'm really taking the step now into actually building my first adventure.
I have already some basic yet precise ideas for the game I want to do. I'm going for a true retro feeling (first person view, /a la/ "Death Gate" or "Shannara") which suits my tastes best, so naturally I'm tempted to select the 256 colour-based option (not interested in most of the features made available by no palette as of now).

Although, as a true noobie with AGS and after reading the manual looking for the answers, I'm still a bit confused and doubtful about one or 2 things regarding the limitations or 256 colours palette, so I'm resorting to bother you, wise experimented users of the forum, to help me make up my mind about it once and for all. So here is:

- I've read that some transparency/fading effects are still available in 8-bits, yet in the manual many fonctions -- for instance the "Transparency property (GUI)" -- explicitly state that "Transparency only works in 16-bit and 32-bit colour games." Does it mean that (to keep the same exemple) it is impossible to fade out a GUI in 8-bits?

- Is cross-fading directly between pictures possible? (ie. Instead of fading an image to black then fading in the next one, I'd like to fade directly from one picture to another). Of course that's only a small detail (I'm sorta picky I'm afraid), but just wondering anyway...


That's it for my wonderings as of now.
Thank you all in advance!

I'll begin straight away by greeting everyone around  , seeing I'm all new and freshly registered here, and just as much straight forward will apologize in case of my 1st question being too dumb even for a n00b or already answered some other obvious place (which I wasn't smart enough to find anyway). This said, here's my point:

I'm a huge adventure games freak 8), and I've been willing to start giving a try to AGS for a long time but never actually had the time to do so before. Now that I seem to have some more in my hands, the thing is I realize I'd be even more tempted (in the long run I mean -- obviously I won't start any serious work before having mastered enough of the soft in order to do so) to create a point and click more in the vein of, say Lankhor's "Mortville Manor"/"Maupity Island", or later games from Legend Entertainment ("Companions of Xanth", "Death Gate", "SuperHero League of Hoboken").

That is (for those too young to have ever played these wonders ): 1st person view (no animated characters displayed on-screen) of static rooms (which is to say that you can't move the view, but don't dismiss the possibility of animations within the actual graphic frame), and rolling menus to access the commands (which would allow for much more of them than with a command board permanently displayed on-screen like in the LucasArts games for instance). Other than that, the basic principles of the point'n'click remains the same (ie. the whole "mouse pointer on any object/spot of the graphics and click to interact with it" thing).

Hence my wondering as to wether this would be easily feasable with AGS or not, or is AGS suitable for developing such a kind of point'n'click in your opinion? The way I see it, such a game is basically a lighter/easier form of a PnC game without having to deal with managing all the animated sprites, collisons detection, fake 3D, etc. stuff, therefore I figured the AGS language allowing for so much more, would certainly permit to develop such simpler form of game...

But then again, given such a big part of its features being focused on developing 3rd person point'n'clicks (Sierra/LucasArts-style, like mentioned in the very description of the website), I'd like the opinion of some experienced users among you about how well- (or possibly ill-?)suited it is for the kind I'd be interested to develop myself?