Messages

For the avoidance of confusion: densming, you won the Best Innovation award. Congratulations! You can watch the category announcement here:

This is so awesome! Thanks Snarky!  I really appreciate this.  I mentioned it over on the other AGS awards 2019 thread, but I am truly honored that so many people still enjoy my videos and have learned from them!  I wish I could have been a part of the ceremony, that looks really cool.

[Best Innovation Award]

Best Innovation Award
densming - For his many video tutorials, that taught a lot of people how to make games in AGS.

Wow!  I had no idea I was honored with this award!  Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed the videos over the years.  Back in 2009 2008 when I started making them, I thought it would be a fun thing to do, mainly to help myself learn AGS a little more. I never imagined that so many people would watch the videos and learn about creating adventure games with AGS.  Although I haven't been creating videos in quite and while, and not active on the AGS forums, I still pop in every so often and see what has changed and how the AGS community is getting on.  It's wonderful to me that AGS is still very much alive and thriving! Keep making adventure games!!

Thank you so much for the award.  It really does mean a lot to me.

-densming

Edit: I had to go back and look - it was actually 2008 when I uploaded the first tutorial video!

[Lifetime Achievement:]

Lifetime Achievement: densming

For making the popular AGS YouTube tutorials, which have taught so many people how to code in AGS. Enough said!

Oops, I suggested densming in PM last year, but too late. I also resent this suggestion recently, before noticing this post. Not sure how this works, but if possible, I'd like to second this.

Wow, thanks guys.  I'm honored, even to be recommended for an award.

I'm still around! It might be fun to do an online-style course.

densming, I also want to thank you for the tutorial videos. They've been vital to me.

Ho! Man! I'm just waiting for more video tutorials from you with advanced features, etc... you got all the love from me -. I just love your book... Again Thanks

Without your videos, my project would have never come to life. You rock! 

All this makes me want to continue the series even more.

wow! You're alive! 
Just thanking you for your videos, learned tons with them when I started. 

I'm glad you enjoyed them!!

I feel the love. I've been neglecting my AGS duties for too long.

I'm still here! I really want to continue the tutorial.  Luckily, the tutorial videos (and the book) are still largely relevant to AGS.  There are many more topics that we want to cover (as well as completing the second part of the book), and we've recently been talking about maybe starting up again.

Hi

i note that the link to book no longer availabe...

barefoot

Yeah, I guess drop.io deleted the book for some reason.  Anyway, I've got it hosted on our site now at http://www.ensadi.com/ensadi/AGSBook.pdf.  I've updated the original post with this new link.  Thanks for letting me know.

While I'm here, I guess I should give a status of the book.  We've got a lot of Part 2 done, but we haven't finished yet.  We took a break from AGS book writing (as well as the YouTube tutorials) while George and I were working on other things (like iPhone and BlackBerry apps).  Since AGS is now going open source, there will likely be some big changes coming down the pike which might make some of the things in the book outdated. We'll just have to wait and see I guess!  I'm excited to see what happens to AGS in the future.

densming

Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback so far.  I've already had some folks give me some editing help and suggestions (cat, NickyDude, Mods, limeTree, and especially Ethan Damschroder who gave me a whole pageful of corrections!).  And thank you to everyone who has posted to say that the videos were helpful.

Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about AGS? You seem to really know your stuff.

Sure, ask away.  There are lots of folks here on the forums who know AGS much better than me, so someone is bound to be able to help.  I would ask that any technical help be put into a separate post or PM, so that this thread doesn't get off-topic :-)

Thanks for ruining (sp?) a what promised to be perfect weekend... 

Hey, no problem.  I'm always looking for anything I can do to mitigate would-be productive time. :-P

And bonus points for using drop.io

Yep, great resource, that.

My only comment would be that the intro ends a little short, it'd be good to see you promote how the scene has developed since the millenium - how companies like Wadjet Eye have changed the scene thanks to AGS, etc. The book reminds me of those Guerilla Film Maker's blueprint books, and they feature case studies with film-makers - I think some case studies with some AGS developers would really make it that much more interesting to read.

I agree about the intro.  Not only that, but I feel that the intro paints a picture of AGS that seems dated by the way I've presented it, and that wasn't the intent.  That needs to be changed.  I like your idea about case studies, and there are plenty of great AGS games that I didn't mention which deserve to be mentioned.  There's so much stuff, it's difficult to know where to start and how it should be organized.  I don't really want the intro to be huge, but on the other hand I want it to do a good job in describing AGS and the community behind it in a way that gets people excited about writing games.

None the less, very good job, it must have taken a while!

George and I only work on this 1 day per week for a couple of hours, so yeah, it's taken a year to get this far...

If anyone wants to help work on this, please let me know.  We're open to volunteers who want to contribute in any way.  Maybe I'll put a post up in the Recruit a Team board as well.

THANK YOU everyone who has given feedback! It's very helpful!

[123 pages long]

Hi everyone!

As many of you know, some time ago I decided to create several video tutorials for AGS and put them on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=21DB402CB4DAEAEF).  These videos have been very well received, and I feel like they've helped people to get started with AGS who might have otherwise been overwhelmed at how to begin.  The feedback I've received both here on the forums and through YouTube have been great, and so George (my AGS partner-in-crime) and I thought about other ways we could contribute.

To that end, George and I have decided to write a book documenting how to use AGS.  Different people learn in different ways, and, while some people prefer learning by example by watching video tutorials, I think others learn best through reading.  We've completed a DRAFT of PART 1 of the book and there's a link to the draft at the bottom of this post.

I know that other people have written AGS documentation, technical manuals, etc. in the past and I know documents of this kind fall short due to either not being complete, or just because they're not kept updated with AGS changes.  But our thought was that AGS is very stable at this point, and, while Chris stays VERY busy supporting AGS and providing additional functionality, I think that huge, global changes aren't made too often to AGS.  I don't mean to undermine Chris's work with AGS in the slightest bit here, I recognize the amount of work he puts into AGS and the AGS community, but I think that a book that documents the current version of AGS (3.1.2), even if it wasn't kept up-to-date, would still be relevant for a while to come.  And, George and I plan to keep the book up-to-date at least for a while.

The book is broken up into 2 parts.  The first part, which is linked below, is 123 pages long and covers the basics of AGS and is a good start to people learning how to write a basic game.  We're working on Part 2 now, which will cover more "advanced" topics, like Timers, Dialogs, customizing the interface, cutscenes, and other things.  The *really* advanced stuff, like modules and plugins, aren't in scope for this book at all, so we won't be covering those aside from briefly mentioning them in Part 2.

Part 1 covers the following:
The AGS Editor
Sprites, Views, and Characters
Rooms and Events
Hotspots, Objects, and Inventory Items
Sounds and Music
General Settings

Anyway, a DRAFT of part 1 of the book is here:

http://ensadi.com/ensadi/AGSBook.pdf

Feel free to take a look at it, and give us feedback.  Is this book thing a good idea? Is is something that anyone will care to read?  There is still TONS of editing that needs to be done to really polish it and make it useful, and we're looking for editors, so if anyone is interested, send me a PM.

Our thought is, once the book is done, we'll release it as a FREE PDF, with the option that if people want a printed copy, we will have a copy on LuLu.com where people can order prints of the book.

I hope people find this useful, and please leave us your feedback!

Thanks

densming

Happy birthday, Densming! And thanks a million for the videos

Well, what more can I add? Happy birthday from me too.

Happy Birthday to the great Densming! AGS youtube king!!!

seconded! Happy birthday!

I'm a little late in responding to these (ok, a LOT late), but THANKS to everyone for the birthday wishes!

densming

Hi MisoSoup, thanks for the nice comments, I'm glad the tutorials are helpful to you.  :-)  I've had a few people send me emails about how to publish their game once they've completed it.  I should really make a video about it.  I see that Khris and Matti already answered you, but I think the videos could benefit from answering this question anyway.

Nice post RickJ!    Very well laid out and informative.

Maybe I should have made it clearer in the videos.  The %s is just a placeholder for your string variable.  So just treat %s as if it's the playername (or whatever the string is) in your quoted string as in NsMn's example.  Likewise, you can use %d for integers, and you can even put more than one placeholder in a string, like this:

Display("So %s! You have been kicked out of your flat because you don't have %d coins!", playername, priceOfFlat);

Just put the variables in the same order as the placeholders.

See this page for more help: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/manual/StringFormats.htm

Ha ha!  Haven't see lmgtfy.com before.  That's hilarious.

Actually, I'm not sure why this works.  Since the second if statement doesn't have "else" in front of it, I would think that making the gui visible in the first block would cause the second if condition to be true, which would immediately hide it again.

Does the visible property not actually get set until after the function exits?

Thanks CJ! The API is great, by the way. I've just started playing with it. A pity there aren't more people using it but I guess that's a testament to the editor already being very extensive! I'd love to see this documented more; perhaps Ill add this as an "advanced" topic to my video tutorials.

I'm assuming this is Windows?  If so, you could use a for loop on the command prompt:

for %f in (*d2*) do ren "%f" "01%f"
for %f in (*d#2*) do ren "%f" "02%f"
...etc...

Be careful though, if you run this from a batch file (as opposed to directly from the command prompt), you'll need to use double percent signs:

for %%f in (*d2*) do ren "%%f" "01%%f"
for %%f in (*d#2*) do ren "%%f" "02%%f"
..etc..

Is there a way to refresh the Project Tree with the Editor API?  For example, if I change a dialog's name can I force the editor to refresh the tree (or at least the Dialogs component) after I made the change?  I've looked through the exposed methods for the various objects in the Editor Plugin API and I can't find one.

The closest thing I found was CreateNewView method which adds a new view and then refreshes the ProjectTree.  I thought about a workaround where I create a temporary view just for the sole purpose of refreshing, but this is a little clunky and besides, I didn't see a way to RE-refresh the list after I removed the temporary view!