Messages

Using it now. So far, it's great!

Anybody taking part? Sounds like fun, in a sort of drop everything and take an amnesia fortnight kind of way.

There are two ways I have gone about keeping track of progress in my games. One is setting a bunch of flags like "sawDonkey" or "TalkedToFred", and the other is a floating point progress meter. With this, there may be, say, twelve "puzzles" in the game and each one may have a bunch of mini-steps. These could be as simple as talking to someone or looking at a tree. So if I'm 5 steps into puzzle 6 and I advance each ministep by 5 points, I'd be at state 6.25. That would make it easier to implement this kind of save system, between your progress state and your inventory, you'd probably have most of what you'd need. It would be tougher to do a non-linear game this way, but you could actually create contingency branches for everything.

I've noticed that I sort of hit a brick wall with too many room-size objects, which makes it tough to do the background this way. Any idea what that is? Basically, if I have two alpha images for a foreground and a midground, I'm fine. But if I add a third object for a background (which isn't even an alpha channel PNG, it's an 8-bit JPG), the game suddenly slows to a crawl and is unplayable. Going from zero to two object layers has no slowdown at all, and the third breaks it. And I've tried swapping them around, it doesn't seem to matter which 3 layers are on, it's like it just can't handle anything over two. But if I have several smaller alpha channel objects, that doesn't cause any issues.

That's interesting. I should try that.

By removing the unchanged pixels from the object animation

Is this something I need to do? Or is this just the way the compression works?

Also, isn't there a major slow-down issue with 32-bit sprites? I assume this is why I can't have more than a small number of alpha channel sprites on screen at a time? So, it would probably be best to convert the background object to 16-bit, right?

Has anyone looked into why there are only 5 frames of background animation allowed and whether allowing an increase in this number would break anything?  Has anyone tried making a mod for this?

I've ported most of Jack Houston over to it with no problems at all.  Also verified it on Linux and it runs fine.

Awesome! Just making sure I was on the same page. You're doing great CW, thanks for all your hard work. We all owe you much gratitude!

So, is it still looking like this branch will be able to merge at some point? I'm getting pretty far developing with it and I thought I should probably ask to make sure that the intent at least is that taking my 3.3.0 RC project into a later merged branch will still be feasible.

Just to be clear, this build is strictly about setting the playback resolution, and still only allows a maximum of 1024x768 for the game its self, right?

Making adventure games is something I have dreamed of since I was a kid. I tried adapting other engines, I tried starting from scratch, but the hill has always seemed insurmountable. When I found AGS, at first I had it confused it with SCI Studio, which I had played around with a few years earlier and concluded that, although it was fun to tinker with, it was severely lacking and not much more than a novelty. However, after watching a few of Densming's videos (he was still producing them regularly at the time), I realized I had stumbled onto something... amazing. It was everything I had wanted in an adventure game engine, right there in my hands. Furthermore, it was an elaborate and complex system that actually made sense and was remarkably well thought out.

Now, after working with it for several years, I can honestly say I believe there is probably a way to make it do just about anything I could ever want out of an adventure game. Especially now that we've broken the "HD" barrier. Of all the languages and engines out there, I've never found a more enjoyable environment to work in.

Some people play with Legos, some live inside Minecraft. My sandbox is AGS.

This is absolutely stunning! I especially love the KQ6 crossover design, it feels very much in line with that design work. Really beautiful. I would love to see this as a complete game someday.

Here's a screenshot from the new 1920x1080 AGS build of Jack Houston. Pretty amazing to see AGS looking this crisp!

Just wondering, how many of you are currently testing this branch? Has anyone had any issues with it? I'm getting great results so far. Other than minor annoyances like not being able to zoom out in the room editor for these huge screens, it's working like a charm for me.

I'll just add my $0.2 from the perspective of the (very) small commercial studio demographic.

Toward the continued development of AGS 3: I have seen the newest builds make leaps and bounds toward the engine I desperately need and want for Jack Houston and the Necronauts. Running the game for the first time in 1920x1080 using CW's CustomRes branch was nothing short of a religious experience. I feel that if vsync can be added back in for D3D, the engine will be exactly where I need it for now. I can get around the speed limitations. I would love to see the engine receive more tweaks and bug fixes for a while, because I can see myself using 3.x for the next year or two if need be.

As for the possibilities with a new AGS 4: I have to agree with Snarky that I don't think anyone wants to see the fundamentals of the AGS development environment change, with the exception of perhaps a more 21st century OO scripting language. I love the editor, and I think the features and the way they work have been refined so sharply over the years that they have become the major draw for me with AGS. I would pay for a better engine if there were one, but when it comes to the structure of AGS, the features it has and the ease of implementation, money cannot buy a better environment for making adventure games. If I jumped ship tomorrow for Unity (which I am currently looking at as a possibility for the long run) or one of those other "adventure makers", a major disadvantage is it would mean losing all the years of refinement that has made AGS a joy to use. This is why I think it's imperative that the basic structure of the AGS editor and development features remain spiritually in tact.

And this brings me to my final point. Although I can understand, in theory, the idea of a generic AGS 4 aimed at making "any kind of game", I think this would be absolutely detrimental to AGS. It is, after all, ADVENTURE game studio. Unity is designed to accommodate any kind of game. AGS remains a light and streamlined system because it is aimed at doing a particular thing, and it does it EXTREMELY well. I don't really think there would be anything to gain by putting in the extra work to accommodate other game genres. In fact I think it would greatly damage the usefulness of AGS for doing what it was designed to do: emulate Sierra & LucasArts adventure games. Just think of the editor and how it's laid out: text parser, lip sync, dialogs, rooms, translations, all these things were developed specifically for creating adventure games. Although it is possible to hack AGS a bit and create other kinds of games, which is perfectly cool, I do enjoy the fact that it is tailor made specifically for adventure games. I think everyone does.

Therefor, I would think that writing up a wiki to outline the desired goals for an AGS 4 would need to start with outlining all the things AGS does right (which is, above the hood -- I.E. to the end user -- , 90% of it IMO). Then creating a road map for getting to those results by way of more modern and efficient means, on a technical level, so that when you do reach the complexity level of, say, resolution, you don't hit any roadblocks.

I can't comment to much beyond this as I'm not a contributing programmer, but that is how I'm seeing it from my particular side of the fence.

I've been following this thread closely and I have actually begun to port Jack Houston and the Necronauts into the CustomRes branch. So far everything is working beautifully. The only issue I really have with it right now is the vsync. The scaling looks much better in D3D, but I really need to get rid of that screen tearing from the lack of vsync.

I'm really hoping this branch can be merged into the 3.4.0 and its features remain a part of AGS, as the 1080 resolution is critical for Jack Houston. Definitely waiting with bated breath to hear more. Thanks Crimson Wizard, this build is an AGS dream come true so far.

-s

Looks awesome!  The minimalist graphical approach reminds me a bit of Flashback and Out of this World (AKA Another World), as well as Steel Sky of course.  Congrats!

-s

I actually have upgraded!  I'm still using 320 x 240 sized graphics, but I'm blowing them up to 640 x 480 before importing them into AGS.  It's a bit overkill, true, but I like having a low-res game with high-res

That's funny, I was just thinking "why not just blow up the graphics?"  I sure as hell would not want to do that with an existing game (especially one the size of Resonance), but for a fresh game, sounds like a good call.  Not really an issue for me, Han Solo needs to be low-res all the way for the retro factor and Jack Houston is all high-res, but there are a lot of designers like you guys straddling the line between retro coolness and modern convenience.

Yeah, even without the fancy menu handling that has been bandied about.  Simple support for 1280x800 would be awesome, preferably with aspect ratio correction for those with 4:3 monitors.  Would be a world of difference for the project I'm working on now.

Kinda sad to see the widescreen issue hasn't gotten any more love.  I know AGS started as a tool for re-creating retro adventure games, but it's 2010 now and the fact is that most people are playing these games on widescreen monitors with computers that can eat 1920x1080 games for lunch.  I'd even settle for 1280x800.  I just want to be able to design a game that features high resolution graphics that utilize the full width of a widescreen monitor, because those are just about the only monitors on the market anymore.  As long as we keep making 4:3 games, we're just toying around with old school novelties that appear dated on modern computers (and I'm not bashing that in general, I just want to move forward a little more myself).

Thanks Chris,
-s