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Yesterday eri0o suggested to add a property for each object, telling which module to use for events.

I figured to make something, and made it displayed on Events tab, closer to events themselves, for convenience.

Furthermore, this property displays a automatically refreshed selection of script modules for global objects, and a fixed room script for room contents.



Pressing on [...] makes Editor go to the correct selected script module.

Released a 3.6.1 Patch 7 with a single hotfix regarding mouse cursor:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-1-patch-7/

[Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 7 installer]

AGS 3.6.1 - Patch 7

Full release number: 3.6.1.29

Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 7 installer

Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 7 as a .zip archive

For Editor

Spoiler

VC 2015 redistributable needed for AGS Editor on Windows

Download Color Themes for the Editor

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For Android

Spoiler

AGS Player, suitable for running any compatible AGS game

NOTE: the Editor now includes Android build component letting you prepare your own games for Android

[close]

For Engine/Editor developers

Spoiler

AGS source code central repository

Debug symbols database (for analysing crash dumps)

[close]

Released: 23th September 2024

Previous stable version: AGS 3.6.0 P11 forum thread


This release is brought to you by:

- Alan v.Drake (fixes, improvements)
- Crimson Wizard
- edmundito (iOS fixes)
- eri0o
- mausimus (Text Parser fixes)
- Walter Agazzi (fixes)



Summary

3.6.1 update focuses mainly on improving performance and usability of existing features, in both Editor and Engine.

The noteable addition to the Editor is a "Log Panel", which lets you read game logs right in the editor's window. "Goto definition" now works on game object script names and opens their respective panels. Room editor features better panning and zoom controls. Views allow to select and modify multiple frames at once.

In the engine, there's a significant improvement to script performance, which may make script-heavy games run 30-40% faster compared to AGS 3.6.0 (these were real test results on a certain game with 3D simulation). There's a big improvement to the speed of manipulating Overlays, and general speed improvement of graphics rendering primarily useful for high resolution games.

There are other fixes and improvements to various parts of the program too.
Please be sure to read "Upgrading to AGS 3.6.1" topic in the manual: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/UpgradeTo361.html


Changes in the Patch 7:

Engine:
 - Hotfix mouse cursor not being drawn sometimes after changing rooms (regression in 3.6.1 P6).


Changes in the Patch 6:

Editor:
 - Fixed Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V not working in GUI editor.
 - Fixed sprite export and copying a sprite to clipboard operations were always exporting a 32-bit image, regardless of the actual sprite's color depth.
 - Fixed "Recreate spritefile" command was unintentionally converting any sprite to 32-bit if its source was not found, and it was taking existing image from the old spritefile.

Engine:
 - Fixed Software renderer could crash the game under some circumstances when the sprite cache's limit is exceeded (this is a regression in 3.6.1).
 - Fixed text-based lipsync's frame delay calculation: the existing formula was causing the delay value to "jump" back and forth with the slightest difference of speech text length, resulting in the speech lines of close length to be played with the notably different animation speeds.
 - Fixed drawing a 32-bit sprites on a 8-bit surface (e.g. a room mask), it was done wrong and was causing a memory corruption too.
 - Fixed drawing a room's walkable mask in script could cause errors during character walking if used colors exceeded walkable area number limit.
 - Fixed walk-behinds not drawn over characters and objects anymore (regardless of their baselines) after walk-behind mask was changed using drawing operations in script.
 - Fixed Game.SimulateKeyPress() not working in "old key-handling mode" (regression since 3.6.0).
 - Fixed script location is not reported in case of logical errors in engine's functions (regression since 3.6.0).

WinSetup:
 - Removed an obscure "Use 85 Hz display" option.


Changes in the Patch 5:

Editor:
 - When the room background size changes, clamp Room Edges to the new size.
 - Fixed Editor refusing to load a project if its folder name exceeds 40 characters.
   (An obsolete historical limitation which we forgot to cut from the program.)

Compiler:
 - Fixed script compilation hanging forever if a non-latin unicode character is met in script (outside of comments).

Engine:
 - Fixed GUI.ProcessClick() using mouse position when detecting a GUI control, instead of the position passed in the argument list.
 - Fixed Region.GetAtScreenXY() was returning null for offscreen coordinates. Made it return region[0] for consistency with other room areas, and backwards compatibility.
 - Fixed room Overlays not sorted in the order of their creation, like screen Overlays.
 - Fixed a potential mistake in Lucas-Arts speech position when there are multiple room viewports and speaking character is not directly visible in any of them.
 - Fixed Engine could switch program's locale to the current system locale by mistake when player is typing text. This could potentially lead to random glitches in text input in games which are run in ASCII mode and are handling extended characters.
 - Fixed TextBox was trying to display unsupported characters (in ASCII mode), resulting in random garbage.


Changes in the Patch 4:

Editor:
 - Fixed extracting templates with very large files inside would cause "Out of memory" error.
 - Fixed crash occuring when trying to import a non-existant GIF frame during Sprite Import.
 - Fixed potential mistake with sprite transparency occuring when importing a 8-bit sprite into 16/32-bit game.

Compiler:
 - Fixed "\t" (and few other less common escaped chars) not handled properly when they are inside string literals.
 - Fixed a crash in compiler occuring if user script defined a variadic function.
   (User-defined variadic functions are not properly usable at the moment, but this at least prevents an unhandled exception.)

Scripting:
 - Declare "UNICODE" macro for scripts if game is made in unicode mode.

Script API:
 - Added a number of missing OPT_* constants used with Get/SetGameOption functions.

Engine:
 - Fixed setting Screen.AutoSizeViewportOnRoomLoad to false in "game_start" could cause primary viewport and camera become initialized with zero width and height.
 - Fixed setting camera's size in "game_start" would unexpectedly get camera clamped to 320x200.
 - Fixed number of mistakes in Text Parser occuring when handling "multiwords".


Changes in the Patch 3:

Editor:
 - Fixed that after deleting a View's frame editor did not select next frame (regression in 3.6.1).
 - Fixed "Delete last loop" button not appearing in the View Editor if the view is filled using "Assign sprites to view" command from the Sprite Manager.

Engine:
 - Implemented an alternate solution for rendering "bad" TTF fonts that does not increase their loading times (after previous patch 2).
 - Allow scene render during "load room" event if the last room transition was "Instant".
   This has to be done because number of games used this event for custom transitions.
 - For games compiled in "Debug" mode "warnings.log" file will be written in "savegame dir" on platforms where modifying game directory is forbidden in principle (OSX, iOS, Android, Web).
 - Fixed System.Log() was registered for plugins using a wrong argument list.

Compatibility:
 - Fixed loading of 3.5.0 saves (broken in 3.6.1).

Windows:
 - Fixed disk space check was testing space in the current directory instead of the save game location.


Changes in the Patch 2:

Editor:
 - Fixed few potential program errors for "Generate Keystore" in Android preferences.
 - Fixed external processes (such as test game runs) were started using ShellExecute, which could theoretically lead to unintended results.

Engine:
 - Fixed String.Replace crashing the engine if the resulting string exceeds 3000 bytes.
 - Fixed releasing a mouse button could cause double "on_event" call (with eEventGUIMouseUp).
 - Improved rendering of TTF fonts which have glyph sizes surpassing declared font's height.
   This fixes the look of text on gui controls, and automatic outlining on these fonts.
 - Fixed a dialog shown with InputBox() function drawing typed text beyond text box'es border.
 - Fixed custom dialog options in the "old mode" not triggering redraw when the active option changes.


Changes in the Patch 1:

Editor:
- Fixed View's frame preview sometimes drawn incorrectly, in case of certain panel sizes.
- Fixed folding in the script editor not working correctly if there's a commented closing bracket ("//}") inside this code section.
- Fixed Editor sometimes failing to update game exe's file information and/or icons, if user was importing any sprites during this working session.

Engine:
- Fixed room objects not updating under Direct3D/OpenGL renderer, if they were assigned a dynamic sprite, then that sprite was deleted, and a new one assigned with coincidentally same ID.
- Fixed room objects not updating under Software renderer, if they were assigned a dynamic sprite, and that sprite was modified while object was not visible on screen.
- Fixed inventory cursor's crosshair not displayed (when enabled in game settings).



What is new in 3.6.1

Common features:
- Implemented Deflate compression option for sprites.
- Removed length limits for: Game name, savegame folder, Character's script name and regular name (description), Inventory item's name (description), Mouse cursor's script name, Audioclip's script name.

Editor:
- Discontinued Source control integration functionality, removed "Put sound and sprite files in source control" option from General Settings.
- In General Settings moved few properties to different groups for better consistency.
- Added "Scale Character sprite offsets" property to General Settings. This property refers to scaling of Character.z and sprite offsets added by LockViewOffset script command.
- Added TextureCacheSize and SoundCacheSize properties to Default Setup. These let configure the sizes of runtime texture and sound cache sizes respectively.
- Added "Leave room after fade-out" event to Rooms (called "Unload" by default).
- Added Translated property to all GUI Controls (was available only in ListBox). Translated property tells whether this control's text has to be translated, and applied text direction (in right-to-left text mode).
- Support '\n' linebreak character in the Label's Text and potentially other text properties.
- Improved Room Editor controls:
  Added free panning mode done by holding the middle mouse button, or alternatively - by holding Space + LMB.
  Mouse Wheel without key modifiers scrolls the room vertically; Shift + Mouse Wheel scrolls the room horizontally.
  Zoom is done by Ctrl + Mouse Wheel and room now zooms towards or outwards the cursor position.
- In Room Editor the context menu is now displayed by RMB or Shift + RMB while editing masks.
  The individual room mode menu is merged with the "copy coordinates" command when shown.
- In Room Editor the hint with coordinates is now also displayed when moving Objects or Characters with keyboard.
- In Dialog Script editor support most Edit menu and context menu commands from the regular Script editor, with a few exceptions.
- In Sprite Manager added command "View" -> "Show filenames" which toggles display of a sprite's source filename under the sprites.
- Adjust sprites' import settings after "Crop sprite edges" command; this would ensure that these sprites are restored from source file keeping their cropped sizes.
- During sprite export Editor will display a proper progress dialog.
- Zoom controls in Character and View panes now allow downscaling too. View editor displays the preview sprite stretched to fill the parent panel.
- View editor now allows to select multiple frames at once, across multiple loops too, using standard Shift + LMB and Ctrl + LMB combinations. Properties panel lets modify properties for all the selected frames at once.
- Added "Replace with all sprites from folder" command to the View editor's context menu.
- For Audio Clips in the project tree added "Force Reimport", "Force reimport all file(s)" and "Replace Source File" context menu commands.
- For Output Panel added "Copy selection" context menu command.
- Implemented Log Panel that lets you see the engine and game logs right in the Editor.
- Improved LipSync panel looks in case user's system has display scaling option enabled.
- "Goto Definition" command in script will now work for most of the game entities too, such as Characters, GUIs, and so forth. In that case it will find a game's entity and open a respective editor panel for it. This still does not work for some types, such as Room objects, and Views.
- Added main menu commands for opening a Project folder and Compiled folder.
- Added "Export Global Messages to script" menu command. This command is meant for upgraded pre-3.2 game projects, and will generate a script with a String array, moving global messages texts there.
- For script's tabs added a context menu command for opening this script's location.
- When run with "/compile" argument Editor will print all messages to the console (stdout), instead of displaying modal message windows.
- For Android build target Editor now supports a directory to place plugins in.
- When building a game for Android and Linux the Editor will now be more tolerant to missing plugins and only issue a warning instead of stopping with error.
- Config will now be saved in UTF-8, letting to support setup program's title text in unicode.
- For non-Windows build targets Editor will fix config containing Direct3D graphics driver option and set OpenGL instead.
- For Color Themes: implemented character literal, braces match and braces error settings.
- Made Editor be somewhat more tolerate to missing XML nodes in Game.agf, in many cases it will still let open a game.
- When upgrading older game projects, Editor will insert a call to SetRestartPoint() in the end of the 'game_start' function in GlobalScript.asc. This is done to complement removal of an automatic restart point in the engine. This inserted command is safe to remove.
- When upgrading pre-3.2 rooms with disabled SaveLoadEnabled property the Editor will reset this property and insert a comment with a warning into the corresponding room's script. This is done because this property is deprecated as is no longer accessible.
- Fixed Editor refusing to open a game if one of the translation files is missing.
- Fixed General Settings and Default Setup not working correctly right after importing a pre-3.* game project.
- Fixed importing GIFs or 8-bit PNGs may lose transparent pixels if source images used other palette index than 0 for transparency.
- Fixed Project Explorer's folders collapsing after certain user actions, such as dragging items or renaming things.
- Fixed deleting collapsed "region" in script would sometimes lead to portion of the script undeleted but staying invisible.
- (Possibly) Fixed a "Index out of range" exception in Script editor, related to the "script location" drop-down list, which could occur at random circumstances while
  working with the script, and any Color Theme is enabled.
- Fixed Editor could miss some of the files when cleaning up old compiled files after the Game's Filename property is changed.

Scripting:
- Support "#else" preprocessor directive.

Script API:
- Implemented Room's "After fade-out" event.
- Added eEventLeaveRoomAfterFadeout event for the global "on_event".
- Added eEventGameSaved event which runs after game was saved.
- Expanded interaction functions for Character, Object, InventoryItem, Hotspot and Region types: now they all receive respective object's pointer as a parameter, similar to GUI event functions, as well as a cursor mode this interaction was run with, if applicable.
- Added Game.ResetDoOnceOnly(), which completely resets all DoOnceOnly instances.
- Added Game.PrecacheSprite() and Game.PrecacheView(), which preload certain sprites and linked frame sounds into the engine's sprite cache memory.
- Added ScriptName property to AudioClip, Character, Dialog, GUI, GUIObject, Hotspot, InventoryItem, Object.
- Added static GetByName() function to AudioClip, Character, Dialog, GUI, GUIObject, Hotspot, InventoryItem, Object.
- Added Object.AnimationVolume property, which works similar to Character.AnimationVolume.
- Added static File.ResolvePath() and File.Path attribute.
- Added support for a text formatting to a number of functions: DisplayAtY(), Character.SayAt(), Character.SayBackground(), DrawingSurface.DrawStringWrapped().

Engine:
- Updated to SDL 2.28.5 and SDL_Sound 2.0.3+.
- Significant performance improvement to scripts. Script running speed restored to a level close to AGS 3.2.1. Testing few "script-heavy" games showed fps raise by up to 30-40% compared with 3.6.0 engine.
- Improved performance of String objects in script.
  For instance, appending a character to a String is now roughly x2 times faster, *sequential* iteration of String.Chars[] in Unicode mode is about x12 (!) times faster (Strings in ASCII mode have relatively less improvement, because they have been faster than Unicode mode already).
- Improved performance when creating, deleting and manipulating Overlays; allows the game to have thousands of those with much less slowing down.
- Improved performance when updating and deleting dynamic sprites, and notifying any objects that have to redraw themselves. Engine no longer resets Graphic properties of objects referencing deleted dynamic sprite to 0.
- Implemented "texture cache", in addition to the existing "sprite cache". The texture cache keeps textures generated from raw sprites and lets reusing them, improving performance and reducing CPU workload. The actual impact is proportional to the game's resolution and amount of simultaneously animated objects on screen.
- WFN font renderer now too supports unicode mode and renders texts in utf-8, so long as the font contains glyphs of corresponding indexes.
- Buttons, ListBoxes and TextBoxes now support Right-to-left text direction.
- DrawingSurface.DrawString now supports Right-to-left text direction.
- All the script File functions now treat paths in case-insensitive way (including subdirs), which makes them platform-independent.
- Removed an automatic SetRestartPoint() call at startup. This is done in case user does not want to use default "restart" save slot, or has a custom save system.
- Support handling multiple mouse clicks per game frame, similar to how multiple key presses were supported since 3.6.0.
- When starting up, engine will now precache only first 4 or 8 loops of the starting player character's View. This is done to avoid filling sprite cache with too much sprites at once in case when the player's View contains lots of additional animations.
- Characters will now have their graphic offsets, set by Character.z property and LockViewOffset() function, scaled along with the character's own scaling. This is done so long as the respective game option is enabled in the General Settings.
- Ensure that character and object scaling is updated even when the game is not drawn. This fixes rare issues when their scale property did not update in time whilst the game was completely fadeout, and similar cases.
- Allow to change Character's move speed while its moving.
- When Character is ordered a new move command while already moving, the engine will try to make a smooth transition between old and new moving without a delay.
- Ensure that when Overlays have identical ZOrder they will be sorted in the order of their creation. Besides convenience, this is also meant to restore historical behavior from before Overlay.ZOrder property was introduced.
- Allow game to call DynamicSprite.CreateFromDrawingSurface() and CreateFromBackground() with zero or negative size, clamping it to 1x1, in consistency with Create().
- Engine will now log a warning for the most incorrect parameters to Animate function instead of quitting the game.
- Engine will now skip blocking Character.Say commands instantly while skipping a cutscene.
- Object.SetView now lets invalid loop and frame values, and fallbacks to using loop 0, frame 0, printing a warning. This is also consistent with backwards-compatble SetObjectFrame() behavior.
- Changed Object.SetView() to not play a frame's sound, which could lead to a duplicated sound play if Object.Animate is run right after.
- Text Overlays internal images are now registered as dynamic sprites, and their IDs may be read from Overlay.Graphic. This lets find out their sizes using Game.SpriteWidth/SpriteHeight and optionally draw them somewhere using DrawingSurface.DrawImage.
- Ensure all the script API is now correctly available for the plugins.
- Engine will now safeguard plugin's reading and writing of game saves, so that any mistakes done by plugins won't affect other parts of a save.
- Engine will disable vsync in a "infinite fps" mode, because vsync prevents getting more fps.
- Engine will force any in-game debug messages to be displayed in message boxes, disregarding game's "Display all messages as speech" option.
- Display critical alerts as system modal messages on all platforms that support that (unless engine is run with "--no-message-box" parameter).
- Print some info about memory usage when reporting a "Out of memory" error.
- Deprecated in-game "console", as practically useless.
- Added new config settings in "graphics" section: "sprite_cache_size" (which replaces deprecated "cachemax" in "misc") and "texture_cache_size".
- Fixed Characters may be seemingly "walking in place" for some time when arriving at destination.
- Fixed Display and Say commands treating the second met "&" sign as a voice-over token too (they must only check the first one in string).
- Fixed PlayMP3File() function limiting filename argument by an arbitrary number of characters.
- Fixed speechlines were adjusting their Y position while trying to not overlap GUIs even when these GUIs are completely offscreen.
- Fixed first Sierra-style speechline in a sequence was adjusting its Y position without need when GUIs are set to be hidden during game pause (this includes blocking speech). Normally, the speechlines are adjusting their Y position in order to not overlap GUIs, but when GUIs are hiding during speech there should not be any need to do so.
- Fixed script behavior in case a local variable was assigned a value without being initialized with a zero memory by compiler's intruction beforehand. This is not a problem with the standard compiler, but technically could be an issue with any custom implementation.
- Fixed old-style letterbox viewport getting broken after loading an old pre-3.5.0 save.

Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSStream interface, IAGSEngine.OpenFileStream() and GetFileStreamByHandle().
- Added IAGSEngine.ResolveFilePath() method, which resolves a script path (with location tokens) into a proper system filepath.
- Fixed IAGSEngine.GetFontType() incorrectly reporting TTF font type for WFN fonts with more than 128 characters.

Compatibility:
- In Editor, restored all the Character's variables available in "backward-compatible" mode. This is primarily to make it easier to import very old games.
- Allow to run an animation over a loop with zero frames, by using the placeholder frame. This lets particular old games to continue running instead of crashing with error.
- Fixed slower character walking speeds in pre-3.1 upscaled and high-resolution games.
- Fixed Object.SetView() and SetObjectFrame() not treating -1 for loop and frame as "keep previous values" in older games.
- Fixed inventory window not updated after game.top_inv_item is assigned a new value.
- Fixed a "New Room" command in old-style dialog scripts was preventing "First time Enter room" event to be called.

Windows:
- 32-bit Windows engine is now built as "large address aware" program, which will allow it to use up to 3 GB of RAM on 32-bit systems and 4 GB of RAM on 64-bit systems (was 2 GB previously).

iOS:
- Updated port for 3.6.*.

Web / Emscripten:
- Fixed Safari cannot switch the game into fullscreen mode.

WinSetup:
- Added options for setting texture cache and sound cache size.
- Added options to disable particular graphic drivers and graphic driver selection, and fullscreen mode selection.




Thanks to everyone who contributed to and tested this version!

A lot of things are possible in AGS, the question is only in amount of learning and work effort required.
If you go to the games database, and do "Search Games by Category", then you may search for "Non-Adventure Games" and see a list of platformers, racing games, strategy games, card games, and so on.

Furthermore, there's a list of open-source AGS games:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/advanced-technical-forum/a-sticky-list-with-open-source-ags-games/
It includes platformers too.

But AGS is not really best suited for arcade games, there are other game engines that have a better support for this kind of game out of the box.

PS. "how to make a platformer" is rather a topic for "Advanced Technical Forum".

I gave a quick try to this long existing feature request, to support having object interaction and event functions in any script module besides Global Script.
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/pull/2534

Making this work on the engine's side was pretty simple. Although in the implementation that I tried engine tests every script for the matching symbol, which may make running interaction somewhat slower, depending on the number of modules. I doubt that would be a performance problem, since this uses fast lookup tables, and normally happens as a reaction to player input. But there's definitely a room for improvement here. Either the script name may be saved along with the function name during game compilation; I suppose that would be a reasonable thing to do. Or it may be cached at runtime after running the event for the first time (or do this in case compiled data does not contain a script name).

But frankly I was more bothered about Editor's side of this issue, where "..." should do something more than leading to a global script.

This made me step back and think that it may be a smarter thing to save script name alongside with the function name. In other words, have strings like "GlobalScript.asc::cEgo_Interact". And if it does not have a script name, then assume it's a GlobalScript. This might work well at least if saved in compiled game, but also may work if used in the events fields. Maybe...

I suppose further, that maybe the Editor may automatically copy the previously used script name from assigned events when you create a new handler. For example, if you have a Character, and you have already assigned a "MyCustomModule.asc::cEgo_Interact" for Interact event, then you press [...] button for Look event, editor will insert "MyCustomModule.asc::cEgo_Look". If there are multiple scripts names used in these events for some reason, then maybe the first found one is used (?).

I am posting these thoughts here, willing to make a small pause and think this over again, but maybe somebody has ideas too. Unfortunately, even though the ticket exists for a very long time now (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/485), there was not much discussion of this. Unless there had been one on forums and I missed it.

This is primarily the question of file format.
Current module format SCM is possible but not convenient to expand in such way.
In the past I suggested to support importing/exporting script modules as zip archives, which would contain ash/asc pair and a text file with meta data in it (could be JSON).
Alternatively, it may be done as a AGS package format, the same it packs templates and games in.

But since this is not the compiled game data, but editor asset, i think that zip would be superior here (and in case of templates too).

I believe there's a module which does precisely same thing:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-gotthere-0-5/

maybe there are differences in how it handles secondary issues, like over-hotspot labels and such, but i never investigated that.

So, I am ready to merge this in, the only doubt is separator.

I did it with a dot, which makes it look like
- "MyCharacter.1.ogg"
or
- "MyCharacter1.1.ogg" - example of character name with trailing digits.

An alternative is a hyphen, which will make it look like
- "MyCharacter-1.ogg"
or
- "MyCharacter1-1.ogg"

While the playing is moving, just keep waiting a single frame. The game will appear to progress as normal.

This approach is implemented in the Khris's "GotThere" module, linked above.

Unfortunately, topic starter have never mentioned requirements for this feature, so I cannot tell whether this will suit them or not.
As I noted multiple times in this thread, this approach prevents player from interacting with anything else during the walk (other objects, GUIs, etc). Player may only click or press a key to abort current move, nothing else. If that's acceptable, then this may be a way to go.

OTOH, it may be possible to generalize this method by waiting in on_mouse_click instead. This way you do not have to insert this "wait" command in every interaction event. But you must provide "walkto" point in custom properties.
This is a trade off: write more in script, and have a chance to forget, which leads to certain action being non-interruptible, so less consistent,
or have to specify custom properties, but each action will be guaranteed to be handled the same way.

@blexx, in regards to solving a cancellable interaction in the current version of AGS,
Looking back at my first reply in this thread now, I found that my proposed solution is actually not the optimal one. Not sure what I was thinking, somehow I was observing this as a individual situation in the game.

The generic solution would be different. In very simple terms:
- In "on_mouse_click" dont run interaction right away (so not ProcessClick, etc),
- instead save the clicked object, verb and "walkto" destination in variables, and issue non-blocking Walk,
- "walkto" destination for all objects and hotspots may be done using Custom Properties, for instance,
- in rep-exec test if character is Moving, and when it's not moving AND has a saved interaction, AND is close enough to the saved "walkto" destination, then run that interaction using RunInteraction function (these functions may be checked in the manual)
- if another on_mouse_click is run during this walk, reset previously saved interaction variables
- also, these variables has to be reset in case something interrupted player's walk, like a region that triggers a cutscene. Probably there should be a convenient script function that clears them up (like ClearPlayerInteraction) and then you may call that function whenever a cutscene starts. Not sure if this may be automated.


@Scavenger mentioned this "NoBlock" module on Discord recently:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-noblock-v0-7-cancelable-interactions/
it supposedly does what I described above, more or less.
It's old (from 2006), but I suppose may be fixed for the use in the recent version.
Or maybe someone could write a new (better?) one for the current version.
But this is rather a topic for "Technical Support" forum, rather than "Editor development".


EDIT: There's also another, simpler "GotThere" module, made by different principle:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-gotthere-0-5/

So, judging by my tests, the feature is technically working overall. I will test it more, but the big question now is usability. It will be silly if I merge this, and later people will find that it does not work in their situation.

This means that I need to have a number of common scenarios, which may be tried with this functionality.


Then, when I wrote a list of requirements for this feature, I mentioned that it have to be possible to apply it to a already released game, with saves made before this feature existed. But I found that this is not going to be possible in all cases. Two noteable problems are:
- GUI controls
- Script modules (their number and order in the list)

GUI controls are historically written as big plain arrays for each control type. This was carried over from very old save format. Unfortunately, when creating a new save format back in AGS 3.4.0 I made a mistake and did not add a list of references which would let to reconnect parent GUIs with their child controls based only on the saved data (engine uses game's data to do this). Because of this, it's not possible to correctly match gui controls from the save if number of controls on some GUIs have changed, because engine won't be able to tell the parent GUI the restored control was belonging to.

I fixed this in this experimental version by adjusting the save format accordingly.
In fact, I might even add this change to the next AGS update regardless of this feature, since it might come useful in the future.
But this of course will not fix the problem for the saves done previously. Which is very unfortunate.

From what I see, the only remaining workaround for such case is another proposal from this thread: selectively skip parts of the save. I.e. if a user will be able to tell the engine: do not read GUIs from the save. If GUIs are not read back, then there's no data mismatch and no error. There will possibly be a need to adjust GUIs after restoring a save, but this is something that user will have to do in script.

The remaining question is, when and how to instruct the engine to do so. The instruction may be a game setting, applied to all saves. But then even "correct" saves will not have this data restored. If a user needs data restored from "correct" saves, but skipped in "bad" saves, then engine must first try to read it back, learn that data is "bad", report that, and let user to handle this in script by instructing engine to re-read the save, this time skipping the data.

In the second case, the engine will need to be able to report that it's not just that the data is mismatching, but rather that it cannot be matched due to a lacking save format. And user will need to have a way to instruct another reload attempt with different settings.

This is now added to AGS 4, see:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-4-0-early-alpha-for-public-test/msg636665729/#msg636665729

Unfortunately, a mistake was found in this patch:
when you change rooms in game a mouse cursor won't be drawn unless its graphic changes for whatever reason.

Here's a fixed temporary build:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6213262050590720

I will have to release another patch with this, but will wait for a few days in case something else comes up.

[Common:]

Updated to Alpha 13
(Please use download links in the first post)

This is suddenly an update with multiple new functionalities. Some of those are going to be exclusive to AGS 4, while few may be a part of the next minor 3.6.* update later.

Contains fixes from 3.6.1 Patches 5 and 6 (except ones related to backwards compatibility).

Other changes:

Common:
- Support true 32-bit colors in GUI, text messages and drawing commands in script. Color number properties now correspond to the encoded 32-bit RGB (R8G8B8 format). Older projects will have all Color properties upgraded by the Editor (but not colors in script!).
- Removed support for 16-bit games. Any older 16-bit project will be converted to 32-bit on import by the Editor.
SPECIAL NOTE: 8-bit games are still supported.

Editor:
- Editor will now remember certain window states: "Sprite selector" window and splitter position, splitter position in "Sprite manager".
- Copy, paste and delete commands now apply to all the selected GUI controls in GUI editor.
- Support editing group properties for selected GUI controls.
- When importing room backgrounds of a different size Editor will now let user decide whether to reset, keep or rescale room masks.
- Ensure that Editor exports room backgrounds in their actual color depth.
- Removed obsolete "Copy walkable area mask to regions" command from the Room editor.
- Merged all "***Color" and "***ColorNumber" paired properties into a single "***Color" property. This property is internally saved as a number, but is viewed and edited as RGB combination for 32-bit games, and as a palette index for 8-bit games.
- Added Custom Properties for: Audio Clips, Dialogs, GUI, GUI Controls, Regions, Walkable Areas.
- Textual GUI controls can now select "Null Font" as their font: this will prevent any text to be drawn even if one is assigned, and make it have zero size (when it matters).
- Added "/maketemplate" command-line option that tells Editor to run, make template out of the said game, and quit.
- Fixed "Flood Fill" operation on mask in the room editor for masks of sizes which are not multiples of 4.
- Fixed "Recent games" menu could throw a error if a saved Editor's config contained empty paths for any reason.
- Fixed "Make template" operation was not adding Rooms subfolder to a template.

Compiler:
- Compiler no longer requires explicit pointer declaration for imported global variables of managed types. Now they are always assumed to be pointers by default, and non-pointer imports of builtin managed types are not permitted, unless a backwards compatibility option is set.
- Fixed compiler could cause memory corruption while compiling certain expressions.
- Fixed parsing of bracketed expressions inside ternary operation ( ? : ).
- Fixed a error message reported in case of undefined symbol, now it correctly states that the symbol is undefined, instead of making a vague statement of "unexpected expression".

Script API:
- All ***Color properties and function arguments now require a 32-bit RGB number. Where Game.GetColorFromRGB() is used to create a color number, there the script should continue to work as before, but if a literal number was used in script, these must be updated by hand or wrong colors will be displayed at runtime.
- Added eNullFont constant that lets assign or pass a "null font" to any property or function parameter which expects a font's ID. This "null font" will simply make any text not drawn and have no actual measurements (size, spacing, etc).
- Added global events: eEventDialogStart, eEventDialogStop, eEventDialogRun, eEventDialogOptionsOpen, eEventDialogOptionsClose (these are handled in "on_event").
- Added Custom Properties interface to types: AudioClip, Dialog, GUI, GUIControl, Region, WalkableArea. This includes functions: GetProperty(), GetTextProperty(), SetProperty() and SetTextProperty().
- Added static Dialog.CurrentDialog property and non-static ExecutedOption and AreOptionsDisplayed properties.
- Added RenderLayer enum, and optional "layers" parameter to DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenShot(), that tells which of the game's render layers to capture when making a screenshot.
- Added Overlay.SetPosition() and SetSize() functions for convenience.
- Added Overlay.Tint(), SetLightLevel() and RemoveTint() functions, Overlay.HasTint, HasLightLevel, LightLevel, TintBlue, TintGreen, TintRed, TintSaturation, TintLuminance properties, matching Character and Object tinting functionality.
- Expanded String.IndexOf() with new parameters: "StringCompareStyle", "index" and "count".
- Added optional "sprite" parameter to SaveGameSlot(), that lets to pass a number of an arbitrary sprite to write into this save instead of a standard "screenshot".
- Added new game-wide option OPT_SAVEGAMESCREENSHOTLAYER that lets to define which of the game's render layers will be captured when making a standard screenshot for the save game.

Engine:
- Do not alter or clamp palette for 8-bit sprites loaded into a 16/32-bit game at runtime.
- Assigning InventoryItem.Graphic will no longer reassign CursorGraphic too even if they were identical previously.
- Added new accessibility config settings in "access" section: "speechskip" and "textskip". These let player to override game's skipping style for character speech and text messages respectively.
- Fix transformed (scaled or rotated) overlays could look wrong in Software renderer.

WinSetup:
- Redesigned winsetup into a tabbed dialog.
- Added "Accessibility" settings for skipping speech and text messages.

This is fixed in 3.6.1 Patch 6
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-1-patch-6/

3.6.1 Patch 6 is released:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-1-patch-6/

[Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 6 installer]

AGS 3.6.1 - Patch 6

Full release number: 3.6.1.28

Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 6 installer

Download AGS 3.6.1 Patch 6 as a .zip archive

For Editor

Spoiler

VC 2015 redistributable needed for AGS Editor on Windows

Download Color Themes for the Editor

[close]

For Android

Spoiler

AGS Player, suitable for running any compatible AGS game

NOTE: the Editor now includes Android build component letting you prepare your own games for Android

[close]

For Engine/Editor developers

Spoiler

AGS source code central repository

Debug symbols database (for analysing crash dumps)

[close]

Released: 16th September 2024

Previous stable version: AGS 3.6.0 P11 forum thread


This release is brought to you by:

- Alan v.Drake (fixes, improvements)
- Crimson Wizard
- edmundito (iOS fixes)
- eri0o
- mausimus (Text Parser fixes)
- Walter Agazzi (fixes)



Summary

3.6.1 update focuses mainly on improving performance and usability of existing features, in both Editor and Engine.

The noteable addition to the Editor is a "Log Panel", which lets you read game logs right in the editor's window. "Goto definition" now works on game object script names and opens their respective panels. Room editor features better panning and zoom controls. Views allow to select and modify multiple frames at once.

In the engine, there's a significant improvement to script performance, which may make script-heavy games run 30-40% faster compared to AGS 3.6.0 (these were real test results on a certain game with 3D simulation). There's a big improvement to the speed of manipulating Overlays, and general speed improvement of graphics rendering primarily useful for high resolution games.

There are other fixes and improvements to various parts of the program too.
Please be sure to read "Upgrading to AGS 3.6.1" topic in the manual: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/UpgradeTo361.html



Changes in the Patch 6:

Editor:
 - Fixed Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V not working in GUI editor.
 - Fixed sprite export and copying a sprite to clipboard operations were always exporting a 32-bit image, regardless of the actual sprite's color depth.
 - Fixed "Recreate spritefile" command was unintentionally converting any sprite to 32-bit if its source was not found, and it was taking existing image from the old spritefile.

Engine:
 - Fixed Software renderer could crash the game under some circumstances when the sprite cache's limit is exceeded (this is a regression in 3.6.1).
 - Fixed text-based lipsync's frame delay calculation: the existing formula was causing the delay value to "jump" back and forth with the slightest difference of speech text length, resulting in the speech lines of close length to be played with the notably different animation speeds.
 - Fixed drawing a 32-bit sprites on a 8-bit surface (e.g. a room mask), it was done wrong and was causing a memory corruption too.
 - Fixed drawing a room's walkable mask in script could cause errors during character walking if used colors exceeded walkable area number limit.
 - Fixed walk-behinds not drawn over characters and objects anymore (regardless of their baselines) after walk-behind mask was changed using drawing operations in script.
 - Fixed Game.SimulateKeyPress() not working in "old key-handling mode" (regression since 3.6.0).
 - Fixed script location is not reported in case of logical errors in engine's functions (regression since 3.6.0).

WinSetup:
 - Removed an obscure "Use 85 Hz display" option.


Changes in the Patch 5:

Editor:
 - When the room background size changes, clamp Room Edges to the new size.
 - Fixed Editor refusing to load a project if its folder name exceeds 40 characters.
   (An obsolete historical limitation which we forgot to cut from the program.)

Compiler:
 - Fixed script compilation hanging forever if a non-latin unicode character is met in script (outside of comments).

Engine:
 - Fixed GUI.ProcessClick() using mouse position when detecting a GUI control, instead of the position passed in the argument list.
 - Fixed Region.GetAtScreenXY() was returning null for offscreen coordinates. Made it return region[0] for consistency with other room areas, and backwards compatibility.
 - Fixed room Overlays not sorted in the order of their creation, like screen Overlays.
 - Fixed a potential mistake in Lucas-Arts speech position when there are multiple room viewports and speaking character is not directly visible in any of them.
 - Fixed Engine could switch program's locale to the current system locale by mistake when player is typing text. This could potentially lead to random glitches in text input in games which are run in ASCII mode and are handling extended characters.
 - Fixed TextBox was trying to display unsupported characters (in ASCII mode), resulting in random garbage.


Changes in the Patch 4:

Editor:
 - Fixed extracting templates with very large files inside would cause "Out of memory" error.
 - Fixed crash occuring when trying to import a non-existant GIF frame during Sprite Import.
 - Fixed potential mistake with sprite transparency occuring when importing a 8-bit sprite into 16/32-bit game.

Compiler:
 - Fixed "\t" (and few other less common escaped chars) not handled properly when they are inside string literals.
 - Fixed a crash in compiler occuring if user script defined a variadic function.
   (User-defined variadic functions are not properly usable at the moment, but this at least prevents an unhandled exception.)

Scripting:
 - Declare "UNICODE" macro for scripts if game is made in unicode mode.

Script API:
 - Added a number of missing OPT_* constants used with Get/SetGameOption functions.

Engine:
 - Fixed setting Screen.AutoSizeViewportOnRoomLoad to false in "game_start" could cause primary viewport and camera become initialized with zero width and height.
 - Fixed setting camera's size in "game_start" would unexpectedly get camera clamped to 320x200.
 - Fixed number of mistakes in Text Parser occuring when handling "multiwords".


Changes in the Patch 3:

Editor:
 - Fixed that after deleting a View's frame editor did not select next frame (regression in 3.6.1).
 - Fixed "Delete last loop" button not appearing in the View Editor if the view is filled using "Assign sprites to view" command from the Sprite Manager.

Engine:
 - Implemented an alternate solution for rendering "bad" TTF fonts that does not increase their loading times (after previous patch 2).
 - Allow scene render during "load room" event if the last room transition was "Instant".
   This has to be done because number of games used this event for custom transitions.
 - For games compiled in "Debug" mode "warnings.log" file will be written in "savegame dir" on platforms where modifying game directory is forbidden in principle (OSX, iOS, Android, Web).
 - Fixed System.Log() was registered for plugins using a wrong argument list.

Compatibility:
 - Fixed loading of 3.5.0 saves (broken in 3.6.1).

Windows:
 - Fixed disk space check was testing space in the current directory instead of the save game location.


Changes in the Patch 2:

Editor:
 - Fixed few potential program errors for "Generate Keystore" in Android preferences.
 - Fixed external processes (such as test game runs) were started using ShellExecute, which could theoretically lead to unintended results.

Engine:
 - Fixed String.Replace crashing the engine if the resulting string exceeds 3000 bytes.
 - Fixed releasing a mouse button could cause double "on_event" call (with eEventGUIMouseUp).
 - Improved rendering of TTF fonts which have glyph sizes surpassing declared font's height.
   This fixes the look of text on gui controls, and automatic outlining on these fonts.
 - Fixed a dialog shown with InputBox() function drawing typed text beyond text box'es border.
 - Fixed custom dialog options in the "old mode" not triggering redraw when the active option changes.


Changes in the Patch 1:

Editor:
- Fixed View's frame preview sometimes drawn incorrectly, in case of certain panel sizes.
- Fixed folding in the script editor not working correctly if there's a commented closing bracket ("//}") inside this code section.
- Fixed Editor sometimes failing to update game exe's file information and/or icons, if user was importing any sprites during this working session.

Engine:
- Fixed room objects not updating under Direct3D/OpenGL renderer, if they were assigned a dynamic sprite, then that sprite was deleted, and a new one assigned with coincidentally same ID.
- Fixed room objects not updating under Software renderer, if they were assigned a dynamic sprite, and that sprite was modified while object was not visible on screen.
- Fixed inventory cursor's crosshair not displayed (when enabled in game settings).



What is new in 3.6.1

Common features:
- Implemented Deflate compression option for sprites.
- Removed length limits for: Game name, savegame folder, Character's script name and regular name (description), Inventory item's name (description), Mouse cursor's script name, Audioclip's script name.

Editor:
- Discontinued Source control integration functionality, removed "Put sound and sprite files in source control" option from General Settings.
- In General Settings moved few properties to different groups for better consistency.
- Added "Scale Character sprite offsets" property to General Settings. This property refers to scaling of Character.z and sprite offsets added by LockViewOffset script command.
- Added TextureCacheSize and SoundCacheSize properties to Default Setup. These let configure the sizes of runtime texture and sound cache sizes respectively.
- Added "Leave room after fade-out" event to Rooms (called "Unload" by default).
- Added Translated property to all GUI Controls (was available only in ListBox). Translated property tells whether this control's text has to be translated, and applied text direction (in right-to-left text mode).
- Support '\n' linebreak character in the Label's Text and potentially other text properties.
- Improved Room Editor controls:
  Added free panning mode done by holding the middle mouse button, or alternatively - by holding Space + LMB.
  Mouse Wheel without key modifiers scrolls the room vertically; Shift + Mouse Wheel scrolls the room horizontally.
  Zoom is done by Ctrl + Mouse Wheel and room now zooms towards or outwards the cursor position.
- In Room Editor the context menu is now displayed by RMB or Shift + RMB while editing masks.
  The individual room mode menu is merged with the "copy coordinates" command when shown.
- In Room Editor the hint with coordinates is now also displayed when moving Objects or Characters with keyboard.
- In Dialog Script editor support most Edit menu and context menu commands from the regular Script editor, with a few exceptions.
- In Sprite Manager added command "View" -> "Show filenames" which toggles display of a sprite's source filename under the sprites.
- Adjust sprites' import settings after "Crop sprite edges" command; this would ensure that these sprites are restored from source file keeping their cropped sizes.
- During sprite export Editor will display a proper progress dialog.
- Zoom controls in Character and View panes now allow downscaling too. View editor displays the preview sprite stretched to fill the parent panel.
- View editor now allows to select multiple frames at once, across multiple loops too, using standard Shift + LMB and Ctrl + LMB combinations. Properties panel lets modify properties for all the selected frames at once.
- Added "Replace with all sprites from folder" command to the View editor's context menu.
- For Audio Clips in the project tree added "Force Reimport", "Force reimport all file(s)" and "Replace Source File" context menu commands.
- For Output Panel added "Copy selection" context menu command.
- Implemented Log Panel that lets you see the engine and game logs right in the Editor.
- Improved LipSync panel looks in case user's system has display scaling option enabled.
- "Goto Definition" command in script will now work for most of the game entities too, such as Characters, GUIs, and so forth. In that case it will find a game's entity and open a respective editor panel for it. This still does not work for some types, such as Room objects, and Views.
- Added main menu commands for opening a Project folder and Compiled folder.
- Added "Export Global Messages to script" menu command. This command is meant for upgraded pre-3.2 game projects, and will generate a script with a String array, moving global messages texts there.
- For script's tabs added a context menu command for opening this script's location.
- When run with "/compile" argument Editor will print all messages to the console (stdout), instead of displaying modal message windows.
- For Android build target Editor now supports a directory to place plugins in.
- When building a game for Android and Linux the Editor will now be more tolerant to missing plugins and only issue a warning instead of stopping with error.
- Config will now be saved in UTF-8, letting to support setup program's title text in unicode.
- For non-Windows build targets Editor will fix config containing Direct3D graphics driver option and set OpenGL instead.
- For Color Themes: implemented character literal, braces match and braces error settings.
- Made Editor be somewhat more tolerate to missing XML nodes in Game.agf, in many cases it will still let open a game.
- When upgrading older game projects, Editor will insert a call to SetRestartPoint() in the end of the 'game_start' function in GlobalScript.asc. This is done to complement removal of an automatic restart point in the engine. This inserted command is safe to remove.
- When upgrading pre-3.2 rooms with disabled SaveLoadEnabled property the Editor will reset this property and insert a comment with a warning into the corresponding room's script. This is done because this property is deprecated as is no longer accessible.
- Fixed Editor refusing to open a game if one of the translation files is missing.
- Fixed General Settings and Default Setup not working correctly right after importing a pre-3.* game project.
- Fixed importing GIFs or 8-bit PNGs may lose transparent pixels if source images used other palette index than 0 for transparency.
- Fixed Project Explorer's folders collapsing after certain user actions, such as dragging items or renaming things.
- Fixed deleting collapsed "region" in script would sometimes lead to portion of the script undeleted but staying invisible.
- (Possibly) Fixed a "Index out of range" exception in Script editor, related to the "script location" drop-down list, which could occur at random circumstances while
  working with the script, and any Color Theme is enabled.
- Fixed Editor could miss some of the files when cleaning up old compiled files after the Game's Filename property is changed.

Scripting:
- Support "#else" preprocessor directive.

Script API:
- Implemented Room's "After fade-out" event.
- Added eEventLeaveRoomAfterFadeout event for the global "on_event".
- Added eEventGameSaved event which runs after game was saved.
- Expanded interaction functions for Character, Object, InventoryItem, Hotspot and Region types: now they all receive respective object's pointer as a parameter, similar to GUI event functions, as well as a cursor mode this interaction was run with, if applicable.
- Added Game.ResetDoOnceOnly(), which completely resets all DoOnceOnly instances.
- Added Game.PrecacheSprite() and Game.PrecacheView(), which preload certain sprites and linked frame sounds into the engine's sprite cache memory.
- Added ScriptName property to AudioClip, Character, Dialog, GUI, GUIObject, Hotspot, InventoryItem, Object.
- Added static GetByName() function to AudioClip, Character, Dialog, GUI, GUIObject, Hotspot, InventoryItem, Object.
- Added Object.AnimationVolume property, which works similar to Character.AnimationVolume.
- Added static File.ResolvePath() and File.Path attribute.
- Added support for a text formatting to a number of functions: DisplayAtY(), Character.SayAt(), Character.SayBackground(), DrawingSurface.DrawStringWrapped().

Engine:
- Updated to SDL 2.28.5 and SDL_Sound 2.0.3+.
- Significant performance improvement to scripts. Script running speed restored to a level close to AGS 3.2.1. Testing few "script-heavy" games showed fps raise by up to 30-40% compared with 3.6.0 engine.
- Improved performance of String objects in script.
  For instance, appending a character to a String is now roughly x2 times faster, *sequential* iteration of String.Chars[] in Unicode mode is about x12 (!) times faster (Strings in ASCII mode have relatively less improvement, because they have been faster than Unicode mode already).
- Improved performance when creating, deleting and manipulating Overlays; allows the game to have thousands of those with much less slowing down.
- Improved performance when updating and deleting dynamic sprites, and notifying any objects that have to redraw themselves. Engine no longer resets Graphic properties of objects referencing deleted dynamic sprite to 0.
- Implemented "texture cache", in addition to the existing "sprite cache". The texture cache keeps textures generated from raw sprites and lets reusing them, improving performance and reducing CPU workload. The actual impact is proportional to the game's resolution and amount of simultaneously animated objects on screen.
- WFN font renderer now too supports unicode mode and renders texts in utf-8, so long as the font contains glyphs of corresponding indexes.
- Buttons, ListBoxes and TextBoxes now support Right-to-left text direction.
- DrawingSurface.DrawString now supports Right-to-left text direction.
- All the script File functions now treat paths in case-insensitive way (including subdirs), which makes them platform-independent.
- Removed an automatic SetRestartPoint() call at startup. This is done in case user does not want to use default "restart" save slot, or has a custom save system.
- Support handling multiple mouse clicks per game frame, similar to how multiple key presses were supported since 3.6.0.
- When starting up, engine will now precache only first 4 or 8 loops of the starting player character's View. This is done to avoid filling sprite cache with too much sprites at once in case when the player's View contains lots of additional animations.
- Characters will now have their graphic offsets, set by Character.z property and LockViewOffset() function, scaled along with the character's own scaling. This is done so long as the respective game option is enabled in the General Settings.
- Ensure that character and object scaling is updated even when the game is not drawn. This fixes rare issues when their scale property did not update in time whilst the game was completely fadeout, and similar cases.
- Allow to change Character's move speed while its moving.
- When Character is ordered a new move command while already moving, the engine will try to make a smooth transition between old and new moving without a delay.
- Ensure that when Overlays have identical ZOrder they will be sorted in the order of their creation. Besides convenience, this is also meant to restore historical behavior from before Overlay.ZOrder property was introduced.
- Allow game to call DynamicSprite.CreateFromDrawingSurface() and CreateFromBackground() with zero or negative size, clamping it to 1x1, in consistency with Create().
- Engine will now log a warning for the most incorrect parameters to Animate function instead of quitting the game.
- Engine will now skip blocking Character.Say commands instantly while skipping a cutscene.
- Object.SetView now lets invalid loop and frame values, and fallbacks to using loop 0, frame 0, printing a warning. This is also consistent with backwards-compatble SetObjectFrame() behavior.
- Changed Object.SetView() to not play a frame's sound, which could lead to a duplicated sound play if Object.Animate is run right after.
- Text Overlays internal images are now registered as dynamic sprites, and their IDs may be read from Overlay.Graphic. This lets find out their sizes using Game.SpriteWidth/SpriteHeight and optionally draw them somewhere using DrawingSurface.DrawImage.
- Ensure all the script API is now correctly available for the plugins.
- Engine will now safeguard plugin's reading and writing of game saves, so that any mistakes done by plugins won't affect other parts of a save.
- Engine will disable vsync in a "infinite fps" mode, because vsync prevents getting more fps.
- Engine will force any in-game debug messages to be displayed in message boxes, disregarding game's "Display all messages as speech" option.
- Display critical alerts as system modal messages on all platforms that support that (unless engine is run with "--no-message-box" parameter).
- Print some info about memory usage when reporting a "Out of memory" error.
- Deprecated in-game "console", as practically useless.
- Added new config settings in "graphics" section: "sprite_cache_size" (which replaces deprecated "cachemax" in "misc") and "texture_cache_size".
- Fixed Characters may be seemingly "walking in place" for some time when arriving at destination.
- Fixed Display and Say commands treating the second met "&" sign as a voice-over token too (they must only check the first one in string).
- Fixed PlayMP3File() function limiting filename argument by an arbitrary number of characters.
- Fixed speechlines were adjusting their Y position while trying to not overlap GUIs even when these GUIs are completely offscreen.
- Fixed first Sierra-style speechline in a sequence was adjusting its Y position without need when GUIs are set to be hidden during game pause (this includes blocking speech). Normally, the speechlines are adjusting their Y position in order to not overlap GUIs, but when GUIs are hiding during speech there should not be any need to do so.
- Fixed script behavior in case a local variable was assigned a value without being initialized with a zero memory by compiler's intruction beforehand. This is not a problem with the standard compiler, but technically could be an issue with any custom implementation.
- Fixed old-style letterbox viewport getting broken after loading an old pre-3.5.0 save.

Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSStream interface, IAGSEngine.OpenFileStream() and GetFileStreamByHandle().
- Added IAGSEngine.ResolveFilePath() method, which resolves a script path (with location tokens) into a proper system filepath.
- Fixed IAGSEngine.GetFontType() incorrectly reporting TTF font type for WFN fonts with more than 128 characters.

Compatibility:
- In Editor, restored all the Character's variables available in "backward-compatible" mode. This is primarily to make it easier to import very old games.
- Allow to run an animation over a loop with zero frames, by using the placeholder frame. This lets particular old games to continue running instead of crashing with error.
- Fixed slower character walking speeds in pre-3.1 upscaled and high-resolution games.
- Fixed Object.SetView() and SetObjectFrame() not treating -1 for loop and frame as "keep previous values" in older games.
- Fixed inventory window not updated after game.top_inv_item is assigned a new value.
- Fixed a "New Room" command in old-style dialog scripts was preventing "First time Enter room" event to be called.

Windows:
- 32-bit Windows engine is now built as "large address aware" program, which will allow it to use up to 3 GB of RAM on 32-bit systems and 4 GB of RAM on 64-bit systems (was 2 GB previously).

iOS:
- Updated port for 3.6.*.

Web / Emscripten:
- Fixed Safari cannot switch the game into fullscreen mode.

WinSetup:
- Added options for setting texture cache and sound cache size.
- Added options to disable particular graphic drivers and graphic driver selection, and fullscreen mode selection.




Thanks to everyone who contributed to and tested this version!

Something I did not realize earlier, but since there's a color theme selection on AGS forum now, it's possible to switch between light and dark theme (at least).

Thing is, if I mark certain text with a color in my posts, such as "AGS release" for example, this color will not necessarily look good in the other theme.

Is there any way to format my post with some respect to the theme that a user chooses? Like, define different font color for a text, one per a theme, or use a color-defining keyword provided by the forum itself?

If not, would it be possible to implement in the new website?

Like with any complex problem, it's essential to divide it in smaller subtasks, decide how do you want to design each of them. Then find which parts you already know how to do, and which not.

Crossword requires following:

1. Describe the crossword in script data, and a way to configure it, either in script, or reading from a file, etc.
Crossword consists of:
 - cells to enter words (you need to define its geometry)
 - solution (a list of correct words per each position)
these are separate data, because same placeholder may be used for different words.

2. Describe the crossword state, where some words are inserted in particular places, regardless whether correctly or not.

3. Present the crossword state on screen. There is a multitude of options here. Personally I'd recommend DynamicSprite drawn using DrawingSurface, as its a single universal object, which may combine graphics and letters, and you may place it anywhere (room background, GUI, etc).

4. Handle player's input, at the start decide how the puzzle is controlled, is it by clicking on crossword, or typing words in certain sequence, and so forth.

5. Handle success detection, matching crossword's state (created by player) with the solution.

Can someone please remind me, what are the commands that you must use to mark game executable for Linux?
I noticed that this information is missing in the first post here.
(Also it's still missing in the manual, which is unfortunate).

Is this it, or am I missing anything:

Code: ags

sudo chmod +x data/ags32
sudo chmod +x data/ags64
sudo chmod +x gamename