Messages

This problem was fixed in the latest 3.6.0 patch.

For properly remaking FMV games in AGS, things may be easier if its video playback support was upgraded
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/engine-development/feature-request-videos-non-blocking-playback-with-guis/

Today it's possible to use one of the existing video plugins, like this one:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/plugin-spritevideo-v0-9-3-sprite-and-video-render-based-on-direct3d-plugin/
(except it does not support audio)

[1. The window title]

1. The window title is assigned a unicode string in 3.6.0, this is done unconditionally now. Therefore, if a game title is saved in ANSI and contains non-latin letters, it will display as gibberish.

I think it's possible to fix in windows version of the engine, because windows API provides methods for both unicode and ANSI string parameters. But:
* this will work only on Windows, because other systems (linux etc) don't know how to display ANSI.
* this will work only on Windows systems which have "language for non-Unicode applications" set to Hebrew, or possibly ones which default language uses same ANSI charset as Hebrew.
On all the other systems this text will still display wrong.

2. The winsetup issue is because the window title is taken from the config file ("titletext" option), which is generated having ANSI encoding by the editor. This is something that I missed when was adding Unicode support to the Editor, assuming that the config file does not store human-readable text.

This should be fixed, and config file likely has to always be saved in utf-8. The engine may take care of it regardless what encoding the game requires.

3. The save folder name. Since some time the engine forces the save folder name to have only chars in certain code range, I think this is 32 - 127, with exceptions for punctuation signs. If there's any chars outside of that range, they are replaced by underscores '_'. This is done for compatibility between various systems. So, at the moment, it seems like you cannot have save folders named in Hebrew.

I looked in AGS 3.6 but i couldn't find any "object.rotation" or such syntax i guess it's not available yet. Are we talking a distant future for sprite rotation or is it far away? I don't try beta's alpha's and all those things, too scared to mess up my main project files!  

This is implemented in AGS 4, for objects and characters this property is called GraphicRotation.

Hi ! I noticed a problem, I use 3.6.1.6, I have some "strings" declared at the top of my script, I give them a value in game_start function (String a="My String A" etc...), but if I have a code that asks "if (Label.Text==a)", it crashes as "a" is null.

This sounds like this may be a scripting mistake, please post an actual script example, and exact error message.

EDIT : also I saw that declaring label array in game_start doesn't work (label pointers will be null if they are called later in the code)

Please post an actual script example, so that we can see what exactly you are doing.

[Editor:]

Updated to Beta 9
(Please use download links in the first post)

Contains all changes from 3.6.0 Patch 5.

Other changes in this update:

Editor:
 - 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.

Script API:
 - 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.

Engine:
 - 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.
- 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().
- Fixed managed structs in script may cause program crashes after you restored a save and try to save again (regression in previous 3.6.1 Betas).

Compatibility:
 - Warn of write into "readonly" script variables, instead of error, as some older games may to try to write there.
 - Fixed inventory window not updated after game.top_inv_item is assigned a new value.

[Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 5 installer]

AGS 3.6.0 - Patch 5

Full release number: 3.6.0.52

Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 5 installer

Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 5 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: 14th September 2023

Previous stable version: AGS 3.5.1 P20 forum thread


This release is brought to you by:

- Alan v. Drake (improvements, fixes)
- Cameron Cawley [ccawley2011] (fixes, improvements to SpriteFont plugin)
- Crimson Wizard (stuff )
- Dominik Mierzejewski (fix)
- Donovan Watteau (fix)
- eri0o (updated Android port, Web port, Editor improvements, etc)
- fernewelten (new fonts outlining, improvements to script compiler, fixes)
- Francesco Ariis (fixes)
- Morgan Willcock (improving templates, help with CI)
- Pablo Navarro [panreyes] (fixes)
- ChamberOfFear (improvements)
- rofl0r (fixes, suggestions)
- sonneveld (porting engine to SDL2)
- Thierry Crozat (fixes, plugin update)
- vga256 (fixes)
- Walter Agazzi (fixes)


Summary

AGS 3.6.0 is another big change to AGS.
First of all, this release presents a SDL2-based engine. For about 2 decades AGS engine was based on Allegro 4 graphic library, which was discontinued somewhere in the early 2010-ies (only received few patches since). There was an intent to move to to Allegro 5 or SDL since, but for various reasons this task was continuously postponed. Now it's done.
Secondly the Editor and Engine now have full Unicode support. This means that you may use any language whatsoever in scripts, object descriptions and custom properties, as well as translations; so long as you also provide proper unicode fonts.
Third, we have finally expanded a list of platforms that the Editor can build for: now this includes Android and Web (Emscripten) port.

There are much more changes and improvements in this release, check out the full list of changes below.
Also, please be sure to read "Upgrading to AGS 3.6" topic in the manual: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/UpgradeTo36.html



Changes in the Patch 5:

Editor:
 - Reimplemented multiple sprites properties editing in the Sprite Manager. This ability was dropped in 3.5.0 unintentionally.
 - Fixed Autocomplete not treating certain struct members as "static" or "protected" if their declaration is too long.

Engine:
 - Fixed Character.WalkStraight() was resetting walking animation if called during walking.
 - Fixed Character's idle animation getting reset to frame 0 when the speech is played without a valid speech view (idle animation should continue playing in such case).
 - Fixed idle animation sometimes not starting immediately after Character finishes walking.
 - Fixed a crash occuring if script tries to get or set a custom property for a non-existing Room Object (this seem possible to do by iterating over `object[]` array).

Compatibility:
 - Implemented "legacysave_assume_dataver" override option in config, which lets to instruct the engine which game data version to assume when restoring legacy (pre-3.5.0) saves. This "hack" appeared to be necessary because of a mistake done during development of the older engine versions, where the save format was changed, but engine was made to rely on the game data version instead of incrementing save format index.
 - Implemented "legacysave_let_gui_diff" override option in config, which lets the engine to read less gui elements from restored save than the number registered by the game. This is to emulate a (possibly unintended) effect in pre-3.5.0 saves.
 - Fixed engine could try to load game data from game.exe without checking whether data is actually appended to it when restoring a legacy save in a game with a different file structure.
 - Fixed number of GUI elements were not tested when loading a legacy save, which could lead to GUI data getting overwritten incorrectly without a warning if number of controls changed since. If the test failed, engine will act according to "legacysave_let_gui_diff" config option: either quit with error or log a warning and continue.

Plugins:
 - Fixed potential "index out of bounds" exceptions in the built-in PalRender plugin.

Templates:
 - In "Verb Coin" template fixed action label could be updated incorrectly if the cursor was moved over buttons on any other GUI.


Changes in the Patch 4:

Editor:
 - Export Game's Title into translations.
 - Fixed Game.agf was not created after importing a 2.* game project (regression in 3.6.0).

Engine:
 - Character.AnimationVolume property is now applied to the portrait animation as well.
 - Removed few of the less important game messages from logging, because they may quickly clutter the log under some circumstances.
 - Fixed when animating a character portrait, the first frame's linked sound is not played.
 - Fixed IsSpeechVoxAvailable() returning positive result if run from IDE and Speech folder is empty.
 - Fixed speech and messages were skipped by modifiers and other special keys (Ctrl, Alt, etc).
 - Fixed crash occuring when you resize DynamicSprite while it is displayed on screen.
 - Fixed audio clip started right before a ChangeRoom would not play until after the room changes.
 - Fixed in Software display mode the room Overlays may not be properly covered by a walk-behind under very specific conditions.
 - Fixed System.Log() would cause engine crash if there are more format placeholders than args.
 - Fixed some game options that are not allowed to be changed at runtime could still be overwritten when restoring an old save, leading to a weird game behavior.


Changes in the Patch 3:

Editor:
 - Don't error when loading a room file which has unsupported number of events, instead these will be cut out. This may let e.g. use room templates from newer versions of AGS.
 - Sprite's default property is changed from deprecated Resolution setting to SourceFile.
 - Fixed full spritefile recreation would write duplicate sprites into the spritefile, if game project (Game.agf file) contained multiple sprites with same ID for any reason (for example, if they were added by manually editing Game.agf).
 - Fixed importing SCI fonts with >128 chars.
 - Fixed font preview did not properly display characters with indexes 128-255.

Engine:
 - Fixed "noloopcheck" script function modifier was not handled correctly sometimes.
 - Fixed a button with inventory placeholder did not update immediately when the active inventory is set.
 - Fixed textual GUIs were not redrawn immediately after a call to SetGameOption(OPT_RIGHTTOLEFT).


Changes in the Patch 2:

Common:
- Fixed a TTF font could cause a crash in the Editor or the Engine if the font renderer tries to draw a letter with higher number than the highest glyph number in the font.

Editor:
- Added "Restore all sprites..." command to the Sprite Manager's context menu (this duplicates the "File -> Recreate sprite file" menu command added previously).
- Refresh Sprite Manager after fully recreating a sprite file.
- Sprites will now hide their "Resolution" property if the game settings have "Allow relative asset resolutions" disabled. This is to avoid user's misuse of this property.
- Fixed a minor memory leak occuring when editing a tree item's label in Project Explorer.

Engine:
- Engine will now find and load plugins in the game dir when run from a different location.
- Fixed crash occuring if Character was told to FaceLocation while "Turn to face" game setting is enabled, and character's View does not have enough loops.
- Fixed Character resetting current non-blocking animation if it was ordered to Move, as soon as it arrives at destination.
- Fixed crash occuring if a GUI button was somehow set a negative NormalImage number.
- Fixed "bad script stack" error could be sometimes displayed if the game was aborted in the middle of running a script.


Changes in the Patch 1:

Editor:
- Fixed room's deprecated setting LegacyMusicVolumeAdjustment not applied correctly.

Engine:
- Fixed Room Objects whose dynamic sprite was deleted in "leave room" event becoming invisible during fade-out transition. Logically this has to happen, but historically they kept displaying until the transition end, so we restored this behavior for compatibility, and simply because there's no "after fade-out" event in the engine yet to delete these sprites.
- Fixed Game.StopAudio() fails to remove queued clips if no particular audio type id is requested.
- Fixed performance regression in the script related to long loops (regression in 3.6.0).
- Fixed memory leak occuring when printing text in Right-to-left mode (regression in 3.6.0).
- Fixed rare mistake during text wrapping which may occur if a Unicode text is cut in the middle of the word.
- Fixed playing certain WAVs caused game to freeze forever on exit.

Compatibility:
- Fixed frame-linked sounds not playing in the games made before 3.6.0.
- Allow game to call DynamicSprite.Create() with negative size, clamping it to 1x1.

Templates:
- In Sierra-style template fixed "mouse over" graphic for the "Load" icon.



What is new in 3.6.0

Common features:
- Full Unicode support for all game texts: game properties, scripts, translations, input.
  ASCII/ANSI mode is still working, for backwards compatibility. This may be configured in the game project.
- Extended sprite compression options: lossless storage optimization for 16- and 32-bit sprites; LZW compression option for sprites in addition to existing RLE compression.
- GUI controls may now be told to clip their contents, which means that nothing gets drawn outside of their borders (as defined by X, Y, Width, Height properties). The only exception is Sliders, which are more complicated.
- The historical TTF fonts' "fixup" that altered their height and vertical offset is now optional and works only if backwards compatible option is set.
- Max number of AudioChannels is now 16 (was 8).
- Removed game Cursors hard limit (was 20).
- Increased Room Objects limit to 256 (was 40).
- Discontinued "Windows Game Explorer" support in both Editor and Engine.

Editor:
- Editor requires .NET Framework 4.6 to run.
- Added Android build target support (requires "Android component" installed).
- Added Web/Emscripten build target support (requires "Web build component" installed).
- Expanded UI color theme format, support global color options and allow missing entries.
- Script editor works in unicode mode.
- Added "Text format" option in General Settings which lets switching between ASCII/ANSI and Unicode (UTF-8) modes. This defines which format the game texts will be written in, when saving the game project and compiling the game.
- Added "Use old-style keyboard handling" option to the General Settings, which lets select between classic key press handling and new one meant for unicode chars support in scripts.
- Supports compiling UTF-8 translations. TRS file now has "Encoding" setting that tells how to interpret this TRS text.
- Added support for building multiple speech voxes, by taking files from the Speech subfolders.
- Added support for adding custom files into the game package. This is done by assigning a list of directories to "Package custom data folder" option in General Settings.
- Editor now copies a acsetup.cfg file from the project's root folder (if one is provided by) as a base for generating default config file. Settings from Default Setup will be written over, but other found options won't be removed.
- Added "Sprite file compression" option in General Settings, replacing "Compress the sprite file" option. The new option allows a selection of compression algorithm used for sprites.
  Currently supported: None, RLE (old default compression) and LZW.
- Added "Enable sprite storage optimization" option to the General Settings, that permits the editor to repack sprites in a different storage format, reducing their disk size whenever possible. This option may be used alongside with the sprite compression. Note that this does not change how the sprites work in game.
- Added "GUI controls clip their contents" option to the General Settings.
- Added "TTF fonts height used in the game logic" option to the General Settings, that makes your game use real font's pixel height when arranging text and text-based UI elements, as opposed to the nominal font's size.
- Added "Touch to Mouse Emulation", "Touch to Mouse motion mode" and "Display FPS on Screen" to Default Setup. Removed few deprecated options.
- Added "TTF font adjustment" property to Fonts, as well as to General Settings where it serves as a project default for the new fonts. This property lets you choose between "no changes" and backward compatible TTF fixup meant to keep fonts made for AGS displayed as they were meant to.
- In the "Import TTF" dialog added a choice to import the size closest to the given pixel height.
- Fonts now have Auto Outline Style and Auto Outline Thickness properties.
- Fonts now have a readonly Family Name field, that lets user see the original name of a font they've imported (if available).
- Added IdleDelay property to Characters that lets you set time needed to pass before IdleView is activated. This is equivalent to the Character.SetIdleView script function.
- Added Character.IdleAnimationDelay property to let setup idle view's animation speed.
- Added Cursor.AnimationDelay property to let setup cursor's animation speed.
- The TextWindow edges now have distinct names in the dropdown list of the property grid.
- Rooms created from a Blank template will now have default background of a game's resolution.
- When creating new room objects they will now have their script names set to some default value.
- Added Room.BackgroundAnimationEnabled property to let have disabled animation on room load.
- Editor will now create an empty sprite file if one is missing in the game project. Any existing sprite descriptions in the project will be kept, letting user to reimport these from sources.
- Added "File -> Restore all sprites from sources" menu command.
- Added "Apply" button on editor's Preferences dialog.
- In Preferences replaced "Import Color Theme" with a "Open Theme Folder", as a temporary solution for managing theme files.
- Select script editor's font in the editor's Preferences.
- Added "Help" option to the editor pane's tab context menu.
- Upgraded script editor to Scintilla 3.21.1 and ScintillaNET 3.6.3.
- Cursor's position in script is now displayed on the status bar.
- Dialog scripts now too can open help topics for keywords or script functions under cursor on F1.
- Added zoom controls for the Sprite Manager, Character, Cursor, Inventory and View panes.
- Sprites may now be imported by drag'n'drop into the Sprite manager.
- In sprite manager's context menu added command "Create source files for all sprites with missing / external sources..."
- In sprite manager's context menu added (restored) command "Replace sprite using previous files".
  Also made "previous file" remembered consistently whenever a sprite is imported or replaced.
- In sprite manager's "export all" dialog added "skip if inside project's folder" option.
- In sprite manager's "export all" dialog added "reset tile settings" option.
- On the View pane the frames having set delay and linked sound will be now indicated with icons.
- Editor no longer errors and fails when opening a game project with some script files missing.
- Editor no longer errors on empty translations when compiling the game.
- Editor now exports values of the string type Custom Properties to translations.
- Editor no longer prevents exporting string arguments from Get/SetTextProperty calls to TRS file.
- Editor now cleanups spritefile on game load, identifying any data not referenced by the project and marking it for deletion.
- Fixed editor silently enabling all available Build Targets when upgrading a pre-3.4.0 project. This could be very inconvenient as there are several of them supported now.
- Fixed open folders in the Project Tree were collapsing whenever you create a new subfolder or change an object's name in properties.
- Fixed editor was not preventing from entering Character's and AudioClip's ScriptName too long for the engine to handle.
- Fixed Image and View properties in various objects were allowing negative values.
- Fixed some of the object previews (at least GUI) could crash if user entered a non-existing sprite's number as an Image property.
- Fixed editor displaying unhandled exception if the script which user is trying to open was missing. Instead it will now open a blank script.
- Fixed room editor was suggesting to save the modified room even if no changes were made.
- Fixed a recently imported sprite could be displayed incorrectly scaled up in the room editor for high-resolution games, if the "Allow relative asset resolutions" was enabled in General Settings, and the sprite 0 had "Resolution" property set to "Low".
- Fixed program crash occuring on sprite's import if failed to open a source file for any reason.
- Fixed View animation preview stopping at frame 100 (if loop contains over 100 frames).
- Fixed going to a "find all" result in dialog script did not highlight the found text, and sometimes did not scroll down to it.
- Fixed "Goto Definition" not working for Enums and Defines (macros).
- Fixed script autocomplete sometimes was not updated right after opening a script.
- Fixed script autocomplete for function calls was mistreating commas in strings and inline comments as if they were separating actual parameters.
- Fixed script autocomplete was not displaying members of extended structs if the parent struct was declared in another header.
- Fixed script autocomplete was not working for enum names.
- Fixed structs and enums were not highlighted if declared inside a script's body.
- Fixed in dialogs numbers inside names were incorrectly highlighted as numeric values.
- Fixed matching or mismatching braces were not highlighted consistently at all times in regular and dialog scripts.
- Fixed crash occuring when user was trying to set breakpoint on the very last line in script.
- Fixed few editor panes were not opening correct help topics in F1.
- (Possibly) fixed error message text in the runtime error popup could be drawn partially beyond the popup borders if the user's system has text scaling option enabled.

Compiler:
- Support unicode character literals.
- Support using float literals when defining default values for function arguments.
- Support hexadecimal number literals (e.g. "0xABCDEF").
- Removed 500-characters line limit.

Script API:
- Expanded `on_key_press` callback, now supports two parameters: key code and key modifier flags.
- In the new key handling mode `on_key_press` is called for each actual key press;
  e.g. combinations like Ctrl+Z will result in two `on_key_press` calls, one with eKeyCtrlLeft and second with eKeyZ; added support for "NEW_KEYINPUT_API" macro in scripts.
- Implemented new `on_text_input(int ch)` callback which is called when the engine receives a printable character. This callback is essential for handling unicode chars in script.
- Similarily, expanded `dialog_options_key_press` with the third `mod` argument, and implemented `dialog_options_text_input` callback for receiving unicode chars during the custom dialog options state.
- Implemented `dialog_options_close` callback which is called when custom dialog options are removed from the screen. This allows to perform any required cleanup.
- Added eEventEnterRoomAfterFadein event for `on_event` callback, which corresponds to "enter after fade-in" room event.
- Added eKey constants for Shift, Control and Alt keys.
- Added eKeyMod enum for key modifiers constants.
- String.AppendChar(), ReplaceChar() functions and String.Chars[] property are now working with the unicode characters.
- String.Format("%c") specifier will now be able to print unicode characters.
- Extended Button.Animate() to have blocking style, direction and starting frame parameters, thus matching other Animate commands (of Character and Object).
- Extended all Animate() commands by adding "volume" parameter, that defines volume of the frame-linked sounds for the duration of this animation.
- Added Character.AnimationVolume, defining volume of the frame-linked sounds.
- Added Character.IdleAnimationDelay to let control idle view's animation speed.
- Character.Scaling is no longer limited by a range of 5-200 (now supports 1-32767).
- Hotspot.Name and Object.Name may now be set in script.
- Added Object.ManualScaling and Object.Scaling.
- Deprecated Object.IgnoreScaling (use Object.ManualScaling instead).
- Object.SetView default loop & frame values are now 0 (was -1 which retained loop and frame indexes from the previous view, often unexpected to the user).
- DrawingSurface.DrawImage() and DrawSurface() now support optional source rect coordinates.
- Added functions for getting DrawingSurface of room masks: GetDrawingSurfaceForWalkableArea(), GetDrawingSurfaceForWalkbehind(), Hotspot.GetDrawingSurface(), Region.GetDrawingSurface().
- Added new delay parameter to Mouse.ChangeModeView() to let control cursor's animation speed.
- Added Game.ChangeSpeechVox() and Game.SpeechVoxFilename, support switching the voice-over pack.
- Added Mouse.AutoLock property that toggles automatic mouse lock inside the game window.
- Added Room.Exists().
- Added System.Log().
- Added SkipWait() that skips any active Wait() function.
- Added WaitMouse() to complement existing Wait functions.
- Added InputType enum which defines input devices and lets create their sets as flags.
- Added WaitInput(), a more generic and extendable function that accepts a combination of flags telling which input types to wait for.
- All Wait* functions now may have infinite timeout if you pass a negative timeout parameter.
- All Wait* functions now return the reason they were skipped: a combination of InputType flag and a respective key or button code.
- Added GUIControl.Transparency property.
- Added Overlay.CreateRoomGraphical and CreateRoomTextual. Use these two functions to create "room overlays": that is - overlays that display a sprite inside the room, sorted among other room objects, characters and walk-behinds.
- Added readonly Overlay.InRoom property that tells if this is a room or screen overlay.
- Extended Overlay.CreateGraphical() with a new "clone" parameter that tells whether to assign a sprite index, or make a sprite's copy owned exclusively by this overlay. The former will save program memory but make overlay update if the sprite is edited later. The latter is meant primarily for backwards compatibility.
  Overlay.CreateRoomGraphical has the same param.
- Added Overlay.Graphic property that lets you change overlay's sprite after it's created.
- Added Overlay.Width and Height properties, that let you freely scale existing Overlay.
- Added readonly Overlay.GraphicWidth and GraphicHeight properties that let read original overlay's graphic size, as not all overlays hold a sprite reference (e.g. textual overlays).
- Added Overlay.Transparency property.
- Added Overlay.ZOrder property that lets you sort Overlays among themselves and other objects in the same "game layer": screen overlays are sorted among GUI, while room overlays are sorted among room objects, characters and walk-behinds.
- Added Speech.TextOverlay and Speech.PortraitOverlay for accessing blocking speech overlay and portrait overlay respectively.
- Added Game.BlockingWaitSkipped which tells the result of the last blocking wait skipping, also including result of the blocking speech skipping.
- SkipSpeechStyle now supports eSkipNone mode; when used it will disable any kind of skipping, such speech can be only skipped by a direct command from script.
- Extended Screen.ScreenToRoomPoint() with an optional "restrictToViewport" argument, which lets to choose whether tests over empty place result in conversion through the default viewport or a null pointer.
- Added AudioClip.PlayOnChannel().
- Added AudioChannel.Pause() and Resume() functions, and IsPaused property.
- Added AudioChannel.SeekMs(), complementing PositionMs (as the Seek() function interprets position differently depending on the audio format).
- PlayVideo() now supports an option to play both game's and video's audio track simultaneously.
- Added File.WriteRawInt() to complement ReadRawInt().
- File paths in script now support $DATA$ token, which tells to read files from the game package. This only works for read operations. Functions that support this token currently are:
  File.Open(), DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile(), ListBox.FillDirList().
- Debug(2, 0) command that displayed walkable areas is superceded by Debug(2, n), where "n" is a mask type: 0 - none, 1 - hotspots, 2 - walkbehinds, 3 - walkable areas, 4 - regions. This command also works as a toggle switch, calling it with the same mask index will turn it off.
- Debug(5, n) command that displayed character's walk paths now also works as a toggle switch.

Engine:
- New SDL2-based backend for graphics, audio and input.
- Hqx graphic filters discontinued (could be temporary).
- Windows-only DirectMedia video playback discontinued (could be temporary).
  Only OGG/OGV videos are kept supported at this point.
- Support resizing game window on desktop systems.
- Support "borderless full-screen window" mode in addition to the real (exclusive) fullscreen.
- Support for switching vertical sync at runtime with Direct3D/OpenGL renderers. Also enable vsync in windowed mode too.
- Unicode (UTF-8) text support: engine can now switch between ASCII and UTF-8 text mode. This is controlled by both game's OPT_GAMETEXTENCODING setting and translation's "Encoding" setting: they tells whether to interpret game texts as UTF-8 or ASCII/ANSI.
- Support optional translation's "GameEncoding" setting: it hints the original game's codepage to help with their conversion. This is mostly meant for translating existing older (ANSI) games.
- Engine now supports using real pixel height of the TTF fonts when arranging text and UI elements on screen; using nominal import size of the font is used as a compatible mode for the old games.
- Also supports separate "normal" and backward compatible "fixup" modes when initializing TTF fonts, letting to display both common TTFs and ones made specifically for AGS in the past to display as they were meant to be.
- Supports scripts using functions and variables from any other scripts, regardless of the script module order in the project.
- Removed limit of simultaneous Button animations.
- Removed limit of Character followers.
- Removed Overlay limit.
- Character.SetWalkSpeed() is no longer restricted by an arbitrary limit of 50.
- Process character's idle view based on real game speed, not hardcoded 40 fps.
- Improved file writing times (e.g. when doing a game save) by using buffered file stream. Initial tests showed 50% faster file writing.
- Engine now renders GUI controls as separate textures when using hardware accelerated renderers. This may significantly improve performance in the high-resolution games and games with large number of GUI elements on screen.
- Engine now shares the video texture data for all game objects on screen sharing same sprite. This improves performance in case there are multiple objects which use same image.
- Various performance optimizations for both raw drawing and texture updates (Direct3D/OpenGL).
- Engine now ensures that in threaded audio mode the AudioChannel's state only changes once the game is updated, and not while the game script is running. This prevents situations when the clip could begin playing before all properties are set in script, or when AudioChannel's properties' values (such as Position) could change while running a game script.
- 24-bit wav PCM support, comes with the new sound library.
- File.ReadRawLineBack() now always reads full line, and not limited to 200 characters anymore.
- Debug displays, such as showing room mask and character walk paths, are now implemented as non-blocking translucent overlays, allowing you to keep playing the game while they are on.
- Implemented debug key controls for calling a built-in save and restore game dialogs. These controls have to be set in user config as "save_game_key" and "restore_game_key" in "[override]" category. These may be used by testers if the game is missing a save function or one is bugged.
- Engine now supports loading compiled scripts as separate files packed along with the game, along with those embedded into the main game data or inside room files.
- Engine no longer bails out with error if the chosen translation cannot be loaded on startup.
- When reporting script errors, engine will print callstack for all the active script "threads": for example, if there's Wait() function called and error happened in repeatedly_execute_always, then it will print both actual error's location, and Wait() call's location.
- Engine config now has graphic modes defined as a simplier string options: "[graphics] fullscreen" for the fullscreen mode setup, and "[graphics] window" for the windowed.
  Fullscreen option can explicitly define a "borderless full-screen window" mode.
- Added "emul_mouse_mode" and "emul_mouse_relative" options to config in "[touch]" category.
- Added "cache_size" and "stream_threshold" options to config in "[sound]" category, they setup the rules for sound caching and choosing whether to load a clip fully into mem or stream one.
- Added "load_latest_save" and "show_fps" options to config in "[misc]" category.
- Added "background" option to config in "[misc]" category, that defines the starting run-in-background (aka multitasking) mode (may later be changed by SetMultitaskingMode()).
  Added "--background" command line option for the same purpose.
- Added "--sdl-log" command line option for setting up SDL2 library output verbosity. The engine log config now has a new "sdl" group meant for SDL2 messages.
- Support "--user-conf-dir" command-line arg (and "user_conf_dir" config option) superceding "--localuserconf"; the new option directly tells the location of user config file.
- Path related command-line and config options, - such as "shared_data_dir", "user_data_dir" and "user_conf_dir", now support $GAMENAME$ token in path which is resolved to the game's title.
- Added "--clear-cache-on-room-change" command-line arg (and similar config option).
- Don't error when DrawingSurface.DrawImage has bad transparency parameter (warning instead).
- Don't error when detecting bad format in File.Read* functions (warning instead).
- Added stubs for agsshell plugin (a contemporary cross-platform variant of ags_shell).
- Added stubs for agsappopenurl plugin.
- Fixed potential crashes if a room-related API function has been called in "game_start"; this is achieved by having a dummy room placeholder object. Still results of such calls are undefined and should not be relied upon.
- Fixed potential crash on room load if the walkable area mask contained color values above the supported range.
- Fixed dialog script's "goto-previous" command not working if used from the first sub-topic run using "goto-dialog" (a very-very old bug).
- Fixed AGS_EngineInitGfx plugin callback was not called during OpenGL renderer initialization.
- Fixed Direct3D/OpenGL renderers were displaying plugin's raw drawings in a wrong position in the scrolling rooms, if the drawing was done on AGSE_PRESCREENDRAW or AGSE_POSTROOMDRAW events.
- Fixed overlay may fail to be created sometimes, if previously another overlay had been forcefully removed when changing rooms (this is an ancient bug which existed for many years).
- Fixed ListBox.RowCount reporting 0 if called before the control was displayed once.
- Fixed GetTextWidth would still return a size of an outline for an empty text string.
- Fixed text may be misaligned in gui controls, as its outline thickness is not counted.
- Fixed some TTF fonts could be cut at the bottom when the speech is displayed.
- Fixed scheduled sound fadeout effect was not cancelled by skipping a cutscene.
- Fixed OGV Theora videos positioned incorrectly if they have certain sizes or aspect ratios.
- Fixed game fps sped up if SetGameSpeed() is called repeatedly in game script.
- Fixed game not reacting to system close commands when stuck in script, which made it impossible
  to close the "hanging" game by usual means (other than terminating the process).

Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSEngine::GetGameInfo() function which returns information about the game, such as its title and GUID.
- Added new render callback AGSE_POSTROOMDRAW, for handling drawing inside the room above all room objects.
- Added IAGSFontRenderer2 interface, expanding the original font renderer interface, improving font plugins support.
- Added ReplaceFontRenderer2() and NotifyFontUpdated() functions.

Compatibility:
- Fallback to the first loop with frames if current character's loop does not have any.
- Use the dummy frame if current character's speech view loop does not have any.
- Ignore character having view/loop with no frames while it's not in the current room.
- Legacy behavior of MoveCharacterBlocking's return value.
- Fixed walkable area's continuous scaling was broken for high-res rooms in old games.
- In pre-3.* games force player to walkable area after changing rooms, this is to emulate an unintentional effect created by the old engines.
- Fixed pre-3.4.1 anti-aliased TTF fonts display (their vertical position was broken).
- For pre-3.5.0 games support old behavior of coincidental dynamic sprite replacement on GUI backgrounds (and few other places) without explicit assignment; that is - when the new DynamicSprite is created right after deleting an old one.
- Support Label.TextAlignment with legacy alignment constants for pre-3.5.0 games made with the custom engine from "Clifftop Games".
- Support native resolution hack for games made with "Clifftop Games" custom engine, where 640x400 games are run as 640x360.

Android:
- Rewrote universal AGS game launcher/player using up-to-date Google guidelines. The former "launcher" is now called "AGS Player".
- Implemented single game project template meant for building your own signed APK.
- Implemented two touch-to-mouse control scheme (selectable in config), for one finger emulating LMB only, and for two fingers emulating LMB and RMB.
- Support relative motion speed setting for touch-to-mouse emulation.
- In AGS Player added "Browse" button to the game folder selection, which opens default system file picker.
- AGS Player now searches for games recursively, in all the subfolders.
- AGS Player now has preference button per each game, which opens individual game's settings.

OSX:
- OpenGL renderer is now supported on MacOS.

Web / Emscripten:
- Initial port release.

Windows:
- Installer will create program links with three-digit version in the name.

Plugins:
- Added SpriteFont plugin to the list of builtins, for ports that use ones.
  SpriteFont plugin is updated to support custom "Clifftop Games" font variants.

WinSetup:
- Added "Fullscreen as borderless window" checkbox.
- Remade sound options to reflect the move to the new audio system in the engine.




Known issues

* Although Unicode text is supported overall, some languages may still not be printed correctly automatically. Firstly, those that require "letter linking", such as Arabic or Persian, do not have the proper linking on its own. This may be worked around using special text converters and fonts. Another issue is that texts printed right-to-left in the source (where print direction is done using Unicode's control characters) are not wrapped correctly and may require manual placement of line breaks, or scripting their split in game.
* MIDI no longer plays on its own on Windows. For MIDI you (and your players) must install "sound banks" (also known as "sound font"). Please refer to this article: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/MIDI-playback.html
* AudioChannel.Position and AudioChannel.Seek do not work for MIDI and MOD sounds. Try sticking to PositionMs and SeekMs for now.
* There are reports about Direct3D not being able to restore the fullscreen mode after alt+tabbing occasionaly.





Thanks to everyone who contributed to and tested this version!

On a really old Windows laptop however performance was abysmal, perhaps a hardware (old OS) issue. I suspect it's CPU rather than RAM related and I'd be curious if others can confirm this since this might indicate some minimum hardware requirement.

We'd need to have more details in order to have any idea on the reasons, firstly what are the system specs, and then, which version of AGS is your game built with, what is the game's native resolution, which graphics driver do you set in config, and the size of the sprite cache, at least.

It also may depend on what do you do in your game; like lots of raw drawing for example.

The average CPU / RAM usage may be checked using Windows task manager, on the processes tab.

I found what is the difference. In the keyboard module you are calling WalkStraight. Unlike Walk, WalkStraight has a slightly different code that results in resetting to frame 0 always. While Walk remembers the last frame.
This seem to be an oversight in the engine. The solution would be to make them work in the same way.

Meanwhile, the simple solution in script would be:

Code: ags

int frame = player.Frame;
player.WalkStraight(player.x + dx, player.y + dy, eNoBlock); // walk player character to the new coordinates
player.Frame = frame;

Here's the progress so far:

I have same opinion that I mentioned in regards to the previous sketch in regards to the "shrine" location.
Having such a sharp turn backwards right near the room edge will be inconvenient, and also makes the room composition look bad, in my opinion. If it's a small non-scrolling room, then imo it's best to have every place accessible in a direct or semi-direct route from the central opening.

[when a new walking destination was ordered]

No, it's already in the keyboard module i'm using, look here:

but it does not work that way, unfortunaly. Khris (Module creator) said he'd might fix it in the future. But i think he shouldn't. Cause it's such a basic animation feature that it should be in the engine itself from the get go.

Wait a minute.... I thought this is about a seamless walking, when you order ONCE and character makes turns along the pathway. I thought THAT does not work, which sounded like a true mistake.
But I used a inconvenient test case, I did a better one and can see that THIS actually works.

In fact, I found that it keeps the last frame number even when a new walking destination was ordered while character is still walking.

So... what is the problem then? @AndreasBlack, could you elaborate on this case? Which code do you use to order character to walk? If you are using a module, please post the link.

Is there anyone else interested in testing this? Based on my tests this is generally working, but I may be missing something.
Explanation and instructions are here:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/pull/2127

Download build:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b3h3w3oxdwhfe4cuve5xr/361-multiviewframeselect.zip?rlkey=hckjbxjfozq7fsn7nd9xzm8qg&dl=0

If everything is fine, I would merge this, and this will be a part of the next 3.6.1 beta soon.
Then again, i might add this, and fix any problems later.

I found a very nasty bug; it occurs after you restored a save containing user managed structs, and then try to save again. When saving it has a chance to crash the engine, or write a random amount of garbage into the save file.

This bug was introduced around 3.6.1 Beta 1, released in the end of May. Which makes me wonder how it lasted unnoticed for 3 full months. Unless nobody is using 3.6.1 Betas, or nobody who used them had any managed structs in their scripts...

It is possibly not present in ags 4 releases, because of some differences in program code.

EDIT: we have some trouble with the build server, but I will release an emergency update with a fix as soon as it's working again.

You sometimes complain about how you haven't (in your view) done a good job improving AGS, @Crimson Wizard, talking about mistakes you've made and so on. I think this list is a great demonstration that you, along with the other contributors, have in fact made great strides, even just in the last couple of years. Most of the things you listed as the major weaknesses of AGS back in 2021 have been addressed, or are currently being addressed, at least to some extent.

Because they were not done in time. These should have been among the first things addressed in the open source AGS. Instead it took me almost 10 years to just force myself to work on some of them.
The first 5 or 6 years of development were majorly a waste of time, wrong directions taken, effort being spent on adding hacks and temporary solutions.

[rooms are saved in binary format]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but which of these cons still stand in AGS now entering version 4?

Hmm, let's see...

...Most of the game data is inside a big xml file, and rooms are saved in binary format so you cannot even look what's inside of them without launching AGS. Imported sprites are written into one big file, where again you cannot look into them or replace without running editor. This also makes parts of the project prone to file corruption: anything happens during saving the game may make you loose a whole room, or all of the sprites.
- For the same reason, it's complicated to work with AGS games under a version control tool (svn, git etc): as parts of the game are binary blobs, it is impossible to track the actual history of their changes.

Since 3.6.0 there's a command that fully recreates spritefile from the source images, making it possible to rely only on these sources when sharing a project (although the process of recreation takes time, but it's in range from tens of seconds to few minutes for huge projects).
In AGS 4 Rooms are now stored in open format.

- Lack of Unicode text support.

General Unicode support was added in 3.6.0. There are still few things not working without extra effort from the user, primarily related to the RTL languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Persian), and possibly text input not working well for more complex cases like Chinese.

- Imperfect translation system, where translations may be complicated to update and easy to break. No true support for localizing other parts of the game rather than the texts: such as images, sounds, voices (you have to do this by hand, sometimes using workarounds).

There's a first step towards better translation format in AGS 4, where translations are now saved in PO format, making them more break-proof. But other problems still remain.

- Building game packages for other platforms than Windows and Linux requires manual labour. No official support for gaming consoles.

Since 3.6.0 there's automatic building for Android and Web (Emscripten).

- Scripting language is a mix of low-level and high-level concepts, but does not get any of these to the logical conclusion. So on one hand you cannot refer to plain variables and structs using their memory adresses, on another you have "managed" structs but the use of these is limited by incomplete syntax and unsupported features. It's like having bits of both worlds instead of one but complete.

AGS 4 features a new script compiler, which fills in multiple gaps in the script syntax. There are few strange cases which do not work yet, but this is being addressed right now afaik.
In addition, "managed" structs are not limited anymore, and you may have managed structures of any complexity in script.

- Script's implementation is slower compared to popular scripting languages. This won't be noticed if you have a regular point and click scene, but may quickly become a problem if you e.g. script a fast paced arcade sequence with physics simulation, etc.

While it's true that AGS script is slower than other scripting languages, its runtime performance has been improved in 3.6.1, and a new script compiler in AGS 4 optimizes the compiled script making it somewhat more faster. There's probably still a potential for optimizing it further.

- Most of the things may be only created at the design time. You cannot have dynamically created rooms or objects. This complicates working on anything that is not a standard point and click scene, and forces you to precreate almost everything in the editor, even if you need an object only for some temporary visual effect. If you want a "procedurically generated" scene or game, you have to precreate a number of dummy objects and reuse these.

This still stands in general.

However, since 3.6.0 the Overlays became a noteable improvement in this respect. Since these may be created dynamically, and now you may have unlimited numbers of them, it is possible to use overlays to generate graphical scenes at runtime.

- Lack of contemporary visual effect support: e.g. no GPU-based object rotation, no custom shaders, let alone any 3D effects. Any additional effects have to be scripted with the use of the pixel drawing (aka "software drawing") which is significantly slower.

AGS 4 supports Rotation for almost everything (including cameras).
There's still no custom shader support though, or other things.

- Engine is not well optimized for high-resolution games: the way it draws things, or loads resources, maybe works well with "classic" low resolutions, but not with higher ones.

In 3.6.0 -> 3.6.1 engine received a number of performance improvements, making high-res games run faster, and even require less memory for some reason.

- Abscence of debugging and diagnostic capabilities: you cannot tell what's going on inside the engine when it runs your game.

Since 3.6.0 there's a System.Log script command that lets you print something to the engine log.
Since 3.6.1 there's a Log Panel in the Editor that lets display the engine log while you test run your game.
These two things combined improve debugging capabilities.
Unfortunately, while useful, it's still a manual workaround; as there's no mechanism to make engine tell you scene contents, or values of variables, etc.

Updated with fixes (same download link as above).

Well, I did an experimental version that allows multiple frames selection using Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click, based on 3.6.1:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/pull/2127

Unfortunately, there's something wrong with out build server again, so I made a manual build for testing:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b3h3w3oxdwhfe4cuve5xr/361-multiviewframeselect.zip?rlkey=hckjbxjfozq7fsn7nd9xzm8qg&dl=0

I found the missing piece: the module only draws to its DynamicSprite, and you have to draw that to the room:

BTW, you may assign the module's graphic to a room object or overlay to skip a second bitmap redraw and make things slightly faster. You may also do that once the dynamic sprite is created, probably at room load (?).

Code: ags

function room_Load()
{
    // other set up

    oObject1.Graphic = ThePlace.Screen.Graphic;
}

When the dynamic sprite is updated, the object's look will also get updated automatically.

[EDIT:]

The Sprites editor lets me select multiple selection and I use this to assigning the selection to a view. It gives options such as overwriting or adding the frames to an existing loop, and also to set all frames as flipped or to add them in reverse order. I only find that it missing one option which is to set a certain delay for all the frames in this process.

I did not remember that this process let you choose "flipped" already.

I guess that both things may be worth adding for convenience.

Adding a "delay" option to sprite paste dialog will probably be much easier to do, but multiple selection in view editor is a must have regardless, because oftentimes people need to adjust their animations after import.

EDIT: Oh, I see, so the situation is more confusing.
Apparently there are TWO separate methods for importing view frames. There's a context menu command + dialog in Sprite Manager called "Assign to View", and a separate context command in a View editor itself. And they have different capabilities....
The "Assign to View" can assign only to the first 8 loops for some reason.
This is such a mess...

I guess this is a matter of supporting multiple selection in the view editor, which would allow to change properties for multiple frames at once?

Opened a ticket:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/2124