Messages

I don't know if translation is a thing, but we should consider making the labels as separate sprites. The map could also be implemented as GUI with labels.

You may have GUI with labels, but also a room with objects.
In case of a room you could make a mini-character going around the map, similar to Monkey Island 1 or Hero Quest. (It's theoretically possible to do on GUI, but then you will have to implement your own pathfinding)
In case of GUI, it's easier to setup textual items (with objects you'd have to create sprites, or dynamic sprites with translated text at runtime).

I forgot to post this earlier, but here's a game I've been thinking about as of a reference:
https://archive.org/details/openquest

I don't remember all details, but iirc it's either 1 or 2 rooms game with a simple sequence of actions.
It was an original candidate for a new demo game back in mid-2010ies, at least in my mind, but it's made in AGS 2.72 and uses a number of obsolete features, so would need to be upgraded anyway.
EDIT: the archived version does not include the sources unfortunately, and I cannot remember if I had them anywhere.

Another example of a good "simple demo" style, at least imho, could be this game:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1208-awakener/

This is all just for the reference, to illustrate what I had in mind when proposing to make a simple demo game.

If it were me, I would suggest creating a bare-bones, minimalist demo game: One or two rooms, with everything needed for a traditional adventure game but nothing fancy going on. Release this separately (on github or similar) as "Demo Game - Basic." Arguably, this game should be the result you (can) get if you follow the AGS tutorial to the end.

I think Snarky has reasonable arguments, and initially I thought this is what would be done first, before going into more complex demos.

Overall I feel like I myself got somehow swindled from one idea to another. This happens way too often to me lately, I cannot stay focused on initial thought. But probably that's because I am not actually dedicated to the game design process, and only comment on what others are doing.

The kind of project discussed here may indeed be useful as a big feature demonstration, but I am not certain if it will work for a basic tutorial purpose.

Perhaps, I may propose to imagine you are the absolute beginner to AGS. Try to look at this with their eyes, and ask what do you expect from a "demo game", if your intent is to quickly start your own.

But I don't think I will be participating in this conversation, as I simply cannot stay focused on the problem well enough to provide reasonable contribution.

I might have made a mistake though. There's only 1 item under "game features" now, and because we use this version of the manual to make a AGS distributable, it may look confusing to readers.

I need to find a way to "hide" these pages temporarily, until there's more related content.

There's a way to create separate "branches" in the manual, and put pages there, but these branches wont be accessible and editable from the Wiki frontpage, one would have to use git for that probably, and that's more complicated.

Alternatively, of course, we might quickly make several pages with at least some minimal information.

EDIT: Another alternative is if I make a private clone of the manual, and gather these new pages there. Then later, when there's enough material, I'd copy these texts to the official place.

Does anybody have a good idea on how to solve this? Perhaps if there were a temporary place to gather these pages before there's enough content to look good in the manual?

Myself I don't have much spare time now to write these pages.

I don't think so. I believe someone would have to make a Mac/Linux version of the plugin, and even then you might have to rebuild the game to link it properly with the new plugin.

Flashlight plugin have been rewritten many years ago by JJS, as a part of the initial engine ports. It is present in our repository: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/master/Plugins
It's kept 100% script compatible, because it's used to run old games. It may not be 100% precise in behavior though, and I've never tested it myself.

The plugin may either be built standalone (*.dylib), or integrated with the engine if particular compilation flag is used (BUILTIN_PLUGINS).

It's possible to find out whether plugin is used at all at runtime, if you run the engine with "--log-stdout=main:all", it will print its attempt to hook up plugins or use built-in functions.

Yes, replace the "room" with "location" in the rule, and "location" may consist of number of rooms, if changing rooms is necessary to showcase something.

What does everyone think? (Apologies for the gigantic image -- couldn't figure out how to make tables work in the forum post).

You could upload a spreadsheet to any file hosting, like google drive, and post a link instead.

In regards to the table, I'm afraid this kind of configuration will result in lots of empty cells, and a waste of visual space. The "group" may be made as a single column, where you print a group's name (or a short tag), perhaps even with a colored background corresponding to a group.
It should be easy to sort the items, keeping them grouped by "group" value.

[each room is self-sufficient]

The real question is: how much adventure game is needed for a demo game? If you want to get a game with good story and great world building, there are tons of them in the database. The demo game should IMHO showcase the most common use cases and how to implement them.

Yes, I guess you're right.

So, the rule should then be that each room is self-sufficient, not requiring visiting other rooms for completing.

I dunno if we should lock access to seeing complex features behind complex puzzles. If the purpose is to help the player understand how to implement reflections, for example, and reflections is considered a complex feature, it seems odd to require the player to either complete a maze or figure out which ingredients of a sandwich to give a guard so that they can access that room to see the reflection in action.

I agree. I think all rooms should be accessible from the start. Of course, the separate locations should be grouped on the map (e.g. Beginner Village, Intermediate Fields, Advanced Woods) but all available from the start.

Something I might propose as an option is to have walkthrough and tutorial modes, or rather have a proper walkthrough, but also an option to unlock all rooms at once. Of course in such case a walkthrough has to be scripted with a thought that player may arrive to a room without passing previous stages, in which case it might give necessary inventory items, for instance, or have each room self-sufficient and not depending on other rooms.

If you want to have no speech animation at all, then set SpeechView to 0.

I have just tried and I get this error: SetCharacterView: invalid view number

Looks like it should be -1:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Character.html#characterspeechview

Which exact behavior do you want to get?

If you want to have no speech animation at all, then set SpeechView to 0.

It was probably because Play command was after Say, and because Say is blocking, the sound played only after.
So the solution was to move Play before Say, as Play is not blocking.

But if that's true, that's not how you normally add voices to character speech. Instead there's a voice system:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/VoiceSpeech.html

There's also 640x360 for 16:9 aspect ratio.

I have ideas I think would be nice and useful to demo, but I cannot tell whether this is fine for the demo game in question or not. Initially I thought there may be a "simple" demo and then another more complex one, but now when you are discussing this tutorial approach where advanced rooms open up as player progresses, I wonder if more complex functionalities may also be included at some future stages.

One thing that I might propose for consideration is the "maze" made of a single re-generated room (or small number of rooms). Number of classic and AGS adventure games have featured a maze region where character would travel around "cells" inside a larger maze. Only particular locations would be made as individual rooms, but most of the generic cells would be implemented inside a single room that gets reshaped depending on a "cell type".

[Editor:]

Updated to Beta 2
(Please use download links in the first post)

This includes all the fixes from 3.6.0 Patch 2 too.

Backported a group of UI improvements from ags4 branch (forgot to do this much earlier); + couple of simple but convenient script events.

Editor:
- 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.
 - Reimplemented multiple sprites properties edit in the Sprite Manager. This ability was dropped in 3.5.0 unintentionally.
 - Added "Leave room after fade-out" event to Rooms (script function called "Unload" by default).

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.


Also fixed Sprite Manager and Inventory pane's misalignment on Windows 10+ with desktop scaling. There are few more panes that have the problems, but they were not fixed yet, as it turned out to be more difficult to be compatible with different OSes and scaling variants.

I will open a separate ticket just in case. https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/1123

This should have been done back in 2020, because the fix appeared to be rather trivial. But now it's fixed in 3.6.0 Patch2.

-First, even when "Allow relative asset resolutions" is disabled, the property is available in the sprite editor and can be modified. This is confusing because changing the value has no actual effect in-game. I think the property should be hidden or made non-editable when the game-wide setting is disabled.

This should now be done in 3.6.0 Patch 2
(https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-0-patch-2/)

-Second, it used to be possible to bulk-edit this setting by selecting multiple sprites and adjusting the property. Now, the changed value is not applied to all the selected sprites, but only to the first one. I would consider this a regression.

The bulk-edit is reimplemented, but in 3.6.1 branch, because it is accompanied with a performance fix which is somewhat experimental (the bulk-edit was previously disabled by mistake, while fixing the significant performance issues when selecting many sprites at once).
This will be present in the next 3.6.1 beta update.

Released 3.6.0 Patch 2:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-0-patch-2/

[Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 2 installer]

AGS 3.6.0 - Patch 2

Full release number: 3.6.0.49

Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 2 installer

Download AGS 3.6.0 Patch 2 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: 4th June 2023

Previous stable version: AGS 3.5.1 P20 forum thread


This release is brought to you by:

- sonneveld (porting engine to SDL2)
- 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)
- Thierry Crozat (fixes, plugin update)
- vga256 (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 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!

Thank you as always CW, and since it's you I should take this time to ask- I'm nearing the end of my games dev, I've built it in 3.5.0.27-P5 and I just assume I should not try to update but then Grundislav said he updated mid Rosewater and well, you would know best, do you think it would be pretty painless to update? I wouldn't do it just for fog- I kind of assume the module wouldn't be ideal (too curious not to ask) so I planned on handling it as an object but there's a lot of other neat things to utilize in 3.6....

I'd like to avoid any misunderstanding, 3.6.0 only added room overlays. Prior to 3.6.0 you could use room objects and characters for this.

As for upgrading, 3.6.0 seem to be quite stable, there have not been new serious bug reports in the past few months (knocking on wood). But some things have changed, and you may have to play with backwards compatibility settings (or not, depending on what you have in your game).

@Crimson Wizard that's definitely simpler. Wouldn't this code interfere with eModeUseInv, though?

EDIT: Oh wait, I see. You simply put the (if player.ActiveInventory == iWhatever) code under the block for hotspot_interact?

I forgot about this, but you may do both ways, adding a player.ActiveInventory check in on_mouse_click is perhaps more consistent.