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Please tell, which version of AGS is this game compiled with?

1) Write your story on the word pad completely, the scenarioes, items, dialog conversations, quests, etc

You would be able to do this in the ideal circumstances, but things are never ideal and you likely won't be able to do this when you're making your first game (unless it's a very short game).
Firstly, you may get bored quickly by not seeing things active and interactive in your game.
Secondly, as soon as you see things in game, they will appear to you in a different light, and you may suddenly realize that initial ideas are not good anymore.

So, I'd rather say, write an outline, to have a good idea of where are you going, but not forcing yourself to do full detail (such as all the dialogs). Then try making the first level (stage) of the game using the placeholder art for simplicity.

From my personal experience, one of the biggest pitfalls at early stage of development is trying to make a single scene perfect before moving to another. Or spending way too much time on cutscenes, animations, etc. As you are making an interactive game, and not the animated cartoon, I think the first priority should be the overall plot, style and gameplay.

In general, if it's your first game, the priority is to get a grasp of what game making is (in this particular engine too), learn the technique, so that you are able to produce things more efficiently.

The Theme support in AGS is still at the experimental stage at the moment.

If there are any obvious errors or inconveniences in theming itself, such as demanding values for everything and not being able to fallback to defaults, not being able to color certain elements, and so on, then these should better be reported as program issues. You may use either the "Editor development" forum section or our github issue tracker for that.

At the moment we only maintain VisualStudioDark theme (half-officially), so if there are any issues with that it's best to post separately in the same locations.

Regarding any other theme, I guess it's best to speak with their respective authors (e.g. I have no idea what "dracula" theme is).

No; but why do you need this, what are you trying to achieve with this?

Note that the declaration syntax "int arrayname[5]" means one array with 5 elements, not 5 arrays. Array cannot be named "peter[0]", such expression would mean "take the 0th element of array peter", "peter[4]" would mean "take the 4th element of array peter".

I didn't know XP support could be added to the new AGS versions. Usually, once software drops a system support, it's for good and cannot be reversed.

The Editor dropped XP support, as it now relies on a .NET version not available for XP.

The engine does not have anything that would disable it on XP completely, but it has to be built in certain way to run on XP.

And what if someone asks for that (little me)? How many people should request for it to be distributed? Because stats show in some world regions over 1% of desktop users still have Windows XP. I know 1% may look as funny number, but it is actually thousands of people.

I will ask a person who is managing our automatic builds. Of course it also may be built manually, but this may be inconvenient to do every time.

Which version of AGS are you going to use? We are currently making releases for 3.5.1 (only bug fixing updates) and 3.6.0 (next big update), so if this is done automatically - it will be performed for these versions.

EDIT: here's for example a 3.5.1 engine for xp, you may try out if it works:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t75p3o1zc6o8dgh/acwin-351-xp.zip?dl=0

3.6.0 engine for xp:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ebohgw9jogvhl2/acwin-360-xp.zip?dl=0

AGS 3.5.0 Editor dropped Windows XP support, because it requires .NET Framework 4.5.
Also, since 3.5.0 Windows engine cannot be run on Windows XP, unless it's built in a certain way. It's possible to do, but we don't distribute the XP version, as nobody asked yet.

The latest Editor that runs on XP is 3.4.4.
For some reason I cannot find it in our uploads, so here's 3.4.3 instead:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/tag/v.3.4.3.1

The script may be version specific, but currently AGS is backward compatible, which means that you can enable old script functions. This is done in General Settings -> Backwards Compatibility section.
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/GeneralSettings.html#backwards-compatibility

If there are only few old functions used, they may also be replaced with the newer alternatives using following table:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/ObsoleteScriptAPI.html

Every fixed object in AGS has ID property:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/InventoryItem.html#inventoryitemid

But for above code you don't need it at all, as LoseInventory() function accepts InventoryItem, and ActiveInventory is already InventoryItem.

Code: ags

  if (player.ActiveInventory) {
    player.LoseInventory(player.ActiveInventory);
  }

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Character.html#characteractiveinventory
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Character.html#characterloseinventory

Today for most cases you don't need IDs, unless you are using them for cross-references with your own custom data.

Probably waaaay overcomplicating things. Screenshot will come tommorrow if i can't get it to work tommorrow. Thanks for the help always!

A single screenshot, or at least a schematic, can save several posts of explanations. Your last post left me as puzzled as the previous ones, I still cannot guess what the problem is based on your description. You mention parallax, was that causing issues? I cannot tell how multiple floors or use of hotspots are relevant to the baseline problem, if they are.

The characters are walking behind certain things not just characters, but objects, or certain parts of the rooms. Before i've set the baseline in game start, had no trouble until i realised this issue. I'm most likely doing things wrong.

Why do you set character's baseline yourself at all? How are your objects and characters arranged on screen?

Could you post a screenshot of your game? That would at least make it more clear what the situation is.

I'm confused as to when i should use the character.baseline and when not and just "Walkbehind Area's"?

Normally, for traditional looking p'n'c games with sideview you don't need to set character's baselines, and only arrange objects and walkbehinds correspondingly. The character's and object's automatic baseline is at their "feet". For walk-behinds you need to set baseline yourself (you may do that by dragging a baseline control in the editor).

You mostly need manual baselines for some special scenes, and games with alternate perspectives (like top-down view, for example).

I believe it's better to design the API/behavior in a way that touch directly can be handled by the game developer, as in #1538 and later figure this other behavior, so that it doesn't conflict, as I believe it's more important to enable proper touch support.

But right now there's no proper touch API, as you point out, while the missing ability to simulate right click makes "AGS Player" unusable for a large list of games, which will defeat its purpose to a significant degree. The 3.6.0 version was supposed to keep the behavior as much as possible, while switching to SDL2. It's clear that touch API won't get in 3.6.0, and not known when it will be added; therefore in my opinion it is logical to add a right click emulation to 3.6.0 if there is a technical opportunity for that.

I may look into this too, if you don't want to hack around this emulation and focus on the future things. But I'll have to learn how touch events work, and how does "touch->mouse translation" in SDL work.

If, after the touch API is designed and integrated, it will be found that the emulated controls somehow conflict with it, then these emulated controls could be adjusted again, as touch API will have a priority.

I've tried playing around with Character.baseline, but it's like i've explained in the topic. What am i missing? Ofc when the characters walks behind another character he should be behind. When walking in front he should be in front of the NPC. This must be such a common thing. I did search for it, but couldn't find the solution, unfortunaly.

By default character's baseline equals to its Y coordinate, and it is updated automatically by AGS. You only have to set baseline when you need to override this behavior. Please describe your situation in more detail? What happens in your game and what problem are you trying to resolve?

Right click is not implemented in this version

You probably mentioned this earlier, but I missed or forgot. Does this mean that AGS 3.5 could emulate right click on Android, but 3.6 cannot? If so, this is a problem that should be documented. Could you open a ticket describing this situation, and what prevents from having similar functionality?

Sorry to necropost this. I've been looking into the engine, and one thing strikes me as weird, the choice of MojoAl. Don't get me wrong it works for what it works for, but wouldn't switching to OpenAl - Soft give like the same features + all the cool effects (Reverb, Pass Filters, Echo, Delay, etc)?
Open Al has been rather 'abandoned' since 2012 or so.

When we were moving to SDL2, we used much of the work prepared by another developer (Nick Sonneveld) to speed this process up. At that time I did not ask questions about this.
If I remember correctly, the choice of OpenAl's implementation was affected by some issue with the license and/or compilation on certain platforms (such as consoles, as Sonneveld was working on a Switch port of his own simultaneously).

If we keep using OpenAl interface in the future, then switching between mojoAL and OpenAl Soft is purely a matter of replacing one library on another. At this moment there is not much sense in that, as nobody would be able to use these additional effects without a proper scripting API. In regards to scripting, 1) it's too late for 3.6.0, and 2) tbh personally I'd rather revamp the audio api in whole before adding such things.

I also didn't know that the "e"Block was a enum, my knowledge of AGS has levelled up :-)

For the information, there's a list of all enums in the manual:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/StandardEnums.html

Sorry, I just realized, that you could download the experimental AGS 4 build, which converts rooms into directories, and all parts are stored separately. Make a copy of your game, open it in AGS 4 editor, and you will receive RoomN folders with masks and backgrounds in them.

https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6671755447107584
^ this is the latest build; scroll down to "Artifacts" and choose either "archive" or "installer".

You may then continue using AGS 4 (although it is considered to be not stable), or take these resulting assets and import them to your 3.5 or 3.6 project.

EDIT:
if you have trouble loading the much older game in AGS 4, then try first opening it in 3.6.0, saving, and then opening in AGS 4.

Not in the editor, but the room format is known, so someone might write a tool that extracts masks or backgrounds.
For example, we have a tool that imports/exports scripts into rooms, it may be expanded to work with other parts:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/master/Tools/crmpak

I'm assuming the BlockingStyle should be the first optional parameter check as it takes precedence over the other optional parameters.

Well, that's purely a question of convenience, but all the optional parameters must be after non-optional ones.

Edit: i see from your post you are naming the optional variables as they where declared, is this necessary or am i going to get a horrible bug for not doing so?

No, names in import declaration and in function definition may be different.
One thing that I'd mention is that not giving any name at all means whoever uses this function won't know what these parameters mean (and script editor won't show their names in a hint).

in header:

Code: ags

import function animate(int id, String saybg, int struct_id1, int struct_id2, BlockingStyle block = eBlock);

in script:

Code: ags

function animate(int id, String saybg, int struct_id1, int struct_id2, BlockingStyle block)
{
     character[id].Animate(8, 4, eOnce, block);
}