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Hi all. So I am using Sierra style portraits in my game. Here are some examples:





I am trying to readjust the portraits so the characters' faces are level with the text (that way the player's eyes are more drawn to their expressions, which are easy to miss). I tried changing the Speech.PortraitY parameter, but it moves the TEXT along with the portrait. Is there any way to move the portrait by itself? Or a way to move the TEXT by itself? Either will do!

Thanks in advance,

-Dave

It'S 640 x 360!

nice stuff! Did you show that Djinns close up face already? Or is he a mystery?

You mean this guy?

Just received a bunch of new character portraits for the four companion characters. They now EMOTE with EXPRESSIONS.

A tiny minor detail but one I am enjoying immensely.

This is Logan. He can now express FEAR!


Thie is Mandana. She can now express HAPPINESS!


This is Vicki. She can now express SARCASM!


This is Eli. He can now express ANGER!

This was not my intention and I apologize. This thread seemed to indicate that a "developer perspective" was wanted, so I gave it. I understand that not everything can be done at once. I am sure there are reasons why things are set up the way they are. Reasons that I am not aware of.

As I said, I am just a user of AGS. I don't understand how the engine actually works, so I am inevitably going to make a request or make a comment that is "wrong" And I don't want you to quit in frustration because of it. My comments are obviously making things worse, so I'll back off for now. But please reconsider.

I can think of three instances in the past where we hired someone to fix this problem (or make it easier to deal with in some way) and each time we were told it was impossible or just too difficult/time consuming to be worth it. So we've learned to just accept it. I get the impression we'd need to design our own specific save system if we were going to do this. Which... is difficult, but not impossible.

"Most AGS games aren't updated after release in the first place."

I can say with certainty that the savegame incompatibility issue DISCOURAGES me from updating my games as often as I'd like to. I take all the usual precautions - lot of dummy global variables, characters, etc. There's always a small detail that I fail to foresee that breaks everyone's saves completely. And if I want to update to a new version of the AGS engine (as I did recently with Gemini Rue) it's impossible. Those savefiles are gone.

This kind of thing is a BIT out of my wheelhouse, so please correct me if I'm wrong. It seem like the engine is being fragmented and evolving in completely different ways by different people, which means we will have several different versions of the engine that all individually do awesome things but are impossible to merge together cohesively. Again, this kind of thing is WAY above my head, but my first impression is that this is exactly what we should NOT be doing? That this will inevitably lead to big problems? Again, beyond my experience, but my first reaction is to go "Eeek!"

As I said before, getting new development features is less of a priority for me then aiding ease-of-use for players. 90% of my tech support questions are caused because winsetup is arcane and clunky, and if the wrong options are chosen the game just refuses to play instead of giving useful feedback. For example:

The eternal struggle between DirectDraw and Direct3D. In many cases, one of the drivers will work but not the other. If the wrong driver is chosen by default, the game just will not start. It would be nice if the game could detect which one your computer will run, and just switch over to it. 

Also, the options for fullscreen mode are confusing. Currently there are three:

-Max round multiplier
-Stretch to fit screen
-Stretch to fit screen (preserve aspect ratio)

The average user will not know what "max round multiplier" means. *I* don't even know what it means, nor can I find an explanation anywhere on this forum or in the manual. And I don't understand why anyone would want to "Stretch to fit screen" and NOT preserve the aspect ratio. If there's a reason for including that option, I am unaware of it.

OK this has gone slightly off-topic. I'm aware that these are issues/questinos that I should have brought up before, but never did because I didn't think they were a priority for people. I've been encouraged to be more vocal so this is what you get.

Oof. Okay, so the problem is obviously the font. Sorry to waste everyone's time with this.

I tried using that file you uploaded, Snarky, and it works! ...half of the time. The capitol "S" seems to disappear at arbitrary times (usually at the beginning of a sentance). I suppose that's better than when it disappeared all of the time, but still.

I guess it's time to find a font that looks somewhat similar. The issue is that since the game is 640 x 360, when blown up to full screen in anti-aliasing mode most fonts look AWFUL. Cambria was one of the few that didn't.

edit: And now the "M" disappears every time! haha. OK. I think it's time to retire Cambria.

AGS is VERY good as it is now. Making games is a pleasure. That's the bit that everyone wants to keep.

The main issue with AGS is that the games are getting more and more difficult to run as computers change. On some computers, only Direct3D mode will work. On some others, only DirectDraw. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for this that I can see (especially since DirectDraw is so old it's not even supported anymore). That is the main issue that I am concerned with - enabling the end user to easily PLAY the games. Everything else is pure window dressing. As a commercial developer, this is the highest priority for me. I don't know how everyone else feels.

There could be something broken with the font itself. Every other font I try doesn't have this problem. Although I have yet to find a similar font that I like just as much.

Yeah technobabylon was made in an earlier version of the engine. I will probably have to upgrade it soon.

Does it displays OK with anti-aliasing disabled? All problems go away for me, but it's obviously very pixelly.

TB is a 32 bit game.

(typing on phone. sorry for brevity)

Aaand there was a whole slew of posts on the first page that I didn't see. I am batting a hundred today. I am AFK at the moment so if you've got the time - great!

Yes I misunderstand that completely. Although why it made an entirely different letter disappear is a different mystery entirely. Either way, I'm just going to disable anti-aliasing and go with the pixelly version of the font. It looks fine!

So I just... put the font in the game's folder and viola? I am going to try this now!

edit: aaand now the "M" disappears. This is just weird.

The game in question is Technobabylon, which was... dang it. I forget which version it was. One of the 3.3s. If you've fixed it since, then nevermind!

The "weird" results are in the image. Somehow he ended up with a 0,0 resolution.

I just spent the last half hour giving tech support to a customer whose Winsetup file looked like this on his computer:



The bottom half of the window is missing, so he was forced to go into the config file to change the settings, which led to... weird results.

It turned out that he has a 4k monitor, and scaled everything up by 200% because text was so tiny. When he ran Winsetup.exe, the TEXT scaled up just fine, but the WINDOW did not.

He reset the scaling on his display and the window displayed normally:



Is this an setting that can be taken into consideration in a future update or is this something that's out of our control?

From what I can see, money was never the issue. We've offered to pay folks before to improve AGS, and the answer has always been no. It's a hobby for most people here. So there's no reason to make AGS a commercial engine.

Dave, Your wife help you for export to other platforms . Some people like me haven't  programming experience so we need to publish game on mobile and other platforms.Hire master programmers want much money and All of them not familiar with AGS too.
Commercial version at least is great idea for export to other platforms. 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the discussion, but it seemed that the point of making AGS commercial was to further fund the creation of AGS? I.e., pay a developer like CW to do more work on it? That's not going to work if nobody actually wants to take the money.