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When ego walks to the side, the scene scrolls (the background image is larger than the screen) but not at the 40 fps implied by SetGameSpeed. It seems to move at maybe 5 or 10 fps - is this normal? Is there a way to get the scrolling to look smoother? The sprites also move jerkily, but I'm guessing that's just because they don't have many frames per second and gliding is off.

Sorry for all these noob questions, but this is the beginner's technical board, and in my defense I did check the manual and the forums first.

Don't worry too much about performance in advance. You can always optimize later.

That depends on whether I can selectively smooth sprites or not. I don't want to spend months creating sprites in one way, then find that I have to go back to the start and recreate them in a different way - smaller, bigger, more or less blurred, more or less variable images for faking appearances, in groups or alone, designed for scaling or not, etc. I've been burned like that before - I'm already on my fourth set of sprites, and two of those changes were due to unforeseen performance issues. If there is a vital choice to be made I always do it the wrong way.

Depends what you mean by smoothing.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding things. I realise that alpha channels need 32 bit, so I assumed that smoothing scaled sprites did as well. If smoothing works at lower color depths then that's very good news.

But can I have ten characters scaled on screen, and only one is smoothed? I'm assuming that this would improve the speed of rendering?

It'd be nice if we had an update to 2.72....

Strongly agree! Just adding my vote. I got pretty excited when I saw the message dated 25 November saying "I'll get to 2.72 soon" .. then I saw it was 25 November 2006...

If smoothing is turned on, is it possible to flag most sprites to not be smoothed? I can't find any references to this in the manual.

On a related note, is it likely that smoothing will ever be applied to 16 bit or 8 bit games? My game has grayscale sprites in front of 16 bit backgrounds, so there's no reason why they shouldn't smooth in principle. It seems a shame to slow the game down to 32 bit color just to allow something that could be made to work in a lower color depth.

Only problem you could encounter is that AGS games do not work in Wine natively. The same possibly applies for MacOS (though I can't be sure on that). There are ports of the engine to those platforms (but MacOS port stopped at 2.71 and Linux port has some, er, compatibility issues).

Linux and Mac support are major pluses for me, but the 2.71 issue is a serious one. Is this situation likely to change? Or should I stick to developing with 2.71 for the sake of the Mac?

Check out the Character Control Module demo to see an example of a LOT of characters moving around the screen without causing any slowdown.

Thanks! I think I've probably asked enough questions. It's time to fire up the program and see what it can do first hand.

You might need some custom save/load feature if you plan to continually expand an existing game. ... Afaik, there's no limit to the amount of strings as long as they're inside scripts. ...  It's possible to not use AGS-characters/objects but to "RawDraw" everything to the screen every frame. ... With some clever coding, it's possible to do almost anything in AGS.

The more I learn about AGS (especially recent versions) the more excited I become! And I just had it confirmed that the memory leak in Sludge is real, it's not just down to my amateurish coding. Part of me thinks I should contact the developer and ask him to fix it, but to be honest AGS is looking so cool right now! Can I justify delaying the game by three months in order to port it to AGS? Can I justify NOT converting to AGS with so many great features on offer? This is going to be so much fun!

OK, one more techy question. How is performance affected if you have ten tiny characters on screen? What about twenty? I'm talking maybe thirty pixels high each. Or less. Has anyone done that before in AGS, or is it too processor intensive?

I honestly can't even imagine a single object moving to the tune of a thousand frames, though I would love to.

I have several animations in my game that contain more than 1000 frames, usually crowd scenes. In Sludge there was a problem with removing background characters, so I found it was easier to pre-render the entire crowd. Also I use sprites instead of video, to avoid codec problems (the opening sequence looks like video but is actually a 1500 frame sprite).

I'm hoping there are other ways to do this in AGS, because some of these sprites have large transparent areas, and this creates HUGE, HORRIBLE memory needs. I'm dsure there are better ways to achieve the same result, and I'm encouraged by the seeing so many amazing modules and plugins.

You'd probably be better doing them as seperate games, IMO. You could make a connecting, front-end game, and link them using RunAGSGame.

If I can do it seemlessly I will, but the major selling point of the game (eventually) will be that you don't download a particular game, you download an environment. In it you can endlessly explore and stumble across amazing stories. It's my guarantee that eventually people will want to buy it, because every version will be bigger and richer than the last.
There is no danger that the size will get too big. As more stories are added I will be reusing more and more resources. I think the game will expand more slowly until in ten years' time it is something like a 600 MB download, though by then I hope to have a regular publisher.

Strings don't have a character limit.

Is there a total string limit? Ignore this if the answer is in the documentation, I'll get to it soon enough.  In Sludge the limit is 65,500. Which seems a lot at first, but they soon get used up.  Sludge uses the same list of strings for everything. For example, I have 3,000 objects that require an average of 3 or 4 strings each (1 for the name, plus reactions to "look at" and "use" etc.) That's 10,000 strings used up before I even talk to a person! I'm hoping AGS is more flexible.

2000+ locations? Really? What are you going to script???

It's always been my dream to have a game where you can wander around and become part of classic novels and major ideas. The first version will contain Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (see lesmisgame.com). The next version will add to the same game world, and let the user play through Tolstoy's War and Peace. Then 6 months later I will add Dante's Divine Comedy, and so on. The first version has 140 rooms, the second will probably add another 100, the third will add about 80, and so on. I've been working on this since 2000, though have only been putting in serious daily time for the past year. In the first ten years I expect to add at least 1000 scene, probably a lot more.

An earlier version of this game had 5000 working scenes already, but the graphics were not good enough, so I started again with more modest goals. You can see a video of the earlier version here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=o0hTnFF97po  

Thanks for the quick reply!

I hear that there is actually a stern limit to the total number, but I think it's above 2,000, or maybe right at it.

I'm guessing that this could be bypassed by writing some code? E.g. one "room" could be a forest, and I could write variables to rearrange the trees? But 2,000 is probably enough.

2. I believe that 2.72 is very, very stable.  I'm sure that 3.0 will be as well.

That's good to hear. Am I right in thinking that there are enough AGS users making large games (or with good programming knowledge) that it's unlikley that a major memory bug would pass them by? With SLUDGE, the memory issue (assuming is genuine) is very major, but nobody noticed it until now, because the user base is too small so nobody happened to run into it.

3. Game speed is directly affected by screen size and color depth, both of which can be set from an easy-to-use menu.

So an 8 bit game be nearly twice as fast as a 16 bit game? Assuming that most of the large resources are in the form of graphics. And that would apply even if the graphics were stored asJPEGs and converted on the fly? Sorry if I'm talking nonsense here, I'm reading the manuals as I type.

the total limit on sprites is 15,000.

15,000 frames? Then are there other ways to show animated objects? For example, if I have an object like a roaring fire or waves on the sea, could I animate them in some other way instead?

5. I'm not 100% sure about what you mean here; you can't use a text editor to completely build an AGS game, no. 

I was just thinking of my experience with Sludge. At the start I used all the standard commands (make screen region, say, move, etc) but over the months I've written alternate code that encapsulates the original command and also does other useful stuff (e.g. my "Say" allows an entire conversation to be included in one string, by calling as function that breaks up the string, assigns the parts to wheoever is standing nearby, and then calls "say"). I'm hoping the same thing can be done with AGS, so if I want to bypass a standard command or method, I can. For example, I don't want to have to click on separate buttons or navigate a menu every time I have to enter X and Y coordinates!

You can also write complete modules and plugins.

I'm just exploring those now. Very interesting indeed!

Hi! I've been developing a game in SLUDGE for several years (lesmisgame.com), but recently discovered a serious memory leak. So I'm looking at AGS instead - the size of the AGS user base is very reassuring! But how is AGS for very large games? My first game only has 140 scenes, but I plan to add another 50 or more every six months after the first release. AGS looks pretty exciting, but does anyone know:

1. Is there an upper limit for rooms, and does this affect playback speed?
2. Are there any known memory leak issues?
3. Can I do anything to make my game run faster, apart from reducing the screen size?
4. I have several sprites that have over a thousand frames each. Could these be automatically imported, or would I need to add each frame manually?
5. the 150 character limit - is this per screen, or for the whole game?
6. Is it always possible to write custom functions to replace built in functions?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

I can't stop smiling!

This is FANTASTIC news! I think my Zak fan site will need a major update soon!

Keep up the good work!

www.ZakSite.co.uk

Has anyone managed to get the FM-Towns version of the game working in ScummVM, with proper OGG sound?

I did what the site said (renamed the files and placed them in the same directory as everything else) and it worked fine. Sorry I don't have any other suggestions.

is Zac McKraken actually any good? It's the only Lucasarts adventure I've never properly played, but no one seems to feel the need to talk about it much.

This is why I think it's the best game ever created (in my humble opinion): http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tolworthy/zak/links.htm#whygood

This is what other people say: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tolworthy/zak/random.htm

These are the only complaints I have heard: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tolworthy/zak/mazes.htm

Hey, this is great! We're discussing my favorite game on the AGS board! And it's totally on topic because the first Zak sequel was made with AGS. And the latest one is as well.   BTW the next sequel is due out at the end of the year and it looks like being amazing: needs 2 CDs, has 20 movie cut scenes, made by a serious bunch of dedicated Germans... you KNOW it will be good

I wanna see a sexy Latino love-goddess Annie with flowing black, wavy hair and big... curves.

You did know that the girls are based on real people, didn't you? (The wives and girlfriends of the programmers. Annie Larris is David Fox's wife). She may well be a sexy Latino love goddess, but I am too polite to ask.

If you're including Annie though, make her cuter than her sprite because she always struck me as way too prudish and boring.

You obviously haven't seen the Japanese version of the game These are pictures of the girls were included in the FMtowns box:

Or maybe I am thinking of Leslie...

Thanks! I'll PM you right now...

I've added a page to the Zak site to give general information: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tolworthy/zak/zakmovie.htm

I asked a question on another forum, and was directed here. Clearly this is where the cool people hang out.
original message: http://forums.adventuregamers.com/showthread.php?p=139764&posted=1#post139764

I asked for advice about the Zak McKracken Movie project. AGA said "There are a couple of guys in the AGS community who make their own amateur movies. Maybe try asking there..."

Here is the original question:
Does anyone have experience making indie movies? I need advice.

I'm corresponding with a guy who wants to make a movie based on Zak McKracken. For copyright and practical reasons, I think this would only work as a super-low-budget production. But Zak was always character driven, not SFX driven, so I think this could succeed. But I have almost zero experience of independent film production. Does anyone here have any experience? I'm not asking for volunteers (though that would be nice!) just for advice.

I am encouraged by that British guy who shot a movie for 400 quid and was selected for this year's Cannes competition.

For the record, I think a successful Zak movie would be like a cross between Scorsese's Taxi Driver (strange loner with a vague purpose) and Blair Witch (super-low budget mystery excursion). For copyright purposes we could even avoid mentioning his name at all. I don't think a straight game-to-movie would work, but I do think the core story and characters are very strong if given a slightly darker edge.

What do you think?

its AGS, not AVG.

Whoops! Sorry, that was my anti virus prog. It was late at night

And by "anything", what do you mean exactly? Name something and I or someone else can definitely tell you if it's possible, and how easily it can be done.

Two simple examples:
1. I wrote a simple function to make doors open automatically when ego moves near. I just define the hot area and a simple sprite. The program then detects when ego is near the door and opens (or closes) it.
2. I have one line of code for adding a link to another room. It calls a function that calls all the other common functions for both leaving and entering - hotspots, changing rooms, removing or adding ego, etc. Plus it makes ego walk a few steps onto or off the screen (so ego does not just 'appear'). It saves me a lot of time when adding a new room.

Would that kind of thing be straightforward in AGS?