Topics

Came across this, thought it could be inspiring for background artists - it's a collection of 50 Scooby Doo background paintings.

http://secretfunspot.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/50-scooby-doo-background-paintings.html

some could be straight out of adventure games:

[imgzoom]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_y0ZlSySQA1Q/RxrrLLr0AMI/AAAAAAAAB3w/wWcpgJzMpE0/s1600/2PDVD_033.jpg[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_y0ZlSySQA1Q/RxrrpLr0AcI/AAAAAAAAB5w/Clc2Myq2-cQ/s1600/1PDVD_038.jpg[/imgzoom]

I'm currently watching this with great enjoyment, and thought someone else might be interested to hear Ron's hour-long postmortem on the creation of Maniac Mansion from this year's Game Developer's Conference.

There are post mortems from a bunch of classic games like Elite, Doom, and Prince of Persia. But personally I think the one I'll watch next is Eric Chahi's Another World talk.

Edit: ...and since I rarely find a good occasion to link to it, here's my favorite game design-related lecture of all time, "How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design", Brenda Brathwaite's immensely inspiring talk on her board game Train from GDC 2010.

Holy fuck how I look forward to this book!

"The Art of Sierra" (interview with author at The Artful Gamer).

Very interesting interview with Al Lowe over on Gamasutra. It's an extract from a book on graphic adventures which I can't really work out whether is just a compilation of Wikipedia articles along with some interviews. In any case, Al gets into some stuff I haven't read before about how the art resources for Sierra games were created (Think you're keepin' it real and kickin' it old-school style by pushing pixels? Now, put away that newfangled mouse contraption and try doing it with a Pong controller!)

This is a bit silly to post perhaps, but I found it an interesting exercise, and I thought perhaps others might find it fun or even feel like playing along and posting their memories of some other game.

So, a while back I took part in a forum discussion about The Longest Journey, and I suddenly realized that my memory of the game was very fragmented. So today, as a sort of clear-your-head writing exercise I decided to spend 15 minutes writing down everything I remembered about the game, including plot, characters, puzzles and whatever other details came to mind, and see if it made any sense (spoiler: It didn't really).

So, 8 years or so after I played the game, here's my take on what happened in The Longest Journey:

Spoiler

Teen girl April Ryan lives in a near-future sci-fi world called Stark. Wait, actually it starts off with April’s dream about a dragon and saving its egg by watering a talking tree. But then she wakes up in the real world, in a town or part of town called Venice.
April has a lesbian landlady who always sits around the living room and is way too willing to answer personal questions with sexual innuendo. There’s also some asshole who lives across the hall who’s always coming onto April. Outside the house there’s an old Hispanic hippie named Cortez, I guess he’s kinda like Sean Connery in Highlander.
April attends some art college where she’s working on a holographic sculpture of the dragon from her dreams. Then for some reason she has to go to a cinema and give a plain-clothes cop poisoned candy or something to get in. She also has to retrieve a key for an electrical box from the train tracks using an inflatable rubber duck, a clamp, a band-aid, and some other inventory-puzzly stuff. And she uses a talking police monkey toy to fool the cop behind the cinema.
Anyway, there’s this cinema and inside is Cortez who sends her into another world â€" though it has nothing to do with the movie on the screen like in Last Action Hero. Not sure what the point of the cinema was to be honest.
So she arrives in this Tolkien-esque fantasy world called Arcadia that turns out to be the place from her dreams. Right away this old guy, some sort of priest, tells her a legend about The Balance between the two worlds, Stark â€" the world of science, and Arcadia â€" a world of magic. It’s a really simple concept but he goes on for half an hour about it and you kinda humor him because he’s been waiting his whole life for “the chosen one” to arrive, so why not let him have his moment of glory.
There’s also a crazy old captain who has a crow in a trunk. He also talks for ages if you let him, but it doesn’t really add anything to the plot.
You also trick a guy in the market place by using your magnetic screwdriver to win a shell game or something (remember, anything scientific is considered “magic” in this world of magic, irony ftw). Somehow you end up with the captain’s crow as your sidekick â€" he talks a lot too and is supposed to provide comedy.
At some point in-between all this you return to Stark, and there’s a bit in an art gallery where some retarded kid has painted pictures from Arcadia. Cortez seems to think it’s important. Not sure why.
I must admit I don’t remember the continuity of all this, but you keep switching between Stark and Arcadia at least a couple of times throughout the game.
In arcadia you end up on a ship where there’s a barrel of apples, you visit the Ewok village, go to see some creepy witch (but even if it’s scary you can’t die, so no worries), meet some guy from Stark who knows Cortez, drinks a lot and rides a bike. You also visit a flooded library and read a ton of books about the history of Arcadia without knowing which ones are important. You also talk to some Shrek-lookalike guy who lives in a tree. And eventually you get to this castle in the air where a wizard called *Roper Klacks lives â€" he sends you through this M.C. Escher-like staircase room straight out of Labyrinth, and eventually you best him at magic by using a pocket calculator. No kidding.
Back in Stark there’s a ton of stuff going on that I don’t remember any context for. You go to a police station and use a cop’s glass eye to get past security, there’s a bit where you shake a can of soda in an industrial paint shaking machine to get rid of a cop in cyber armour, and there’s this dude who swears a lot. He’s some kind of hacker and he rides around in a flying-saucer-wheelchair kind of thing. Possibly you also go see a priest unless I’m confusing it with another game.
Then there’s a scene in a futuristic space airport where you find an empty pizza box. There’s a sequence aboard a spaceship with stereotypical Aliens/Doom 3 metal hallways, and eventually you get to the bad guy’s skyscraper and trick your way in with the pizza box.
Then you’re back in Arcadia walking through a surreal desert where April has some kind of weird flashback/psychotic  episode where she confronts her abusive father. And then she gets to some kind of tower where she thinks she’ll become The Guardian of the Balance but instead the bad guy’s henchman redeems himself by taking on the task of hovering inside a bright light for the next million years.
Then at the end we discover that the old lady telling the whole story was actually April as an old woman. Not that we hadn’t guessed â€" but always nice to have your suspicions confirmed.

[close]

(Disclaimer: This is, by its very nature, a highly subjective view on the game. It's not a review of the game, and I have no wish to try to defend my views/interpretations - any opinions expressed are simply part of my memories of the game)

I'd like to implement support for a lossy image format in the AGS plugin I'm working on (mainly to make very hi-res games feasible to distribute online), but I've been having a hard time finding a format without iffy licensing issues - JPEG2000 seemed nice, but their website hints that there could be unclaimed patents on parts of the technology.

Then today I came across PGF which offers good compression ratio (marginally worse than JPEG 2000, but significantly faster decoding makes it an acceptable tradeoff), alpha channel support, and is licensed under LGPL. The downside is that hardly any drawing programs support it, though the logical implementation would be to store graphics in a lossless format during development and convert the files and store them in a custom resource file upon release, so not really an issue.

However, it doesn't seem that very many are using the format yet (OGRE3D does support it, but it's just one in a long list of formats) and the lack of feedback on strengths and weaknesses in a practical implementation makes me a bit hesitant. So is anyone here familiar with the format or better yet, have used the library for their own game/application?

[What is a Photoshop Phriday?]

What is a Photoshop Phriday?  

Photoshopping isn't drawing a completely new image -- It's editing images to create a new image, such as editing one image or combining several images. The contest usually lasts for a fortnight. Also, you don't have to specifically use Photoshop -- Paint Shop Pro, MSPaint, or any other programs can be used. Please make sure your image doesn't exceed the width of the screen.

See this link:
http://www.somethingawful.com/photoshop/

And for other examples, see here:
http://www.worth1000.com/
________________________________________

CShelton, winner of last photoshop phriday, hasn't been around lately, so Questionable has asked me to host this week's activity.

Alright, so this being the internet, I assume you are all familiar with the concept of cosplay (if not, read the wikipedia entry, then google "cosplay fail", have some laughs, get bored, then return and continue reading).

Now, whatever your opinion on cosplay (and yes, excellent, hardly-embarrassing-at-all cosplay does exist), it's easy to see why it's being ridiculed with all those photos of 200 pound Sailor Moons and epic fails in Naruto hairstyling floating around. Yet, from an artist's point of view, wouldn't it be quite awesome if people loved the fictional character you've created so much that they'd abandon all sense of vanity to dress up as them?  But why should this mixed honor of having your creations emulated by 12-year-olds with bad wigs and giant cardboard swords be reserved for anime and blockbuster console games?

This week's mission, should you choose to accept it: Show us the best and worst of AGS character cosplay

Bring on those goth lolita Nelly Cootalots, the frighteningly corporeal Joey Malones, or demonstrate that it takes more than ginger hair and a pair of green trousers to be a paranormal investigator!

To provide you with some inspiration, I jumped into the Delorean, booted up the flux capacitor and zoomed over to WadjetCon 2015 where I ran into this friendly bunch of hardcore TheIvy fans:

I found an interesting new bug. Basically I have a DynamicSprite that is continuously updated (recreated from screenshot, never deleted). I kept setting this sprite as the background of different GUIs, updating it every time and resizing to the current GUIs width and height, without removing the background from the old GUI currently using it. I did it well knowing that it could cause problems, as part of a test during debugging.

If the new sprite was smaller than the size of the old GUI it was currently the background of, the old GUI would return to its default background color. If the old GUI was smaller, it would just crop the new background. But after a few times of switching back and forth between small and big GUIs, the game crashed with this error:

An internal error has occurred. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, post the details on the AGS Technical Forum.
(ACI version 3.12.1072)

Error: SpriteCache::removeOldest: Attempted to remove sprite 627 that does not exist

It's not really an issue since I would never use this method in a real game, but nevertheless it's probably something that the engine should be able to handle.

Not sure if this is considered a bug, but it definitely makes it hard to troubleshoot my code. I briefly tested my game with the latest engine, and got the error message:

Error: DynamicSprite.CreateFromDrawingSurface: requested area is outside the surface

This is nothing new to me, though I thought I had fixed the problem causing it. However, all the previous times when the game crashed, AGS either told me or sent me to the relevant line in the script. This time, nothing, so I have no idea where to look. I tried running through it with the step-by-step debug function, but since it's cause by a repeatedly execute script several seconds into gameplay, it takes forever to get to to the crash - I held down F11 for several minutes before giving up.

[UPDATE: From today (Monday 15th September), you can post guesses on the submitted song titles in the thread. Please use spoiler tags. (In case you're the first to post and have everything figured out, consider not posting the full list but letting others have a chance as well). If your own song title hasn't been guessed by the end of Tuesday, please post it yourself.]

UPDATE: From today (Monday 15th September), you can post guesses on the submitted song titles in the thread. Please use spoiler tags. (In case you're the first to post and have everything figured out, consider not posting the full list but letting others have a chance as well). If your own song title hasn't been guessed by the end of Tuesday, please post it yourself.

After a year's absence, Photoshop Phateverday returns. TerranRich, the winner of the last competition, didn't have time to host one of his own. So with Gilbot's permission, I decided to kick off a new round myself. The time frame for this first competition will be a single week. I hope this will encourage people to get started right away instead of thinking they have plenty of time and then never getting around to posting anything.

-------------------------------------

What is a Photoshop Phriday? (just in case you forgot)

Photoshopping isn't drawing a completely new image -- It's editing images to create a new image, such as editing one image or combining several images. The contest usually lasts for a fortnight. Also, you don't have to specifically use Photoshop -- Paint Shop Pro, MSPaint, or any other programs can be used. Please make sure your image doesn't exceed the width of the screen.

See this link:
http://www.somethingawful.com/photoshop/

And for other examples, see here:
http://www.worth1000.com/

-------------------------------------


This week's mission, should you choose to accept it, is: Illustrate your favourite song title

Note that I write "favourite song title", not "title of your favourite song". This is all about translating a cool, fun or evocative song title into visuals in an unexpected way. Go through your record collection or mp3s, I'm sure you'll find at least a few titles that bring up absurd imagery in your mind. Here's an example that I mocked up a couple of years ago for reasons I no longer remember:



Personally I much preferred it without the song title on the poster, but someone I showed it to found the American playwright and Pink Floyd references a bit too obscure. This, however, leads me to the one rule of the competition:

Please try not to reveal your song title in your post or as text in the image itself. It's more fun for the rest of us to try to figure it out on our own. If you want, you can include the title using spoiler tags, or reveal it by the end of the competition if nobody has guessed it. Let me know if this is a problem, we can make exceptions if using the title is absolutely necessary for your image (a newspaper headline for instance) - especially if it's funnier that way.

Deadline is 16th September. I wish you all good photoshoppery.

Want to add a puzzle where the player has to assemble a torn up photo, a shredded document or a jigsaw puzzle? Then this could be the module for you!

After Ghostlady posted in the beginner's tech forum asking how to make a jigsaw puzzle in AGS without running into object limits, I came up with a concept for how to do it using a struct and DrawingSurface routines. Originally this module was developed exclusively for Ghostlady's game, but we figured that others could also find it useful, so we decided to add some more functionality and make it public.
The module allows you to create a puzzle either from similarly sized sprites in a View or from individual sprites, which can be any size and have any final coordinates but need to be set up one by one. To help you do this, the game features a debug mode where you can position each sprite pixel perfect and then output their setup script to an external text file for cut-n-paste.

Ghostlady has been testing earlier versions, but this is the first public beta. I'd love to hear any feedback on bugs, usability and feature requests. Thanks for trying it out! See module documentation for description of functions and their proper usage.



10 May 2009 Update: Problems have been reported when setting "Use low-res co-ordinates in script" to false (AGS 3.1 and later). I will look into this as soon as possible.

11 Jul 2008 Update: No bugs (except the one I found myself) or feature requests were reported for the BETA, so I'm declaring this slightly updated version the official 1.0. The download link should work directly. Many thanks to Joe Carl for suggesting googlepages.

JigsawModule 1.0 including demo game.

The demo game was developed in AGS 3.02 SP1. The module itself should be backwards compatible down to 3.0 (which introduced Dynamic Arrays), but you will have to turn on "Left-to-right Precedence" in the game settings because of a bug in 3.0.1 and earlier.

(The author of this module does not condone the excessive use of gratuitous logic puzzles in adventure games. For everybody's sanity, please limit the use of this module to one or two puzzles per game )

I chose not to post this in the finished games thread for Diamonds in the Rough, to prevent spoilers by people forgetting to use the hide tag. If the mods think otherwise, please do move it.

A few months ago, I wrote a review of Diamonds in the Rough for a Danish PC maganzine. I gave it 6,5/10, which I think is its lowest grade yet (the weeks after release were pretty damn impressive when the average on gamerankings.com was 98% or something, but it's still at a solid 83%). I named multiple reasons, including the inconsistent implementation of the thought interface, the static visuals and a lot of running back and forth. But I could never explain my main grievance, as I didn't want to spoil the ending.
Now it's been several months since the game's release, so I think it's safe to discuss the ending without anyone peeking out of curiousity while waiting for their own game to arrive. I should say that this post has nothing to do with Alkis' questions about the panel's ranking of his game in the games database. I've been meaning to write this for some time, his post just reminded me.

I did not mean this thread to put anybody off buying the game. I add this after Snarky's post, because it was never my intention for someone who didn't play the game but considered buying it to read the spoilers. Here are some some more positive reviews of the game. Some of them mention the ending, but always in a positive tone (though in a secretive manner), so maybe it's just me being grumpy:

Just Adventure review - A
Adventure Gamers - 3/5
GameBoomers - B
Four Fat Chicks - 5/5


The rest of the post is pure *SPOILERS* for the ending of the game:

Spoiler

Ok, so the organisation that you work for turns out to be a bunch of racists, fighting for a racially pure America. The inspiration to this being an incident where the founder and current leader's sister was stabbed by a gang of black punks and lost her ability to bear children.

Jason, the player character's, amazing talent turns out to be... telling black and white women apart! Not by seeing them with a bag over their head or looking at pictures of their clothed booties, but by picking random numbers from a list through paranormal means. I don't know, but this seems overly complicated. Assumably the people who put together the list would easily be able to verify the ethnicity of the members of the sample group? The logical fallacy is that Jason is picking what they already know - how is this helping anyone? (see more on this below)

They then tell the chosen numbers to this girl who has the psychic ability to make the women sterile (I'm really not making this shit up) as a sort of poetic justice. Their plan is to make 100 women sterile in a year. They will then send psychic projections to all the news media in the country to tell them this (I guess it's more impressive than using UPS). They make the demands that all negroes must leave the country within a month, or they'll continue their efforts at a daily basis (what, 3-400 more sterile black women a year? I doubt that will even make a mark in the statistics). Once the blacks are gone, they will continue with all other non-white races. They'll really have to upscale their psychic gynecology department for this scheme to work out. Jeez, even sending out a group of crackheads on the street to stab random black women would have more effect than this.

They see Jason's special ability - the fact that he chose the black women on the list - as proof that they are doing the right thing, not realizing that he just choses what others want him to select. Ok, so this is why they need him to point out what they already know. But really, if they could convince the rest of America that Jason's list selection skills means that God or whoever wants an Aryan nation, then Uri Geller would be ruling the world.

Anyhow, Jason asks for some time to think, goes home, connects to the internet through a stolen wireless modem and his boss' password (poor internet security that doesn't check MAC adresses in a town where contact to the outside world is forbidden) and tells his story in a webcast (bloody emo). He's taken a deadly poison, because he can't live with what he's done: "17... 17 women will never bear children... because of me! Because of me!". Nikolas' excellent score plays during all of this, and brings the melodrama up another notch. "Can you hear me! Can you see me!" he says, before losing consciousness...
At the very same moment, there's a knock at the door. It's the psychic infertility girl who was the love interest before betraying you. She leans over him, saying "Don't die!" and Jason, as his last act, kisses the girl, thereby also poisoning her. At this point I couldn't help laughing, it was just all too much. There is certainly a dark comedic element in the writing, but I think my grin was a bit too wide. THIS was the monumental surprise ending that a letter in the game box begged us not to reveal???

All this is followed by an Afterword written by Alkis, where he details his research of racist groups during development. This is very fascinating, but I'm just still sitting there thinking: "That was it? That's the most stupid Evil Plan(tm) I've ever heard. It wouldn't even sound credible in a James Bond movie!" Even from a logistical point of view it just wouldn't work. Are you going to have that poor girl sitting around performing paranormal uterectomies all day? Aren't somebody going to locate you sooner or later? Even if the organisation is placed in the middle of nowhere, you can't build a whole town without leaving a paper trail - which any investigator looking into well-funded racist groups would pick up.

At the end of the afterword, Alkis mentions that some people didn't like the ending. As I read it, some of the beta testers were unhappy that Jason died at the end. I totally agree with you, Alkis, if someone tells you within the first 5 minutes of a game that he is incurably poisoned, then he'd better be dead when the credits roll - no magical antidotes to the rescue. No, the darkness of the ending is not what I disliked. I didn't like the ending because it was plain stupid and all immersion in the melodrama just trickled out during those ten minutes of dialogue with each line more ridiculous than the previous. I'm sorry, but this somehow made M. Night Shyamalan's movies seem almost clever. Can anyone please to explain the conspiracy plot to me in any way that makes sense? Alkis? Anyone?

Edit: Oh, I forget to mention Jason's nicely self ironic line during the bad guy's plot exposition: "When we first entered this room, I thought you guys were going to shoot me. I no longer think so.  You see, my fear of being shot eventually took second place to the dread that you are going to bore me to death with a droning account of your ludicrous propaganda." - and then it goes on for another five minutes. Spare some poison?

[close]

Don't get me wrong, the game does have some nice gameplay features, and the writing is mostly good, which my grade also reflected. But in this post I chose to focus on the ending, because I really want to know what others think of it. Or whether they have different ways of interpreting it.

I've been trying to set up a dynamic array of bools (tried replacing with "int", but I get the same error). However, the compile fails with the message:

LightMap.asc(317): Error (line 317): Parse error in expr near 'new'

The line in question is:

Code: ags

origscalesetting = new bool[0];

At the top of the script module I have declared:

Code: ags

bool origscalesetting[];

If I comment line 317 out (I thought perhaps the zero-size array was a problem), it just get stuck at the next "new bool" line, which is:

Code: ags

origscalesetting = new bool[Game.CharacterCount];

That's just a modified version of the example from the manual, so it should work. What am I doing wrong?

While surfing around, I came across this open-source lipsync software. It analyzes a voice clip (.wav, .ogg, .mp3*) and automatically assigns phonemes to it. It then writes the data in a fully documented file format. But I assume that the source code can be changed to output data to Pamela and other formats. (To see it in action, check out the demo for Lipsync Tool a commercial implementation of the technology - I tried it on a few old voice samples, and was quite impressed).

With the growing number of voice acted AGS games, lipsync support is becoming a standard feature of AGS. Unfortunately the only supported lipsync program, Pamela, is crash-prone and slow to work with. Everything has do be done manually, and the text of each voice line must be pasted in. The Al Emmo team spent a month or more just on the lipsyncing. It's probably wise that Dave Gilbert hasn't tried to use it on his games, or we would still be waiting for Blackwell Legacy.

However, with this source code lipsyncing would become a batch process with little-to-no work from the developer.

I don't really think this needs to be integrated in the AGS engine, but could work fine as a stand-alone tool (which would also prevent any license issues for the finished game). Unless CJ sees any need to add further lipsync format support, it would have to be customized to output Pamela files though. Unfortunately I don't have the programming skills to do any of this, but I thought it might be a good idea to make you aware of this technology, and maybe hear what people think about its possibly use with AGS.

Edit: I see now that it requires Microsoft's SAPI SDK to be installed, but I don't think that would be a problem for developers dedicated enough to recruit voice actors.

*Edit 2: It seems that, unlike the Lipsync Tool, the source code only supports .wav files. I don't know how much work it would be to integrate .ogg and .mp3 decoding before running the sync.

Edit 3: Made some further tests. I ran the compiled binary from the source code distribution file on a couple of wave files (purely automated, textless sync) and then played the output back in Lipsync Tool.  They were Blackwell Convergence samples of Joey and Rosangela that Dave posted on his forums, and both voices synced up great. I'm also quite impressed how many of the words that the speech recognition identified correctly in the text output (not that the exact words as written are all that important for the sync).

Inspired by one of tolworthy's recent blog entries I decided to script a lightmap module, where the tint values of the character are applied based on the colors in a sprite or an external bitmap file rather than regions. This allows for much smoother (and easier to set up in cases of many shade values) lighting effects. Also, lightmaps can be easily swapped or even animated if room conditions change - e.g. flipping a lightswitch.

Currently retrieving and applying RGB tint data works great. However, I'm having a few problems deciding how to interpret saturation and luminance values based on a lightmap and haven't been able to find any existing implementations for reference. I tried downloading SLUDGE, which alledgedly has the feature, but my virus scanner found a trojan in the .exe (it may have been a false positive, but the next time I restarted the computer I was logged out of windows instantly, even in safe mode - I ended up having to do a full reinstall).

My one solution for it would be to retrieve the brightness values from a secondary black and white bitmap file, but it seems to me that it should be possible to calculate the values from the colored image. Trouble is that whenever I used an average (or even weighted average) of the RGB values, it's only possible to get 100% brightness in pure white light. I want it to be possible for instance to have the character tinted bright red (which with an average calculation of (255,0,0) would give 33% brightness) yet be 100% bright. Whenever I try to implement workarounds, I still get the problem of the luminance dropping whenever two colors mix - so that a character walking through a gradient from pure red to pure green drops in brightness while he's passing through the middle section.

Any suggestions on how to implement saturation/luminance without resorting to separate lightmaps? I'd really like to see this module available to the public - I'm even working on an in-game lightmap painting tool.

This may look like spam, but I got forwarded this link from my editor and thought it might also be interesting to others here - especially to those in the community who are trying to earn a living from their games.

Videogame Marketing and PR: Vol. 1 - Playing to Win by Scott Steinberg is now shipping and available for order. The volume contains over 200 pages of insider commentary including a foreword by Electronic Arts, 3DO and Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins and offers all the secrets needed to help both beginners and experts alike sell more games, increase review scores and make headlines around the world.

Go to http://www.sellmorevideogames.com/ to download a PDF version of the book for free. I'm not sure how long that offer lasts since they seem to be charging $6 for it normally. I'm sure that the book is somehow meant to pimp the guy's consultancy business, but at least parts of it look quite interesting - especially the final section with contributions from game industry people.

I just added a new module to my game, bringing the total number of modules up to 18. However, when I try to save the game, I now get the compile error message:

Runtime error: too many script headers.

I've tried re-ordering my modules, and the error is always located in the bottom module no matter which one it is. So now I wonder, have I reached the limit for the number of modules you can have in a game (at least for version 2.72)? It's no big deal, since I can easily combine a few of them into one, I'm just curious about the limit.

I'm aware that CJ is currently working on the new editor and probably won't implement new features for a while. But I thought this was a good idea and would rather suggest it before forgetting it:

Many of the coolest graphical effects in AGS require the use of RawDraw. But there's always the problem of RawDrawn items appearing behind characters and objects. It's possibly to also RawDraw the character (with manual scaling of the sprite to match area scaling), but any light effects or walkbehinds will not affect the RawDrawn sprite. To solve this, I suggest two new functions:

RawDrawCharacter(Character* cha, optional int x, optional int y, optional transparency)
RawDrawObject(Object* obj, optional int x, optional int y, optional transparency)

The functions would RawDraw the character and objects on-screen just as they would normally appear - behind walkbehinds according to baselines, with proper scaling, tinted or lit according to area/global settings, at the coordinates of the original character/object unless anything else is specified (for ease of use, the coordinates for each function share the same inconsistencies as normal object/character coords). Since it's assumed that the real character will be 100% transparent to hide it, the default transparency for RawDrawing the character is 0 - this is the only parameter not carried over from the character but must be changed manually if transparency is needed.

I realize that there may be some problems in realizing this, as sprite/walkbehind handling may use different allegro libraries than the RawDraw functions. In that case I see why it's not possible. But either way, thanks for taking the time to read and consider this suggestion.

This is not a bug report as much as something I'm quite curious about. I was playing Duty & Beyond, and discovered afterwards that my savegames were huge (around 3-3.5MB each) considering that I didn't recall seeing any use of dynamic sprites or large arrays. So I decided to look at the files in a text editor. What I came across was several entries of this format:

jre1.5.0_04\lib\ext\QTJava.zip CLIENTNAME=Console CommonProgramFiles=C:\Programmer\Fælles filer COMPUTERNAME=ZNOTE42

nd;C:\Programmer\QuickTime\QTSystem\;;C:\PROGRA~1\FLLESF~1\MUVEET~1\030625 PATHE

àèL àèL xŠ’^
er\Adobe\AGL;C:\Programmer\VDMSound;C:\Programmer\QuickTime\QTSystem\;;C:\PROGR

Seemingly folders that should have nothing to do with the interior workings of AGS. I then started checking my other savegames for games like 1213, 6 Days a Sacrifice and Access Demo, as well as my own game. AGS Version numbers were 2.62.772, 2.70.864, 2.72.920. Same results.
My first thought was that it was some kind of memory leak, but seeing as they refer to QuickTime,  maybe it has to do with the sound or movie playback or other external libraries accessed by AGS. But why refer to the Java folder then? Anybody got a better explanation?

After the new DynamicSprite commands were introduced, I've started using them for a great many effects. Often I RawDraw a sprite to the background, use RawDrawRectangle and RawDrawTriangle with RGB color (255, 0, 255) to clip the sprites - and then, when using DynamicSprite.CreateFromBackground, the pink areas simply become transparent in the DynamicSprite. However, I fail to achieve the same effect when trying to use a sprite featuring the color (255, 0, 255) as a mask, which would allow for more detail and smoother edges. Here's what I've tried:

1) Importing a 2 color paletted sprite with (255, 0, 255) in index 1 and choosing index 0 as the transparent color. The result was that the colors got switched in the palette (i.e. the areas I wanted pink are white, and the rest of the sprite will end up translucent when RawDrawn). Same thing happens if I choose top-left pixel for transparency on import even if that pixel is NOT pink.

2) Importing a 32 bit sprite with alpha channel and pink areas opposite of alpha channel. Result is that pink areas are RawDrawn as intended (visible). This seemed to work, but when a new DynamicSprite is created from the background, the pink areas are NOT transparent as they are when using normal RawDraw routines.

I can't think of any other ways, so unless someone knows of a way to make this work, I'd like to suggest this (something  I suggested before, in a beta release thread but which never made it into the tracker):

SUGGESTION: The ability to copy transparency/alpha channel (if 32 bit) from existing sprite to DynamicSprite of the same dimensions. This would be an enormous help in some of the effects I'm trying to achieve. (if possible, an optional variable could select whether the new alpha channel should replace or add to existing alpha channel, but this isn't strictly necessary).