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Am I the only person who thinks pixel art looks a bit crap in hi-res? Don't get me wrong - pixel art in itself can be absolutely beautiful, and I'm astonished with the works of the pixel artists on these forums. It's just that these sprites are so tiny that I have to squint to even make out the colors in most of them - only Larry Vales really pops out, the others might as well be silhouettes when viewed in 1600x1050 resolution. Plus you get that really unflattering aliasing against the white background, the bluecup being a prime offender.

I definitely think pixel art should somehow be represented in the artwork (but not exclusively, I'd like to see some nice characters from hi-res games too), but in my opinion they should appear as they do in-game - using 2x nearest neighbour resizing. What good is a bunch of mascots that a newcomer will have no relationship to, if they don't even give a true impression of the varying visual styles of AGS games?

The main site is in my opinion near perfect now, though it seems we'll be discussing the banner for a while longer. The layout of the "About AGS" page is also very nice and functional. Just a few suggestions:

I think the "Screenshots and Features" section could have a bulleted main features list with the screenshots running down the right hand side of it. It seems a bit pointless to link to a "full feature list" (which requires javascript to be activated) without also having a short list for those who just want an overview and may not be familiar with all the technical terms and file formats.

I don't really like the link to the "Modules and Plugins forum" being hidden under "Older versions and other downloads" - it doesn't seem like a place I would click after having downloaded the most recent version of AGS. Wouldn't it make more sense to put them under "Resources"?

Great work, SSH - it's always annoyed me that RunAGSGame didn't re-initialize the viewport (the problem I ran into when trying to create similar in-game options), but as always you've found a workaround.

monkey: Without having tested it, I'm guessing you could use a Vbs to Exe converter. The question is whether or not the script is able execute files that don't have the .exe extension. If so, you could rename your game .exe to .dat or similar and the converted vbs would be the main executable.

Now, all we need to complete the package is a fully customizable configuration utility to replace winsetup.exe, with the additional option of writing custom keys to the .cfg file

Or the forum server turned sentient and is trying to tell us that that we should stop squabbling over the the design. 

ProgZ, I took the liberty of pasting your banner into the current site design. And while I appreciate your effort and skill, I don't really think the two styles work together:



In my opinion, the banner is much too busy and attention grabbing and the colors way too dark and saturated compared to the rest of the page. Conceptually I like it, though like Snarky I find the pixel art connotations too limiting and not representative of AGS' versatility. I think a more traditional font along with fewer but bigger characters - some of them pixellated, some hi-res - would make for a cleaner and more attractive banner. I also find that the shadows don't actually come across as shadows but rather as a dashed line.

You could also try visiting your local library, and remember to check the children's and young adults section. There's tons of well illustrated books for kids about all kinds of historical and popular scientific stuff (man, the books of my childhood taught me more about the insides of pyramids and how medieval castle's were built than anything I've read later). I'm sure you'd be able to find a clear and well explained cross section of a WWII U-boat in a book on submarines or just naval warfare in general.

What exactly are you trying to do? Are you checking if the character is standing at a specific coordinate? If so, you should try looking up "Regions events" in the manual.

Edit: As for the problems in your code 1) cEgo.Walk(150.345) is an invalid format, you need a comma between the coordinate sets not a period, 2) Even more important, your if statement checks for cEgo.Walk returning true - as far as I know the Walk function doesn't return any value.

Looking at screenshots on the back of the gamebox, I think it could be a Type IID U-boat. It looks a lot like the external views of the submarine in the game.



I couldn't find any pictures of its inside, but there's a very detailed schematic of a similar but somewhat bigger type at this site: http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-570GeneralPlan.htm (click the images for hi-res, translated cross sections).

Edit: This page also has several WWII era U-boat schematics, just scroll down the page.

Not embarassing per se, but I spent A LOT of time drawing game logos on my pirated Amiga floppies. These aren't even all that elaborate, but they're the only ones I have at my house at the moment, the rest are at my mother's place. I wish I had my disks for The Untouchables and The Colonel's Bequest here to show you, I more or less drew the entire cover/title screen on those.

What I meant is that if the player has half-completed one puzzle and decides to leave it and start another, the position of the pieces in the first one will be reset if he returns to that later. This is because the module was only scripted to keep track of one puzzle at a time. If you move the code to your room scripts however, the code in each room will keep track of one puzzle, allowing you to move freely between them.

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.

Of course you can. There's no limit on how many jigsaw puzzles you can use in a single game - you just need to initialize a new one from a different set of puzzle pieces. The only problem would be that the state of the previous puzzle would be lost, so the player can't move back and forth between puzzles in different stages of completion. This could be solved by moving the module code to the room script and using a different room for each puzzle. But if each puzzle needs to be solved before moving on to the next, this won't be necessary. Feel free to modify the module in any way you want.

Or simply cheat and spawn the same item - or an item of a similar function (e.g. knife becoms scissors or glass shard) - in a later location if the character hasn'¨t found the original item. Alternately, provide a different way of solving the puzzle that would have required the item in question - this is actually my favorite way of solving the problem. I also liked how A Second Face would spawn random junk that you could sell if you ran out of money.

You can also make the item indirectly necessary to leave the room - for instance, you need a keycard from inside a locker to open the door. You pick up a screwdriver to break the padlock open, get the keycard and leave, but the screwdriver remains in your inventory. A variant of this is to somehow alter the item in the process - the screwdriver breaks, leaving you with a bent piece of metal that you will find useful further down the line.

In cases where the player knows exactly what he's looking for, I don't see anything wrong in not letting the player proceed until it's found. It certainly wouldn't be out of character for Indiana Jones to say "I'm not leaving without Chachapoyan fertility idol" when you click on the exit. As long as you avoid vague statements like "I have a feeling that I'm not done here" just because the player failed to spot the 4 pixel lump of chewing gum under the desk.

Perhaps the most logical method would be to make the action of picking up that specific item the reason that you can't return to the location - for instance getting spotted stealing a museum piece or - to return to our Indiana Jones example - have the whole temple come crashing down around you when you pick up the idol.

When you're in the editor, press F1 and the manual will pop up. You can also open the help file from your AGS program folder, it's called ags-help.chm. There's also an online version but as far as I can tell it's not quite up to date.

It's very easy in fact, but somewhat hidden in the manual. Simply make a GUI with a label on it and set the label text to "@OVERHOTSPOT@" (without quotation marks). In-game this will be substituted with the name of whatever the cursor is hovering over.

Yes, these are all possible. The sections of the manual (use the index) explaining these are: "Conversations", "Global variables" and "Voice speech".

Yes, either an extension of Overlay or some new generic type of dynamically created room independent object that could be freely set to obey/ignore baselines and walkbehinds would be greatly appreciated. It would especially be a huge help in module scripting to avoid the end user having to create dummy characters or whatnot.

AGS will bitch and moan (i.e. give you an error log) if you don't delete them before quitting, but strictly speaking it shouldn't be an issue. Otherwise quitting with Alt+X or Alt+F4 would constitute a memory leak, and I've yet to experience that in AGS. I've had games with huge DynamicSprites crash on me repeatedly while testing without eating up memory after the program terminated.

Zooty, in a discussion at another forum some people have solved touchpad issues on the Toshiba Sattelite by simply removing the power cord and battery and holding the ON button for 30 seconds. No mention of LAN cable, but it's worth a try.

It would seem that no, kids generally don't play adventure games anymore - however, a lot of adults do, many of them women. So unless you're targeting your game exclusively at a young demographic, there's definitely a market for the genre.

You may also find some answers to your questions in the  recent forum thread "What Constitues a Commercial Grade Adventure?". Good luck with your game!