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Yeah, Sierra backgrounds are vector based and drawn at runtime, which is why their games could store so many rooms on just a couple of floppys. Just out of curiosity, shouldn't it be possible to render the backgrounds in hi-res, getting a crisper, more Flash-like look?

Keep in mind to use .ogg files instead of .mp3s for sound while developing the game, this seems to be the main licensing concern. The final game should be compiled with an mp3-less version of the runtime, but you can wait to get this until the game is done as you will most likely want to use the latest version throughout development.

It should be:

Code: ags

function hHotspot4_WalkOn() {
  if (cNick.HasInventory(iJournal)) cNick.ChangeRoom(2, 328, 362);
  else {
    cNick.Say("I should check this area before i go out there");
    cNick.Walk(500, 300, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
   }
}

Because there are no brackets following your "else" statement it only pertains to the Say line, the walk function runs in both cases.

Now that the sound system is being revised so thoroughly, would there be any chance of adding stereo panning for channels? I've always thought it was a bit weird that the PlayAmbientSound coordinates only affected volume (not to mention that it's relative to the character rather than the viewport).
It would be quite cool if you could set a panning percentage (-100 to 100 with 0 being even distribution between left and right) from repeatedly_execute so that sound sources at the off-screen left end of a scrolling room would only play in the left speaker and gradually center as the viewport scrolled towards the sound source. This would also work great with characters/vehicles moving across the screen or simply to distinguish the positioning of two characters speaking.

You don't need Photoshop, just get Adobe Reader to open pdf files. There's also several other design documents available on Al Lowe's site. My favorite (since it's more story based than the Larry games) is the Freddy Pharkas design.

Interesting approach to store and re-use the DynamicSprites once rendered. I employ a lot of similar effects in my scripts but always generate them on a loop by loop basis, which of course impairs the framerate if overused (though often necessary for dynamic shadows and lightmap tinting). Have you run any tests on how the module affects memory overhead and savegame size?

Would you somehow be able to retrieve the sounds currently playing, or would it be necessary to keep track of this in a custom play function? One example that springs to mind is a feature in my current game where calling up the pause menu will fade out the room music and play a pause menu tune. Returning to the game will fade the pause music out and resume the previous music at the same point it faded out. With the new system it seems I would have to store the ID for the background music when it originally started rather than just before fading it out?

Nice tutorial! The end result is quite impressive.

Try googling the phrase "digital matte painting", which seems to be the technical term for this kind of collages. It's really an artform of its own, and there's tons of websites and forums dedicated to compositing and manipulating photos for backgrounds  (mainly for use in films and as concept art for games). There's also some excellent tutorials out there, for instance this site and this one. Jonathan Boakes also used it extensively in The Lost Crown. His site used to have a very nice development diary where he showed how he composited photos for one of the beach backgrounds, but unfortunately it seems to be gone after the game's release.

I was actually thinking of using this technique for my next game after Goldmund showed me how he used it in his game-in-production Donna: Avenger of Blood.

Edit: I managed to find an archived version of the original Lost Crown website, here's the part I was talking about. The second page of the article uses more collage that the beach background.

Edit 2: Just discover this really awesome collection of tutorials, including some of the above stuff.

Yeah, it would be great if AGS automatically (of course with an option to prompt you or simply turn it off) backed up your game instead of just warning you. Even better if it compressed the backup using an open source archiver like 7-Zip and stored it with a file name containing the date of the backup.

Edit: Another suggestion, based on Dualnames post in the beginner's forum.  It would be great  if you could supply FillSaveGameList with an optional range parameter. That way you could for instance use FillSaveGameList(40) for your save game menu but FillSaveGameList(50) for your restore game menu so it would also display special savegames like autosave and quicksave (correctly ordered by save time) without risking the player overwriting them.

The widescreen issue has been brought up several times (often by myself):

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33896.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24993.0

I totally agree that we need better support for 16:9 and 16:9 aspect ratios, My personal interest in the topic back then was to make a 640x480 game that could also run in 640x400 mode without compiling two separate .exe files. But since then, widescreen monitors have pretty much become the standard, and it begins to feel like a weakness of the engine that the highest widescreen resolution currently available in AGS is 640x400.
The main obstacle so far seems to be that there aren't any true standards for widescreen resolutions, and the ones most common (1280x800, 1680x1050) are much higher than any current AGS resolution. 1024x576/1024x640 seem reasonable widescreen resolutions, but I don't know how well supported they are by current hardware. 960x540/960x600 are apparently more common, but they don't make it easy to create a game that also supports 4:3 resolutions.

Edit: If, on the other hand, you just mean something that adds black bars at the sides of a 4:3 viewport, your video card should be able to do so already if you go to the Display Properties  (in my Nvidia drivers you can even set this up on a program-by-program basis) . But it would nevertheless be a nice winsetup option too.

I did the exact same thing, and yes, I created separate functions (AbsInt, AbsFloat, MaxInt, MaxFloat and so on) mainly for speed. I used them in line drawing algorithms, so I suspect using Int when applicable strains the CPU. Another thing I did was making the parameters optional by putting out-of-range default values that the function checks for.

But it is indeed annoying that you can't extend managed structs, it would make a lot of my utility functions seem much more intuitive and part of AGS.

Khris, I agree that you need not to change the transparency of DynamicSprites. But with the current DrawingSurface setup, any sprites drawn to a clear DrawingSurface using the DrawImage transparency parameter will just show the magic pink color through the transparent sprite. The resulting DrawingSurface will not have varying degrees of transparency.

Yes, I think alpha channel support for DrawingSurfaces would be among my top priorities as well. That way you could draw sprites onto cleared surfaces using the transparency setting without finding only the ugly magic pink peering through them.

Trent R: Yeah it is quite awesome. After a couple of weeks' use I'm still very happy with my new notebook. Despite it having a GeForce 9600M GT video card rather than the hardcore gamer (i.e. noisy and battery consuming) 9800 version, it seems to run pretty much anything I throw at it in decent resolutions and framerates.
I paid about 1100â,¬ for it here in Denmark due to taxes, but in the U.S. it seems to retail around 1000-1150$. Be aware that there are multiple versions of the GX620 on the North American market with different CPUs, so check the specifications if you're looking up prices.

Edit: My current favorite feature is that it hooks up to my old analog Creative surround speakers, so I can get 5.1 sound instead of using headphones.

I'm so happy my days of studying hardcore film theory are over, but one thing which did stick in my mind (vaguely) was Hugo Münsterberg's "The Photoplay" from 1916. His main argument is that, even at that early stage, film was a medium with an aesthetic of its own, setting it apart from the theatre. Nevertheless, for a discussion of similarities between the two media, you cannot really turn a blind eye to this text. It can be found online at: http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/library/data/lit38804/index_html?pn=1 (download the PDF, the online reader sucks).

Also take a look at André Bazin's "What is cinema?" if you can find a copy, if I recall correctly he also talks at length about the relationship between film and theatre.

I could definitely use a more customizable setup menu, but it's been mentioned several times before and it is obviously not one of CJ's top priorities. I think the easiest solution would probably be coding an external app that reads/writes directly to the .cfg file.

I don't know if they have anything in your price range, but as for brands I can wholeheartedly recommend MSI. I just bought an MSI GX620 and I can honestly say it's the finest piece of machinery I've ever owned. The design is lovely, the build quality great, and they seem to have a very good feel for matching hardware while avoiding bottlenecks.

I'd say keep the school computers updated with the latest stable version of the editor. Since you're already up to AGS 3.1, Linux compatibility and the interaction editor are no longer issues anyway, so there's no real reason to work on anything but the latest version. I've yet to see a game being broken by updating it to a stable version, but of course you should tell your students to keep backups whenever they update their games.

I think bonus content is a great idea if delivered in a way where the player doesn't feel cheated that he missed out on some of it because he forgot to click on some obscure item. The CSI games unlock production artwork and video interviews if you complete a chapter with full points, and if I remember correctly Fahrenheit also had some kind of system where you could spend points on unlocking special features.
Most recently I played a Sherlock Holmes themed hidden-object game where you had to find a Sherlock Holmes cap during each of the 12 cases to unlock a mini-game in the main menu. But as it turned out it was just a Mastermind clone that delivered about three minutes of entertainment before I decided to uninstall the game. So keep in mind that the "value" of what you unlock has to correspond to the trouble you went through to find it.

I think the best AGS implementation of this so far was in Blackwell Unbound where you could take polarpoid photos of the main characters in the game (not really a puzzle, you just have to remember to do it) to unlock production artwork, outtakes from the voice recording sessions and a music player.

Looks awesome, the style reminds me of the old Amiga game Blade Warrior. Good luck with the project!

Edit: I like the scanlines, but they may end up looking like crap when stretched to the native resolution of a TFT screen - so yes, definitely an option to turn them off. Also, instead of a full-screen alpha channel sprite, which may slow things down, how about just using a non-alpha sprite and - assuming it's displayed on a GUI - set the GUI transparency to 50%?