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Try setting the cloud GUI to non-clickable, I'm guessing the GUI is catching the click.

Personally I can't see the harm in open source at all, as everybody says the resource file issue is simply a matter of accessing the data through a closed-source .dll (or whatever the format is on non-Windows platforms). To be honest I'm not even sure patching onto CJ's source code would be the most productive approach - though it's perhaps unfair to make such a statement without actually seeing the inner workings.

It would be a total waste not to take this great opportunity to make platform agnostic by default, including the plugin API, so I'm not sure how much the original code could be salvaged or if it would be worth the effort to convert the C++ to, say, C# instead of rewriting from scratch. Clarvalon has done such a great job with XAGE so it may seem a moot point, but I'd hate to see some great AGS schism where we're again stuck in a situation of choice between system compatibility and expandability (as was the case with 2.72 and 3.0+ for a long time - just ask Tolworthy ).

You know the best part of all this? Now CJ will finally get time to finish the original DemoQuest!

I'd be curious to hear which system  this game supposedly ran on. I'm picturing something like the Dizzy series or Alice in Wonderland/Below the Root on C64, basically a platformer with puzzles and character interaction, but checking original poster's age I take that it's much more recent? Anyhow, I'd love to play it too - in a lucid dream if necessary. 

This thread reminds me of when I was 11 or 12. My best friend (still is!) and I  had both purchased C64s around the same time, so we were trading tapes and more or less playing the same games in parallel. One of the games was a sidescrolling beat-em up  titled 'Ninja' (erroneously named Last Ninja on my tape), where you had to fight a number of enemies to advance to the next floor of a Japanese pagoda (ripping off Bruce Lee's 'Game of Death'). There wasn't really any progress in the game, just some palette cycling and higher difficulties. Yet my friend kept telling me that he'd gotten further in the game, to a level set in a garden - where the gameplay consisted of the Ninja walking around with a watering can and tending to the flowers!!!
I'm not sure if it says more about my gullibility or the lack of strict genre divisions back in those days, but I have to admit that I at least partly accepted his claim. I'm pretty sure he made it up, but maybe I should ask him next time we meet . Anyhow, as ridiculous as it sounds - why aren't there any martial arts games where you get to tend your zen garden between fights? Or let you prune bonsai trees, wouldn't that be kinda neat?

I don't have any experience with the built-in icon animation (I don't think it was implemented when I coded my cursor modes, so I animate them in rep_exec), but what you could do is either 1) animate the storm cloud on a GUI underneath the cursor and update the gui coordinates to align with the mouse coordinates every loop, you will see a bit of lag/misalignment on fast cursor movement though. Or 2) Use a DynamicSprite to composit the cursor graphic. In rep_exec redraw it when the the animation frame changes (use a timer to set speed). I'd go with the second option myself.

Hey uswin, nice to hear that others also would find this feature useful. Your post made me rethink the scope of the plugin and I now consider releasing it in a more modular form than originally intended. The "big picture" vision included replacing AGS' viewport renderer entirely, but since that could take a while I may as well finish the PGF importer and release it as a stand-alone plugin until then.

As I said in the other thread, the main thing holding me back has been deciding how to handle the custom resource file format (to bundle the PGF images in a single data file instead of storing them individually in the game folder). To clarify, I don't actually need to finish the resource file part of the plugin before releasing the PGF importer, but I must make sure that the folder structure and id tag format are final specs so all your image links won't be broken just because I changed my mind during development.

I commend your realistic and honest approach to this difficult situation, CJ. I realize it's a tough decision, like allowing your teen daughter to go on her first date. Despite the metaphor turning out a bit creepier than intended, I am sure that all of her suitors here on the forums will be well mannered, treat her with the utmost respect and accept that "no" means no.  :

Open source seems like the popular choice these days, and I've yet to see it fail in any epic fashion. Some open source projects do branch out, but mainly for the sake of diversity and portability, rarely in a way that creates feature redundancy or confusion in the user base. Though I would strongly suggest some sort of official or semi-official working group to help coordinate efforts and avoid contributors creating unnecessary compatibility issues.
It *will* take a lot of discussion and we're never going to end up agreeing entirely on how stuff should be implemented (not even discussing the priorities of implementation - I'm assuming here that engine features will be added first and foremost because the people doing it finds them useful themselves). But it would be nice to avoid any reinventing-the-wheel issues or second-guessing what others may have in the works.

Personally I don't have any reason to change the editor, so I'm crossing my fingers this first experimental release turns out well, so we can start extending the engine itself. I'll be honing my C# skills in the meantime

All in all, great idea CJ, and the only viable future for our beloved engine.

Goldmund! Great to see you around - I hope all is well with you, Dominika, and the baby.

Old games run too fast because their developers chose to code in-game timers to count CPU cycles instead of addressing the machine's real-time-clock (for performance reasons). Since the speed settings in AGS simply sets an upper limit to the frames-per-second count, short of unforeseen bugs in AGS or Windows, a 60 fps game will still run at a maximum of 60 fps no matter the CPU frequency.

So have no worries, your grandchildren will also be able to bask in the monochrome glory of Donna!

once you've cleaned this up we can finally say Wintermute has nothing on ags.

Just in time for the Wintermute 2.0 to go into beta, no doubt

I was working on a plugin to support the PGF file format, but it won't be suitable for use in an in-development game until I have the specs for the custom resource file format set in stone.

Even those that *have* been ported to PC from Amiga/Atari ST are often better on their original platform, at least until the move from EGA to VGA. Personal Nightmare and Neuromancer being two of them. B.A.T. is pretty awesome too, but I think the PC version was also decent. Kult a.k.a. Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess was extremely odd, but well worth a try.

In my opinion, what you should be checking out on the Amiga aren't the pure adventure games but the awesome genre hybrids from before Myst turned adventure gamers into a bunch of whiny reactionaries with zero hand-eye-coordination. Even if you've played them on the PC, the Amiga versions with 32-color graphics and digitized audio are a whole different experience. I can't recommend It Came from the Desert warmly enough.

This URL (from 3.2 release thread) works fine for me.

Most of the info you found was probably years old. While I haven't tested it myself yet, I was under the impression that this is no longer an issue in AGS 3.2.

* Added support for anti-aliased TTF fonts in all situations where they weren't previously supported.

Right-click the "Scripts" node in the project tree and choose "Import script", then select the tween.scm file and AGS will create the script and header in your scripts list.

Obviously though, no one here is drawing 149,000 sprites per game loop.

Divide the 149,000 by the number of seconds it took, and 40fps for the average game and you'll see it translates to 128 sprites with alpha and 465 without - those number are pretty representative of how many sprites you would expect a particle system to draw per frame, so the difference in performance is far from trivial.

Wow, that's crazy. I realize that the drawing routines still need to examine each pixel for alpha value, so if it took twice the time I could understand, but more than three times longer? Thanks for doing the research, this is very useful information to keep in mind.

So yes. Pink is actually much much quicker than the alpha transparency, oddly enough.

Interesting experiment. So when you say the sprites were identical, does that mean even the alpha sprite only had 100% opaque and 100% translucent pixels, but stored in the alpha channel rather than as colored pixels? Or did it have semi-transparent pixels?

Sheet music that cannot be printed is pretty useless though - I'd hate to try to balance an e-book reader on a sheet music stand

Not anything that's gonna prevent piracy. Since it's sheet music I assume you're permitting the document to be printed? All a pirate would need is a virtual printer driver that writes the postscript data to a new PDF and they'd have a non-DRM copy.

Edit: On the other hand, that also means if your current formats allow printing you may as well distribute it as PDF too . Problem solved.

You actually believe that these games will land you a job with Square eventually? That's even more funny

You know, after reading this quote from Game Developer's coverage of Final Fantasy XIII I wouldn't be so skeptical:

When development started on Final Fantasy XIII its gameplay, scenario, and technical specs were only vaguely defined. The team pushed forward anyway, creating a large number of assets but with no clear sense as to what would ultimately be usable in the game:

"Even at a late stage of development, we did not agree on key elements of the game, which stemmed from the lack of a cohesive vision, the lack of finalized specs, and the remaining problems with communication between departments."