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Ok thanks. I was also wondering, with this plugin, is it possible to have flat (non-facing) sprites? What would happen if you assigned a texture with transparency as surface on a primitive?

You could make a rough but playable version of the game using temporary art - and if people liked it, I don't think you'd have any problems at all finding a talented artist to help you finish it.

Despite using an SDK, this is friggin' amazing! Now all that we need is a gravity gun, and Valve will be out of business! I can't believe it's so much fun just rolling that cylinder around the square!

Regarding the boxes, can all primitive surfaces be texture mapped seperately now?

Hmm, I'm not quite sure, but I might have been thinking about the wrong scaling factor. I'll have to take a look at my code. It could be that the only sprite deformation made now is for the shadow being projected onto the wall.

At one time I had a script for finding the vanishing point, and another for reconstruction the perspective by GetScalingAt at different points of the screen. But currently those are commented out. Let me get back to you when I'd had a chance to go over my module. And probably by PM rather than flooding Wretched's thread

Edit: I just remembered, or rather, I checked where the perspective scaling comes from. Turns out that I'm using some hokey value based around a simple Maths.Sin of a user-defined camera angle. Well, it made sense at the time

Thanks for the clarification. So where would you get the z value from? I've pretty much been doing the perspective calculations for my module using the same techniques as you would when drawing projection in 2D. Would I need some kind of 3D calculations to get the z value?

The interesenting shapes are quite impressive. I don't remember even seeing a first person shooter engine that handled them so well! Didn't see a single clipping error even after adding tons of primitives on and within eachother. Great work.

Haven't checked out the texture mapping yet (but it tends to look pretty horrible in low-res, so I might wait to play with it until a hires version comes along). Also, there seems to be some funky stuff going on with the Yatzheebrand sign. The text disappears when seen from certain angles (from outside the bar).

Edit: Holy crap, it's fast as well. I just kept on adding primitives to the scene (you can do some awesome looking trees with clusters of spheres by the way), and the framerate didn't drop until just before the engine crashed (and still at 33fps!).

Steve, I've been trying to look into the different kinds of sprite transformation, and I must admit that I still don't really understand the concepts. What exactly does the z coodinate in your second example do?

When I asked, I imagined something like the Distort function in photoshop, where you simple move the coordinates for the corners of a previously rectangular sprite. But perhaps there are more factors than these needed for correct perspective transformation?

Let me quote myself from the What's Wrong With Adventure Games GTD:

However, let me add my two cents to the "puzzles - do we need them?" discussion:

Two of my favorite games, mostly for sentimental reasons,Ã,  are the first two Police Quests. But for now, let's focus on PQ1. Is there a single puzzle in the game? Well, that depends on your definition of "puzzle". For most of the game you just do what you are told, and do your job following proper police procedure (not too difficult when you actually have the manual ). I can only recall two situations in the game that demanded any kind of thought process - finding enough proof to get a no bail warrant and reporting back to your boss from the hotel. But did any of this make the game too easy or detract from the immersion? Hell no, I really felt like I was a cop peforming my duties, doing things by the book. I always knew what to do next, and usually how to do it, BECAUSE IT MADE PERFECT, LOGICAL SENSE WITHIN THE SITUATION!

The major problem with adventure game plots and settings seems to be the lack of natural gameplay potential - interation that flows from within the plot, the characters and the setting. PQ is a game about a cop - what do cops do? Wouldn't it be cool to play a cop? Sure it would! Space Quest is a game about a janitor on a space ship - what do janitors do? Nah, that's too boring, let's throw him into some wild adventures. See where I'm going?

Another example, from the designer of Police Quest nonetheless, is Codename: Iceman. The player character is a spy - sounds cool, right? - what do spies do? Well, for one they don't travel across the Atlantic in a nuclear submarine, torpedoing enemy ships along the way, risking international conflict, just to infiltrate a country where - get this - a fellow spy, who you met in the Caribbean just before you mission - has been all along! What's that you're saying? The guy is a submarine captain too? Oh, I see. What do submarine captains do? They certainly DON'T do metal shop work at the lathe, trying to repair diving equipment. Nor do they play dice with one of their crew people for a piece of advanced technology essential for the mission and world peace. These are absurd tasks, that have little to do with the actual scope of the man's mission.

Instead of coming up with weird puzzles and trying to fit them into your narrative, try to come up with with game concepts that are full of cool tasks which lends themselves to interaction. Even a cleaning lady game where you have to find the right product to get the blood stains off the bathroom floor is more fun than rubber duckies

Oh, and how prophetic I was about the bloodstains-off-bathroom-floors thing - the Fahrenheit developers must surely have read that

I always pictured the good old days of AGS somewhere in spring 2001, which was just before my joining

In other words, you came along and ruined everything?Ã, 

Steve, I wonder if you could be persuaded to turn some of the Allegro sprite deformation commands used in the AGS3D plugin, into an actual DynamicSprite-deformation plugin? If it's even possible to read/write DynamicSprites from a plugin.

So much is changing in my life right now, that I don't even know where I will be next summer. But if I can make it, I certainly will participate. So would this be in Helsinki? Always wanted to go there - and I even have enough frequent flyer miles to take me.

Wow. This is quite impressive indeed. I can't believe how far you've come just in the last two months. Didn't the old plugin support 640x480 res though? When I try it here I only get a 320x200 window in the upper left corner with corrupted graphics.

Edit: Ah, I see. I could have sworn that the previous version of the plugin (not module) supported it though - I've been running all the AGS3D tests in hi-res to see what kind of frame rates I got. Still, this is beginning to look like an actual game. I especially loved the ringing phone - I see great potential in the plugin/module.

* Added Character.Scaling property; renamed IgnoreScaling to ManualScaling to reflect its new functionality.
* Added DynamicSprite.SaveToFile function.
* Arrays and structs are now officially supported, and are documented in the manual.
* Fixed CreateFromBackground not using the X & Y co-ordinates correctly.

Awesomeness! I can't believe how much 2.71  has improved the overall quality of Shadowplay. All hail CJ!

Edit 3: Removed two other edits. Never mind, it seems to work now.

Oh ok, so this isn't a technique I should look into for my dynamic shadow script then (based on dynamic sprites, so no caching)? Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to try this out, if the internet works when I get back to the hotel.

Wow, so you've actually managed to do all the texture perspective deformation that can't be done in-engine?

Yes, you would if you used that solution.

But just go with the animated background (that is, multiple background frames to toggle between). That would be the best way in your case I think.

It depends on where and how you want to use it, but usually you would run it in a room script wherever needed. If you put it in a room interaction, it will be run from the room script.

I assume you don't want him to be green throughout the whole game?
Edit: If so, why didn't you just draw him green to begin with?

Why is MP3 still in the game engine even? Backwards compatability? Wouldn't it make more sense for CJ just to make the non-MP3 version standard and the OTHER one something you had to ask for?

Gabriel Knight 2 and 3 are certainly among the contenders, as well as the ending of Last Express. For games that just plain shook me up, Dreamweb and Harvester probably take the cake.

Isn't that the guy from Flight of the Amazon Queen only without the hat?

Edit: Thanks Blackthorne. Sure looks like him, modified in the FoA style with muted colors. And where did his groin go? That must have hurt!