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I find it strange that 3D Realms didn't release a proper gameplay video along with or right after PAX. Instead we get this wobblycam footage with zero contrast or color on the screen, which frankly doesn't exactly improve my impression of the game.

I used to love Duke Nukem 3D - mainly because it was the first 2.5D game with an easy to use WYSIWYG editor - and stood firmly by it and the other Build engine games in the Duke vs. Quake 'war'. But in this day and age, do we really need another corridor shooter about musclemen fighting aliens? I'll probably play it just to see wtf they were working on for all those years, and hear which movies they ripped quotes from this time. Unlike Alan Wake, I don't really have any expectations to crush for DNF, but I don't wish it to fail epically like Daikatana - in a way I'd like it to be a fitting coda for the FPS era (of course me wishing that it's over doesn't make it so, but enough with the shooting already).

Well, as I said "require you to create as many Characters as there are inventory items in the game" meaning individual items, so 20 chairs means 20 characters, sure. If you want an infinite number of items available to the player, of course its no solution.
But since characters can be placed in any room it makes more sense to have a pool of, say, 100 characters total than creating 40 objects (max amount) for every room just in case the player decides to fill it with furniture. Also, with a bit of scripting you can reuse characters between rooms and store their positions and graphics in a struct in the room script so they can be assigned again when the player enters that room.

The other alternative would be writing your own pathfinder and use DrawingSurface functions to draw the furniture on a full-screen sprite. Then player/item collisions could either be checked using GetPixel on the sprite or using rectangular checks against a struct storing the coordinate/size of the furniture in the room.

For the walkable area issue, you can use Object.BlockingHeight and Object.BlockingWidth to make a rectangular area around the object non-walkable.

Now, as for dynamic object creation, you *could* simply create a pool of existing but hidden objects in each room to draw from, and whenever the player drops an item, you assign the appropriate graphic to one of the objects, make it visible and put it at the correct coordinates. You would, however, need to keep track of its name in a separate String array since you cannot change Object.Name at runtime.

HOWEVER, a different solution could be to use Characters instead of Objects for the items. This would first of all only require you to create as many Characters as there are inventory items in the game, and Character.Name *can* be changed at runtime in case there's not a finite amount of each item (e.g. you don't need a Character name "table" to put a table, just get an unused character and name it that along with changing his graphic. Keep in mind that if you use this approach you'll have to assign all the item graphics as frames in the view editor and then use Character.LockViewFrame to set the graphic of each item in-game. Character also supports the BlockingHeight/BlockingWidth properties, BTW.

Developer interview video from PAX (with bonus DeLorean) over at The Spoony Experiment. Not much new info, but their focus on staying true to the movies is reassuring.

This is exactly the kind of thing the CharacterControl module was written for.

Found a working download link on pixelgeddon.com (ProgZ's own site I guess?). BTW, there is a thread specifically intended for game requests, just so you know for the future.

Very true, Ghost. I was thinking of buttons with graphics, but if you just want a text list of the level numbers/names a ListBox is the better choice.

In an adventure game, A, obviously.

And miss out on the whole industrial espionage section of the game? I mean, I love Phoenix Wright but I'm not sure courtroom drama makes for very exciting gameplay from the witness' stand.

Add more buttons to the GUI, and then use either the Button.Visible or Button.Enabled properties to hide/disable all except the first two (run this in the game_start() event). Then when you unlock a new level simply set Button.Visible or Enabled to true for the button corresponding to that level.

Sure, just make a GUI with the buttons you need and then in each of the button scripts, put "player.ChangeRoom(X);" where you replace X with the room number that you want the button to send you to.

Didn't Diamonds in the Rough have a plot like this? (I still haven't played the full version)

It does, very much so. Though your character isn't some peripheral pencil pusher for Evil Inc., but quite pivotal to their plan (yet unaware of its goal and scope). Lesson learned: Anonymous corporations who track down people with psychic powers and seclude them in a company owned town in the middle of nowhere probably aren't doing it for charity.

WikiLeaks through anonymous means (provided I'm not the only likely suspect, otherwise the authorities). When it happens depends on my chances of collecting better/more evidence by keeping the job, and on whether there's an immediate threat that can be halted by exposure.

Depends a lot on the game, I would say. What's the genre, setting, theme etc. - i.e. what "kind" of logic should they apply? Any kind of fantasy/sci-fi story would probably get more useful feedback in a forum dedicated to those genres (also in terms of unintentional cliches and such).

Also, taking into account that this is a game, I'm not sure a screenwriting or literature forum would be all that helpful. So my best suggestion would be to try the interactive fiction community. Lots of very smart people there, and while some of them probably also play AGS games, it's not as large a percentage as it would be here and you can put a spoiler warning at the top of your post.

Interactive Fiction Community Forum

Edit: Also, you could PM people on the AGS forum whose opinions you trust, or who've made games in a similar style to yours. Personally speaking I wouldn't mind having a game "spoiled" if my comments could help the developer - and possibly even enjoy the game more, albeit in a different way, by seeing how it evolved during production.

*ponders whether a Towelie fan-game would meet the bonus point requirement*

Good question actually, haven't tried it, but MediaCoder looks like it could do the job.

Ok, then I suppose it can be your screen settings or video codec. Avi files are played with whatever codecs you have installed, so results may differ between users. If you want to be on the safe side you can encode the file in OGG Theora format that always uses AGS built-in codec for playback.

Um, could be that you're telling it to?

From manual:

0: the video will be played at original size, with AVI audio
1: the video will be stretched to full screen, with appropriate
   black borders to maintain its aspect ratio and AVI audio.
10: original size, with game audio continuing (AVI audio muted)
11: stretched to full screen, with game audio continuing (AVI audio muted)

in other words:

Code: ags

PlayVideo("logo.avi",eVideoSkipNotAllowed, 0);

@anian: Ah, sorry, I get your point now. Could be that I'm just not used to the stylistic conventions of strategy games. I haven't played one in a decade and a half and isometric views weren't that common back then - SimCity, Colonization, Railroad Tycoon, Warlords, and so on.

I think it works fine without branches - as long as there's leaves on a tree you can barely spot the branches under the canopy from a bird's eye view. Check out satellite images on Google Maps if you don't believe me, for example Central Park.

Great work, InCreator. The interface is simple but flexible, and the results look very nice. I can't say whether you need a doctor, but if coding this is a sign of madness, let me be the first to welcome you to the asylum! I would have done the same had it been my game, though most likely I'd try to get it running in realitime in AGS, only to find myself yet again cursing the sluggish DrawingSurface functions (good choice to go the pre-rendered route, btw). You wouldn't believe half the overcomplicated features I've built prototypes and editors for, one of them coincidentally a perspective shifting module for semi-3D trees! (which snowballed into experiments with displacement mapping, voxel landscapes, and self-shading normal-mapped sprites - pushing AGS boundaries is, if not a mental illness, certainly an addiction ).

Since you need variable wind in-game, I'd suggest two approaches combined:

1. In-game: Use multiple leaf layers for each tree (e.g. 4). When wind is applied, you move each layer back and forth in the breeze, creating a parallax illusion of depth. As the wind grows stronger, you can displace all the layers in the direction of the wind, with the top of the tree pushed further that the lower branches - taking it far enough, the tree will look like it's about to fall over.

Along with this I suggest:

2. Pre-rendered/drawn: Animate a wind "ripple" effect in the individual layers - you can either do this by hand or using some video effect, but Calin's suggestion of particle animation could be an easier approach. In a light breeze, you'll then play this animation back at a slow speed and increase the speed for stronger wind. This animation shouldn't suggest any direction to the wind, because then we'll need to rotate it.

Now, I imagine this being rendered on a DrawingSurface in AGS, so all the animation would be handled in rep_exec(). When you initialize the tree animation code, you can randomize the starting frame of each layer of each tree, to avoid identical trees. Of course you also have a number of animations for each tree layer and randomize between these for further diversity.