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I looked at Sam and Max 2 website and realized that adventure games are becoming modern.

Just wanted to ask, is it possible, some day or way, that we will see AGS 3D? Lucasarts is implementing their Grim Fandango engine and Larry 8 will be in 3D, too.

But 3D-characters in adventure games have existed since inventing of that technology (like in Alone in the dark series, for example)

c:\windows\winexec.exe
Well, somehow, I managed to get something named like this into my computer. Now,  suspect that It's the reason behind making my Internet explorer ultra slow.
All other internet-based programs, such as kazaa and msn messenger download things normally (which is 8-10 kb/sec for me), but Internet explorer kinda' times out and speed will be no more than 0,2-0,3 kb/sec.

I tracked down this thing after a little confusion and deleted it. but all i found out about this, was EvilBot written into exe file info.

What is that thing?
Anyone seen this thing?
Is it the evil thing behind breaking my IE?
How to get *really* rid of this thing? (IE is STILL slow)
What else does this thing do?

Thanks in advance. Any help would be appreciated.

Tough deleting sprites will result warning message, I found another way AGS crashes.

I tried to logically do right, but that resulted a crash.
This is what I did:

I drew some of my sprites over and made duplicate ones. When replacing the old ones in a view with newer ones, I removed all the old sprites from a loop.
Then I deleted them from Sprite Manager, thinking that as they're not assigned to a view anymore, It's safe.
Well, it wasn't.
When trying to put new sprites into same loop, AGS usually goes to a folder in Sprite Manager where old, just deleted one was and tries to select the old sprite. And that caused the error, because old sprite was no more there. I got an error message and pressing ok caused same error message to appear again and again, which left me no other option than press Ctrl-Alt-Del and force AGS to close.

Once again, long story about a little bug.

Question:
These AVI/FLI/FLC videos. They're not packed into any VOX or EXE file, right? (since AGS started to have a new version weekly, I've kinda lost the track what's implemented and what's not). Anyway, if videos are not packed-

Suggestion:
They could be packed into something. To ease video/ (-less) game distribution and other thing is that in a game where some cutscenes play as AVI video, it could spoil the fun, because players could check out all the cutscenes to get a hint what to do next. And for adventure games, which usually have low replay value, It's not very great thing.

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Hm. I'm making an adventure game (doh!) and I was just wondering (as I usually do hundred seven times a day) that whole thing sucks and why the hell am I doing this. And then I felt (as I also feel millions of times a day) that I want to work my arse off this time and make something REALLY good.

Just... just that I don't have enough motivation and what's the point when all I get is mom telling me that my 32-hour day cycle (22h cpu, 10h sleep) isn't normal and dad steps occasionally to my room to ask when the hell am I going to find a job and stop making telephone/electrical bills.

So... I... (You can skip next part)

Want to do a game. And sell it.
Want to do a game that doesn't make me guilty charging money for it. Not in front of this community or my concience (did i write this right? whatever, you'll get it.). As I have no job and nobody believes in me, making all my relatives see that this endeless ass-warming at the front of a computer is really able to produce money of any kind, would be big thing for me.

So. Here I wonder. How much money could I ask for a game? I want price to be fair enough not to rip people off and make them burning pirate cd-s. I live in Estonia and we haven't changed our currency to euro yet, so what looks a little to other people, is pretty good price for us - and vice versa. Relation to euro/dollar is 15:1.
and with a dollar, I can already supply myself with nicotine for one day. Or two empty recordable CD-s. Even three. For example, 15 bucks already supply me with cigarettes for half a month! And If I get 15$ or 15â,¬ for every copy and manage to sell at least few every week... well, nice dream it would be.

So - 15$. Is it too much for a full game, with s3m self-tracked music, 3ds max rendered-backgrounds, and 2D sprites?

Paths. Some games have npcs wandering around (Lure of temptress, shadow of the comet,etc).
Is it possible to have pre-defined paths for npcs?
So they  move on specified route through - let's say 5-or 6 rooms?

And I notice that there's "Player walks out n edge" room interaction. Haven't tried but I assume it won't work on non-player characters.

"NPC walks out n edge" could be useful then, too.

Though I've spent few days experimenting, I still can't figure out how to use thought bubbles.

I managed to create a bubble using text window gui option, but it's kinda lame. And I'd like to see one or two smaller (with decreasing size) cartoony bubbles under the big, text-filled one. Desirably, pointing at the character who's thinking. How is it done?
And how thinking GUI stretches according to amount of text to display?

AGS has a nice premade and editable inventory GUI in latest versions.
Why not "thought" GUI?

Not a tech forum question, but which one it is then?
Yeah, I made a background drawing tutorial. And I want to make it available to everyone, on AGS Resources page (If CJ thinks it's good enough).
Problem is I don't know how!

Tutorial is here:

http://www.hot.ee/increator/draw.htm

Another problem.
Thing is, I'm Estonian and I cannot make games in my mother language, because we have very common vocals "ä", "ö", "ü" and "õ". So I can't use the,, simply because AGS takes only these latin letters which are in english language, when importing a font.

I'm not the only one. Finnish use alot of "ä", Germans and Swedish too, plus that "ü" and most of Norwegian places include letter of "ö"... I'm not a language specialist, but there's lots of europeans with those chars in their languages.

At the time when AGS was DOS only, I used numbers as those letters, like instead of word "ämblik" (spider) I used "2mblik" and instead of "ü" I used "y" (beacuse "y" is spelled in Finnish same way as our "ü").

Well, this doesn't look good, and I hope there's something that could be done. Another, and same painful way was to use SCI-Studio and replace some numbers with those special letters, but this cut off my ability to have any numbers in game, because 4 letters, upper and lowercase, take away 8 other characters, at my case - numbers.

I *understand* that there's lots of languages with different letters and AGS just can't support them all. So here's my idea - what about increasing maximum number of characters in a font and maybe having a possibility to Import custom characters into a font,
let's say, 10 characters per font that could be customized?

Uh - I think it's a bit too difficult to implement...
But at least - It's said now.

Font auto-outline feature seems to work badly.

I imported a TTF font (Verdana) for 640x480 res at size of 9 and it become weird and crappy. Auto-outline erased some lines (pixelwide) from several letters, and missed outline from several places. When I tried my game in 320x200, font outline was fine!

I tried same thing with different fonts & sizes and most of them experienced problems. Then again, some didn't.
And some fonts looked alot better in 640x480.
Font sizes more than 10 were almost always buggy.

What's wrong?

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1) Darken processor style GUI textbox.
I can do something like that making 2x2 pixel
grid with black color (works well only hi res), but It'll be awesome to have a textbox which just darkens a rectangle of background. I think I asked for that some time ago.

Things like this are used in many games. First one that
comes into my mind would be KGB a.k.a Konspiracy by Cryo/Virgin... making this can't be that hard (we cand darken sprites, right? why not background?), plus I thought AGS could use some improvement on way games could look. This far, most improvements based on MORE complex scripting.

2) Colored font. I mean, multicolor font. Again, this is not an utopia, VERY old games use that (gradient ones are especially cool).

3) Font w/shadows? why not list it here. Actually I don't believe any of my suggestions would be implemented soon/ever, but digitally, my thread doesn't take much server space, so what the heck. ;)

4) Font editor? If SCI studio did that, why not to have even better one in AGS? It's Adventure Game STUDIO, after all. And some of SCI-code is existing already, in importing possibility.

5) Views in folders or Views w/names. Just like sprites.

6) Help with possibility to search from pages. (this far, we can only find pages that include searched keyword, not the keywords, though they're highlighted, which is really nice)

7) Colored text scripting. Speaks for itsself. And is handy to avoid errors.

8) Forced mistake check (like button or menu option that finds errors in scripts, just like saving a room does - good for making script right before trying to save a room)

Actually, I just hope a lot of feedback on my ideas.

character[CHARID].visible

Didn't find it from global variables! No such thing?
Or I just searched badly?

It can be done by changing character's view for a empty frame, but such variable could do things alot easier. Especially needed when character is inside something - so he's not visible and just his speech w/color is needed (such as in a car, starship, house, behind a locked door, etc)

Hm. Is it technically possible to use a walkable area that is just 1 pixel wide line?

(Thing like that is needed, for example - for character walking on a rope or a narrow log over the chasm)

I tried and couldn't. Width of 2 pixels worked fine.

[edit:]

I wanted to ask one thing and I'll do it here because this doesn't sound like beginners question.

My game is 320x240 16-bit color.
I made a system in AGS for using sniper rifle scope.
Room is covered with *huge* black character (dims: 640x300), basically large black rectangle with drawn circle and sniping lines at the center (with transparent colour).

and Excecute_Repeatedly event will change characters x and y relatively to mouse.x and mouse.y--
okay, this worked.

Now, what I want to ask, does way like that slow game down too much? Just I'm running AGS way below minimum requirements (Pentium 75MHz, 32 MB RAM, Directx 9.0, 1MB video) and didn't notice any slowdown --- but replacing that big sprite around every step doesn't make much sense to me neither.  Is AGS really able to work efficently with so large sprites, or was it just because I didn't have any other characters in that room, neither any music/sound?

I'm asking that because AGS was previously (older versions, i remember) slowed by using large objects and for my CPU, any higher resolution will be painful, so I can't test that much, but If that works, I'm gonna increase resolution and thus- that means even bigger "sniperscope sprite".

Or is there any limit for a sprite dimensions which would work fine to some point?

edit: Uh, noticed a thread about same thing here -- I think we'll have a general question

EnableWalkableArea()  ..and...
DisableWalkableArea()

cute, isn't it?  

How do I make an object that can be not walked through - like an openable door?

Hm. I think I'm not first one to mention this, but using RunDialog(x) while cutscene is playing makes skipping cutscene impossible. ESC key just skips whole cutscene until it reaches the point where dialog is. Is it a bug?

In case you don't understand, just: make a cutscene, put rundialog into somewhere in the cutscene and now, try to skip the cutscene.

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Does ANYONE know from where or how can I get almost (what almost? historical!) traditional font used in many-many games for speech, such as "Chewy:ESC from F5", "KGB a.k.a Konspiracy" and many other games, especially ones by LucasArts (Indiana Jones was one of them, if I'm not mistaken and games released under Virgin Interactive).

Hardcore adventure gamers should be already guessed for now which one I'm talking about - at least someone could.

I don't know its name (if it has any name) but its bold, outlined and big. And it looks very much like BIOS font in screen mode 13h, 320x200 8-bit... BASIC and Pascal programmers maybe get their hint from here...

Well, I'ts hard to ask for something you cannot really describe.  

And other thing: Is there any good tools/programs available for making fonts by my own (for AGS, of course) except that superbuggy SCI-studio?

There could be multiple sprite import!
-- I'm using 3ds max for my gfx and when I save my 3d-animation, it gives me files like:

image001.bmp
image002.bmp
image003.bmp
image...

So, If AGS could detect them by itsself, It could take alot less time when importing sprites for animation!

I think some others will find that useful, too.

  How do I *ANIMATE* regions to make their RGB values to change after every - let's say - 30 steps?
(Point is to simulate disco lights, regions for AGS itself and animated 3-d background for overall beauty).

I know there's a deal with SetRegionTint (or some thing like that) and timers(I guess).

Anyone care to give me a simple code?