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Right. But I usually need invisible guy to TALK and this means already messing up 2 Views. And after invisible stuff I must change them back... oh god.

Hum, not a bad idea. DreamWeb was best one, but I also remember something called Berlin 194x (x marks teh number I dont remember) and maybe even Mission Impossible (NES). Yeah, that point of view could be interesting. Btw, There's "evil grandma" look, too. Anyone remember the bathroom in Gym in Leisure Suit Larry 3?

Yeah, and set funny stuff as his Idle View.
In matter fact, you could find out, how to use different Idle views randomly for one character, I'll be needing that too.

Ah, I'm dying to see that one :o

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.

Ov.. what?
I've noticed that rooms with lot of scripting are *much* slower, like in Pleurghburg, though it has low resolution.

Great graphics! Looks like some weird (but cool) amateur style, like you have mixed Monkey Island, Loom, DOTT and Pleurghburg together...
Well, graphics DO matter, at least for me, because these shots started to interest me at first sight.

[actually]

Just two questions!

1) Do you actually have a story to tell?
2) If so - Isn't that the same story all soft-porn TV shows such as Playboy and, of course, all these Hentai games have told over and over?

If answer to first question is "yes" and to second "no" - well, this could be an interesting game, I think. Just don't encourage anyone to become a lesbian neither... heh.

Then again - main guy could pull a knife and have a bloodbath with 15 lesbians and maybe use a sniper rifle when peeking at the party... and... okay, enough of my InC-piration.

Yeah.. But I *actually* CAN play games. What else do I need?

Yay, and when do we see Anti-Glide mode setting to characters INDIVIDUALLY?  Like, I don't want my plane to stop moving after every 3-4 frames, but I want roger to do so.

Thanks, CJ.
By raising resolution, FPS fell from 8 to 2-3.
Then again, with 320x240 8-bit, same thing is 14 fps.
Seems that I should start learning to draw with less colors

I noticed that AGS will take RAM as primary performance factor - with 16 MB, slowdown is critical... (scope "jumps" as mouse moves, but still, playable!) I think that AGS-s minimum requirements start at p75 with 8MB ram. Below that, It's slow.

After ags moved into Windows only- fadein-out is MUCH faster. Old DOS versions had painful fading.

Hey, and if someone wants a sniper rifle example, I'll be happy to put it up somewhere, let me know.

[adventure]

Oh god, why hasn't nobody found out that the magic of Adventure games is excactly in the game part?
Just how many of you have been reading a book so good that you start to identify yourself with the main character and have sudden urge to enter the world/situation you're reading about? Adventure games excaclty do that. Our problem is just that stories in these games aren't usually that good so we miss the main point. Even superb ones, like Gabriel Knight for example. Sometimes I download games just after reading a similar book, like when I finished "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" or some other. In matter fact, adventure games even aren't best way to do that. Just when I finished "Treasure Island", a game of Pirates! 2 gave much more wanted experience than Monkey Island series or any other pirate adventure game (and there's dozens of them) could. Why? The freedom! Because I could make my decisions absolutely by my own and I didn't have to stick to a storyline! Doesn't same go for MANY other games? Just try to imagine GTA as adventure game!

I just don't think that we could do adventure games about everything - there's some invisible story limitations and crossing them would make adventure game "suck".

Maybe you should write a good book first, and when you're sure that this IS a good book - convert it into a game.

[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

Some ideas here, too. Like translations - from time to time someone asks for translations for a game. A new forum topic is usually created, there always some AGSers who'll like to help and in a week or so it travels into history of this forum.... Until new AGS game developer asks for a new one. Why couldn't there be something like 'Translations' corner where are all games listed, which currently need translations - maybe with their text dump files, too. It's pretty obivious that no developer would wait for new translators forever and every game has some kind of a "translate deadline" after which the game will be taken down from the list. At the moment, forum topics  about this stay there forever (or at least too long). This could be a systematized (uh..) thing about translating games. But this was only an example - we could have such "corners" about many other things.
And posting there could be somehow controlled/limited too - because there's too much cases where someone asks for something (like translation) then few guys offer help and third one says "you from Taleban" or something like that and that gives hundreds of offtopic posts about politics in middle east - so topic starter can only dream about translations he needed.

Just maybe I'm not a person to say this, but this forum & site is a bit more than a place to download and learn about AGS. It feels more like an adventure game developers home or something like that. So - there's millions of things CJ could pull out from resources page and make "mainstream" - like have a page for free (donated) characters and other things like that.
But then we start to call it AGC... Adventure Gamers Central... and this is something CJ probably wouldn't want, right?

After all, he has a lots of work to do without these ideas - we're all impatiently waiting for new releases of AGS and planning to write our testaments to his name. God bless the Chris...

Uh, just noticed that my english is bad as hell - hope someone understood what i was trying to say (sorry).

You haven't planned your request well, don't you?
People happen to have different drawing styles aswell drawing SKILLS. Putting many different characters into one game - made in different style -- will surely make a big mess. You'll get alot better help if you:

a) draw characters by yourself, just ask for help to animate them -- or:

b) ask for characters but redraw them with your own hand and style - and then maybe ask for animations on them

But otherwise - It'll be an interesting experiment, but not a selling game, I think -- just imagine Gabriel Knight mixed with Day Of Tentacle -- or Leisure Suit Larry with Indiana Jones.... But then again - who knows?

P.S. Can't Draw? Lower the resolution! Can draw? Still lower the resolution! Wanna sell game? DEFINETLY lower the resolution!!!

Collision detection? In every step? Sounds very sloooow for me.

Haddas, I think you could try following to solve your problem:

Spoiler

Use Scissors on spoiled Cousin

[close]

But you're on your own now. Don't blame me if this doesn't work, okay?

*Ahh. It's so nice to have place for making insane computer-game-jokes... But it's time to move on. How about AGS Technical forum, eh guys?*

(for stupid people - I was only joking, don't try this at home - BOTH of my ideas)

Okay, so we are heavily offended and even attacked by Ones Who Write Walkthroughs. They usually give their e-mail addresses in top of solution. So - The Ones Who Like To Think And Not Fight Temptation - let's unite and send to another ones hate-mail, viruses and mailbombs... etc, because they take away our possibility to think by ourselves and get smarter by that. Let's shut down every big solution server like the-spoiler.com or gamesdomain.com. Let's fight for our right to try everything on everything and revenge them for making us to feel like weak humans. Who's with me?  

btw, alternative solution here:

Get Scissors
Use scissors on Modem power cable
Talk to nurse
Open Hospital door
Walk to Home
Play further

In my opinion, good adventure game means game that is short only when used a walkthru. But when played without one, player spends a lot of time exploring all possibilities, hotspots and so on. So in my games I'll try to make excactly THAT part to be as entertaining as possible because otherwise It's just frustrating (and we have all seen that, in MANY games, right?). So best way to make game lengthy is to give player wish to try everything -- not to find the solution but to have more fun. Like - when doing something not needed to complete the game, still present player with good jokes or even some nice animations otherwise not seen...
Rob Blanc series make a good example here.

Hmm... reading the article about lengthening your game again, I think you just missed with the title of the article. It should have been "How to act like an amateur adventure maker" or "Seven mistakes beginners usually do" or something  like that...
Anyway, I think criticizm is wrong here and I find that one funny as hell. Maybe AGSezine needs even more humour, because humour has always been strongly related to adventure games and this bring us to a conclusion that makers of these games are pretty humorous people too. Like Al Lowe or something. Just read the topic "how to attract people to my game" in this forum...

AGSezine could be in HTML-format too. I'd like to help and convert these docs, but my machine is way toooo slow to start messing with that... even opening an issue in Word takes 3-4 minutes.