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  enum Ags3d_Filters
  ...
Ã,  import static function SetCharacterPosition(Character *thechar, float x, float y, float z);

Oh, you evil evil man!
Couldn't you have mentioned this before I wrote up the documentation?
Sounds good. I guess I'm not up to speed on 2.7 programming...

And the doc still shows AGS 2.7 as minimum requirement. Isn't it v2.71?

You're probably looking at the .txt file which I removed from the latest zip.

There's some sorting issues with Scid's bar

Aieeeeeeeee! Wow, this sorting is giving me trouble. Thanks for the report.

I think it will also work if you set up your game to default at 640x480

Hmm, I think there's a difference between changing the resolution in the setup and in the editor. I'll need to test 640x480. I can probably just use Ags3d.SetWindow(0, 0, 640, 480) and it will work though.

SSH, I'm not sure that one would fit in a DustBuster. (Some scale, Zor?)
You could probably club the spider to death with it though.

Sorry, I must not have been clear (or am just misunderstanding you): I'd like to know if there is a certain "formula" to calculate the most useful and precise scaling, based on the dimensions of the original sprite.

Not really, since the player has a collision box too. Just make a guess based on the coordinate system (the default unit is an inch, so a reasonable width is 24.0 and height is 68.0).

Nope, our lovely Rosella only has 4, the poor soul. I DID want to test the 8 loop thingie, but I didn't find any pre-drawn character with 8 loops, and was certainly not going to draw one...

Aah, I forgot to mention this in the manual - all loops in a view must have the same number of frames, since it remaps the loops depending on the orientation.

I think you've earned a credit in the manual by now.

And you're in.

I put a new version up with the camera position and collision tag accessors.
It also fixes the sorting bug (DOORHANDLE sorted in front of ROSELLA) you reported, and the sorting problems with objects and characters I mentioned.
I fixed the SetFirstPerson function and updated the manual.
Finally, I fixed the dependence on EGO that you reported and that I misunderstood totally before

So I think I've covered everything.

v1.05:
http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

[player]

EDIT - Hmmm, you seem to assume that the player character's internal name will be EGO. It would be good to either change that (maybe you can use the "player" keyword?) or document it. For instance, I, for one, never use "EGO" even as the internal name.

It's just for the tutorial section. I think it's pretty clear, but player might be better.

EDIT 2 - Also, I assumed SetObjectScale would resize the object... but when I try using it on the "DOORHANDLE" object, no matter what value I use, it remains the same size. SHould it change the size at all, or am I assuming wrong? Or am I using the thing incorrectly by going Ags3d.SetObjectScale(DOORHANDLE, whatever.0, whateve.0, whaveter.0); ? Nevermind

If this confused you it probably needs more explanation in the manual.

BTW, in teh tutorial you have SetNumDirections - forgot the "Character" bit. And forgot to add that we have to put "25.0" as the last parameter in SetCharacterFollowGround.

Right, I'll fix that.

EDIT 3 - I tried to make my character collidable-with. I managed to do it, AFTER setting her scale. This is not mentioned in the documentation, and it kinda should. : ALso, as a user, I'd like to know what kind of calculations upon the character sprite I should make in order to get a standard "scaling". For instance, I saw your Mika sprite is 40 pixels wide, and the first float in her scale is 10.0. Does that mean that generally speaking we should divide the sprite's width by 4?

The characters and objects follow the same rules as the other sprites. So the scale is only used for sorting and player collision. The collision width you choose depends on the sprite scaling.
Which reminds me, I should allow objects to be rotation dependent.

Also, you mention in the manual that the "character functions" acn also be changed at runtime (in the editor, I mean) with the ASDRFT keys.

I did? I must have cut and pasted that text into the wrong section.

That's not so, unfortunately (it WOULD be great!), as I can't right-click-select objects OR characters, and there is no longer a key to press that cycles through available prims (though I think that even then it did not select characters or objects).

Yes, I got rid of that key. I think it's pretty much superceded by the right click to select, and it didn't work right with multiple selection.
I should probably allow selection of sprites, characters and objects. That's a pain to do, but definitely possible. Hmm.

EDIT 4 - When making her walk, I randomly get this error (or at times get no error at all):

"in Ags3d (line 2993)
from Ags3d (line 3199)
from Ags3d (line 3208)

Error: GetGameParameter: invalid frame specified"

That's odd. I'll take a look. (Does she have 8 loops?)

EDIT 5 - You didn't add any way to get the camera/player's coordinates? I'm sure that's just an oversight, bue please correct it... I find that to be THE most useful set of values, as it allows us to make all sort of special effects depending on where the player is. 3d's the best way to take advantage of those.

You're right, I forgot those would be useful.
Another useful one would be the tag of the ground, and the tag of the primitive you are colliding with. Oh, and tagging objects and characters.
For example:
Ags3d.GetPlayerGroundTag();
Ags3d.GetCharacterGroundTag(int chr);
Ags3d.GetPlayerCollisionTag();

EDIT 6 - "Ags3d.SetFirstPerson(false);" doesn't seem to do anything... or is it just me?

I think by now we've established that you're not incompetent
I'll take a look.

Cheers,
Steve

PS I think you've earned a credit in the manual by now

Hah!

I finished up the documentation and converted it to rtf.
I also tweaked a few of the functions and enabled autocompletion.
Finally I added the ability to change primitives' filters from the editor.
I think this is just about ready to unleash on the great unwashed masses.
I'll keep it in beta here in this thread for a couple of days, then start a new thread for it.

Cheers,
Steve

http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

Java definitely has short circuit evaluation. I've written plenty of Java and I'd have run into problems if it didn't. See here:
http://java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2002/tt1105.html#2
As for J2ME, oh dear. That sucks.

Pah! I refuse to conform to that archaic brace standard, just to get autocompletion.
Ok, maybe I will... thanks Strazer.

Kind of weird though! What kind of parser doesn't treat all white space the same? Aside from lines beginning with # that is...
Errm, and lines with // in them...

[[EDIT:]]

I presume that you of course know that the String.Append function returns the appended String, and does not actually change the String*?

That's probably what I was doing wrong. Heh.

[EDIT:] Hmm...it's odd that it doesn't autocomplete.  My structs defined in SM headers do...perhaps it doesn't like that '3' being there?

Does it autocomplete static function names defined in a struct in a script module? If so perhaps it's a new feature of beta 4? I doubt it's the '3'.

GetLightX? I don't remember exporting that one.
If it's useful I'll export GetLightX, GetLightY, GetLightZ. Although using your own works too, obviously.
I was worried about flooding the interface with accessors and swamping the essential functions.

Sorry about missing out the parameters. I wrote some of it from memory.
This evening I'll finish the doc and convert it to html.

Cheers!

Hmmm I didn't check, didn't you use some of the 2.71 beta 3 features? Or it's changed (maybe the module part doesn't rely on that?)? Otherwise the requirements may need to be changed.

Yes, you're right, I appear to have used:
- new Strings, in a few places (although I couldn't get String.Append to work)
- correct mapping of PgUp and PgDn keys
- dynamic sprite rotation
- Maths.ArcTan2

I'd better change the requirements when I finish the doc.

is that "props" GUI ever going to get used?

Not for this... It would make things inconsistent if you could say, set the filter for objects and characters through their properties, but then had to call a function to set the filter for primitives.

how unutterably sad it is to type "Ags", nay even "Ags3d.", and not see an autocomplete box popping up! Do you know why this happens?

I guess CJ hasn't had time to parse the headers for struct members to add to the autocomplete list. That would be very nice, wouldn't it?

Updated to do more things automatically, and simplify the scripting.
Also added a text file with the first draft of the "manual" based on Gilbot's parallax script module manual.

http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

For my RoN game, I doubled the speed of the avatar in the Town Square once the player had been there four or five times. Since that's the hub room and the player will be traversing it a lot...

Half the fun of that game was imagining what the hell was going on.
Unless you're an artist with considerable skill, I doubt you'd do it justice.
I'd remake something simpler like Enchanter (hah!).

Don't expose the structure at all.
Just give the user static functions - it's less confusing that way.

you also kept me working on the "Indy: FoY Demo" instead of wasting my time

Does this mean I get a credit?
(FoY is taking longer than Duke Nukem Forever!)

implementing features for AGS 3D that you added in 12 hours...

Well, to be honest I've probably spent at least 24 hours on it so far.

[EDIT] Make that 25 hours.
- big speedup (worst case improved from 15 to 34 FPS on my PC) by caching info needed for sorting
- delete selected primitive(s) with Shift-X in the editor

And I'd just like to say how awesome the module system in AGS is. It was trivial to convert this to a module and it worked flawlessly.

comicguy,
Good luck with your project. I didn't mind the questions, don't worry.

everyone,
There's a new version, with:
- ability to turn on and off the editor completely
- characters optionally follow ground height
- a "give me coordinates" ray cast option in the editor to make it easier to place objects
- slightly faster drawing of unclipped primitives
- sprites with "heading" rotation (see the Scid's sign in the demo game)
- better separation of the module and the demo game

http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

I could give or take the borders to the panels on the left. I think they look nice but they clash with the other buttons on the right.
I like the layout, but what happens when you run out of room for, err, rooms?
It's not like we're generally hurting for screen real estate anyway. I never run AGS maximised.
And what is wrong with the general settings the way they are? This way you can make a change and instantly press Ctrl-T. If you put it in a dialog you'd have to perform the additional step of accepting the changes.

Things I'd find useful:
- the room menu always available (so that Ctrl-I and Ctrl-E work from anywhere)
- a quicker way of starting to script interactions (perhaps an option on the right click menu to avoid the whole New Interaction/Run Script/Edit Script malarkey).
- also, a way to get straight to the script/header of a module under development would be good. Perhaps we could have a checkbox that marks the module as under development, and then some menu items and shortcut keys to go to the code.

WHILE I'm travelling to that point the text "George" does appear - rather too early - but when I acually get there, no go.

I haven't adjusted his collision box it seems, which determines where you need to focus to talk to him. If you look up or down it should work.

comicguy,
Textures on walls and so on just aren't possible with the current AGS engine. I don't particularly want to get into writing a plugin that links to allegro and draws a perpsective correct textured triangle. I don't even know if it's possible (to convert an AGS sprite into an allegro texture). If there was such a thing, I could add it as an option to Ags3d, but then there's the workflow problem of assigning textures and UVs to the primitives.

Gouraud shading is similarly out, but if there was a plugin or an engine function it would be trivial to support.
Edge anti-aliasing is right out. I'd have to write an anti-aliased triangle rasteriser in C, which would be dog-slow and take me ages. I just don't have the motivation for that.

If I WAS going to go the plugin route, I'd probably make a plugin that loaded and displayed Doom or Quake levels. The source code is available so it wouldn't be that hard.

Importing meshes is a possibility, but only for a limited number of meshes since each one needs its own support functions in Ags3d due to the way it's written. Also, the meshes would have to be convex or they would render wrong since of necessity I don't do any in-primitive triangle sorting. I guess if you knew exactly from what angles the object was going to be seen you could sort the triangles yourself. For example if you had a wine glass shaped object and you knew the camera was always going to be above it you could sort the triangles bottom to top.

As for it being used without any coding, I don't think that's going to happen. The editor doesn't support placement of (AGS) objects or characters. You have to do that yourself in the room scripts.

Of course you can add 2d sprites to the world to give it some texture - bottles, trees, stools, lamp posts, mail boxes, and so on.

It doesn't at the moment sound like Ags3d is the engine for your project though. Perhaps Heir of Norton's (Wolf3d engine) will suit you better? Or, although I don't know much about it, I suspect that Blender is getting towards usable as a game engine. It has some scripting support. shbazjinkens knows more about it.

strazer,
Dang, and I thought you'd posted to comment on how badly I'd broken the module guidelines!

Pah, textures schmextures.
We don't need no steenking textures.
Etc.

Would it be possible to add an option to group objects in the script, and rotate/scale them around a common center point, or some other predetermined point? This (the basic elements of Constructive Solid Geometry) would make user-created objects much easier to use in a game, if they could be constructed together from simpler primitives, and then moved/rotated/scaled as a single object.

Hmm. I'll have to think about it. Preferably when I'm more sober... Sounds like a good idea, but I'm not sure how it would work exactly. If you have a specific process in mind let me know.

Unrelated note: I'm getting the DOOM-style texture mapping, mostly. It basically works, but there are a couple points where the textures are distorted. One is because of an error somewhere in the Z-clipping code (whice is based on the old Z-clipping and needs to be redone anyway). The other occurs at a certain distance from the "walls" from one direction, but not the other (I have no idea why THAT distortion is happening). I'll fiddle with it a bit more and, if I can't get it fixed, I'll post it as-is and see if anyone else can help fix it.

I'd be interested to see it. I'm sure we can sort it out!