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I demand a high-quality Ocean Dennis character sprites pack to be made by a skilled artist (i.e. not by me). With walkcycles, and everything. Dennis has reached the point where there should be a template, just like RoN 

I must confess this thread seems to be dealing with 2 aims at the same time. and I can't quite grasp their overlapping area, and what is/isn't feasible.

Next thing I want to see made with AGS: MORTAL KOMBAT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n76JWYONHvY

[reproducible]

reproducible random number stream.

Very useful for those who want to create procedural universe, but don't want to store everything in memory. The seed is enough.

Think of the random dungeons in early RPGs (but it's still the same dungeon if you visit it twice).

I say yey for Steve.

Oceanspirit Dennis in: A Secret in the Night

So cliché but delightful ;-)
I like the twisted humour.

RickJ:
Currently I keep a sprite holding the complete map in memory, redrawing only the parts of it that have actually changed between loops, then display a cropped version of it according to the scrolling offset and viewport size.
That's more or less what you were suggesting, I take it?

RiskJ actually explained what I wrote I was too lazy to explain 
He's not suggesting exactly what you're writing. His method is much more universal.
- Just like you, the part of the map he actually draws (once and for all) is larger than the viewport.
- however, he doesn't necessarily draw the *whole* map. He only draws the parts of the map that surround the viewport and might need to be quickly displayed. Cleverly, he suggest to keep track, within the hidden drawingSurface, of what should be eventually displayed where on screen, so that the map's hidden drawingSurface is almost never redrawn.

So, at each frame, what's displayed on screen is:
   1/ mostly the viewport, plus
   2/all the surrounding bits that have been drawn (calculated) in the "background".

It's not very clear but it would need a drawing to explain 

I can't think outside of the box any longer, so I'm glad for any input on this.

About the optimization questions you raised, I can think of several things, from the easiest to the ones that require a bit of refactor :

1/ Is the "ds.Clear(Game.GetColorFromRGB(255, 0, 255));" really required?
I couldn't figure that out from your code, but if it's not, then drop it, my guess is that it's not a low-cost function.

2/ Do you really need to create and destroy "t" at each redraw?
I couldn't figure that out from the code either. But, just like for Clear, this type of allocation might be expensive. Test it in a loop with no other instructions. If it turns out to be expensive, then always re-use the same "t".

3/ Copy-paste the body of the  "_compose_tile" function where it's called, each time it's called.
It's dirty! But it saves width*height (several hundereds of) function calls, and function calls can be a bit expensive, as I've shown in some performance tests I've done a while ago. If you don't want to do that, at least try not to pass paramaters. Use global variables instead. I had also shown that the function call's speed is proportional to the number of parameters. It's DIRTY too, but you're designing a function where speed is critical --> You decide.

4/ Keep an index of the tiles contained in each layer and zPlanes.
Do you get me? Instead of saving what is the zPlane for each tile, instead, make a list of tiles contained in each zPlane.
This needs a (bit of) refactor.
Why would you do that? Because, then, it saves all the time spent on evaluating "if..then..else" in each iteration of the double-loop.
--> Instead you'll call the double-loop once for each zPlane, and there WON'T be any "if..then..else" in the double-loop (i.e. no time wasted on comparing the conditions).


Oh, and the dirty tiles thing is ABSOLUTELY essential.
But, as abstauber remarked, it'll be ruined if you scroll. Well, there is a way to reduce the impact, but I'm too lazy to explain ;-)

[faster]

Secondary question.

In terms of brute performance, what do you think would go faster, for a tiled scrolling?
1/ Using GUI controls (1 control per tile) and fiddle with the positions of each control,
OR
2/ Redraw the (dirty) tiles manually?

I'm not asking about technical limitations like "the GUIs are always on top" or "there are only 30 controls per GUI". Just brute performance.

hmmm... Steam Punk you say?

Oh yeah, talk dirty to me, baby.

I demand Oceanspirit Dennis: Scourge of the Underworld DX to be made Open Source so that it can be continued!

...just.... don't.... make him gay, pls

I demand it to be continued by gay people.

I love the GUI!

I like the way the backgrounds are built. If it turns out that the puzzles and storyline are cool, I'm sure an artist could give all that a makeover... then we'd have another FoA! (I'll have good dreams tonight)

It definitely sounds like the opinions about those graphical styles vary from one person to another.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't like this whole school of black-and-white drawings colored with very bright, mostly primary colors (look at the floor on the right-most page... yellow, blue and red stones).

According to Scott McCloud's famous "The invisible art", this historically comes from the fact that American comics were first printed using cheap printing techniques - for economical reasons, because they appeared in daily newspapers - whereas in Europe, quadrichromy appeared quite early. So American comic use primary colors a lot. I must confess I'm not used to that style and it's really, really not my cup of tea.

As for the "he obviously learnt to draw in the 80's", well, the expression was not well chosen, but, eh, you know what I mean. Good drawer, but old-fashion, very comic-strip style.

[god machine]

That story is not so interesting, but it was one of those rare moments when you feel like you're special, being a point-and-click lover. Don't be surprised if you already know all of what's below - for me it was a surprise.

I was in a library (Chapters, on Parnell street, in Dublin), wandering in the comic books section.
I was grumpy because there were litterally thousands of those American Super-heroes comic books, and just a handful of comic books from Japan or from the Belgian school.

Anyway, at some stage I come across an Indiana Jones comic book.
At first I didn't really want to open it, because Indiana Jones novels or comic books are usually not very good.
But I was so bored that I started browsing it very quickly. It was called "Indiana Jones Omnibus Vol. 1"

There were 4 or 5 independant short stories in it, and the graphic style was kind of 80's*. Not great art.

https://www.dynamicforces.com/images/C111170.jpg


http://www.hypergeek.ca/wp-content/gallery/ind/ijfuradvv2p2.jpg


On one of the pages, I'm surprised to see a drawing that looked a lot like Fate of Atlantis' god machine (the one in the background of this picture)


I read more carefully, and it turned out that the first story of the comic book was actually "Fate of Atlantis".
I checked the credits, and it said : "Story by Hal Barwood and XXXX, Lucasfilm games" (yeah, that's right, not "Lucasarts").
The other stories of the book were by random guys.
The characters didn't look much like in the game (especially Kerner, who is bald, dark-haired, and has a moustache :-))

Suddently I felt happy to have this very mediocre piece of comic book in my hands :-) :-)

Here is a picture that shows Sophia, if I'm not mistaken :
One of the posts below shows that it's actually not her.

http://images.darkhorse.com/common/salestools/previews/indyomv3/indyomv3p3.jpg

And here is a bonus picture :



* It turned out that the comic book was actualy from the 90's, but.. drawn by a guy who learnt in the 80's ;-)

Here're some pictures of Edna (before we changed the skin):

Hurray!

Actually wanted to animate her, but couldn't be bothered... far too fiddly

Animate the cowboys in the foreground :-)
...Or the stage's curtain!

I'd say the major issue of the walkcycle is that she looks like the left arm is going forward simultaneously to the left leg, and the right arm simultaneously to the right leg.

...Not only for dialogs. For scripts too, pleeeez 

About those last changes :

The ones that are a YES :
- Made his stirrup shape different, I feel it looks more like a stirrup in a star shape, though you might disagree.
YES!
- Added a teeny bit if lighting detail to his buckle.
YES!

The ones that are a NO:
- Took away the one finger in his right hand, it seemed weird to have one standing out like that.
NO! It made him look like a duellist, always ready to pull his gun out.
- Made the boot of the heel of his right shoe thicker, it looked like he was wearing a lady's shoe to me.
NO! To me, the boot looks too heavy now. I preferred the original (exagerated santiag, that fits this overslim character)
- Gave him eyes! You might not like it though.
NO! It looked like his eyes were hidden by the hat - Very Clint-Eastwood... I loved it.

The other ones are good, but would really matter only to a cyborg with bionic eyes

Next time I'll only listen to Monsieur OUXX, when I understand what I write.  

Yeah, if you wanted to use integers all the way you'd have needed to have calculated "speedx" and "speedy" from the very beginning (using floats), and stored their approximate values as integers. Then, when you move your sprite, you'd just need to add speedx to x and speedy to y.
You can't mix integers and floats (or you have to be careful), because if you do it too soon or too late, it screws the accuracy of the results and produces random values.

But still, your code is good! Nice script.
Damn, I'm dying to write fun things like that, when instead I've broken the "interval red-black binary trees" of AGSH again :-/