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Objects can be off-screen just fine. You can e.g. move them off-screen when the player enters the room, before fading in.

The MoveDirect functions and MoveStraight functions can be used to move a character directly, and having it ignore walkable areas (or lack thereof) while it does so.

What I would do is this:

create a separate animation for the smoke, that starts with several blank frames (that can be 1x1 pixel in size).

Start this animation at the exact same time as the gun firing loop is triggered.

Well, I'm having some troubles upgrading to 3.0, that can be blamed squarely on Bill Gates.

In the meantime, I found out, to my surprise, that using WAV files rather than MP3 doesn't actually help.

(edit) However, the problem does disappear almost completely if I don't do a RawClearScreen before all the rawdrawing. Apparently that's a pretty slow operation.

I believe the AGS download page could use a link to this site.

That's because AGS 3.0 won't work without that dotnet plugin, and the dotnet plugin will refuse to install unless you have the "microsoft installer installer" first, AND downloading said installer from the official site is not possible if you're running an older version of windows.

As I'm running that I see that installing the installer installer from that patch site is also not possible unless you have the proper service packs installed first, which I'm sure will first require me to download an installer service installer pack service installer.

In other words, thanks to Mr. Bill Gates, upgrading from 2.72 to 3.0 is more complex than it sounds unless you're (apparently) running the latest versions of windows. And I'm sure most people interested in retro gaming have the exact latest version of everything. Yay.

I note that the download page presently says that the Mac binaries can run games with AGS 2.5 and above. Does this actually hold true for games created with 2.7 or 3.0? Also, is it correct for that page to claim that the port is "currently in beta" when apparently that beta hasn't been updated for over a year?

And more specifically, can somebody who owns a Mac please confirm or deny for me whether ATOTK can be run on a Mac?

Thanks!

Radiant, can you try out 3.0.1 because I've made a few changes that might improve this for you.

I'll give it a shot this weekend. It's complex code, too, so I hope it upgrades to 3.0-style well

Ok. Well, thanks anyway. I've tried once or twice to upgrade, but half the game broke, and I didn't want to invest time in learning the new programming language yet, so I'll finish this one in 2.62 and do the next game in 3.0. But maybe it'll help Radiant or any others struggling with this problem.

2.62 -> 2.72 isn't that big of a switch (at least, you can still use the non-OO code in 2.72 without problems).

But, I'm afraid I'm having pretty much the same issue in 2.72 so that might not help

They just ditched my ideas so quickly; to be honest it depresses me more than it pisses me off. Why is it, that whenever I work so hard, try my very best, it ends up bad one way or another?

What exactly were your ideas? By which I mean your hypothesis - what was the purpose of the questionnaire?

I'm in class right now and the deadline has ended, thank you for your responses. I will pay the community back one day (via games).

Oops I was about to fill it in now (I was short on time yesterday). Good luck anyway.

I'm pretty sure that once CJ sees that I posted, he will follow lead.

Here I am, right on cue!!

What is this, Kibo?

Some of the factors you can control (eg. if you're rude you're more likely to get a ticket than if you're polite),

Yep. A friend of mine got a E20 fee for driving a bicycle that had no functioning headlight, plus a E50 fee for calling the officer names... plus I think the former is a misdemeanor and the latter is a felony, so that was NOT such a bright idea.

The easiest way to do snow (other than via the plugin) is either using RawDraw, or putting the flakes on a GUI.

Frankly I've never used any overlays; I tend to use GUIs as they are more customizable.

It's not a problem to put it in your repeatedly_execute as long as you're not doing that every single frame (which could cause excessive slowdown). You seem to want to do it every couple seconds, which should not be problematic.

What exactly do you need for your game?

If you can tell us what you're trying to do, we can tell you if overlays are, or are not, useful in doing that.

The plugin has several options that are difficult to implement, or that run slowly, if written in plain AGS code.

But yes, it's certainly possible. ATOTK uses snow and fog effects, and we made the decision to not use plugins, so that the game can run under Linux as well.

I think some of your questions are unclear.

For instance,
15) What do you think of movies dealing with political issues?
there's a huge difference between, say, Pearl Harbor, and Fahrenheit 9/11. Both obviously deal with political issues, but do it completely different, and it seems that most people who like either of those hate the other. So what exactly do you mean?

Likewise,
12) What is your view on full or partial nudity used in a movie?
does "good" mean you're watching porn (i.e. you want nudity in the movies you watch), or that you don't mind nudity in movies? If the latter, how is that different from "don't care"? Likewise for offensive language - does "good" mean you want offensive language in movies, or that you don't mind it?

What does
13) What do you think of comedy based on awkward situations?
mean? Example please?

I'd be using Wintermute right now if it had been listed above AGS in the magazine from which I read about them. It's all the fault of the alphabethical order.

So that is why nobody uses BHT... 

I've actually got a game planned that takes advantage of some of these DS things.

Even though every int or String in an array only takes up a few bytes, declaring a large array (10000 or so indexes) can allocate quite a bit of memory (and thus file space) to it,

I'm afraid that doesn't nearly account for the 240 MB size. An array of 10000 integers would take up only 40k of memory.

After resizing your images to exactly same right size as used in the game you could try optimizing it some more. I recommend PNG format in 8bit indexed mode (with optimized palette)

I'm afraid that's not going to help much, because regardless of what you import graphics from, AGS stores them internally in its own binary format.

Of course, using 8-bit graphics rather than 32-bit graphics will, for obvious reasons, reduce the amount of space used by your graphics by a factor of four.

Every game I make personally I start with placeholder music, things from CD's mostly, which I've either bought or been sent. As a developer I'm blatently going to try the music that stirs me most against my scenes, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to be any different.

Personal use is, of course, different. What I was talking about is releasing a game with somebody's music, without asking. For releasing a game, I agree that many composers would be honored, but that's not a reason not to ask them. It's just common politeness, and it's not like it's hard to ask somebody.

Well, not really   I suspect you have imported a substantial amount of high-resolution high-color sprites, is that correct? (check the size of your acsprset.spr file).

Scripts are neglegible in size, compared to graphics and music. It's also possible that you're using a lot of music, but that usually doesn't compress well (like, 1100 Mb -> 240 Mb) and sprites generally do.