Messages

Is speed important? Of course, people abuse AGS for lots of stuff, but the main objective are 2D adventure games. SVG would be neat, though...
I'd choose the library that is easier to use and has the longer expected lifetime and support.

Thanks for the explanation

What do you mean by "splash asset"?

In the assets folder->rooms there is a splash screen, but I don't think it is ever used.

One reason for this thread is to point out stuff that is either confusing in the demo game, needs more documentation or should be improved.

Hi!
I want to port Cornelius Cat from AGS to MonoAGS. It is a fairly short game and has neither save/load nor translations, which is not available in MonoAGS, yet.
I thought I'd create a new thread for this, now that there is a separate board, to keep things organised.

I'm currently trying to set up the basic game structure (using mostly the Demo game and a bit of CW's games) and already have the first questions:

Is a player character needed, because it is loaded before the splash screen?

The splash screen (loadSplashScreen) has nothing to do with the Splash asset, right? It is the AGSSplashScreen from the engine but there does not seem to be documentation for it?

Awesome, thanks!

Hmmm I've been thinking:

#5 Cat

No sorry, I didn't even submit anything. I had an idea but didn't get around to write a proper pitch. But I voted for #5.

My guesses:
#1 Sinitrena
#2 Gurok
#3 Ponch
#4 Mandle (even so he says it isn't)
#5 Danvzare
#6 Baron
#7 Hobo
#8 Blondbraid
#9 CaptainD
#10 WHAM

Looking really great! Now you should start making terrain tiles

Awesome!

I think there should be a subforum for MonoAGS

Yes, a sub-forum for MonoAGS will be useful.

Could we have a sub-forum for MonoAGS? I think it could be either located within the AGS Development or the Associated Sites section. It would be useful for engine development as well as game development using the engine.
Oh, and the moderator should be tzachs, of course.

I also want to point out, that if #5 is ever made into a game, it has to have graphics by Matt Frith

Spoiler

[close]

I fixed it in this branch- can you try pulling from that branch and see if that solves it for you?

Awesome, it works! Thank you so much!

Having everything protected and not private will encourage people to extend via inheritance, which I (and many others) don't like. Inheritance should be used sparingly, I believe, as a lot of time it acts as an anti pattern. This is why MonoAGS tries to encourage composition over inheritance.

We used to say about a college: "Some people use inheritance as a weapon"

But CJ IS JC. Why would anyone question this? It's even more so with him being only present in the past. Those of us who were lucky enough to exchange dialogue with the great Pumaman, tell others in stories and create adventure games in his honour.

Wow, I've never seen it that way, but now that you mention it...
I'm really glad I'm one of the blessed ones that were able to talk to Him.

I just edited while you posted. I'm investigating paths now.

It's not about big deal, it's just weird and shouldn't be like that. After a clean checkout during rebuild all resources should be fetched and the solution built.

I have a separate repository for my game and MonoAGS as submodule. In contrast to CW I plan to have a separate repo for each game and not one for them all.

I can install Autofac from the nuget manager, but this causes a change in the MonoAGS repository.

Also, could you explain what the difference is between dependencies (as seen in the solution explorer for AGS.Engine) and references (as seen for AGS.Engine.Desktop)?

I'm sorry for so many dumb questions, I haven't been working with C# for a few years now and obviously I'm not up-do-date anymore.

Edit: It might be something related to paths i.e. where the packages folder is created. One of the changes I see in the diff when I install the nuget package is related to the location of the packages folder.

.nuget is a checked-in folder of MonoAGS, in my solution I don't even have one. I'm not sure how deleting it would help, besides, the config in there has nothing to do with autofac. I don't have a local .nuget file/folder in my project.

For testing purposes I checked out a clean copy of CW's MonoAGSGames repo and tried to build it. I get the same problem here.

Edit: Another thing I tried: I checked out another clean copy of the original MonoAGS solution. This I can build and run without problems

[Allow NuGet to download missing packages]

I really don't know what happened to my VS installation. First I had problems with the SDK not installed, and now there is something wrong with nuget. In the options I have Allow NuGet to download missing packages and Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio checked but it is simply not done during build.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my pitch was:
...

I thought so
It's a nice setting but like Snarky, I couldn't really imagine what the gameplay would be like.

[Autofacs]

How did you create your game project?

I created a new empty solution with VS. I then added a new empty game project and a game.Desktop project from visual studio. I created a local git repo for it and included a git submodule of MonoAGS. Then I added AGS.Api, AGS.Engine and AGSEngine.Desktop to the solution using VS.
When I build the solution, I get the following message:

Severity   Code   Description   Project   File   Line   Suppression State
Error   CS0246   The type or namespace name 'Autofac' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)   AGS.Engine.Desktop   D:\Daten\MonoAGS\Games\CorneliusCat\MonoAGS\Source\Engine\AGS.Engine.Desktop\AGSEngineDesktop.cs   4   Active

AGSEngine.Desktop has a reference to Autofac, while AGSEngine has Autofac as nuget dependency.

Because some of the projects have evolved since then and you need to add references to Autofacs and System.ValueTuple (and possibly Guilabs.Undo). These are not mentionned in the docs.
However they are not simple Assemblies/DLLs. They are NuGet packages, so to add them you need to right-click on "References" in Visual Studio, and select "Manage NuGet Packages" (please indicate if this option is not present). Then in the new panel that opens you need to select the "browse" tab, and in the search box type "Autofacs". Once you find the reseult, click on "Install". Do it again for the two other packages.

If you find that they are already installed, then you need to force Visual Studio to re-download them (because it doesn't like sources and packages to be moved around). The simplest way is to delete the ".nuget" folder from your project (not in Visual Studio, on the actual hard drive).

I assumed that this is nuget related. But didn't know how to tackle it. I now did as you suggested (the broken autofac reference was then replaced by a working one and there is now a newly created packages folder in my solution) and I can compile now.

The question is: Why did I have to do this in my new solution with the git submodule but not in the original checkout of MonoAGS? Because there I magically have the packages folder already and the references work.

Edit: I realised that re-installing autofac did not cause any pending changes in the repo, i.e. just the packages folder was created. When I do a clean checkout, is there a command I can run on nuget to automatically retrieve all missing packages? I think this is the actual step that was missing.
Edit: re-installing autofac did actually cause a change to the submodule, which I of course don't want.

I'm sure I just missed some documentation somewhere but I can't find it.
I created a new solution and added my game projects as well as Api, Engine and Engine.Desktop projects from the git submodule. But I get an error that autofac is missing. I don't have the packages folder that I have in my other checkout. What do I have to do to get it? It is not checked in, so there has to be some other package management.

Thanks Babar!
@Danvzare Having played the game should be a prerequisite to suggesting it.
@KyriakosCH The continuing proposal of your own game (see rules in first post) now got you a permanent ban for it being chosen as PotM.

For now the download link works. When AGS Archive is turned off, a whole lot of games in the database need to be updated.

[AGS 4.0]

Sooner or later, a new version of AGS will be needed. I want to start a discussion because I want to see the general vibe of the community about this.

Several people started projects for this, to my mind come

• AGS 4.0 which is a cleanup of the existing AGS engine
• MonoAGS, created by tzachs as AGS successor
• XAGE by Clarvalon

The question is, how should we, as AGS community, treat those projects? I started this topic because of Monsieur OUXX's thread. He suggested that MonoAGS should be allowed for MAGS. How much space do we want to give it in the forum already? He also suggested to make topics about it in the technical boards.

Some advantages I see in giving MonoAGS or XAGE more attention:

• Make it more visible, spread the knowledge
• The sooner people use it, the sooner there is feedback for the developer(s)
• Prepare for a smooth transition to a new tool

Some disadvantages

• It is in a very early stage and probably only useable to a few hardcore game developers, not the majority here.
• There is no official successor of AGS
• It could be confusing, especially for the technical boards, especially with more different engines

Do we want to define an official AGS successor? Shall we wait and see how projects develop? Maybe it is time to have a separate board for MonoAGS where all technical stuff can be discussed? Shall it be allowed for MAGS?

What are the thoughts of the engine developers, game deveopers, the community?