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Wow thanks CJ! Much appreciated!

Hi CJ

Now we have the ability to create views programatically, another thing that would be amazingly useful would be the ability to import a sprite from a filename using the same behaviour that Quick Import Sprites uses, with the ability to replace existing sprites by passing a sprite number, as well as the ability to create Sprite Folders.

Thanks!

lemmy

awesmoe stuff thanks loads CJ!

[Native.GetAreaMaskPixel]

Hi CJ! We've done a lot of work on the AGX integration. However along the way I've cheated a little and used a few things out of the AGS.Native namespace. I know this is a bit of a no no due to it being at risk of being refactoring etc, but we were eager to get it in for TFE development and I've also abstracted it all into another class so it would be easy to switch over.

The main change is a visual character placement tool. When you add a teleport, walkto, or pose change to the AGX script, it will display the target room and allow you to click/drag or nudge the character to their target position (Click for full image)



All characters present in the room according to the currently edited script will be displayed in their current pose and position, so you can align them up perfectly in cutscenes without ever having to edit X, Y coordinates. It can also display walkable areas to aid in placing your characters, and takes into account character scaling for walkable areas.

Obviously some of these are poking around where they shouldn't be, so I just thought I'd make you aware of what we're using, if any of it breaks in future versions it's obviously our own fault :

Native.GetAreaMaskPixel to get hold of the WalkableArea indices.
Native.LoadRoomFile to get hold of a loaded Room ptr needed to draw the background, and also to get access to WalkableAreas for scaling min / max values.
Native.DrawRoomBackground to actually draw the background.

That's all the functionality it uses, I think.

Thanks CJ! and apologies for poking about in lovely AGS's innards :o

lemmy

Thanks guys! Your supoprt means a lot! We've added zoom, character scaling and walkable area support now Refresh the images to see.

L&B Team

[Visual character positioning]

AGX plugin update guys and gals!

We've finally got the AGX editor integrated into AGS, which has allowed us to interface with AGS more closely and to provide the AGX script editor with funky features such as:

Visual character positioning

When you add a teleport, walkto, or pose change to the AGX script, it will display the target room and allow you to click/drag or nudge the character to their target position (Click for full image)



All characters present in the room according to the currently edited script will be displayed in their current pose and position, so you can align them up perfectly in cutscenes without ever having to edit X, Y coordinates again! It can also display walkable areas to aid in placing your characters, and even obeys character scaling set up for walkable areas!

Thanks to CJ for the awesmoe plugin interface!

Thats all folks!

Will keep you posted on any new additions as and when they go in!

L&B Team

awesmoe thanks CJ!

oop, actually while I think of it, the ability to add new files to source control too would be handy.

Thanks muchly!

lemmy

Hi CJ!

Just wondered if there was any interface to the source control integration for AGS editor plugins?

Basically, on edit of one of the AGX rtf files inside the editor, I'd like to be able to pop up the check out box with both the source rtf file, and the game data .xml file that rtf file generates on save, and be able to add both these files to the "pending checkin" dialog box.

Is this possible, and if not, would it be possible to do it in future?

Thankies!

lemmy

Looking great guys! Congrats on the progress will keep my eye open for this one

Deluxe Paint

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint

It would mean people would have to pay for make a game that they may only want to distribute as freeware and then they have to make games to meet with Steam's approval. What happened to the good old, style adventure games that was what made the program great. They could make huge games or simple ones. It was available to people who were rich or poor. CJ still has the rights to AGS 3 I assume, so why not simply offer it as the free version and the new engine as the paid one.

Yes, but then how would CJ make all the lovely cash from XNA Studio? I'll bet CJ coded a killswitch into the AGS engine so he could stop all AGS games working all over the interweb, to ensure he could make lots of cashonga once BigBlueCup got bought by the big boys. I would have if I were him!! That's Freebie 101 there rock_chick!

Besides, we already paid CJ a bung to be able to get AGX ported over so we're safe!

What are you going to do about all this Xna crap?

I'm sure we'll scrape by!

This game looks great and all, but where are her shoes?

And her raincoat? She must be freezing out there. Have you guys set up scene dependent costumes or do you have another governing system?

Cheers,
Paul.

Trust us when we say this point does not go unaddressed, no pun intended.

Wooo congrats CJ! Rewriting the whole of AGS for XNA huh? Shouldn't take long! Woooooo etc!!!

I take it from this that your C64 port has been cancelled though? :'(

One thing I've noticed is that when a 320 x 200/240 game is upscaled to 640 x 400/480 in DX 9 mode, the character scaling is done on the 640 x 400 screen, so you end up with characters that are higher resolution than the backgrounds which can look a bit odd. Is there (or would it be possible to have a way) to force characters to be drawn at the unscaled resolution as 320 x 200/240 is quickly becoming an unsupported screen resolution, but is needed for the retro look a lot of AGS games go for.

Thanks!

lemmy

Also what would be fab would be a similar interface to get at the room background graphics, and possibly even walkable areas. We're looking to add a room picture to the Teleport dialog wizard used by the AGX script so the user can select a target room and click the x, y, coords on the background itself.

Thanks again!

lemmy

That would be awesmoe, thanks CJ! I can get the dimensions from the Image object to figure out the size to draw it at upscaled.

Thank you!

lemmy

That'd be awesmoe, thanks CJ!

One other thing, what is the control class you're using to display scaled sprites on forms?

PictureBox horribly filters the sprites when they are scaled, and any C# controls I find around the net are awfully slow drawing for animating on a timer. I'm assuming whatever class you're using I could grab from the AGS.Types namespace and place on my forms by placing a dummy panel and changing the variables in the designer code?

Otherwise I guess I'd have to write one myself (pah! such an un-windows programmingy thing to do! )

Thanks!

lemmy

4 8 15 16 23 42...

12... 27... 43... 66... 108

Huh. A new religion is born...

Considering Dharma has roots in Buddism I'm guessing that was an element of how they came up with the numbers.

Oops, I think I did forget to add access to Views to the API. I'll look into it.

I was wrong about my solution as I was looking at the contents of Game, not IGame, in the references viewer, but still got it to work as I hacked it a bit..

I just casted IGame into Game to get at the ViewFolders. I guess you're planning on adding that to the interface so it can be non-hacky anyway i got it working an have a pose previewer for each character. Yay! Screenies soon.

Thanks again!

lemmy

I figured I'd change this thread into a thread of AGSEditor Plugin questions or requests, so they're not cluttering up the suggestion threads or repeated new threads posted.