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I created a small web tool for the AGS community that takes translations from an Excel spreadsheet (in XLSX format) and injects them into an existing Adventure Game Studio TRS file.

It runs directly in your browser. No files are uploaded to any server, and all processing happens locally. Here is the link:

https://tools.rubenlopez.eu/en/xlsx2trs/

By default, it does not overwrite existing translations. If you want to do that (for example, for a proofreading pass), there is a checkbox you can tick. In any case, remember to make backups and only overwrite your previous TRS file once you have reviewed the results.

Although I am not a very active AGS user myself, I occasionally help friends who are, and that is how I ended up making this tool as well. I reused some code from my own engine, which has a web-based editor. That is why this tool runs in the browser.

The tool is not open source, because at the moment it reuses a lot of infrastructure from my website which I don't want to open source, but if I find the time to disentangle it, I'll open-source the converter and maybe host it directly on github.

As a side note, maybe it would be a good idea to have something like this directly in the AGS editor. The TRS file format is not very convenient for i18n teams to work with.

I'm sorry, but this is small features that are relatively easy to script. I'd like to discuss bigger goals here, especially ones that cannot be solved with scripting or too difficult to script; and don't want this thread to become a collection of "new object property" requests.

The suggestion by @Postmodern Adventures points to something bigger. There are many small features that are missing from the engine, but are relatively easy to script. Writing these scripts (if you have the skills) or looking them up on the forums (if you don't) for the Nth time, is a waste of time, maybe not so much for an individual developer, but for the larger community it is.

The best workaround AGS offers today is templates, but that's an all-or-nothing solution. A template may have some features you want, but also others you don't, and reading a template to customize it requires good programming skills that not everyone has.

So one idea for 4.0 could be a mechanism for the community to develop extensions to the engine at a more granular level than templates, so that devs can pick and choose the individual features they need, rather than loading entire templates. For example, someone could create the Sound-on-Hover extension and publish it in some official repo. Does this make sense?

[3)]

3) Shaders, user-defined. This has been asked for so long... and this is a "industry standard" in game engines for a couple of decades now. Shader support will open innumerable possibilities for the graphic effects in games. The big question is how to implement this though. I guess, there are 2 major approaches: a) generic Shader API, and b) have users provide separate shaders per graphics driver.

One possibility is to use SPIR-V for shaders. This is the Vulkan standard, and there are tools to transpile it into GLSL, HLSL and MSL. Does this cover all the graphics drivers currently supported by AGS?