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I've sent off my confirmation email, I'm definately going now.  I don't have a tent that isn't mildewey and rotting so I'll probably need some donated shelter.
Do we have enough tent space to go around?

People's criticism of 2d adventure game animation being wooden is probably less to do with the low framerate than poor animation though.Ã,  For example, there are many Japanese 2d animations that look very high quality and expressive, but use comparatively low framerates due to the time it takes to draw.Ã,  It doesn't detract much from good animation with frames used in the right places.

I agree with you that the fluid, interpolated motion you get with 3d would be nice, also combining facial animation and lip sync animations together with movements could be possible, it could look very slick.
But there's a big drop in expressiveness and animation quality between amateur 2d and amateur 3d games imo, I'm not sure more fluid animation would really make up for it. (it's possible a great 3d animator could make a game with it, but it's not very likely imo)

I think this feature is only likely to be added if lots of people ask for it, and I'm not sure many people but you would want non adjusted for perspective, non lit correctly realtime 3d, unfortunately.

But if moving to supporting 3d models had the side effect of bringing in 3d hardware accelerated 2d graphics, then I'd be all for it, I can see that actually being used

I'll vote for Ozwalled

The antialiasing being built into the sprite can be better than 4 or 8x antialiasing on your graphics card in GF, it just depends on how you antialias it yourself in your paint or 3d rendering program, if you can see jaggies it's because I drew them.  My example was to test if it was working when it was first released, it's not the best kind of effect you could get with it.

Gaps in the outline are due to no scaling filtering, it didn't work on the first version that supported 32 bit (that that example was made in), I'm not sure if it works now or not.

Antialiasing doesn't generally look right in 320x240 because it's such a low resolution.  Try playing a 3d game with antialiasing on in that resolution, you'll see the same blurryness.

3d would be nice of course, but if it's mostly the antialiasing you want then 2d is just as good/better.
There are other reasons I'd like real 3d (lighting, smoother/smaller animations,shadows, perspective adjustment, being able to use lots of different angles with the same character etc etc), but it's a lot of work considering only a few games would probably use it :/

You don't need drivers installed to make the monitor work with the card, assuming it's a newish motherboard you just need get an AGP graphics card, clip it into the AGP and plug the monitor into it.  You'll just be limited to low res/colour until you set up the drivers.
Installing a hard drive is pretty simple, any cables you need will usually come with the drive.  Otherwise your motherboard may also have the appropriate cable with it. http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/tutorials/31/1/ has it step by step.
Just using the old hard drive in a new PC will probably cause problems with drivers etc, best to do a fresh install of windows on it and instal drivers from scratch.

No, I do not mean scaling "antialising" which does not blend the edges of a character with the background, just blends interior details into one another for a nicer scaling effect.
I am talking about alpha blended antialiasing.  The same kind that is in Runaway: A Road Adventure. http://www.agagames.com/scotch/alphablended.zip has an alpha blended character, if you look closely you can see the edges are antialiased, it's a bit messy so it's not the best example, but it is there.
I don't know of any games that use it yet, most AGS games are pixelled using old fashioned methods, so it's extra work to make them antialiased, and 32 bit colour is fairly new in AGS, so alpha blending hasn't been around long.

A Grim Fandango style engine is not easy to add on top of the current AGS engine for the reasons I mentioned in an earlier post.  There is probably a lot more that goes into setting up a real 3d scene than you are considering.
It's not impossible, but for all the trouble it would cause it may as well be a different program entirely.

You need to draw few different visemes, shapes for different sounds.  Put them in a nice sequence so it looks like he's speaking, and them put in some in between frames if it doesn't seem smooth enough.
http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/3ddocs/lipsync/lipsync.html has some illustrations of different shapes.  Adding a bit of movement of the whole head helps too, but that could be a bit of work on a complicated face like that.

I like your style.

Chrichton, MrColossal is refering to alpha blending in 32 bit sprites, which gives an even nicer antialiasing effect than FSAA on realtime 3d.Ã,  Not banding in colours.

The are many advantages of pre rendered sprites over realtime, in lighting, texturing, animation setup, mesh detail and other things.Ã,  The only thing the kind of realtime 3d AGS could have has over pre rendered sprites is generally a higher framerate for smoother animation.
Antialiasing already works just fine.

I don't agree with increator's comments either, but we probably would see lot of poserish, poor quality 3d.. somehow the MSpaint graphics we currently have seem much more preferable to that
If it was Grim Fandango style 3d, with perspective and lighting, that was a possible addition to AGS it would be worth it, but that's not going to happen.

I hadn't seen that interview with CJ, it's nice to see he likes the idea, I can think of loads of cool stuff I'd like to do with a 2d/3d adventure game engine.

But when you really consider how much has to change to make 3d character/2d background support work then I think you'll come to the conclusion that it may as well be done in a seperate program.Ã,  That would be the easiest way.

Of course rendering a 3d model for the character with no adjustment for perspective and flat ambient lighting straight onto the background would be possible, and would require very little to change from the way things are now, there would be very little point in it.Ã,  The character may as well be pre rendered.

The advantages of 3d are in having the characters adjusted for perspective correctly, lit correctly, perhaps casting a shadow.
For this you need to set the camera position and FOV so that the character is drawn with the correct scale and perspective as he walks around, perhaps this could be done in the editor by displaying some 3d perspective grids and moving the camera around until they fit the room, but it'd be hard.
The walkable areas would probably have to be layed out as 3d shapes (it could work with the current system, but not as well).
Character animation and texture systems would have to be completely different from AGS now, importing skeletal (probably) animations, blending between lip sync frames for speech etc.Ã,  It's quite different to the sprite based system.
Lighting would have to be placed in 3d space, the editor would have to be very different to allow for that, and there's not really any way around it that would look any good.
For more advanced 3d effects like shadows there are many other problems, but assuming people just want Grim Fandango level 3d this is what would be needed.
The whole AGS graphics engine would have to be ported to a Direct3d or OpenGl, not sure how much work that would be but it wouldn't be easy (a software renderer might be possible, but probably even harder).Ã,  And presumably people would still want compatability with non 3d accelerated hardware for their 3d games, so there would have to be two graphics engines.
The editor would have to have different panels for 2d and 3d games, for the room editor, views system, sprite/model import.

So there's just so much that is different I think, although I'd love to see a 3d AGS, it's more likely to be made as a seperate program.

If CJ wanted to do that as his next big project, or anyone else, I'd be overjoyed :)Ã,  I'd definately help out with anything I could (test models/scenes etc)

I do think some 3d hardware acceleration would be great in AGS, for more advanced 2d effects, but 3d changes too much of the underlying way things work.

AGS is as bug free as you can really expect it to be, you shouldn't put off a project until it's perfect, it never will be, this is supposed the be a stable version.
The demo game is ancient, I'm surprised it still works at all,  a new one is being worked on slowly.

Could you please avoid making titles all in capitals?

The two places people will probably suggest are http://ron.the-underdogs.org/characters.php and http://www.sylpher.com/ig

I'm sure you could make a character yourself if you really tried though, people aren't too fussy about graphics here.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ags_221.zip
Should make it work.

I've never seen a Divx movie with a logo on it.Ã,  But Xvid is similar to Divx in quality/size (slightly better in most tests I think) and it's free.Ã,  http://www.divx-digest.com/software/xvid.html has the codec on it.
The codec is only half a mb so if you're making a large game then you could include it with it and it wouldn't make much difference.Ã,  But most people who view avis from the internet much will have an xvid codec already installed.

There would be a lot to change if AGS were to support 3d characters on 2d backgrounds, aside from getting it to draw 3d models.  I'd love it to, and I'd make a 3d AGS if I had the ability, but it's not easy simply to add it on top of the current AGS.  3D characters need to be drawn correctly to fit in with the background graphics, so you need to set the camera FOV and position that fits the background, and to have the walkable areas and regions planned out with some sort of 3d structure, lighting would have to be placed in 3d space.  The whole editor would have to be different, 3d animations work differently to 2d ones, not just replacing the character model with a different one, as you do with sprites (not these days anyway).

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but I'm not sure it's worth it, considering most people are happy with 2d, and AGS is designed for Classic adventure game styles.  I do think 3d hardware accelerated 2d graphics is a good idea for AGS though.

I'm surprised there isn't a single engine available for 3d adventure games of the more modern kind.  If anyone does make a game like this in darkbasic or anything else would they consider keeping the engine as customisable as possible, and open it up for others to use?

What kind of game are you intending to make?  For adventure games I couldn't find much worth using, so I tried learning enough c++ (from knowing nothing) to make a basic 3d adventure game engine using OGRE for graphics.. I didn't manage it, but I got characters walking about and animating etc, I'm sure it's possible to make a proper game engine if you put in a few months of hard effort.
Unfortunately there aren't many simple and powerful 3d game making programs, like there are 2d ones.  Especially if like me you want to use some quite modern graphics effects.

Dark Basic is probably a good choice actually for most people, didn't have the features I wanted, but it doesn't seem too difficult to use.

Look up the RemoveWalkableArea and RestoreWalkableArea script commands in the help file.  I think they are what you're looking for.

I'm not sure what causes the delay just the first time.  But it might be the OS loading the codec and movie player.. I guess one way to make it do this beforehand would be to play a very short blank movie at the start of the game, using the same codec as the movie from later on, so that it'll already be in memory when you need to use it for a fluid transition.

if you get a frontend for it, like D-Fend (link on dosbox download page), you won't have to type anything, makes things much easier.

I haven't had any luck running ags does games in Dosbox though, if anyone has could they explain how?
I may finally get to play Novo Mestro

No, and that's intentional.

http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-70-70-4bs-4-7.html
that appears to be japanese Monkey Island, but I have no idea what a Mega CD is..