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So the idea is to have an standard description of rooms and characters, like what already exists in game.agf, but with all the remaining binary information in it too, so some rewritten engine could load this data easily. And this other engine implements the entire AGS script engine, and AGS API?

I'm not saying it wouldn't help things along a little, but it seems like if you're reimplementing the entire AGS engine, loading the AGS file formats is one of the less complicated things on your list. If I was doing it I'd want to go that extra mile because loading the original formats means compiled games can be made to run too.

Hm, I had not come across all these developers worrying about protecting their assets that much. I'm sure most would rather it was harder than easier to rip out content, if that's considered in isolation, yeah... but I'd question if they have seriously weighed up the issue.

A lot of modern commercial downloadable games I have store their data files in jpegs, pngs, xml files other easily readable formats. If it's not a big problem for them, why is it for any of us? Would any developer of a decent AGS game seriously consider not using AGS if there was a potential risk of an automatic graphics/audio ripper being made?

This is what I can think of:

Downsides:
    Would make unauthorised fan games somewhat easier to make, if someone used the source to make a ripper.
     A tiny minority of players might use the ripper to look at the later parts of the game without playing it.
    The engine source could get forked or otherwise confused with bad contributions.

Upsides:
    People can port the engine, and maintain the current ports.
    Plugins could be compiled in to the engine for other operating systems.
    This whole potential scummvm emulator deal is more possible.

The downsides seem pretty small to me, and two are dependent on someone actually making a ripper. The third is not a major issue as long as sensible controls are in place.

I did mean the engine, yes, I'm actually not sure if it's more compatible these days but certainly when I've wanted to run an old DOS game I've had problems matching Windows engine versions unless the version was very close.

An intermediate XML format for adventure games sounds unworkable to me, without strictly limiting what games are able to do. It's fine if you can define a standard adventure game API, a standard graphics system, audio systems, as well as a standard scripting language. Can't see that happening. It's hard enough to standardise web page development even when the browsers are all implementing the same specs. Game engines have entirely different capabilities, and that's a good thing for games.

CJ, is that really the only reason now for the engine being closed source? It seems like the number of people who would care about their game being decompiled is much smaller than those that'd like to be able to have more ports or to compile in plugin functionality for other OSes and stuff. Any determined person can rip graphics and audio out of a game without a decompiler, and the scripts are irretrievable anyway, iirc. If it's also that you'd rather work on your own project by yourself that's perfectly reasonable.

This makes a lot of assumptions about how the AGS source code works and how well AGS would fit into the SCUMMVM scheme.

Each version of AGS engine can only run games made with a narrow window of previous engines, sometimes a few releases, sometimes none. You couldn't take a snapshot of the code and support even 20% of AGS games with it. A widely compatible AGS engine would require months of dedicated work and lots of reverse engineering, even if the AGS source code was released.

It's mainly for that reason I don't think SCUMMVM compatability is a good idea. Users would expect most AGS games to run, when they probably wouldn't.

That's not to say I think open sourcing the engine would be a bad idea, if CJ wanted to do it. It would make the existing ports easier to maintain for a start, as well as allow people to make their own if they're desperate for that.

I do understand, your overall foot movement is not divisible by the number of frames so there have to be some small modifications for it to loop right, as AGS does it now. I'm just saying that movement inside the frame and slight foot adjustments could both smooth out your animation and make it work sooner than waiting for a feature to be implented. If you're ok with waiting, fine.

What sort of feature are you asking for?  A "skip X pixels each walk animation iteration" type feature could sort it out in your case, but it'd still need some moving work. Specifying a movement value for each frame could also work, and wouldn't need frame tweaks but it's more effort to implement and use. It's one of those things that it's hard to design a system for that everyone would like.

Did SCUMM really have this? Does anyone know which approach it took? Most games that have pixel perfect feet do it through animation timing alone, which I understand is harder if you are rotoscoping.

If you keep the frame size the same for all frames then the centering will be the same, you're free to move the character wherever you like inside the box, so you don't need to use scripting. Best thing to do would be to change the animation so the feet are constant rate, but if you don't want to do that you'll have to move it about inside the frame. A scripting solution would be possible but quite awkward.

The speed increase would be small anyway, and non existant in Direct3D mode. If you're very worried about unforeseen complications make a test room with a worst case number of characters and scaled objects. It shouldn't take long. That's the only way to know what is slow. Chances are nothing will be unless you're doing something very unusual.

The main thing you'll notice if you lower the framerate is a jerkier cursor. People are used to at least 60 fps on their desktop, and without motion blur a small fast moving object isn't pretty at TV/film framerates. Some console games use blur or cursor trails for that reason. Not that 30 fps is too bad. 40 looks reasonably smooth. AGS isn't really showing off, 60fps is very common in modern 2D games. 40 is a good middle ground.

It's a relatively grown up community, so I'd like to think that we're above shock games. It wouldn't work in people's favour to start posting them here. But, if someone released "KKK: Kill the Niggers Adventure" it would get removed from the games database because in practice it'd be a troll game, almost nobody would find it worthwhile so its only purpose would be to cause an argument. Chances are the game would have been created specifially to troll, and if they kept posting it, the person could be banned from here too. It's all about the intent.

On the other hand, if the racist game developer was respectful, didn't repeatedly post offensive things on the forums and didn't repost their games on the DB then they probably wouldn't be banned. Moderation isn't here to punish people's personal views when they're not causing problems. There are people on the forum that have expressed views I find idotic or disgusting, but as long as they are civil and respect the forum rules I would feel like some sort of thought policeman if I banned them.

I don't think that's close to the same thing as saying their beliefs are cool.

I went to the effort of typing it into babelfish with charmap the other day. It said "Workers of the world, unite!".

I don't really see how these communist slogans are a very hurtful thing. Unlike neo naziism, they're at least well intentioned, even if they do seem out of place in 2007. If it was slogans in favour of all the horrific stuff that communism became it'd be more equivalent, but it's slogans in spite of them.

Slava, I really don't know what to think about this whole thing. You sound paranoid, but then... maybe there really are people keeping you quiet for reasons you haven't explained, what do I know. Really am sorry about your wife if that part's accurate.

If you want a chiselled look, try using some darker shades on the face, more contrast. Suggest some harder edges and make the forehead more prominent (bring the hair up or the eyes down), add a stronger jawline. The light pink lips are pretty girly. The stubble suggestion was a good one, you can make it work, just be subtle, a little bit of darkening is fine.

http://caverider.com/temp/cl_dude.png might give some ideas.

You're not going to be banned for making a game with AGS, it's nothing to do with CJ or the forums. Obviously your game could be removed from the adventuregamestudio.co.uk games database if it was likely to bring legal trouble or was specifically aimed at offending people. So far it has never been necessary to remove anything except spam, as far as I know.

I wasn't sure when mobiles got the .net framework, but I put in "newish" because AGS was never designed for low power systems and guessed it'd probably only run well on the later ones, but a hypothetical rewrite could fix that too.

When it comes to games porting to a new platform is not necessarily that difficult, especially 2D ones. The main thing that needs to be replaced is the drawing code, which for 2D games can be as little as a few sprite blitting routines, and input code which might be more or less complicated depending on the platform. If you write one SDL backend then you've got a lot of platforms covered right away.

In most cases it's even less work if you're coding for a VM, admittedly. Only need to make adjustments for screen size and input devices. But the difference is not huge, in my opinion.

Anyway, this is not going to happen any time soon It's too much work, and really as cool as it sounds at first, playing adventure games on your handheld is not as fun as it sounds.

.net exists on Windows 98+ (obviously), XBox 360, Linux and Mac and other desktop POSIX systems (with limited compatability), and Windows mobile devices. That's pretty good, but AGS is already portable to Linux and Mac, and the 360 is not a very common system for the average owner to load programs from the internet onto. The newish Windows Mobile devices would be the only platform gained that people often ask for.

An easily portable C++ version could, in theory, go to Symbian and Windows phones, DS, PSP, GP2X and really most of the platforms people have requested. The only one I can remember that it wouldn't work on is Java based phones, like Android.

ScummVM is portable because SDL is portable, yeah (although it's not even tied to SDL, the Nintendo DS backend doesn't use it, for example). I realise AGS is not at all like this, and may never be. All I was saying is if there was a large rewrite, a clean C++ version could go to more devices.

Whatever the engine language, engines would have to be modified to take into account the different screen modes, memory amounts and input devices, so ports would require maintainers. In practice that's the main thing that prevents them.

I don't doubt that AGS could run acceptably on .net for most users. It'd become somewhat slower and memory hungry, but C# is still reasonably fast. It would be counter productive for ports, though.

If ports were something particularly CJ wanted to go for the best thing would be to work on making the current engine thoroughly platform independant. ScummVM runs on nearly anything anyone would want it to, because it was designed to. It can only do that because it's written in C/C++ (well that and it's open source, which allows anyone to maintain a port).

It's good to see more download services. They are obviously the way of the future, especially for niches that can't get retail space, but it's clearly expensive for downloads. Boxed versions of these games would end up selling for the same or less. Consider that The Longest Journey is £10/€13/$20 on Steam, and $5 more gets you Dreamfall. Personally I think Steam is more expensive than it could be, but it's still 1/2 the price.

To be fair it does sell Runaway 2 slightly cheaper than Steam, but in that case they're both rather expensive!

AGS has used DirectX as long as it has been on Windows. The latest version supports Direct3D as well. Any computer that has a DirectX supporting 3D accelerator is going to be able to play 800x600x32 in either mode, but D3D mode will let you use lots of alpha blended or scaled graphics with no slowdown. People avoid high res because they find low res easier to work on, or prefer pixel art, it's much less to do with speed.

The Geforce 4 MX was not entirely worthy of the name, certainly, but it was also a great deal faster than a Geforce 2. It was an entirely fixed function card, no shader support, which is why anything that requires shaders can't run on it, and gamers hated it so much. But for windows apps, 2D graphics and older 3D games it's going to be less trouble than anything 3DFX survived to make, for sure. Unless you play a lot of Tomb Raider 1 on DOS.

[How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?]

How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?

You know, as someone that hasn't been taught so much how adventure games work you're in a pretty good position to assess this actually. Adventure gamers are extremely nostalgic about these games, they are childhood favourites for most, and are fond of even the pointless aspects. I think that you're right about most games click options. You do always use doors and use machines and talk to NPCs, so there's very little point in multi verb interfaces in MOST adventure game designs. I don't believe that a single interaction interface reduces a game to an item hunt for the same reason. If different cursor modes don't add any choice then removing them doesn't remove one. There are uses for specified verbs, but don't feel pressured into using them. If adventure games had never transitioned from being text based then they would be much less common. Play Broken Sword 1 and 2, and (available free) Beneath a Steel Sky for examples of good games on a minimalistic interface.

"The MAJOR exception to this, of course, is the ACTUAL sierra games, especially (in my mind) Sam & Max, where I was eagerly scouring the room with all 3 click types, because I quickly realized there was comedic gold stashed away under every single rock and shrub." Sam and Max is a Lucasarts game If you like these kind of jokes attached to every click then Lucasarts is probably more your company. Or Space Quest would be your sierra game series. This kind of thing works fine for comedic games but if you're doing anything serious then most verb+item pairs can only give a "I don't want to do that" type response.

Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?

Not particularly... if you don't think it's important. A 32 bit high res game is not likely to run at full speed on a 300Mhz computer, but the large majority of people that download your game will have well over 1Ghz, so it's not an issue for most. I get the impression people think high resolution graphics in AGS are a lot slower than they really are. Look at casual games in other genres, they're aimed at low-mid range computers but 800x600 in 32 bit colour is commonplace. AGS is not a slow engine, as long as you are reasonable with the effects.

How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?

They're interesting to see, and nobody is going to be offended... it's usually a bad idea to try making an entire non adventure game in an explicitly adventure game targetted engine though. You're making more work for yourself. I might download the game if it looked good. Very few people play only adventure games.

Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead.  Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?

People should make what they enjoy making, if it's a hobby, but personally I'd rather see advancement, informed by the older adventure games, but not bound by them. Things are much easier on us than they were on developers in the 90s, and if they were still releasing games the genre certainly wouldn't have remained static. It's all too easy to copy your favourite game/band/artist, it's how many people start in any creative medium. It was pretty much what the early AGS community was about. Things are changing though, more people are thinking as independant authors, it's a good thing from my perspective. There's still a lot to explore in interactive story based games.

Banks were recently chastised for underhanded penalty charging systems, and if it's a big enough problem, you can claim a lot of the worse ones back. It worked for some people I know. But yeah, the best thing to do is read what the penalties are to start with.