AGS Project Tracker info

[AGA]

I know GitHub is now used for tracking bugs and feature requests, but until now the info from the old AGS equivalent was no longer available (the forums plugin we used is no longer compatible).

I've put together a way of accessing these issues here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/projects/open/ (and https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/projects/closed/ if you're interested).  Probably worth someone eventually going through these and identifying those that should be imported to GitHub.

If someone can identify those issues that should be ported to GitHub, I can export the raw data to make it easier to import on the other end.

[eri0o]

@AGA is there some way to dump all of these into an Excel (or Google or libre office...) Spreadsheet? I was going through these and taking notes but if there was a spreadsheet maybe it would be easier to color them as done or not relevant or to take a closer look later.

[Crimson Wizard]

I completely forgot that these exist...

After a very quick look, some of these have already been completed,
still there are few that seems like good ideas, and not present on github tracker.

[eri0o]

There is one here that got me curious

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/projects/open/278/

Spoiler

It then suggests this idea of composite views

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/projects/open/320

I have been playing with SCI Companion, and it apparently doesn't have it

https://scicompanion.com/Documentation/views.html

But in reality it kinda does, character portraits usually have mouth, eyes and face as independent entities - so they can talk AND blink. I haven't got much into it yet how it works, there are many scripts that are just included in all games, so it appears that the engine doesn't have much standard behavior it's just that some scripts are just reused in every game.

The more common use of this that I have seen is the use of something like skeleton animation though.

Obviously a lot of the cost of implementation of something like this is making the Editor for this which is almost an application in itself.

[close]

Other one I saw is the music loop one, I sort of have a kludge of my own for that, I have a few musics in a game that is a sequence of 4 loops, and I want to be able once the player does something to let it roll to the next section and then lock it in a loop. What I did is I sliced it in 4 separate files, and then I use PlayQueue just before the music is going to end and if the player hasn't done what's necessary I queue the same loop and if they did, I queue the next one.

[Crimson Wizard]

There is one here that got me curious

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/projects/open/278/

It then suggests this idea of composite views

I had this idea of composite views very early on, but never got to actually design that.
Besides the composite views there's also an idea of parent-child object relation, which example may be seen in Direct3D / SpriteVideo plugin.

But I should have realized earlier that there are big changes, and then there are small additions to existing functions, and they may co-exist for some time.


Reading the proposal of FollowCharacter switching follower's loop today, I'd rather make that work, because it's easy. This can be done by adding a third parameter to FollowCharacter (maybe flags: sync loops + sync frames etc), or adding new special value for distance (like FOLLOW_EXACTLY_LOOP, FOLLOW_EXACTLY_FRAME), and then adding extra internal flag to character, which tells to switch loops and/or frames when following someone.

[eri0o]

That wouldn't work in reality once you need the character to speak you need to turn that off somehow - the loop/frame syncing.

Also I am not at home, but does mouse middle click in a tab in ags Editor, closes the tab? (was looking into the suggestion for close in tabs which is actually addressed in ags4) Mouse middle click for closing the tabs I think is in ags4 already too.

I see also a back and forwards button in the editor suggestion, I tried to do this at some point and failed, but I don't remember what was the issue with it, I think I need to scavenge my branches... One other thing that isn't there but I have hacked code somewhere is for a filterable property grid. I keep forgetting to try to fix the issues of this and see if I can get it to work.

[Crimson Wizard]

That wouldn't work in reality once you need the character to speak you need to turn that off somehow - the loop/frame syncing.

True, but this will depend on a use case. An original proposal was referring to attaching heads to characters, meaning they would have to be animated separately anyway during speech. So while the character is walking, it could follow with loop and optionally frame syncing, and when character is speaking the script will call FollowCharacter once again without loop/frame syncing, and run speech animation.

EDIT: But then, loop and frame are not the only things that have to stay in sync. Scaling too. And maybe other visual effects. So that's still not a trivial situation.

[Snarky]

EDIT: But then, loop and frame are not the only things that have to stay in sync. Scaling too. And maybe other visual effects. So that's still not a trivial situation.

But if the following character is set to FOLLOW_EXACTLY it should have the same coordinates as the primary character and hence the same scaling, region shading, etc., right?

If you are thinking of ways to extend this feature, would it perhaps be possible to add a way to merge the sprites before scaling, to deal with this "bug"?

[Crimson Wizard]

If you are thinking of ways to extend this feature, would it perhaps be possible to add a way to merge the sprites before scaling, to deal with this "bug"?

I was not thinking about extending "follow character" feature much, I believe it's too limited, and there has to be something else for the long run, like one of the two mentioned earlier ideas: composite views or parent-child object linking.

As for "merging sprites", baking multiple sprites together is technically possible, but if it's done automatically by the engine then it's not as trivial and has to be carefully designed. Definitely this must not be done "on the fly", as this may decrease performance, countering all the performance improvements we did in the last couple of versions. There have to be clear defined condition under which this happens. These baked sprites have to be in the cache too, and for the cache they have to have a way to identify which sprites are merged, and probably which effects were on these sprites too, etc etc.

I cannot tell if this work will be justified by fixing a small glitch that may be fixed in other ways.

Besides, right now there's already an existing method involving dynamic sprites, which is under full user's control. It's not immediately clear to me whether automatic solution will have much advantage over that.

[AGA]

@AGA is there some way to dump all of these into an Excel (or Google or libre office...) Spreadsheet? I was going through these and taking notes but if there was a spreadsheet maybe it would be easier to color them as done or not relevant or to take a closer look later.

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/view_smf_projects.html, with raw data at https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/view_smf_projects.csv if you needed it.

[eri0o]

Thank you @AGA !!! That is very helpful!