Settingupthegame - morganwillcock/ags-manual GitHub Wiki

Setting up the game

Now that you know how to create a room, it's time to set up the game-wide settings. These include inventory items, sprite graphics, palette setup and other things which do not depend on individual rooms.

Palette setup

The first thing you need to do when you create a new game is to decide whether you want to use 8-bit (palette-based) color or 32/16-bit (true-color / hi-color). If you want to use 32/16-bit color, you can still use 256-color backgrounds and sprites if you want to, but the engine will only run in a 32-bit color resolution, thus slowing it down.

If you want to use 8-bit, you need to set up the palette. This is because all sprite and background scene imports rely on the palette setup to be the same. You CANNOT use hi-color nor true-color sprites or backgrounds in a 256-color game. All this means, use 8-bit color only when you know what you are doing or when you intentionally want to punish yourself with lots of nerdy fumbling around on settings for colormodes that were not artist's decisions but actual hardware limitations of the time and every artist is glad these restrictions are no longer in place. But you can do really cool color cycling effects only in 8-bit games, other than that this is really outdated technology, but it still works of course, and how it works is explained in the next paragraphs.

You set your chosen color depth by opening the General Settings pane and adjusting the Color Depth setting near the top of the list.

Now, choose the "Colors" pane. Here you will see the 256-color palette displayed in a grid. Most of the slots are marked "X" - these are the slots reserved for the background pictures, and will be different in each room. The other colors will be as they look here for the entire game. These fixed colors allow things like the main character graphics, which must be displayed on more than one screen, to work.

If you want, you can assign more or less colors to the backgrounds. To toggle the background assignment on/off, click on the slot, then check the "This color is room-dependent" box to swap the slot's status.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must set up the palette as you want it before you start making your game - if you change it later, you will have to re-import all the sprites and background scenes.

You can select multiple color slots by clicking on the first slot, then shift-clicking on the last slot in the range you want to select. You can then toggle the background status of all the selected slots at once.

You can right-click in the palette grid to export the entire palette to a .PAL or PCX file which you can then use to read back into the Editor in a different game. If you choose to export to a pcx file, then a screen shot of the Palette Editor will be saved as the picture. This way you can see all the game-wide colors in the file.

The "Replace palette" option replaces the palette entries with those entries from the PAL or PCX file you choose. It can read standard 768-byte PAL files, SCI palette resources (renamed to extension .pal) and JASC PSP palette files.

Inventory

Most adventure games allow the player to carry a set of objects, which he can then use to solve puzzles. Adventure Game Studio makes this inventory easy for you to manage.

Every inventory item which the player may carry during the game at one time or another is listed under the "Inventory items" node. Here, each item has a number and a script name which you use in scripts to identify the object. To create a new item, right-click on the "Inventory items" node.

Double-click on an inventory item to open it up. On the left you'll see the graphic used for the object in the inventory window. To change this, select the "Image" entry in the property grid on the right, and click the "..." button.

The last thing to do with the inventory items is to define their events: what happens when the player manipulates them in the inventory window. Click the "Events" button (the lightning bolt button at the top of the property grid), which brings up a list which works identically to the hotspot events. The available events are described in the reference section.

NOTE: Each character in the game carries their own set of inventory items. This means, if you want to create a game like Day of the Tentacle, where the player can control three different characters, each character will have a separate inventory.

You have two choices about how the inventory is displayed to the player -- a built-in inventory window to get you started, and support for custom inventory windows when you're ready to make your own.

The default option is the Sierra-style pop-up inventory window, which is popped up by clicking on the Inventory icon on the icon bar. You can also have the current inventory item displayed in its own button on the icon bar by creating a button on the GUI and setting its text to (INV) which stretches the item picture to the button size, or (INVNS) which draws the inventory item picture straight onto the button with no resizing. Finally, (INVSHR) , probably the best option, will draw it at actual size if it will fit, or shrink it if not.

The other option is a custom inventory window. To use this, you will need to edit the GUI to add it, so I will explain this later on. While you are starting off with AGS, it is recommended to use the supplied standard Sierra-style inventory window.

Finally, you may have noticed a "Hotspot Marker Settings" frame at the top of the Inventory pane. This allows you to switch on an option so that when the selects an inventory item, the mouse cursor for it will have a dot and mini-crosshair drawn on it, to show the player where the hotspot is. You can enter the color for the center dot and also for the surrounding 4 pixels.

Importing your own sprite graphics

When you were choosing the graphics for the object earlier in this tutorial, you probably noticed that most of the graphics available didn't look up to much. This is no problem, because you can import your own graphics using the Sprite Manager.

Go to the Sprites pane in the editor. Here, you will see the complete sprite set for the game. There are two ways to import your graphics - either overwrite an existing slot with your graphic, or create a new slot for it.

To overwrite an existing sprite, right-click the sprite and select "Replace sprite from file". To import a new slot, right-click on the background to the window and choose "Import new sprite".

The graphic you choose to import must be at the same color depth as your game (i.e. if you are using hi-color backgrounds, your sprites must be hi-color, and vice versa). AGS will attempt to convert the image if possible, but if your game is 256-color then the results of downgrading a hi-color image can be poor.

Then, the Import Sprite window will appear. Here, you need to decide which portion of the image will be imported. You do this by right-clicking and dragging in the image, which will produce a yellow rectangle showing the selection. Once you are happy with it, left-click to import. Alternatively, you can import the entire image with the "Import whole image" button.

NOTE (256-color only): You may well find that the colors on your graphic look slightly strange in the AGS Editor. This is because the sprites are only allocated, by default, the first 41 of the palette colors (see the palette section), so your graphic will be remapped to this much smaller palette. If you find that many of your imported sprites look strange, you can increase the number of colors assigned to sprites, at the expense of background colors (again see the section above for information on how to do this).

If your sprite will only be used in one room then alternatively you can use the "use background palette" option, which will remap your graphic to the palette of the room currently loaded, giving much better results. Note, however, that if you do this, and then try and use the sprite on another screen, its colors will most likely be screwed up. To use the room palette, check the "Use room background" check-box. Make sure to un-check this box before you import any other sprites.

NOTE: The transparent color used by AGS is palette index 0 (for 256-color sprites) and RGB (255,0,255) for hi-color. Any pixels you draw on imported sprites in these colors will be transparent.

You can group imported sprites into folders. This prevents the main sprite list from becoming too long. By default, the Sprite Manager displays the Main folder, which contains some graphics and a sub-folder called "Defaults". Folders work the same way as Windows folders. Right-click on a folder in the tree to rename it or make a sub-folder.

You can delete a folder by right-clicking on it and selecting the "Delete" option; beware though that this will also delete all the sprites in the folder.

Tiled sprite import

You may have noticed a checkbox called "Tiled sprite import". Some people find this a useful way of importing many frames of a character's animation at once.

In order for this to work, you need to have all your sprites lined up on your source bitmap at even intervals. Then, use the "Import from file" option and import it as usual. Check the "Tiled sprite import" box, and select the upper-left frame.

When you click the left mouse button, the selection rectangle will become un-filled and now you can drag the mouse to define how many frames to import - they'll all be enclosed by selection rectangles. Once you have the correct number, click the left button again and they will all be imported.

Alpha blended sprites

AGS supports alpha blended sprites if your game is 32-bit color. In this case, you need to import a PNG image with an alpha channel (you cannot paste alpha-blended images from the clipboard).

When you do so, AGS will prompt you asking whether you want to use the image's alpha channel or not. If you select Yes, then the sprite will be drawn alpha blended in the game if it is used for a character, object, mouse cursor or GUI.

Note that if you use alpha blending, any overall transparency that you set (such as Character.Transparency, Object.Transparency, GUI.Transparency) will be ignored.

NOTE: Currently, alpha blended sprites cannot be antialiased, so if you have the Anti Alias Sprites option turned on in Setup, it will not be applied to alpha-blended characters.

Introduction sequences

You can easily add intro, outro and cutscene sequences to your game. There is no specific function to do these, but using the provided animation and script commands you can create almost anything you might need.

Normally, the game will start in room 1. This is defined by the starting room number of the player character. To change it, open up the player character's Character pane, and change the StartingRoom number in the property grid.

TIP: The starting room facility is also useful when testing your game. You can make the game start in any room, at the point where you are testing it, rather than having to keep playing the game through to get there.

Cutscenes are created using the normal animation script commands, such as Character.Walk, Object.SetView, and so forth. I would suggest you leave this until you are more comfortable with AGS, and have some experience of how to use these functions.

Animations

In most games you will use some sort of animation during the game, whether it be a flag waving in the breeze or the player bending over to pick something up. The term "animation" refers to the ability to change the look of, and move, objects.

Animations in AGS are managed using Views. A "view" is a set of one or more "loops". A loop is a set of frames which, when put together, give the effect of movement. Each frame in the view can be set a graphic and a speed.

Go to the editor's "Views" node, right-click it and select the "New view" option to create us a new, empty view. Double-click the new view to open it. Each loop is displayed horizontally with its number at the left hand side, frames going out to the right. To add a frame, click the grey "New frame" button. To delete a frame, right-click it.

To change a frame's graphic, double-left-click it. The sprite list screen will be displayed (you may remember this from the Object graphic selection) where you can choose the graphic you want to use for this frame.

Note that for walking animations, the first frame in each loop is reserved for the standing frame, and when walking it will only cycle through from the second frame onwards.

You select a frame by left-clicking it -- when you do so, the property grid will update with information about the frame. One of these settings is called "Delay", which is the frame's relative speed. The larger the number, the longer the frame stays (i.e. the slower it is). When the animation is run, an overall animation speed will be set, so the actual speed of the frame will be: overall_speed + frame_speed . Note that you can use negative numbers for the frame delay to make it particularly fast, for example setting it to -3 means that the frame will stay for hardly any time at all. Animation speed is specified in Game Loops (i.e. animation speed 4 will show the frame for 4 game loops - at 40 FPS, that would be 0.1 seconds).

The "Sound" property allows you to enter a sound number that will be played when this frame becomes visible on the screen. This is especially useful for footstep sounds.

You run an animation by using the script animation commands, which will be explained in detail later. Briefly, to animate an object, you first of all need to set the object's view to the correct view number (use the Object.SetView script command), and then use the Object.Animate script command to actually start the animation.

Characters

A character is similar to an object, except that it can change rooms, maintain its own inventory, and take part in conversations (more on these later). It can also have its own custom animation speed and movement speed.

Go to the "Characters" node in the main tree. You will see under it a list of all the characters in the game. To create a new character, right-click the "Characters" node and choose the "New character" option.

You will see that there are a lot of options which you can set for each character. The most immediately obvious one is the "Make this the player character" button, which allows you to change which character the player will control at the start of the game. When the game starts, the first room loaded will be this character's starting room.

The rest of the options are hidden away in the property grid on the right. Some of them are described below:

The "UseRoomAreaScaling" option allows you to specify whether this character will be stretched or shrunk in scaling areas of the screen. You might want to disable this if you have a character who always stands still in the same place, and you want the graphics on-screen to be the same size as you drew them, even though he is standing on a scaled area.

The "Clickable" option tells AGS whether you want the player to be able to click on the character. If Clickable is enabled, then the character will be interactable, like the way things worked in Sierra games. If it is not enabled then the character works like the main character did in LucasArts games - if you move the cursor over him or click to look, speak, etc, then the game will ignore the character and respond to whatever is behind him.

To set which room this character starts in, change the "StartingRoom" property. You can set the character's location within this room by using the "StartX" and "StartY" properties to type in the X,Y co-ordinates you want him to start at. These co-ordinates define where the middle of his feet will be placed.

The "NormalView" is where you set what the character looks like. You must create a view in the View Editor, and this view must have either 4 or 8 loops. If you use 4 loops, then when walking diagonally the closest straight direction is used for the graphics. Each loop is used for the character walking in one direction, as follows:

 Loop 0 - walking down (towards screen)
 Loop 1 - walking left
 Loop 2 - walking right
 Loop 3 - walking up (away from screen)
 Loop 4 - walking diagonally down-right
 Loop 5 - walking diagonally up-right
 Loop 6 - walking diagonally down-left
 Loop 7 - walking diagonally up-left

To change the rate at which the character animates, change the Animation Speed box. Here, a smaller number means faster animation. Note that this does NOT effect the speed at which the character actually moves when walking.

NOTE: The first frame in each loop is the standing still frame. When walking, the game will cycle through the rest of the frames in the loop.

The "MovementSpeed" option allows you to control how fast the character moves when walking. Here, a larger number means he walks faster. If you find that a movement speed of 1 is still too fast, you can use negative numbers (eg. -3) which will move even more slowly. The lower you go, the slower the movement speed.

The "SpeechColor" option specifies which color is used for the text when this character is talking. It effects all messages that are said by this character. You can find out the color for each number by going to the "Colors" pane.

The "IdleView" option allows you to set an idle animation for the character. To do this, create a new view, with one or more loops of the character idle (eg. smoking, reading a book, etc). Then, set the "Idle view" to this view number. If the player stands still for 20 seconds (you can change the timeout with the Character.SetIdleView script function), then the current loop from the idle view will be played.

The "ScriptName" property sets the name by which the character will be referred to in scripts and in conversation scripting. The difference from the RealName of the character is that the script name may only contain letters A-Z and numbers 0-9 (the first character must be a letter, however). The convention in AGS is that character script names start with a lower case "c".

To set what happens when the player interacts with the character, click the "Events" button (this is the lightning bolt button at the top of the property grid). You will be presented with the events list; select an event and press the "..." button to allow you to enter some script to handle the event.

You can also set a talking view for the character. To set one, use the "SpeechView" property. If you set a talking view, then that view will be used to animate the character while they are speaking. You should generally have about 2-3 frames in each loop (the loops are used for the same directions as in the main view).

There is also an available "Blinking view". This is used to play intermittent extra animations while the character is talking. You may want to use this for effects such as blinking (hence the name). If you set a view here, it will play intermittently while the character talks (it is drawn on top of the normal talking view). The default time between it playing is 3-4 seconds, but you can change this with the Character.BlinkInterval script property. NOTE: the blinking view is currently only supported with sierra-style speech.

"UseRoomAreaLighting" allows you to tell AGS whether this character will be affected by light and tint levels set on room regions.

If you disable "TurnBeforeWalking", it will override the General Setting for turning and tell AGS not to turn this particular character around on the spot before they move.

"Diagonal loops" specifies that loops 4-8 of the character's view will be used for the four diagonal directions. If this option is not enabled, the character will only face 4 ways, and you can use loops 4-8 for other purposes.

"Adjust speed with scaling" modifies the character's walking speed in line with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Adjust volume with scaling" modifies the volume of any frame-linked sounds on the character's view (eg. footstep sounds) with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Solid" specifies that this character is solid and will block other characters from walking through it. Note that both characters must be solid in order for them to block one another.

AGS allows you to export your characters to a file, and then import the file into a different game - so you can share the same main character between games, or create one for distribution on the internet. Right-click on the character and choose "Export character". The entire character setup and graphics will be exported to the file, including the character's walking and talking animations. To import the character into a different game, load it up, right-click the "Characters" node and choose "Import Character". The file selector appears, where you find the CHA file which you exported earlier. A new character slot will be created and all the settings imported.

NOTE: Because importing always creates a new slot, you cannot use it to overwrite an existing character.

Conversations

While the old Sierra games were mainly based on action and not talking, the LucasArts games took the opposite approach.

If you want to create a game with conversations where the player can choose from a list of optional topics to talk about, you can now with the new Dialog Editor. Go to the "Dialogs" node.

Conversations are made up of Topics. A "topic" is a list of choices from which the player can choose. You may have up to 30 choices in a topic. However, not all of them need to be available to the player at the start of the game - you can enable various options for conversation once the player has said or done other things.

The Dialog Editor is quite self-explanatory. Double-click a dialog topic to open up its window. You'll see the list of options for the topic on the left, and the dialog script on the right. Each option has a couple of checkboxes to its right:

  • The "Show" column specifies whether that option is available to the player at the start of the game.
  • The "Say" column defines whether the character says the option when the player clicks it. The default is on, but if you want options describing the player's actions rather than the actual words, you may want to turn this column off for that dialog.

Dialog scripts

You control what happens when the player chooses an option by editing the script on the right. For more information on this script see related topic.

Parser input

You'll notice in the dialog editor, the property grid has an option called "ShowTextParser". If you enable this, a text box will be displayed below the predefined options in the game, which allows the player to type in their own input.

If they type in something themselves, then the dialog_request global script function will be run, with its parameter being the dialog topic number that the player was in.

AGS automatically calls ParseText with the text they typed in before it calls dialog_request, so you can use Said() calls to respond. See the text parser section for more info.

General settings

The General Settings pane contains a list of all the various overall options that you can set for your game.

Note that some things listed here are explained later in the documentation, so if you don't understand one of the items in this list, come back to it later.

Many of these options can be changed at runtime with the script command SetGameOption. Basic properties

  • Color Depth - the number of colors your game will use. Default is 32-bit, which lets you use all the range of colors contemporary devices support. 16-bit is rather a compatibility setting, that will reduce the size of your game resources at the cost of color precision. 8-bit color mode is a special feature for making palette-based games. See Also: Palette setup, Palette functions
  • Developer name - this will add the provided string to the game's executable properties, which will also be shown in Windows Game Explorer, if you configure integration with one.
  • Enable letterbox mode - only available if your game's resolution is 320x200 or 640x400. If you enable it, your game will run as 320x240 and 640x480 game correspondingly, while keeping room viewport size at 320x200 or 640x400, and adding black horizontal borders above and below. Today this is rather a compatibility option for importing old projects, because AGS does not have proper support for custom viewport size.
  • Game file name - your game's executable and/or data filename. This string will be used when creating game package files on disk.
  • Game name - your game's title. This string will be displayed at the window title, and also added to the game's executable properties.
  • Maximum possible score - the maximum score your game has, if you are using score mechanics, such as GiveScore script function.
  • Put sound and sprite files in source control - whether game resources, such as sprites and audio, are put under source control. For more information see Source Control integration.
  • Render sprites at screen resolution - whether characters and objects should be scaled in screen pixels rather than game pixels. What this means is that when low-resolution game is run in larger window, sprites will take advantage of this higher resolution and look less pixelated when scaled down. If you prefer to keep your game looks in particular style, this option may be locked to always "Enabled" or "Disabled"; otherwise setting it to "User defined" will let your players toggle it in game setup program to their own liking.
  • Resolution - the native resolution of your game. This is the most important option (on par with Color Depth), which determines the size of game area visible on screen at any given time. This is also the minimal size that game rooms may have. The window your game runs in may still be larger or smaller, depending on choices player made in setup program, and in that case game's image will be stretched or shrunk accordingly.

Backwards compatibility

  • Allow relative asset resolutions - if enabled then your game will scale sprites according to their resolution tags: sprites tagged as "low-res" will be scaled up in a "high-res" game (640x400 and higher), sprites tagged as "high-res" will be scaled down in a "low-res" game (less than 640x400). When disabled resolution tags will be ignored as all sprites displayed with their real size (this is default).
  • Enable mouse wheel support - if enabled, on_mouse_click can be called with the values eMouseWheelNorth and eMouseWheelSouth, which signify the user scrolling their mouse wheel north or south, respectively. NOTE: Not all mice have mouse wheels, therefore its suggested that your game should never require the mouse wheel in order to be playable - it should only be used as a handy extra.
  • Enforce new-style audio scripting - Puts the script compiler into strict mode, where it will not accept the old-style (pre-AGS 3.2) audio-related script commands.
  • Enforce new style strings - Puts the script compiler into strict mode, where it will not accept the old-style (pre-AGS 2.7) fixed-length strings.
  • Enforce object-based scripting - Puts the script compiler into strict mode, where it will not accept the old-style (pre-AGS 2.7) script commands. This should preferably be ticked, since you should no longer be using the old commands.
  • Left-to-right operator precedence - if this is enabled, then operators of equal precedence in the script will be evaluated left to right. For example, 5 - 4 - 3 could be interpreted as (5 - 4) - 3 or as 5 - (4 - 3), thus giving different results. You should always use parenthesis to clarify expressions like this, so that the operator precedence doesn't affect the result.
  • Script API version - defines the topmost level of built-in script content that you want to enable for your project. It is suggested to leave this at the "Highest" value, unless you are importing an older project and newest built-in script functions conflict with some of your own scripts. In such case you may decide between fixing your script or lowering AGS API version. The latter will let you compile game scripts without any changes, at the price of not being able to use newer built-in functions. You may still change it to "Highest" anytime later.
  • Script compatibility level - defines the lowest level of built-in content. It is useful if you wish to keep using some of the old functions that were declared obsolete by newer version of AGS. You do so by setting this switch to version that still had those functions non-deprecated.
  • Use low-resolution coordinates in script - always use 320x200 coordinate space when scripting your game, regardless of its actual resolution. Basically, your game will be treated as if it were 320x200, but pixels are of larger size. Normally this option should be off; it may only be useful when importing really old game project where such setting was a norm.
  • Use old-style custom dialog options API - switch to using pre-AGS 3.4.0 custom dialog options callbacks. The differences between old and new APIs are explained in this topic.

Character movement

  • Automatically move the player in Walk mode - normally, when you click the mouse in the Walk mode, the main character will move to where you clicked. However, if you want to create a game all viewed from a 1st-person perspective, and so don't have a main character, then disabling this option allows you to use the Walk mode for other things. If disabled, then "Character stands on hotspot" events are instead triggered by clicking the Walk cursor on the hotspot.
  • Automatically move to hotspots in Look mode - controls whether the player will walk to "walk-to" spots when the player looks at the hotspot. Normally he only walks on use, speak and use-inv.
  • Characters turn before walking - specifies that when a character starts to walk somewhere, it will first turn round to face the correct direction using available animation frames, rather than just suddenly switching to face the right way.
  • Characters turn to face direction - if set, then when a character turns round with the Character.FaceLocation or Character.FaceCharacter script commands, they will visibly turn around using their available loops. If this option is not set, they will immediately appear facing their new direction.
  • Scale movement speed with room's mask resolution - Character walking and object movement speeds will scale inversely in proportion to the current room's Mask Resolution. For example, having 1:2 mask resolution will multiply speed by 2. This is a backward compatible setting that should not be enabled without real need.

Compiler

  • Build target platforms - a checklist of platforms for which the game will be compiled.
  • Compress the sprite file - when enabled the sprites will be compressed to reduce game size, at expense of performance.
  • Enabled Debug Mode - whether the debug keys are active. When debug mode is on, you can press Ctrl-X to teleport to any room, Ctrl-S to give all inventory items, Ctrl-A to display walkable areas on the screen, and Ctrl-D to display statistics about the current room. When debug mode is off, these do nothing. See the Debugging features section for more.
  • Split resource files into X MB-sized chunks - see here for information.

Dialog

  • Allow speech to be skipped by which events - determines how and whether the player can skip speech in-game. This can be set to allow the mouse and/or keyboard, or neither, to skip speech in the game.

  • Custom Narrate function in dialog scripts - determines which function will be used to substitute standard narration in dialog scripts. For example, if you have

    narrator: The man looks you in the eye.

    in a dialog script, then normally this is replaced by

    Display("The man looks you in the eye");

    during compilation. With the above setting you can provide the name of your custom function that you've defined in your script. Such function must have one of the following prototype forms:

    function CustomNarrate1(const string text);
function CustomNarrate2(String text);

    The return value is actually not essential and may be any type. If the field is left empty then the standard Display function is used.

  • Custom Say function in dialog scripts - determines which function will be used to substitute standard character cues in dialog scripts. For example, if you have something like

    Roger: Hello, my name is Roger.

    in a dialog script, then normally this is replaced by

    cRoger.Say("Hello, my name is Roger.");

    during compilation. With the above setting you can provide the name of your custom function that you've defined in your script. Such function must have one of the following prototype forms:

    function CustomSay1(Character *c, const string text);
function CustomSay2(Character *c, String text);
function CustomSay3(this Character*, const string text);
function CustomSay4(this Character*, String text);

    Last two variants are extender functions for Character struct. The return value is actually not essential and may be any type. If the field is left empty then the standard Character.Say function is used.

  • Dialog bullet point image - defines the number of sprite to use as a bullet image before each dialog option.

  • Gap between dialog options - defines the gap between the options displayed to the player in a conversation. Normally this is 0, which means the options are right below each other. Changing it to 1 or 2 can make the option display look less cluttered; it's a matter of personal preference.

  • Number dialog options - enables keyboard shortcuts to choose dialog options (keys 1-9) and adds an index number before each dialog option when they are displayed to the player. For example,

    1. Hello there!
2. Goodbye

    This allows you to visually show the player which option the shortcut keys will choose, as well as separating the options if you don't use a bullet point.

  • Print dialog options upwards - Normally, if you select a non-textwindow GUI for the dialog options, they will be printed from the top down. However, if you select this option they will go from the bottom of the GUI upwards.

  • Run game loops while dialog options are displayed - whether to allow game animations to continue in the background while waiting for the player to select a dialog option.

  • Sierra-style portrait location - if you're using Sierra-style speech, then this determines whether the portrait appears on the left or the right of the screen. The "alternate" setting means it swaps sides whenever a different person talks, and the "Based on X position" setting means that the side of the screen is chosen depending on where the characters are standing.

  • Speech style - in the default LucasArts-style speech, when a character talks, the speech text is displayed above their head in the game, and the character's talking view is used to animate the actual character. However, if you set this option to Sierra-style then the talking view is used to display an animating portrait separately in the top-left of the screen, with the text to the right of it. This is similar to the way that Space Quest 5, King's Quest 6 and other later Sierra games worked. You can also cycle to another option, "Sierra- style with background", which is the same except a text window is drawn behind the speech text to make it easier to read. "Whole Screen" uses a full-screen character portrait, like the way that QFG4 worked.

  • Use game-wide speech animation delay - defines whether to use game-wide speech animation delay as opposed to using the individual character settings.

  • Use GUI for dialog options - controls where the player's options for dialog are displayed. If set to 0, then in a conversation, the options will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you type in GUI's ID number, then instead the options will be displayed on the GUI you specify.

Inventory

  • Display multiple icons for multiple items - normally, if the player has two of an inventory item, the item will still only be shown once in the Inventory window. If you check this option, however, then all the copies of the item that the player has will be displayed. Useful for RPG-style inventories.
  • Inventory item cursor hotspot marker - whether AGS should automatically add a marker to inventory item cursors to help the player see where the active hotspot is on the cursor. May either draw simple crosshair using told colors, or use specified sprite.
  • Override built-in inventory window click handling - AGS has some built-in processing of Inventory Window GUI controls, whereby a right-click will Look at the item, and a left click will select it if the cursor mode is Interact. However, if you enable this option, then clicking on an inventory item in an Inventory Window will call your on_mouse_click function with eMouseLeftInv, eMouseMiddleInv or eMouseRightInv, and you then need to process it yourself. You can use the game.inv_activated variable to find out what they clicked on.
  • Use selected inventory graphics for cursors - normally, when you select an inventory item the mouse cursor is changed into that item. However, if you want to create a LucasArts-style game (where the inventory cursor is always a cross-hair), disable this option and it won't be changed.

Rooms

  • Default mask resolution - sets default value for MaskResolution property which will be applied for each new room in your game. Mask resolution defines the factor between room masks' sizes and room background size. Common is 1:1, but you can choose other options for less precise masks, which may reduce data size and slightly improve performance in high-resolution games.

Saved Games

  • Enhanced save games - makes your game's saves compatible with Windows Game Explorer. For detailed information please refer to: Enhanced Saved Games Windows Game Explorer
  • Save games extension - determines the special extension for your save files.
  • Save games folder name - determines the name of folder created in the user's Saved Games location to store your game's saves. If left blank, then the game's title is used as folder's name. You might need to change this only if your game's title conflict with some other game.
  • Save screenshots in save games - Saves a mini-screenshot of the player's current position into the save game file. This will create larger save game files, but it will mean that you can use a save game thumbnails GUI to make the save/load interface more professional.

Sound

  • Play sound when the player gets points - controls whether a sound effect is played when the player scores points. If so, you can set the sound number, which will play SOUNDx.WAV (or SOUNDx.MP3), where X is the number you set.

Text output

  • Always display text as speech - if you select this option, then all normal text in the game will be displayed above the main character's head as speech text, much like the way the LucasArts games worked. If this option is not checked, then normal text appears in a pop-up message box, like the way that the Sierra games worked.
  • Anti-alias TTF fonts - If enabled, any TTF fonts you have in your game will be rendered to the screen anti-aliased. This can make them look a lot better, but it has two drawbacks - firstly, anti-aliasing is significantly slower than normal rendering, so you might want an option to allow the player to turn it off. Second, anti-aliasing only works in hi-color games (in 256-color games, the output will look blurred and unreadable).
  • Custom text-windows GUI - allows you to customize the standard text window appearance in the game, using the specified interface element. See here for more information.
  • Custom thought bubble GUI - Determines which text window GUI is used for displaying thoughts with Think.
  • Write game text Right-to-Left - in-game text will be written right-to-left, i.e. line breaks are worked out from the end of the sentence going backwards, and the last words are displayed first. This is used by languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Visual

  • Default transition when changing rooms - defines what type of screen transition is used when moving from one room to another. Various options are available.
  • GUI alpha rendering style - determines which rendering method to use in 32-bit games when a GUI Control is drawn over GUI. The "Proper alpha blending" choice is meant for full alpha blending support, other options exist for compatibility with older versions of AGS only.
  • Pixel-perfect click detection - normally, when the player clicks the mouse, AGS just checks to see if the cursor is within the rectangular area of each character and object on the screen. However, if this option is checked, then it will further check whether the player clicked on an actual pixel of the object graphic, or whether it was a transparent part of the graphic. If this option is enabled and they click on a transparent pixel, then the hotspot behind the object will be activated instead.
  • Sprite alpha rendering style - determines which rendering method to use in 32-bit games when an image is drawn over drawing surface. The "Proper alpha blending" choice is meant for full alpha blending support, "Classic" style exists for compatibility with older versions of AGS only.
  • When player interface is disabled, GUI should - determines what happens to buttons on your GUIs while the game interface is disabled (eg. during a cutscene).

Windows Game Explorer See: Windows Game Explorer

Default setup

The Default setup pane lets you create the default runtime configuration for your game. Since AGS 3.3.5 you cannot directly do that using game's setup utility (winsetup.exe) anymore, because it modifies config file in the user's personal documents folder instead of game folder. For that reason you should be doing it from this Editor's page now.

Most of the options here correspond to the ones you may find in the setup utility. For their meaning please refer to related topic.

Additionally, following settings are available:

Setup appearance

  • Title text - the text that will appear on the title of the setup program window.

Environment

  • Custom game saves path - defines where game will store its saves and individual user's files (e.g. achievements). This path will be used to substitute default value of $SAVEGAMEDIR$ token in scripts. Note that when being set up in the Editor, this option only accepts relative paths (when used they will be relative to the game's location). This has to be done this way to prevent setting absolute path that does not exist on the player's machine, so typically you have to set this if you want to have saves stored locally within the game's folder. Players will be able to modify this path in setup program (where they are actually allowed to put absolute paths too).
  • Custom shared data path - defines where game will store its shared data files (e.g. hi-score tables). This path will be used to substitute default value of $APPDATADIR$ token in scripts. Note that this option only accepts relative paths, so typically you have to set this if you want to have data files created locally within the game's folder. Players won't normally be able to change it in setup program.

IMPORTANT: what you set on this page is a default game configuration, but it may be overriden by a user config. If you have run your game's setup program at least once and chose to save, that created a user config file in its own location. Since then changing Default Setup won't be enough to affect your game, you'd also have to change user config by running setup program again. You may also delete user config file (that is safe thing to do), which will reset settings back to default config and let you test it out.

IMPORTANT: the configuration file will only be recreated during next game compilation, so if you change these settings you will need to rebuild your game one more time to apply them.

See also: Run-time engine setup, Config file locations

Cursors

The Cursors node of the editor shows you the current mouse cursor modes available in the game. Each cursor mode performs a different action within the game. Double-click one to open it up.

The "StandardMode" option in the property grid tells AGS that this is a 'normal' cursor mode - i.e. using this cursor will fire an event on whatever is clicked on as usual. This mode applies to the standard Walk, Look, Interact and Talk modes, but you can create others too. Do not tick it for the Use Inventory mode, since this is a special mode.

The "Animate" option allows you to specify that the mouse cursor will animate while it is on the screen. Choose a view number, and the cursor will animate using the first loop of that view. You can make it animate only when over something (hotspot, object or character) by enabling the "AnimateOnlyOnHotspots" option.

The "AnimateOnlyWhenMoving" box allows you to do a QFG4-style cursor, where it only animates while the player is moving it around.

Three of the cursor modes are hard-coded special meanings into AGS:

  • Mode 4 (Use Inventory). This is special because the game decides whether to allow its use or not, depending on whether the player has an active inventory item selected.
  • Mode 6 (Pointer). This cursor is used whenever a modal dialog is displayed (i.e. a GUI that pauses the game). Normally this is a standard arrow pointer.
  • Mode 7 (Wait). This cursor is used whenever the player cannot control the action, for example during a scripted cutscene. For a LucasArts-style game where the cursor disappears completely in this state, simply import a blank graphic over the wait cursor.

For the standard modes,

  • Mode 0 will cause the player to walk to the mouse pointer location when clicked.
  • Modes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9 will run the event with the same name as the cursor mode.

Fonts

AGS comes with a couple of default fonts, but you can replace the and add your own. You can use both TrueType (TTF) and SCI fonts (Sierra's font format).

SCI fonts can be created in two ways:

  • Extract the font from a Sierra game, using the SCI Decoder program available on the internet.
  • Create your own font and save it in SCI Font format, using the SCI Graphic Studio program.

There are also some fonts available on the AGS website.

When choosing whether to use SCI or TTF font following should be taken into account:

  • SCI font is a raster (bitmap) font, which means that it does not scale and always keeps same size and pixel-precise visual shape.
  • TTF font is a vector font, that may be scaled to suit your game (you choose its size during import), and may be rendered with anti-aliasing.

In general you should prefer using TTF fonts, but SCI fonts may still be useful in low-resolution games (because not all TTF fonts scale down well) and situations where you need pixel-precise looks of the drawn symbols.

Go to the "Fonts" node in the main tree. Here you can see all the current fonts listed underneath. You can create a new font by right-clicking the "Fonts" node and choosing "New font". To overwrite an existing font, open it up and press the "Import over this font" button.

Fonts can have outlines. For LucasArts-style speech, outlines are really a necessity since they stop the text blending into the background and becoming un-readable. To outline a font, either set the OutlineStyle to "Automatic" to have AGS do it for you, or you can use a specific font slot as the outline font (it will be drawn in black behind the main font when the main font is used).

Every font have following optional properties:

  • LineSpacing - defines default difference (in pixels) between two lines of wrapped text. Setting this to 0 will make font use its own height as a vertical spacing. Having line spacing lower than font's height will make lines partially overlap.
  • SizeMultiplier - an integer scale multiplier applied to this font. Note that it is commonly makes sense to assign this for the bitmap fonts, as TTF fonts may be reimported with different font size. When set for a TTF font it will simply be initialized with a higher point-size in game.
  • VerticalOffset - defines additional vertical offset applied to every drawn line of text (when using this font). This property is mainly meant to override particular font's misbehavior.

NOTE: If you go to your Windows Fonts folder, you will not be able to select any fonts to import, since double-clicking them will open them up in the Windows Font Viewer. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this, you must either type the filename in manually, or copy the font to another folder and import it from there.

NOTE: Font 0 is used as the normal text font, and font 1 is used as the speech font. To use any additional fonts, you can set the Game.NormalFont and Game.SpeechFont properties in your script.

Now you are ready to read more about scripting.

Next Reading: Scripting Tutorial 1

Return to Tutorials Index: Tutorials Index