ProgZMax has made a custom, "buff" edition of the AGS Editor. Back up your game first, then give it a spin and all your problems will disappear.

AGS Editor source code available

CJ has put the editor source code up now. NB the engine and compiler are still closed, and CJ will not support custom editor versions or games made with them.

The annual forums-used-to-pawn topic!

This year's forum topic titled something similar to "Forums aren't what they used to be", is the one by Erenoth. Old forumites that stil lurk from the golden era of 2003-4, have posted their thoughts on the matter. They are relative to the list below:

A. Ah, when Yahtzee was here things were better!! (then he went arrogant and left.)

B. I remember Adventure Game Creator..(it was on DOS)

C. I remember Helm, he never let anyone insult him (he did it once and left the forums)

D. Self-referential jokes about "how nostalgia threads on the forums aren't as good as they used to be" aren't as good as they used to be.

Some people said that the forums are better now and that people should move on with their lives. Those that said it were stoned.

Another relative topic can be found here

A sign to view

Well, the great one has spoken. The very founder of the religion known as "AGS" His Most Circumalliumness Christopher Quentin Jones has deigned to read my humble blog. And in doing so, he commanded me to write about the AGS "Assign to View" feature. How can I but obey?

The "Assign to View" feature is a handy way to "push" sprites into views from the sprite manager, rather than "pulling" them into a view one at a time from the View manager. You'll find it in AGS 2.72 as well as the most recent 3.0, but I'll describe the new one here. They're both pretty intuitive once you know they're there, anyway.

So, first click or drag or shift-click or control-click to select the sprites you want to add to a view. This might be part of your walk cycle or another animation that you've imported. Then, right-click on one of your selected sprites and a huge menu pops up with more options than you can shake a stick at.

Choose the "Assign to view" option and a dialog box pops up in the Editor. Here you can select how to add these sprites to a view and clicking on the button beside the view number give you another dialog box that lets you choose which view, along with a handy preview of existing loops in the view.

If you choose all the options you require, you can then head over to the View editor tab and check out your lovely new frames, loops and views. Easy as pie.

AGS 3.0: The Editor

One of the biggest AGS events recently was the release of version 3.0. This is the biggest change in the editor since it moved from DOS to Windows! The actual script language has changed very little in this new version (see previous blog posts for those wee changes), and so that part is reasonably painless in upgrading, but the editor is waaay different.

First, you need to download the .NET framework, which gives the new editor its standard look-and-feel, and saves CJ re-inventing the wheel. You can then run the AGS 3.0 installer (yes, it now has an installer!) or there is a zipped version if you prefer DIY installation.

So now you can have multiple scripts open at once (via tabs at the top of the page), you ran set breakpoints in the code, and single-step through them with the editor and game side-by-side, you can import editor plug ins like the great Media manager and the whole thing has a much more modern look to it. I'd really recommend going in and having a play, and CJ is particularly open to fixing minor usability issues as new people come to use AGS 3.0, so the 3.01 beta already has a lot of things fixed in it.

Another major point is the support for version control systems, like Perforce and Subversion, so large projects with lots of people working can all gel together better, and you can keep track of all changes to your game so when you say, "Oh flippety-flop, I didn't mean to delete that" you can cancel your checkout or go back to an old version of your code.