786432 pixels of AGS goodness

All those of you who don't use AGS because it doesn't have a 1024x768 mode no longer have an excuse. AGS 3.10 beta 3/3a onwards now supports every single pixel of that mode, so you can have your MS Paint artwork in gloriously unnecessary high resolution!

Go native!

CJ put out a new AGS beta yesterday and changed from 3.03 to 3.10. Why? Because this new version now optionally supports native high-resolution co-ordinates. So if you make your game in 640x400, you actually address the pixels from 0 to 639 and 0 to 399 instead of the 320x200 system that has always pervaded across every resolution before.

There's plenty of scope for this to go wrong, so I think I'll try out all my modules in this version and see if any glitches occur. Once they're ironed out, it should allow for smoother animations, scrolling, etc. etc. in hi res games and might well be simpler to understand.

Dynamic Arrays

This post is about a couple of things that changed in AGS 3.0. First, the AGS_MAX_SOMETHING #defines were removed becuase CJ removed the editor/engine constraints on characters and other things. This made some modules break. Now, as I'm lazy its taken me ages to get around to a proper fix for this. One way is to use dynamic arrays, another new AGS 3.0 feature. Well, monkey_05_06 has already written up a great forum post on this issue, so I'll just link to his awesome posting. In short, you check if you're using AGS 3.0, define the AGS_MAX_WHATEVER to be blank, which declares a dynamic array instead of a fixed size, and then initialize the array to be the right size for the actual number of characters in the game (e.g. Game.CharacterCount) in game_start (surrounded by appropriate #ifdefs). Bob's your Uncle!

ß2

Strike a light! Beta 2 of 3.02 is out already and CJ has added a Global Variable editor to the IDE to make declaring named globals much easier. Darn him putting DeNGVaT out of business...

Go to definition

In the middle of the night, I received what I like to think of as a "personal message" from what I like to think of as "Chris Jones". Our illustrious AGS author has asked me to blog about the "Go to function definition" feature of AGS 3.01 and beyond.

When writing a script, we can hit F1 on any built-in function to get the context-sensitive help. But if you right-click on the function name you are calling, you can also go to the function definition if it is in one of your own scripts or modules. This is a very handy feature and lets you navigate your code with ease. You don't need to remember which script the function is defined in, and if the script is not already open, AGS opens it up for you and goes to the correct line.

Because of this feature, I suggest that module authors could perhaps put a bit of documentation for each function after the first line of a function, becuase if the user uses this feature, it makes it very easy for them to access that documentation. Its also good to have documentation in one place as well, though, so this is as a supplement to any other documentation (which I always put in the header file of my modules). I haven't been doing this yet, but I intend to do so on the next release of any modules that I do.