Monday 25 May 2009

AGS's 'Demo Quest' on Xbox360

The bulk of the conversation system is now in place, and there will be further refinements when I tackle the last major component (GUI customisation). Here's a new video detailing the following:
  • New Editor appearance (themes).
  • New Script Action creation method (popups).
  • XAGE again converting and running AGS's sample game, Demo Quest (demonstrating a short conversation between Cris and Beman).


This time we don't cover exporting the graphics from AGS, but you can see that the conversion process is mostly painless. The only changes necessary here are to place the Player character, Cris, in the same room as Beman, to whom we scale up and add an onTalkTo script to initiate the conversation. A side-by-side comparison of AGS and XAGE:

Photobucket

From the video and picture above, the following is evidently missing or incorrect:
  • GUI (Reason: Not yet implemented in XAGE).
  • The character scaling is off (Reason: Room XML required - cannot access walkable areas to automatically determine correct scaling).
  • Wall Panel missing (Reason: Room XML required - cannot access information on room objects).
  • Cris is darker in AGS (Reason: Not sure. Either there's some filtering applied by AGS that I'm not aware of, or the room's palette is affecting the sprite).
Also, the Cris character has no animation for walking up (away from the screen). AGS is happy with this and just substitutes with an appropriate left/right walking animation, whereas XAGE currently expects the animation to be there, hence the odd sliding effect in the video. This will be dealt with at some point.

So far all of the conversion work is based around what is required for Demo Quest, so it would be very interesting to hear about other people's experiences. Once XAGE v0.4 is released I'll see about placing some sort of official feature request with AGS/Chris Jones for AGS Room XML export functionality, providing there's demand for it.

Edit: Ags Forum thread here.

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