Saturday 9 January 2010

Odot Tamat On

A few days ago I came across the source code for an AGS game, Odot Tamat On, by Zabnat. It has an interesting cartoon art style and with a few minor tweaks I'm able to get the introductory cutscene to run in XAGE:

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The number of scripting errors wasn't too high, at 719. It's worth noting that none of the AGS conversions play particularly well at the moment other than Awakener (itself down to 78 errors), but improvements remain iterative and noticeable over time. You can play the original, rhyme-filled AGS version of Odot Tamat On here.

Elsewhere, I've made another revision to the animation system in order to cater for AGS-style views. Each character can now switch between views in order to more easily change the walking or talking animations. The main difference is that views are character-specific rather than from a separate pool that all characters can access. I can understand the reason why they're organised like this in AGS, but as with dialogues/conversations I'm loathe to separate it all to that extent as it seems slightly unintuitive to the end-user. To simplify things I've rename 'Animation Frames' to 'Frames' and 'Custom Animations' to just 'Animations'. Now a script can run both a specific animations or an animation belonging to the current view. This means XAGE can now convert AGS code like cFadi.Loop = 0:

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Almost all of the character animations now run perfectly in XAGE, which is a hurdle I'm relieved to have overcome. Once I've completed the following, Awakener will be pretty much done, excluding walkboxes:
  • Script Stacking.
  • Script parameters and return values.
  • Calling scripts in IF/While conditions.
  • Timers.
  • GUI manipulation.
  • Handling special AGS functions ('on_mouse_click, 'repeatedly_execute' etc).
On a related note, Awakener is one of an impressive five games by Ben nominated for the JayIsGames best freeware adventure game of 2009.

2 comments:

Ben304 said...

Great to see you found another open source project!

Also, 78 errors is great! Well, compared to the starting point :D

Clarvalon said...

Cheers! It's taking longer than I'd originally hoped but the conversion is more thorough as a result of the changes made thus far. I should have something to show you in a week or so.