Adventure Game Studio 3.3.0.1164

Many people may want to create their own adventure games. A tool like Adventure Game Studio is just what they need to complete this task.

Adventure Game Studio is a powerful application that will help you create and test your own adventure games. The games that you can design will be in the style of those 90’s Sierra point and click games like Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers.

With Adventure Game Studio you can cover any aspect of your game: manage the GUIs, create items, make dialogs, design characters, determine views, choose the sounds and customize the cursors. Furthermore you can also edit the scripts that the game will use.

One of the things which I liked about this program is that it allows you not only to create your game, but also to debug and test it. The compiler will provide you with handy hints inserted in the error messages that it displays, helping you quickly understand what caused the glitch.

Another important advantage for Adventure Game Studio is its support system. Firstly the application comes with a demo game that you can modify, in order to get familiar with the functions that the application provides. Moreover, there are many tutorials that will assist you in solving your tasks and an active forum community, which will provide the answers that you are seeking.

Personally, I think that Adventure Game Studio is a handy tool for people who are trying to create their own games. Although the numerous features that the program offers might seem a bit overwhelming at first, its extensive functionality and efficiency make up for this small flaw. Furthermore, this application is distributed free of any charge, so there is no reason not to try it out.

v3.3 [Feb 19, 2014]
- Editor UI now features docking panels. See video demonstration on how to use them.
- Project tree now features folders for characters, dialogs, inventory items, guis, rooms, scripts and views. The "Sort room by number" menu command now sorts rooms within folders.
- In project tree respective script body and header files are now grouped under one item.
- Project tree now supports drag & drop operations to move items. "Move up/down" commands are removed from context menu.
- Added a "Find all usages" context menu item to find all usages for characters, dialogs, views, inventory items and global variables in script. NOTE: this only searches for script name, not numeric ID.
- Added a "Navigate (in tree)" context menu item for almost all document tabs, which navigates to their node on the project tree.
- In script editor, pressing Ctrl G will now open the "Goto line" dialog. The shortcut to open global script has changed to Ctrl Shift G (and shortcut to open the global header - to Ctrl Shift H for consistency).
- Added a "Replace sprite(s) from source" context menu command in Sprite Manager.
- Added a "Browse" button to the "Create in folder" field in the Start New Game wizard.
- Sprite Import window is now resizable.
- Improved how autocomplete list in script refreshes its contents.
- Editor no longer allows to create more game items than engine supports (fonts, cursors, dialogs and inventory items), which could result in crashes in Editor or running game.
- Fixed incorrect selection of a new sprite, imported while the "Select sprite" dialog is open.
- Fixed sprite lookup in folders, differing only by name case.
- Fixed the script editor sometimes mistakenly notified that script was changed externally after it was saved in the editor.
- Fixed overlapping labels in the Editor Preferences dialog.
- Increased maximal Font number from 15 to 30.
- Implemented proper alpha blender for blending two 32-bit sprites with alpha channels. Added new option for gui alpha blending which turns the proper blender on. For the general cases (such as DrawingSurface.DrawImage function) a new setting is added in "Visual" group, named "Sprite alpha rendering style".
- Added "DialogOptionsRenderingInfo.HasAlphaChan nel" property that lets you enable alpha channel for custom dialog option surface.
- The "Old-style game-wide speech animation speed" game setting in "Backwards compatibility" group is replaced with two settings in "Dialog" group: "Use game-wide speech animation delay" (switch) and "Game-wide speech animation delay" (value).
- Added "Translated" property to ListBox gui control, which forces engine to translate ListBox items.
- Added "Dialog.SetHasOptionBeenChosen" function which lets you to set or reset "option been chosen" flag.
- Added eKeyNone constant which lets you to set "no/undefined key" (whenever eKeyCode type is required).
- Added SkipSpeechStyle enum to define speech skipping mode instead of using bare numbers.
- Added two more options for the speech skip style: "skip by key only" and "skip by mouse only" (no timer).
- Added new Speech class which groups several speech-related properties.
This renders some of the previously existing variables and functions obsolete:
- Added Speech.CustomPortraitPlacement, Speech.PortraitXOffset and Speech.PortraitY properties which let you to customize the position of speech portraits on screen.
- Added Speech.DisplayPostTimeMs property that makes speech portraits and/or text stay on screen some more time after speech was finished playing.
- Added Speech.UseGlobalSpeechAnimationDelay and Speech.GlobalSpeechAnimationDelay properties that let you to dynamically enforce and alter game-wide speech animation speed.
- SetMusicMasterVolume legacy script function now accepts volume values between -210 and 100 (was between 0 and 100). This may be used as a workaround for guaranteed music mute if using old audio system.
- Fixed "savegameindex[]" array was declared with incorrect size in script (20, while it must be 50).
- Engine can now load and run old games made with AGS 2.5 and higher (the level of compatibility may vary).
- Enhanced winsetup by moving many options under "Advanced" section and removing "Replay" option which was not usable for years.
- Reimplemented alternate display modes, now side-borders and top/bottom borders should work properly for all game resolutions.
- Added x5, x6, x7 and x8 scaling filters, as well as "Max nearest-neighbour filter" option in setup which automatically finds maximal supported scaling filter for your screen.
- The game automatically fallbacks to Software graphics driver if the Hardware one could not run or initialize gfx mode for any reason.
- Windows version of the engine will now write crash dump on "out of memory error" to help diagnose the situation if this occured due bug in the engine.
- Improved character walking animation at 60%-80% scaling.
- Game.ChangeTranslation() script function no longer causes game to quit if the translation file belongs to different game or has unknown format.
- Fixed inventory items and cursor crosshair with alpha channel not being drawn properly.
- Fixed side-borders that were not applied properly at newer (larger) widescreen resolutions.
- Fixed crash that occured when ListBox.GetItemAtLocation() is called from repeatedly_execute_always() just before the list box is about to be drawn on screen for the first time.
- Fixed custom dialog options clickable area by correcting its horizontal coordinate range.
- Fixed error which took place when user restored a game saved with background music playing, in case the music is not found in resources anymore.
- Fixed audio behavior during cutscenes (error caused audio volume to reset to default). Also AudioChannel.Volume will now return correct value when called from skipped cutscene.
- Stopped play.close_mouth_end_speech_time variable from making effect in voice mode and Sierra-style speech (which it wasn't supposed to do).
- Fixed return value of the AudioChannel.PositionMs for MOD/XM clips;
- Fixed division by zero which occured if there was a 1px tall walkable area (a precisely straight horizontal line) with vector scaling applied.
- Fixed OGG speech ending prematurely if the audio file size is a multiple of 32 KB.
- Fixed bug that could let user to load corrupted saved game, which in turn could cause more trouble.