Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:
Oh, wow. I had no idea that there were other alternatives to AGS. I had similar reservations when it came to what I saw as a 800x600 limit to AGS.
Yeah, AGS strikes me as being similar to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Visual Basic: It's been around a while, and thus is better-established, a good number of end -user products have been made with it; yet it lacks a certain... 'elegance'... compared to younger systems that are less of a kludge.
{side note: for a film major, basically an art kinda guy, I've been hanging out with a LOT of Hard Science and Comp Sci people for a LONG time. Looking at what I wrote just now, I think more of it has rubbed off than I thought.}
That is indeed the home page where docs and downloads can be had. The "AGAST Community" seems to be centered on
http://agastforums.mindfuze.com/index.ph, and the two developers of the AGAST system post there with such speed and regularity that I wonder if one of them has a shell script set up to notify him of any posts. Based on what I've read there, development of the engine proceeds apace at a nicely aggressive speed -- the 1.08g rev is due out Real Soon Now, and will apparently include the ability to play .avi and .mpg files for cutscenes. Among other things.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:o Like: Conversation menus ala Manhunter: New York. This is a bias of mine as an author, because I only have worth when I have characters saying interesting things.
I've only played
Manhunter: San Francisco, which had no dialogue whatsoever, but if you mean the menu-based style of your own games or the LucasArts canon, no arguments here. I think this is the main reason that the Sierra PCs are about as well-characterized as the PC from, say, Zork; where the LucasArts characters are memorable: solid, witty repartee. There's a reason why Porn won best NPC, and this is a good chunk of it.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:o Like: A squared-off area for meta commands like save, load and quit. The Star Trek: Judgment Rites game and the ST game that came before it did it all through clicking on Kirk. Clever for its time (they had, what, 320x200 or 640x480 at best to work with) but kind of annoying otherwise. So more Maniac Mansion than ST:JR for me.
Personally, I like the solution of the later LucasArts games: map the F1 key to the Save/Load/Go Back to Playing/Quit menu. I don't use it that often when I play, and having a portion of the screen real estate set aside for the meta commands wastes valuable space that could be filled with tasty graphics and nutritious animation.
On that note, I prefer the interface from
Full Throttle to that of
Day of the Tentacle , and both of those to the original interface from
Maniac Mansion or
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders . With MM and Zak, there's around 15 commands; with DOTT there's nine. It depends on the game, of course, but simplicity is usually better. FT gets the Gold Medal on a number of counts:
* It's not hardcoded to a strip at the bottom of the screen, see above rant on screen real estate.
*It has
character. It's the tattoo/jacket logo of Ben's biker gang, the Polecats: A Skull over a gloved hand and a boot, with a banner below. When the mouse pointer (crosshairs) are over a hotspot, the crosshairs get a red box. Hold down the left mouse button, get the interface. Drag to the icon that you want and release: The eyes of the skull are "Look at/Examine," the mouth is "Talk to/Use Mouth," the gloved hand is "Pick up/Punch/Use," and the boot is "Kick." Right Button brings up the inventory screen. Cool, intuitive, and evocative.
* It's simple. Doesn't get in the way of the game, and the simplicity as well as the commands chosen are right in tune with the main character.
The non-text-parser Sierra games tried something like this (e.g. King's Quest 5) but put the icons in a bar across the top. This requires one to go to the top and get an icon when finding a hotspot, then go back down. Annoying over time. This icon-bar thing is the default for AGS, which seems biased to Sierra Style Games, where AGAST is more LucasArts-centered. Near as I can tell in my own addmitedly biased opinion.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:o Dis-like: Extremely wide camera shots, as seen in Star Trek: A Final Unity and Blade Runner. You're stuck as a designer if you get into that. There's nothing interesting going on while your character is a few pixels wide (due to the camera being so far back) and running from one end of the screen to the next. Actually, rarely running, even. That second or third mission to ST:AFU had me screaming down Picard for lolly-gagging his way through the fricken scenery, like he was going through a stroll through a gardenia.
Agreed, with reservations. There's two wide angle shots in FT that I didn't feel detracted from it. The wide shot can be used well to link some seperate locations that are a good deal apart in the game world. I'd say that the dislike of the wide shot comes from two things: if the PC lollygags, it interrupts the flow of the narrative, yes. And a wide shot (especially at low res) leads to the "Pixel Hunt" problem discussed earlier.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Is that the kind of thing you were looking for, PTX? I'll try to address some more thoughts along these lines tomorrow.
Oh, most definitely. Looking forward to it.