3.6.2 is planned to be a second minor update to 3.6, focusing mostly on convenience of certain Editor and Engine features, and expanding existing script commands.
Changes in 3.6.2 - Beta 1
Common:
- Event handler functions are now allowed to be located in any script module.
- New naming rule for the voice clips: full char name, followed by a number, separated by a dot, e.g. "RogerTheGreat.1234.ogg". The old rule may be enabled again by a switch in "Backwards Compatibility" settings.
Editor:
- In General Settings added "Use old-style voice clip naming rule" which lets to select whether the game should expect old-style voice clip filenames (4-letter char name followed by number) or the new one (full char name, followed by a number, separated by a dot).
- Added "TurnWhenFacing" property to Characters.
- Textual GUI controls can now select "Null Font" as their font: this will prevent any text to be drawn even if one is assigned, and make it have zero size (when it matters).
- "Events" tab on the Properties Grid now has "ScriptModule" selection, which lets define in which module should the related script functions be generated and looked for. The GUI Controls use a ScriptModule set in their parent GUI, and Room events always has a fixed room script selected.
- Added "Open Recent" submenu in the File menu.
- Sync script editor's commands in Edit menu with the context menu.
- Added "Toggle Line Comment" command to Edit menu for scripts.
- More panes in the Editor are DPI-aware (rescale well with the system font scaling).
- Editor tabs now display icons indicating their contents (may be disabled in Editor Preferences).
- Room panel tabs now display room names.
- Editor will now remember certain window states: "Sprite selector" window and splitter position, splitter position in "Sprite manager".
- Support reordering folders in Project Explorer with drag & drop.
- Support importing plain script files: ash, asc or both, - besides script modules (*.scm).
- On "Color Finder" pane also display actual RGB values that the engine will use. They may be different from requested RGB, because historically engine limits drawing color's RGB precision to 16-bit.
- Font's "SourceFilename" and "Font Size" properties now have buttons that let import another font file, or reimport same font with different size respectively, instead of clicking on a button on the preview window.
- Global Variables panel now allows to declare arrays.
- Added "Controls transparency" slider to GUI edit pane.
- Copy, paste and delete commands now apply to all the selected GUI controls in GUI editor.
- When pasting a copied GUI control, Locked property of a new control will be turned off.
- Support editing group properties for selected GUI controls.
- Support importing 1-bit (monochrome) and 4-bit images as sprites, room backgrounds and masks (converted to 8-bit).
- Support importing indexed PNGs as room backgrounds and masks.
- Do not alter or clamp palette for 8-bit sprites imported in a 16/32-bit game.
- Removed obsolete "Copy walkable area mask to regions" command from the Room editor.
- Improved scrolling of drop-down lists in the Room's navigation bar: made scroll buttons larger, and support mouse wheel.
- Do not delete previously built game exe from Compiled/Windows folder when testing a game from the editor.
- Added "/maketemplate" command-line option that tells Editor to run, make template out of the said game, and quit.
- Fixed Editor refusing to open a project if one or more of the sections are missing in the file.
- Fixed importing indexed PNG as a sprite, previously Editor would mistakenly treat the source image as 32-bit.
- Fixed importing 8-bit BMP sprites with no "Remap palette" and "Leave As Is" as a transparency option would still remap palette index 0 to the first found palette entry with Alpha 0, even if that's a filler entry not used by the image.
- Fixed exporting room backgrounds was always writing a 32-bit image rather than using actual background's color depth.
- Fixed "Color Finder" and color properties were mapping a color number to RGB values with accuracy mistakes, resulting in slightly different values than the engine would use.
- Fixed an unhandled exception occuring when rebuilding rooms if any script's header is missing.
- Fixed double warning message when trying to close the Editor while a game test is running.
Script API:
- Added eNullFont constant that lets assign or pass a "null font" to any property or function parameter which expects a font's ID. This "null font" will simply make any text not drawn and have no actual measurements (size, spacing, etc).
- Added Character.TurnWhenFacing property.
- Added Character.MoveStraight() complementing WalkStraight().
- Added RenderLayer enum, and optional "layers" parameter to DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenShot(), that tells which of the game's render layers to capture when making a screenshot.
- Added File.GetFileTime() that returns file's modification time.
- Added Game.GetSaveSlotTime() that returns a time this save slot was last written.
- Added FileSortStyle and SortDirection enum, and optional "fileSortStyle" and "sortDirection" parameters to ListBox.FillDirList(). This lets to sort resulting list by name or time, in ascending or descending order.
- ListBox.FillSaveGameList(), RestoreGameDialog() and SaveGameDialog() now let define a range of save slots for display.
- Added Speech.SpeakingCharacter that returns currently speaking character (for blocking speech).
- Added MoveSaveSlot() which renames a savegame.
- Added optional "sprite" parameter to SaveGameSlot(), that lets to pass a number of an arbitrary sprite to write into this save instead of a standard "screenshot".
- Added System.GetEngineInteger() and System.GetEngineString() for returning diagnostic information about engine's runtime state. Possible arguments are defined by EngineValueID enum.
- Added new game-wide option OPT_SAVEGAMESCREENSHOTLAYER that lets to define which of the game's render layers will be captured when making a standard screenshot for the save game.
- Expanded
on_mouse_clickcallback, now supports two more parameters: click x,y coordinates.
Engine:
- Dropped support for pre-3.5.0 game saves.
- Ensure that Character.Speaking returns true when a speech is playing even if the character has no speech view.
- DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile() may now load 1-bit and 4-bit bitmaps, converting to 8-bit.
- Assigning InventoryItem.Graphic will no longer reassign CursorGraphic too even if they were identical previously.
- Calling DeleteSaveSlot() on a slot within 0-50 range will no longer secretly move a save with the topmost number (within the same range) to fill the emptied slot. If you still like to recreate this behavior, then use MoveSaveSlot() command.
- Implemented video buffering on a separate thread. Allow to drop late video frames.
- Added new accessibility config settings in "access" section: "speechskip" and "textskip". These let player to override game's skipping style for character speech and text messages respectively.
- Added "max_save" config option in "override" section: this lets to enforce an arbitrary number of saves displayed in a standard save/restore dialogs in game.
- Added "--no-plugins" command-line argument that denies loading any plugins; also added respective config option "noplugins" in "override" section.
- Fixed displaying room masks with Debug command in legacy "upscale" mode.
Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSEngine.Log(), which lets plugins to print using engine's log system.
Compatibility:
- Fixed loading of games made in AGS 2.55-56 which include plugins.
- Fixed loading of rare games made with AGS 2.5 or higher, which contained deprecated "room animations" (animations themselves are currently not functional).
- Fixed old pathfinder imprecision affecting few pre-3.0 games.
- Allow pre-2.7 games to have RestartGame() command be followed and overridden by a NewRoom(). This is necessary for some older games to be able to proceed.
WinSetup:
- Redesigned winsetup into a tabbed dialog.
- Added "Accessibility" settings for skipping speech and text messages.