Getting Started with AGS - Part 7

Animations

A graphical adventure game would be no good without animations. These range from commonly-used animations such as the main character walking, to a flag waving in the background in one particular screen.

Animations in AGS are managed using Views. A view is a set of one or more loops. A loop is a set of frames which, when played in sequence, give the illusion of movement. Go to the "Views" mode in the main tree. This is the View Editor where you will put together all your animations.

The View Editor showing view 1

You should see View 1 selected in the list, and on the right you'll see lots of frames of Roger's walking animation. As I'm sure you've guessed, the "New view" button will create a new blank view.

Each loop is displayed as a row of images (one for each frame), going from left to right. To change the image for a frame, double-click the image, and you'll be presented with the sprite manager where you can select the image to use. All images for use with views are imported as usual via the sprite manager before they can be inserted into a frame.
At the right hand end of a loop, you'll see the text "New frame", which you can click to create a new extra frame at the end of the loop. You can also right-click a frame to insert a new one before or after it.

You'll notice each frame has three pieces of text underneath the image:

SPD: 0 is the frame's relative speed, which you can change by clicking on the "SPD:" text. This number adds a delay to the amount of time which the frame is displayed for, therefore a larger number makes it stay longer. You can use negative numbers to specifically shorten the frame's display time.
NO SND allows you to assign a sound number that will get played when this frame comes around in the animation. This feature is designed for footstep sounds, but has many other uses as well. Using sound will be covered later in the tutorial.
NORMAL toggles whether the frame is displayed normally or mirrored left-right. This feature allows you to just create animations for your character walking right, and then use the same images for the walking left loop, but simply toggle this flag to "FLIPPED".

How you use these views to actually run an animation in game will be explained later on.

Characters

If you remember back to part 3 of this tutorial, we talked about three types of thing that the player can interact with - hotspots, objects and characters. We've now covered the former two, so now it's time to take a look at characters.

Put simply, a character is similar to an object, except that it can move between different rooms in the game, take part in conversations, carry its own inventory, be scaled up and down, lit according to light levels in the room, and more.

Go to the "Characters" mode in the main tree. You'll see that so far you only have one character in the list, labelled "0: ROGER". You can create a new character by clicking the "New Character" button under the list.

The Character Editor

There are quite a few options available for each character. Rather than explain them all here, we'll just cover the most important ones - you can find a full description of all the options in the manual.

Start in room - this sets which room number the character starts off in at the beginning of the game.
This is the player character - sets the currently selected character as the initial player character when the game starts up. The game will start off in whatever room number the Starts in room option is set to for the player character.
This option is greyed out for the currently selected player character. To change it, simply select the box on another character.
Normal view - sets which view is used for the normal walking animation of the character. The view specified here must have 4 or 8 loops, and the first frame of each loop is the standing still frame.
For a 4-loop character, when walking diagonally the closest straight direction is chosen for display. With an 8-loop character, all 8 directions are displayed depending on the character's direction.
Which loop represents which direction is shown in the Views mode (eg. "Loop 0 (down)").
No interaction - if checked, then this character will be see-through to mouse clicks. This is similar to the way the player character worked in Lucasarts games - you cannot actually click on Guybrush, it will always activate whatever is behind him.
The "Import character" button allows you to import a pre-made AGS character into your game. This is NOT how you normally create a character from scratch - rather, this option is what you use if someone else has specifically created a CHA file for you.
Note that importing a character will create a new slot for the import, so you cannot use it to overwrite an existing character.
The "Export character" button exports the current character to a CHA file, in order that it can be imported into another game.

The character's "Name" field simply gives you an easy way to identify the character in the editor, and can also be accessed from the game script if desired.

The "Script name" field is very important, as it sets the name by which the character will be referred to in dialog scripting and text scripting. The reason for having this seperate name is that the script name can only contain the letters A-Z, whereas the main Name field can contain any characters.

Game starting point

Just in case you missed it, I'll repeat what was just said in the Characters section - the "Starts in room" setting of the player character is used to determine which room the game starts off in.

TIP: This feature can be handy for testing various parts of your game. For example, when you're working on room 16, set the starting room to room 16 so that you can get to it instantly when you run the game to test it.

Cutscenes

You can easily add intro, outro and cutscene sequences to your game. There is no specific feature to do this - you simply use the provided animation and movement commands to do whatever you like.

A cutscene is simply the name given to a sequence of actions over which the player has no control. This usually applies to the entire introduction sequence, as well as far simpler in-game events. For example, if the player goes to pick up a rock from the ground, you may wish to use a bending-down animation to show him picking it up. During this bending down and standing back up, the player cannot control proceedings, so it is a cutscene.

There are two main ways of creating cutscenes - the Interaction Editor, and the text script.

To start with, you'll probably be more comfortable using the Interaction Editor, as it provides a point-and-click way of setting up the commands. As you progress with AGS, or if you have some programming experience, you may prefer to jump straight to the text script.

Right, firstly let's do something very simple. When the player goes to pick up the key from the floor of our room, we want him to walk over to it first rather than it just disappearing from wherever he's standing.

So, we want to add something extra to picking up the key. How do we do this? Yes, that's right, we need the Interaction Editor for Object 0 in Room 1 (which is the key). If it's not already loaded, fire it up and return to the interactions we created earlier:

Remember this?

Now, we want the player to walk across to the key before it disappears, so right-click on "Object - Remove an object" and select "Add action before this". We're greeted by the Action Editor once again.

Select "Character - Move Character" from the drop-down list. Change the Character setting to "Roger" (it will then be displayed as "EGO", the script name).

Eeek! It wants a destination X and Y location! We don't know that yet, so press OK to close the action editor, and then Close the interaction editor too.

Move the mouse cursor to where the key is on the background. Look just above the background image, and you should see "Mouse pos: 205, 128" or something similar. These are the X and Y co-ordinates, respectively, of the key's location. So, note them down, and return to the Interaction Editor.

Double-click the "Character - Move Character" entry to open it up for editing, and click Change on the Destination X and Y locations to set them to the numbers we just discovered. We also want to set the "Wait for move to finish" option to True - otherwise, the command will just start Roger off on his way, and then immediately proceed to pick the key up before he gets there!

OK out of the action editor and you should see something similar to this:

Our new command is top of the list for execution

Save the room and game, and try it out!

OK, I think we've had enough of animations and cutscenes for now. We'll return later to explore actual animations and more complex cutscenes. If you want to try some out, check out the "Character - Quick animation" command to get you going.

Go to part 8: Conversations