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That seems like a great idea, because there's a lot of old FMV games which could have achieved greatness but were carrying some obnoxious/obsolete game mechanics, broken puzzles and unclear hints.
They all need a good "repair". Not just this one, but Phantasmagoria and the others too!

We have a whole series of videos for trying to master Godot specifically for point n click games.
Believe it or not, this is still all experimental and we're still not sure if we want to abandon AGS.
Something as simple as playing an animation in a specific way took we 2 days to understand, with systematically false tips from the Godot Discord.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYzHFzDpRQE&list=PL773FMqtyjdt_YdoP0nxZdgFmPL_t1_yp&index=12

[capabilities]

Godot drives me insane.

I can see that it has all the capabilities to achieve amazing things.
The issue is... No one has the knowledge.


Allow me to rephrase that : There are a TON of people who have Godot knowledge. The issue is... Unless you know someone who's willing to be fully involved in your project then it seems impossible to receive consistent and proper help with Godot.

There used to be some sort of Godot forum, similar to the AGS one, which has now shut down (every time you click on a google result you get a 404). Not a good move, I would say!

Then there's Discord. Have you ever visited the Godot Discord? Let me tell you, it's nothing like AGS. There's a gazillion posts per minute. And since it's a continuous flow of chat messages, there's zero consistency. Messages about several topics are mixed together, and you never know what will be the quality of answers. It's like a Russian roulette. The people helping have either no time to try to understand what you're doing, or give crude answers without explaining why the solution is the solution. When the answer is not plain wrong!

I remembered fondly my early days in the AGS forums, when there were people like Ashen, monkey0506, Khris etc. who knew what the hell they were talking about. The information was clear, correct, and there was room for follow-up questions.

Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT about Godot. The quality of the answer was amazing.... I had a brief moment of euphoria, thinking I had finally found my solution... Until I realized it was ChatGPT3 and its knowledge stops in 2021. It was giving answers incompatible with Godot 4.1.1 (deprecated classes)! And of course, the Godot help page doesn't clearly state that the lass is deprecated (well, it does, but... at the end of the page!)

I'm literally banging my head against the walls. AGS is awesome. Godot is even more awesome (because it's a heavyweight) but all that awesomeness goes to shit instantly, every time.


I was tempted by an upgrade from AGS to Godot. But now I'm seriously considering reverting my experimentations and throwing away those last 2 years of experiments with Godot.

Outstanding work as always!

I'm very excited by this game.
All the visuals and music are super tasteful yet not over-the-top, one can clearly sense the artistic sensitivity in this project. A real vibe of Monkey Island 1 -- except in VGA and with less shoehorned spoofs

Wow this was buried in the forums but this needs to stay up!

Maybe AGS 4 should be 64 bits and ditch retro-compatibility.


This is from 2018 :

[imgzoom]https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Modern-OS-Marketshare-640x367.png[/imgzoom]


96% of Windows installed were already 64 bits.

Of course hashmap or btree may be somewhat slower than accessing objects directly, but

Indeed, if it's not for direct access but only for disposing and such it's no big deal.

I'm mostly talking about the script language being slow. It's a bit suicidal to iterate a lot on some data in AGS, or implementing processing that does a lot of function calls.  Both the stack and data access are rather slow.
Again, it's enough for a 320x200 game, but I'm only just wondering why it's not going at the speed of light.

object references could be direct but they use a hashmap/btree

Ouch.

AGS script is slower than many other scripting languages, because it's compiled to generally inefficient bytecode; it emulates x86 asm, but have many repeating operations that are redundant in a scripting language. I wrote a post about this many years ago: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47320.0

Interesting read. Thanks!

[Context:]

Context:
AGS has no problem working with high-resolution games : With hardware acceleration it can display lots of sprites and tint them, etc. The engine is also performant enough for scripting effects when you stick to built-in operations (native sprite scaling, native transparency, etc.).

But AGS becomes slower when you want to make the AGS script handle more intensive algorithms, such as iterating on large arrays of hundreds of thousands of items, or trying to perform per-pixel operations on larger sprites, or when your function calls stack exceeds a certain depth.

This is why when it comes to scripting, especially special effects, AGS is better suited for low-resolution games : 320x200 or 640x480. And that's also why advanced shaders written with the AGS scripting language are out of the question.


I sometimes ask myself why that is. What are the reasons why the AGS scripting language is not lightning fast?

Having very little knowledge of the engine's code, I can't seem to come up with a reason :
- It uses SDL, which is very close to the hardware. If not the fastest possible option, it's pretty close.
- It's written in C/C++
- The virtual machine is running pre-compiled code, literally just byte code.

So, what is slow in all this? Is it that the VM's instructions are not mapped directly to the underlying CPU instructions? Is it that the engine uses simple data structures with a lot of overhead and lookups? Etc.

[I am extremely excited to put my hands on pointers in managed structs.]

A bit late to the party, but: generics are hard to implement (at least syntactically in the compiler).
Whereas there's a much more reachable goal post:  an untyped pointer type (for example: Pointer*) that supports casting. This is how genericity was achieved in early languages since ever -- before C++ had templates and so on.  (void* in C, Object in early Javas... Even object in C# if you're a psychopath).

This idea is already partially implemented in AGS when you have a GUIControl* and you cast it to Button*, Label*, etc.


Apart from that I am extremely excited to put my hands on pointers in managed structs.

[This is a very cool project]

Nice graphics. I was surprised to hear a french theme song. Before reading the presentation, I assumed the hero was spanish since he looks a bit like Zorro and the game is developed in Spain.

This is remotely inspired by "The black tulip" which was written by Alexandre Dumas (same as the 3 musketeers and Count of Monte Christo). Even though not massively famous, the original story and its character still had some success in Western Europe, there was a movie with Alain Delon and so on. Hence the French/Spanish vibe : The movie was mostly a French production but it's one of those things that are in the collective pop culture of non-English Europe. So much so that a Spanish team decided to make a game out of it.
And yes, he's like a French Zorro (preceding Zorro's creation by 70 years  ). You could also say he's like a French Scarlett Pimpernel (except the Scarlett Pimpernel is ultra-royalist bullshit  ).

In conclusion : This is a very cool project inspired by an underrated main adventure character. And they changed it enough to make it their own. Win-win! 

Is there a way of repositioning the verb that shows up in classic mode.

Let's avoid cluttering this thread. I suggest you ask the question in the Beginners Questions thread : "how to move a GUI?". Hint : Try to locate the exact GUI (and label inside the GUI) that displays that text on the screen. You'll find it in the "GUI" folder of your AGS Editor. It probably contains the word "action" or the word "status" (just a guess)

A German speaker told me that this was not correct :

Musik Lautstärke
Sound Effekte

...but this was correct :

Musiklautstärke
Soundeffekte

I cannot assert the truth of his sayings but I'm reporting it.

And how exactly do you think the tipper could tip without having to create an account anywhere? 

I don't know, but I'm guessing there's a whole range of hassle and I was aiming for the least hassle. I live in Sweden and here they have a thing called Swish where the phone number of the recipient is enough to transfer money to them. Don't judge me, I'm a simple person who hates anything related to money.

Monsieur OUXX, how about ko-fi.com ? Goes through Paypal.

I'll loo into it. Is Paypal really still popular in the US or is it behind the curve now? Asking as a European who has no clue.

[In the US, what's a popular platform for "tipping" a content creator?]

Simple question : In the US, what's a popular platform for "tipping" a content creator? By tipping I mean giving a small amount of money with the least hassle possible. It's not crowdfunding, as in "there's a project to achieve and a funding threshold to reach". More like the kind of free donation form that you'd see when downloading some small games bundle or for charity. You click on a button and in one minute you've given 50 cents.

I was thinking of Tipeee but I think it's very Europe-centered and it requires the tipper to create an account. Patreon might be more US-centered, but again it requires the tipper to create an account.

[MacOS]

I see that Expo is very focused on mobile apps (iOS and Android), which makes sense. But does it work on Desktop MacOS and does it build/sign for that target? I can't find it written explicitly. Or does only the binding with Electron make it possible?

EDIT : https://dev.to/evanbacon/making-desktop-apps-with-electron-react-native-and-expo-5e36

For react-native there's Expo: https://docs.expo.io/distribution/app-signing/

What a headache. Thanks!

[it's easy to build an app (Qt or Electron or whatever) for MacOS if you're already on MacOS.]

New question : Do you know of a free online code hosting platform that would let me build and sign my (Electron or anything else) app for MacOS?
My issue is currently that it's not too hard to build any project for its target platform on that platform. For example it's easy to build an app (Qt or Electron or whatever) for MacOS if you're already on MacOS. Since recently, it's also (quasi) impossible to build/sign an app for MacOS if you're on Windows (because of the signing mechanism of MacOS apps).

But I'm guessing there must be platforms online that have virtual machines and automated builds for other platforms? Something that runs build scripts for every platform every time you push your changes (or, as you call it, Continuous Integration). Something like Azure DevOps, except more humble and free.

Does that exist or is it a fantasy?
EDIT: Oh man, I'm going down the rabbit hole with this, fast-learning about MacStadium, Azure pipeline agents and all those strange beasts.

It did not come with Ubuntu when I installed it on VM, but it was as easy to install as "sudo apt-get install curl".

Cool, thanks.