UpgradeTo33

Upgrading to AGS 3.3

AGS 3.3 editor contains a major change to user interface that now lets you to "unpin" visual panels, drag them to any place you want and dock them or optionally leave them in "floating" mode. You may also have more than one editing panel on screen at once, for example room editor and script editor. This allows everyone to customize the panes layout in AGS to their own taste.

You may now create folders for characters, dialogs, inventory items, guis, rooms, scripts and views, move them up/down by context menu, and drag&drop items to change their order. The "Sort room by number" command now sorts within folders.

Script and header files are now combined into one group item, similar to room settings and script.

Proper alpha blending

AGS now features proper alpha blending when drawing GUI Controls and using Drawing Surfaces. This feature is enabled by two separate options in the "Visual" section of the General Settings: "GUI alpha rendering style" and "Sprite alpha rendering style". This is done for compatibility with projects created in previous versions of AGS. When importing a project in AGS 3.3 these options will retain their original values. You may consider setting them to "Proper alpha blending", but that may alter the appearance of your game. New projects will have "proper blending" mode set by default.

To support alpha blending a new HasAlphaChannel property has been added to DialogOptionsRenderingInfo class. This property must be set it in dialog_options_get_dimensions function, the one where you normally define size and position of the drawing surface.

System limits update

The maximal number of Fonts has been increased from 15 to 30.

New Speech class

There's now a new Speech script class that contains several speech-related properties. This renders a number of global functions obsolete, as well as some of the game variables. If you are using any of them in your script you will likely get compilation errors. Simply replace them by the corresponding Speech properties, as shown in the table below:

obsolete function/variable	replace with
SetVoiceMode	Speech.VoiceMode
SetSkipSpeech	Speech.SkipStyle
SetSpeechStyle	Speech.Style
game.close_mouth_end_speech_time	Speech.AnimationStopTimeMargin
game.speech_text_align	Speech.TextAlignment
game.skip_speech_specific_key	Speech.SkipKey
game.talkanim_speed	Speech.GlobalSpeechAnimationDelay

Game-wide speech animation delay

The "Old-style game-wide speech animation speed" general setting previously found in "Backwards compatibility" section was replaced with two settings in "Dialog" section: "Use game-wide speech animation delay" and "Game-wide speech animation delay". The first enables the use of the game-wide delay and the second specifies exact delay value. These settings are accompanied by two respective properties in the Speech class.

Translated ListBox

In the previous versions of AGS the ListBox items were never translated. A new "Translated" property has been added to ListBox class, which forces engine to translate ListBox items. Default value is True but it is recommended to set it to False if you are using ListBox for listing savedgames. NOTE: when older projects are imported, it is set to False automatically.