WinAGI is Back

[pabuslem]

Man, for us who still crave the AGI scene, Andrew Korson's return is BIG news!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome back, Andrew. WinAGI is awesome! When you have a new build or version of the program, please share it with us. How I'd like to see new AGI games made. I've seen some people using the AGI retro style in AGS games, which is also awesome.

Anyway, is great to have you back, Andrew   

[lance.ewing]

...and really great to see you here as well pabuslem. It's fantastic that the AGI scene is starting to build up again.

I think we need to entice a few more AGI fans to this site. I have a feeling that a lot of the old names don't realise that there are active AGI forums in this day and age.

[MusicallyInspired]

Or they think ScummVM's AGI/SCI section is the place to be, which is dead.

[Nicktatorship]

It's not easy to find, that's for sure. So many deadlinks out there, too.

EDIT: There's also quite a few names from AGI past on Twitter.

[Collector]

There is an agigames.com Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/50001122143/ with Chris Cromer as its admin.

Using the Wayback I have (mostly) restored the AGI Wiki here http://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Also, for those that have not read through the forums here a backup of the old Mega Tokyo forums was found. And progress has been made on updating and completing Visual AGI, so we may have two AGI IDEs designed for modern Windows.

[Kawa]

MegaTokyo AGI section: http://helmet.kafuka.org/megatokyo/forum_4.html

[pabuslem]

Hey, Lance! It's also great to see you here, man.

I miss the AGI scene. How I wish Chad Goulding returned to complete his impressive "Time Quest" demo. So much talent and promise.

I think some old AGI fans migrated to AGS. For instance, Steve Coyle, author of AGI incomplete game "Star Commander", was remaking that game using AGS.

Here you can see a post where he presents his remake: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=51627.msg636505847#msg636505847

I don't know if he's still working on it, since he hasn't posted anything new in about two years.

Corby LaCroix, author of AGI games "Corby's Murder Mystery" and the amazing "Caitlyn's Destiny", created the impressive "Heroine's Quest" using AGS.

A while ago, I managed to find and download "King's Quest IV" AGI version. I always thought that was one of the darkest and more complex games in the series and I like to see their logics to learn a little bit more about its programming. Another great game to "dissect" in order to learn is "Gold Rush!".

If any of you visit the AGS site sometime, I recommend you try a game called "Space Quest: Decisions of the Elders". It's a point & click game using a retro, AGI graphic style and starring Roger Wilco's father (it's a prequel). Quite interesting and worth a try!

I like point & click games, but AGI games have such a charm for me... Maybe it's just nostalgia, I dunno. Anyway, it's great to see that there is still some interest in the AGI engine and games!   

[MusicallyInspired]

Ahhhh Time Quest. I was so disappointed when he abandoned that. That was the first AGI fangame that not only really impressed me (many impressed me legitimately) but really hooked me and made me want to play the whole game to see where it would go! It was pretty bare bones (and maybe that's why it worked so well), but the opening cinematic was just super captivating (I'm really into time travel stories and paradoxes and meeting past/future versions of yourself etc) and the art was fantastic. And the game starts you off right away with this plan to use your time machine for the first time. So you're experiencing it for the first time along with your character and it just...just a fantastic start to a game. Maybe the whole game wouldn't have turned out so cool (because being so bare bones your imagination just goes wild) but man did it make an impression. Best AGI demo ever made IMO.

[AGKorson]

Hello pabuslem, thx for the compliment. I am almost done with the next version of WinAGI - just polishing up a few new added features and tracking down miscellaneous bugs as I find them. If you've had a chance to do much with the last version (1.1.22), I would love to get any feedback on it, in case you've uncovered something I haven't.

For me, my 'return' to AGI honestly is driven mostly by moving from 'kids in the house' to 'kids in college, and eventually on their own'. I wonder if that might be true with some of the rest of you. Anyway, after a long hiatus, I've been spending a lot of time relearning what I used to know, and remembering how much I enjoyed it. I never did write an AGI game myself, but it's still on my to-do list.

I'll post a link to a beta version of WinAGI 1.2.1 soon.

[AGKorson]

I just want to say again that I'm really impressed with the WinAGI help file. I've been using it as the go to place for checking how things work in AGI. It's far more detailed with its explanations of the AGI commands than other sources, and what it says I've been verifying against the interpreter and the original source code fragments and so far it has been spot on.

Nice to know it's useful. I spent a lot of work on that back in the day, mostly by disassembling the interpreters. If there are still questions about how things work, I still have all my disassembly notes, and can usually find answers pretty quickly (depending on nature of question of course!) Oddly enough, I kind of enjoy the process of digging answers out of the assembly code.

[lance.ewing]

A while ago, I managed to find and download "King's Quest IV" AGI version. I always thought that was one of the darkest and more complex games in the series and I like to see their logics to learn a little bit more about its programming. Another great game to "dissect" in order to learn is "Gold Rush!".

Yeah, those two AGI games were always the two I admired from a technical point of view.

I like point & click games, but AGI games have such a charm for me... Maybe it's just nostalgia, I dunno. Anyway, it's great to see that there is still some interest in the AGI engine and games!   

Definitely nostalgia for me, but I love nostalgia. Everything I spend time on these days seems to be nostalgic.

I like a lot of point & click games as well. I was thinking about this recently, with the 30 year anniversary of Maniac Mansion in mind, and spent a while reading up on and looking at the original Commodore 64 version of Maniac Mansion. It wasn't controlled by a mouse but rather by joystick and/or keyboard. So basically those that didn't have a joystick (which would have been rare, but I'm guessing a lot of people chose not to use the joystick with this game) would have been moving the cursor around with keys on their keyboard. The feel and appearance of the movement of the cursor in this mode isn't much different from how the Manhunter games work. They're basically point and click games. - Made me start to wonder whether an AGI port of Maniac Mansion could be written. If it could, using the cursor movement technique in Manhunter, then AGI could have produced a game like the C64 Maniac Mansion well before the release of Maniac Mansion.

Obviously the screen scrolling is the big thing missing from AGI though.

[lance.ewing]

For me, my 'return' to AGI honestly is driven mostly by moving from 'kids in the house' to 'kids in college, and eventually on their own'. I wonder if that might be true with some of the rest of you. Anyway, after a long hiatus, I've been spending a lot of time relearning what I used to know, and remembering how much I enjoyed it. I never did write an AGI game myself, but it's still on my to-do list.

My return was back in 2010, although I have encountered a few busy periods along the way. I seem to be able to find spare time a few evenings each week these days. My kids are still home, but it probably was after they grew up a bit that I started finding more time. Also a change in the type of employer I work for. No such thing as overtime at the moment.

I get the feeling that you might be older than me then. Someone asked how old everyone was on here back last year some time. I think I was the oldest to reply to that thread. See if you can find that thread and confirm.   

I'll post a link to a beta version of WinAGI 1.2.1 soon.

Looking forward to it.

[lance.ewing]

(I'm really into time travel stories and paradoxes and meeting past/future versions of yourself etc) and the art was fantastic. And the game starts you off right away with this plan to use your time machine for the first time.

I'll have to check that one out. I'm also very much in to time travel and time loop stories, i.e. movies, books, and games. One of my favourite graphic adventure games on the mobile is a time travel one. Have you tried The Silent Age? I love time travel puzzles, like in Day of the Tentacle.

[MusicallyInspired]

I haven't tried that. I don't play much mobile games, though.

[Collector]

One of my favorite time loop stories is the Stargate SG1 episode "Window of Opportunity". Quite amusing and engaging with superb writing. A good short is the 1990 film "12:01 PM" with Kurtwood Smith.