Getting Started with AGS - Part 9
Cursors
It's easy to overlook mouse cursors, but they provide the essential
interface between the player and the game world. In AGS, each mouse
cursor provides a different mode of interaction to the player.

The Cursors list
Unlike most of AGS, mouse cursors modes are not generic - that is,
AGS has special coded behaviour for some of the cursors. This means that
you are unable to customize what some of the cursor modes do - let's
list these ones briefly:
All the other cursors are 'normal' cursors, in that you can use them
for whatever purposes you want.
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If you want to create a Lucasarts-style game where the mouse
cursor disappears during cutscenes, the easiest way to do it is
simply to import a blank image over the Wait mouse cursor. |
The Cursors editor pane is fairly self-explanatory. Use the property
grid to set a graphic for the cursor; and click inside the
graphic to set the cursor's hotspot, as we did for inventory items. (The hotspot sets which spot
under the cursor will be activated when you click with it).
There are a couple of other options you can set for cursors, let's
cover them briefly:
- Standard Mode tells AGS that this is a normal
user-selectable cursor. It is used when cycling through mouse
cursors, to determine whether to use the cursor or skip over it. For
example, if during the game you disable the current cursor, AGS will
change to the next available Standard Mode.
- Animate allows you to make an animated mouse cursor. If
you check the box, then you need to set the View property to the
view that you want to use for the animation (loop 0 of the view will be cycled continuously).
You can also select "AnimateOnlyOnHotspot" to make the
cursor only animate while it is over something that the player can
interact with; and "AnimateOnlyWhenMoving" to do a
QFG4-style cursor which only animates while the player is moving it
around.
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You can right-click the "Mouse cursors" tree node and
choose "New Cursor" to create additional cursors
to the standard 10. If you do so however, any extra cursors you
create will not have events created for them, so you
will have to handle their clicks using the "Any Click" events. |
Fonts
The default blank game comes with a couple of basic fonts, but you
don't have to use them - you can import your own.

The Font Editor By default, you'll see three fonts are
available. Font 0 is the standard font used in message boxes. Font 1 is
the speech font, used with lucasarts-style speech; and font 2 is an
outline font for the speech font. Outlines are pretty much essential
for lucasarts-style speech. Since the text is drawn directly onto the
screen and not onto a message box, without an outline it could be very
hard to read the text, depending on what colour the screen happened to
be behind it. There are two ways to do outlines - AGS can do an
automatic outline, or you can import a special outline font. They both
have advantages:
- Automatic outlining is easy to use - just set the option, and it
works with any font.
- Using an outline font is faster in the game, since it is just drawn
once (whereas automatic outlining has to redraw the line of text 8
times).
Importing fonts AGS supports both TrueType (TTF) and SCI
(Sierra's format) fonts. To overwrite an existing font, simply open up
its editor and click the "Import over this font" button. To create a new font slot,
right-click the Fonts tree node, and select "New font". The
advantage of SCI fonts is that they are significantly faster to
render than TTF fonts; but the disadvantage is that they only support
128 characters, which means that they are only useful for English. If
you want to support other languages then you'll need to import a TTF
font in order for the extended characters such as é, í and
ñ to work. Where can you get a SCI font? Well, there are
three ways:
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If you go to your Windows Fonts folder to try and import a TTF
font, you will not be able to do so (double-clicking them will open
them up in the Windows Font Viewer). Unfortunately there is nothing
I can do about this - you must either type the filename in manually,
or copy the font to another folder and import it from there. |
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By default, font 0 is used as the normal text font, and font 1 is
used as the speech font. To use any additional fonts, the script
properties Game.NormalFont and Game.SpeechFont can be used to
change the active fonts. |
Conclusion
That's it for the "Getting Started" tutorials. I hope they've helped
you to get a grasp of the AGS basics. If there's anything you didn't
really understand or that you think should be covered but wasn't, please
let us know on the Beginners Technical Forum, so that the tutorials can
be improved to explain it better.
Return to
tutorials index
Tutorial last updated
18 August 2007. Copyright (c) 2004-2007
Chris Jones.
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