AGI Studio

NOTE: Some of this text is from the AGIDev Site

Introduction

AGI Studio, originally created by Peter Kelly, was the first fan-made development suite for AGI and was for a long time the only development suite available for AGI game creation. Almost all fan-made games as of early 2006 were either created entirely with AGI Studio or started development in AGI Studio and later migrated to other development environments.

AGI Studio does not include native support for all aspects of AGI game creation. Notably, it lacks an integrated Picture Editor editor and Sound editor. However, it does allow Picture and Sound resources to be imported from other programs and added to a game's resource files. It also provides a toolbar button that allows Lance Ewing's PicEdit to be run, although this is strictly a matter of conveniently running a separate program. Pictures created in PicEdit must still be imported into AGI Studio manually.

Features

Included in the suite are editors for Logic and View resources. Also included is a WORDS.TOK editor, an OBJECT editor, and a Resource Manager. An extensive Help File was also included.

Logic Editor

The Logic Editor is merely a simple text editor, in a courier fixed width font, for easy editing (version 1.38 BETA also has limited support for changing the font). It has the ability to compile the code into a Logic resource, and also to save your logic code to a text file.

View Editor

The View Editor is all you need to draw, edit and animate objects for your game.

WORDS.TOK Editor

The WORDS.TOK editor allows you to specify the words that your AGI game will recognize when the user types in a command on the [[AGIWiki/input line|input line].

OBJECT Editor

The OBJECT editor allows you to specify the inventory items that will be used in your game.

Template Game

A template game is included with AGI Studio to make game development considerably easier by relieving the programmer from the burden of setting up all the basic functionality of the game.

Version History

AGI Studio ver 1.31

The original AGI Studio was released in 1997, by Peter Kelly. It was written in Delphi, and was available only for Microsoft Windows. Peter maintained AGI Studio through version 1.31.

Nailhead AGI Studio v1.38b

• http://www.nailhead.org/agistudio (archive.org)

by Nailhead

Version 1.38 BETA is the last build of AGI Studio released since 2002. It features many improvements over version 1.31, including syntax highlighting in the logic editor. NOTE: some people have encountered strange view editing bugs (like sprites being saved as black and white) when using version 1.38 BETA. If you encounter this bug, AGI Studio version 1.34 may work better for you.

Nailhead AGI Studio v1.34

• http://www.nailhead.org/agistudio (archive.org)

by Nailhead

Like version 1.38 BETA, version 1.34 was developed by adding to the original source code, but it of course does not have as many features as version 1.38 BETA and may contain bugs that were fixed in 1.38 BETA. This version is recommended for people who encounter problems when saving view resources.

QT AGI Studio

• QT AGI Studio
• http://agistudio.sourceforge.net
• http://people.brandeis.edu/~natb/software.html (archive.org)

A complete rewrite to C using the QT library. Supports logic, view, dictionary, and integrated picture editing. Also comes with template game and an integrated logic generator based on the original Base Logic Generator. This version was originally called Linux AGI Studio by Helen Zommer, and was also ported to Windows by Nat Budin.

Development Status

AGI Studio was originally developed by Peter Kelly. Due to other commitments and a declining interest in AGI, he decided not to do any further work on it, but he also released the source code under the GNU General Public License so that others could add to it if they wanted to. Two new verions have spawned from his project. Nailhead took the original Delphi source code and continued development from it, adding extra features and correcting bugs. Another version, QT AGI Studio, is a complete rewrite of AGI Studio in C using the QT library.

There is no known maintainer of the AGI Studio source code at this time, and development of AGI Studio appears to have been frozen at version 1.38 BETA, which was released in October 2002. An alternative development environment, WinAGI, was released in 2005 and is currently still being maintained by its author. Those who find that they would like additional features in their AGI development environment are recommended to give it a try.

See Also

• Linux alternative, QT AGI Studio
• The WinAGI development environment is an alternative to AGI Studio developed by Andrew Korson. It features numerous helpful tools that AGI Studio does not have and is available for download at http://www.winagi.com.