Plan a section for Engine/Game Features

[ivan-mogilko]

This might have been mentioned before multiple times, but there's a clear lack of "Engine Features" section in the manual. The title could be different. EDIT: "Game features"?

This is the section that should explain what the engine does.

1. Kinds of objects it has, and what are they meant for (overview of their most common uses)
2. Their behavior: looks, animations, walking, speaking, and so on. How they are configured, and what are the "laws" of their acting.
3. Overview most common activities, how they are handled in AGS: drawing things, moving things around, how things interact with each other (visual sorting, colliding), how players interact with them (reaction to input).

This is all a mere outline, but work has to begin in this direction, because the documentation on these topics is severely lacking or buried somewhere inside tutorial.

[ivan-mogilko]

I think we may begin with adding articles under "Engine" capital header. The amount of documentation there is so low anyway, that it's hard to organize better at the moment. As number of article increases, we may hide them into subsections, similar to the Editor's section.

[ivan-mogilko]

Hmm, on the other hand, this section may be called "Game Features" instead. As some of the setup is done in the Editor anyway.

[ericoporto]

Currently this is documented in a hidden https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags-manual/wiki/_GameFeatures

It contains three topics for now, Game, Rooms, Inventory Items. I get the gist of the idea but I am not sure what are the missing things.

On the topics of things I think could be documented somewhere but not sure where is how engine draw things, the room layer, camera, viewports, the gui layer, sprite bitmap -> texture, z-order.

I also wonder if some game states (like the ones mentioned here) should be listed, or at least the Main Game Loop -> Transition, and the Dialog options (is this it's own loop?). Possibly with pointers to Game Events Order and Blocking Scripts sections.

[ivan-mogilko]

Ideally there should be articles about all the main game parts:

• Characters,
• Inventory items,
• GUI,
• Dialogs,
• Cursors, and how they are connected to interaction events

Besides these...
This draft about z-sorting is a good candidate of what can be added there: #210

Other things may include:

• animations
• walking and pathfinding
• speech (how it works overall, what styles are there)
• viewport and cameras, these have explanations in their api pages, but it's worth summing up in a single topic

[ivan-mogilko]

Finished writing 4 articles: Game, Rooms, Characters and Inventory Items (latter was written by RootBound from forums, but I expanded it further). Things were progressing slowly, but I think these may be useful, so decided to make them visible and added the section to the home page.