It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? Before I get to the news, I’ll update you on what’s been going on these few months I’ve been gone. Apparently life got in the way as I was working on my main game project so MS Agent World had to be put aside while I finished my flagship game. That and I also want to transfer MSAW to Game Maker Studio 2 as I am using 1.4 and wish to upgrade. So for now I can’t work on it but I have been doing extensive planning, and that’s where I am currently.

The past few weeks, every time I had free time, I would catalogue all the agents I have and approve/reject those that will be in the game. You’ve heard this already, I’ve explained it many times. Well, I’ve finally finished this process

The results: Out of 420 agents that I currently have, 302 will be in the game and 118 have been rejected. By the end of this cataloguing, I decided to be a bit more strict and aim for quality based on a system I created. Each agent was being judged by 4 criteria:

Art: The quality of the images.
Poses: The amount of programmed actions the agents have.
Frames: How many frames of animation each pose has.
Animation: How smooth the animation is.

With these four criteria, I would give it up to 3 points max with 3 being the highest quality and 0 being the lowest. Then these points would be add up and given a grade from A to D with a +, =, or -. Thus all 4 criteria getting 3 points each would earn an A+ while getting a single point would be D- (getting a 0 in all is an automatic disqualification while D= or D- will be considered for rejection). And with that, I narrowed down the list to 310 agents.

However, it’s not over yet. This is only for the agents that I managed to have on hand. There are still agents out there that I need to get. One source happens to come from sites that are still selling them, or I believe are still selling them. They are up online but I don’t know if they are active. One has an active message board but it hasn’t been updated in a year. I’ve sent an email to these sites to see if they are still available so I’ll find out if these agents cant still be bought.

Another source comes from agents before Microsoft Agent. Old programs like MS Word 97 has assistants that are not part of the MS Agent program but I will be including them in. I just need to figure out how to get them. I may have to use an emulator to do so but I do have a computer with XP on it so I’ll try that first.

There are also some agents that were browser based, agents that only work in a browser. If you go to these sites, they no longer work but I recently saw a video of someone using an emulator and getting these agents to display. If such a thing can be done, then these agents can be saved from their fate in the mausoleum.

There’s also the agents that are not agents. I made a video about this so check out my YouTube channel for the Delphi exclusive agents. Finally, there’s the final boss. I don’t want to spoil anything but let’s say that the final boss is not an MS Agent at all but a successor to the program.

Now that I have a list of the agents that will be in the game, what comes next? I’m not sure. Right now I’m concentrating on getting these elusive agents and adding to my list. Hopefully I can get the number to exceed 350. I think I’ll continue that for now.