AGS 3.2 Final 5 - Recession-busting edition

[Calin Leafshade]

Although gui alpha channels work properly now with no gui background they don't seem to work correctly WITH a gui background.

I have a button which has an image with and alpha channel ontop of a gui background which has an alpha channel and the transparency on the button doesnt seem to work anymore.. i'm pretty sure it used to.

EDIT:Same is true of slider handles

[Knox]

I cant seem to get transparency with a png alpha working correctly on a slider handle's graphic aswell...Ggrrr!!

[subspark]

Yep. Same here. Very frustrating. :'(
Is this issue we're having also related to the fact that alpha-blended inventory icons don't work over a GUI with a background? The alpha channel, it seems, is completely discarded.

We're using PNGs too.

Sparky.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I found some weird behavior with resizing guis.  In particular, if you change to a room with a room size larger than the default game dimensions and try to resize the gui to fit that room size you'll get an error.  Now, while I understand it's going by the game resolution only for gui size limits I see this as rather strange behavior.  Why shouldn't we be able to make guis larger than the game resolution and have them off the limits of the screen?  It certainly wouldn't break anything by default.  I bring this up because, if you make one or two guis larger than the primary resolution of your game by default you get constant warnings that it may cause errors (which it doesn't) and since it doesn't actually break anything I'd rather either the warning was removed or the limitation of resizing guis beyond the game set resolution removed, that way I could avoid the warning by resizing the gui when you entered the larger room and changing it back when you leave.  If it's a matter of creating some maximum size limit to prevent memory waste then by all means impose a maximum gui size, but I'd really like to be able to make guis that fit the rooms in my game even if they are larger than the default resolution.  Thanks.

[ShiverMeSideways]

Thank you, Dave and CJ, for helping me out with my mouse wheel problem! Indeed, the problem was that any other mouse input aside from the left button click cycled through the mouse modes, and I only have the pointer defined. That's why it disappeared.

Cheers!

PS: AGS 3.x and how awesome it is got me back into game-making so major-major thanks, CJ!

[Sslaxx]

You know, just calling them "RC" instead of "Final" sounds better.

[Ryan Timothy B]

Since Progz was mentioning issues with GUI's.  Why is it that when you change the X and Y coords of the GUI it causes an error if the GUI is off the room background?  Very frustrating.  I'm always having to check the X or Y coords plus width and height of GUI to find out if it's off the screen before changing it's position.  So instead of changing it's X and Y if it'll be off screen, I just change it's visiblity to false until it comes back on screen.

[Crimson Wizard]

I noticed there are no help topics which sould cover "advanced" script keywords like "protected", "writeprotected" (I knew that one exists only after getting monkey_05_06's Stack module), "managed" etc. Maybe some other things are missing in the manual too. It would be nice if they are added there.

[Pumaman]

Although gui alpha channels work properly now with no gui background they don't seem to work correctly WITH a gui background.

I have a button which has an image with and alpha channel ontop of a gui background which has an alpha channel and the transparency on the button doesnt seem to work anymore.. i'm pretty sure it used to.

EDIT:Same is true of slider handles

Are you using Classic or AdditiveOpacity GUI alpha style?
HAs this problem just started happening with Final 5?

found some weird behavior with resizing guis.  In particular, if you change to a room with a room size larger than the default game dimensions and try to resize the gui to fit that room size you'll get an error.  Now, while I understand it's going by the game resolution only for gui size limits I see this as rather strange behavior.  Why shouldn't we be able to make guis larger than the game resolution and have them off the limits of the screen?  It certainly wouldn't break anything by default.  I bring this up because, if you make one or two guis larger than the primary resolution of your game by default you get constant warnings that it may cause errors (which it doesn't) and since it doesn't actually break anything I'd rather either the warning was removed or the limitation of resizing guis beyond the game set resolution removed, that way I could avoid the warning by resizing the gui when you entered the larger room and changing it back when you leave.

Reasonable point, please could you post this in a separate thread as it's not related to the 3.2 release.

You know, just calling them "RC" instead of "Final" sounds better.

We've gone through the RC releases, the problem is that most people won't use a new release until it becomes Final, so unfortunately it's only when the Final is released that most people start testing it and the bugs are found.

I noticed there are no help topics which sould cover "advanced" script keywords like "protected", "writeprotected" (I knew that one exists only after getting monkey_05_06's Stack module), "managed" etc. Maybe some other things are missing in the manual too. It would be nice if they are added there.

Yeah, this is because the custom-struct support is still sort of half-finished, and I was planning to wait until everything was fully supported before documenting it. But realistically that's not going to happen for a while so probably documenting the existing keywords would be a good idea.

[Calin Leafshade]

Yes, I'm confident this is a new issue with Final 5

And i'm using AdditiveOpacity

[subspark]

As am I, CJ.

With respect, I've tried everything to get Alpha working properly in the case described.

Sparky.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I'm also confident it's a new issue, because I've had no problems doing this with previous versions.

[Ali]

When I try to install the latest version (On Windows 7 64 bit) it seems to crash my virus scanner (Kaspersky).

---------------------------
avp.exe - Application Error
---------------------------
The instruction at 0x6ddeba67 referenced memory at 0xfa61e8d2. The memory could not be written.

Normally Kaspersky would scan a new program before running it, so I guess this is what's failing. It's probably  Kaspersky's fault, but I thought I'd make it known.

[Pumaman]

Yes, I'm confident this is a new issue with Final 5

And i'm using AdditiveOpacity

Can one of you upload a Before and After screenshot of a GUI with this problem in Final 5, and what it looked like with Final 4? I've tried to reproduce the problem but my test alpha GUIs look the same in both Final 4 and Final 5.
And as I asked, can you all please say if you're using Classic or AdditiveOpacity?

When I try to install the latest version (On Windows 7 64 bit) it seems to crash my virus scanner (Kaspersky).

Heh, probably not much I can do about that!

[frogfrost]

Hey - so great that 3.2 supports black bars on widescreen resolutions - one thing I've noticed, at least on my monitor, is that the bars are uneven at 800x600 - AND, that if I auto-adjust my monitor (you know the auto button that all monitors have now) - boom. It shuffles the image to the left and then all the black is on the right.

Bizarre because I've played lots of games at non-widescreen resolutions that have those bars and not had that problem.

Desktop resolution is 1440x900 for the monitor. Any ideas why it only seems to be AGS stuff that does this?

[Crimson Wizard]

I have a question, is this intended that those functions without any explicit return type can actually return integer?

Like

Code: ags

function f()
{
  return 1;
}

function ff()
{
   int a = f();
}

Is this bug or normal behavior?

[GarageGothic]

"function" is just a fancy word for "int" (or rather it's internally defined as int), so yes that's as designed. I'm sure someone else can explain it in more technically correct terms.

[Pumaman]

Hey - so great that 3.2 supports black bars on widescreen resolutions - one thing I've noticed, at least on my monitor, is that the bars are uneven at 800x600 - AND, that if I auto-adjust my monitor (you know the auto button that all monitors have now) - boom. It shuffles the image to the left and then all the black is on the right.

My monitor does this too. I'm not sure why it would only affect AGS games, perhaps the black borders need to be not actually black, but slightly grey in order for the monitor to recognise them as part of the screen. I'll do some investigation around this.

I have a question, is this intended that those functions without any explicit return type can actually return integer?

Yes, this is for legacy reasons because in the old days the script compiler didn't do any type checking and assumed that all functions returned an int.

Can one of you upload a Before and After screenshot of a GUI with this problem in Final 5, and what it looked like with Final 4? I've tried to reproduce the problem but my test alpha GUIs look the same in both Final 4 and Final 5.
And as I asked, can you all please say if you're using Classic or AdditiveOpacity?

Just to reiterate this point -- I really want to release this Final 5 version as the 3.2 Official Release, but I don't want to do this while there is a potentially serious GUI alpha problem outstanding. Can anyone provide an example of the problem?

[frogfrost]

You know what, to sanity check I just ran Plants vs. Zombies (which is 800x600) and it did it on that too, so it's not just AGS, so don't burn any energy on that one. The bars did look uneven when I booted it in 800x600 on AGS but it honestly could just be my monitor.

Thanks for at least considering it though!

[Stacy Davidson]

I actually have upgraded!  I'm still using 320 x 240 sized graphics, but I'm blowing them up to 640 x 480 before importing them into AGS.  It's a bit overkill, true, but I like having a low-res game with high-res

That's funny, I was just thinking "why not just blow up the graphics?"  I sure as hell would not want to do that with an existing game (especially one the size of Resonance), but for a fresh game, sounds like a good call.  Not really an issue for me, Han Solo needs to be low-res all the way for the retro factor and Jack Houston is all high-res, but there are a lot of designers like you guys straddling the line between retro coolness and modern convenience.