Black Screen at Video

[Miori]

We have a problem. The demo of our game is online and many of the users have the problem, that they get a black screen and  the game hangs up, when they run the game. The first you see in game is a short video.

First we thought its a codec problem, but a test person installed the right codec (Xvid 1.2.1) , but it still doesn't work

The Gamescreen is 320 x 240, the resolution is 640 x 480. The color depth is 32bit. I use AGS 3.0.2.44.

If you want to see the problem you can download the game here . If the game works fine, you are one of the few lucky guys who can play it   

When WE test it, everything works fine, only all others have problems 
We are thankful for every help.

[Pumaman]

Can you ask them to try running Setup and changing the graphics driver to Direct3D; if that doesn't work, try changing the game resolution to 320x240 -- and see if either of those things resolve the problem?

[Miori]

To change the driver to Direct3D 9 works, but the video quality is very bad and cloudy.

Change the Game Resolution to 320 x 240 is a bad idea. The most new video cards are not laid out of such a small solution, then all the game is cloudy and our font is for 640 x 480, hard to read on 320 x 240.

We have 2 Computers, one of them is a bit older and the other one is relative modern, bought last year. On the older PC the 320x240 resolution works wonderful, but on the newer PC it looks very cloudy. It's the same with all 320x240 AGS Games.

[Pumaman]

To change the driver to Direct3D 9 works, but the video quality is very bad and cloudy.

Change the Game Resolution to 320 x 240 is a bad idea. The most new video cards are not laid out of such a small solution, then all the game is cloudy and our font is for 640 x 480, hard to read on 320 x 240.

I'm not saying that changing the resolution is a good idea, I'm asking if you could try it as a way of narrowing down the problem. Glad to hear it works with D3D, though I'm not sure why that would make any difference to the quality of the video...

[Miori]

The difference between the modi


DirectDraw 5 (normal)


Direct3D 9 (it's cloudy, it's stretched and you can see it's in a window)

[Pumaman]

What you call cloudy, Direct3D calls anti-aliasing

As for the stretching -- what are you passing as the FLAGS parameter to PlayVideo?

[Miori]

The parameter for our videos are 1,1  .
We tried with 1,0 so it should not stretch but it although stretch with direct3d9.

The other videos don't have this black border around the video, they are fullscreen with both drivers.

[Pumaman]

The reason for the black border around the video in DirectDraw 5 is that PlayVideo is being used in game_start, before the screen has initialized properly. If you move the PlayVideo command into the first room (eg. the Enters Room event), it should correctly stretch to full-screen.

As for the black screen hang-up that some people are getting, when this happens can they still use Alt+X to abort the game, or does it not respond to this?

[Miori]

The reason for the black border around the video in DirectDraw 5 is that PlayVideo is being used in game_start, before the screen has initialized properly. If you move the PlayVideo command into the first room (eg. the Enters Room event), it should correctly stretch to full-screen.

That works, the black border is away, it's fullscreen now 

As for the black screen hang-up that some people are getting, when this happens can they still use Alt+X to abort the game, or does it not respond to this?

No, only with task manager you can abort the game (alt+ctrl+del)
The black screen (DirectDraw5) is still there and the Direct3D 9 is still like the second screenshot

[Pumaman]

The Direct3D anti-aliasing is expected behaviour, because you're running the game at 640x480 the video is being smoothly scaled up to fit the resolution.

For the black screen problem I'm not sure what else to suggest. It seems to indicate some sort of codec issue, but if they've tried installing the latest version and that hasn't fixed it I don't know what more it could be. Does the video have sound, and if so what audio codec is being used?

[Miori]

Now we stretched the videos to 640x480 by ourselve, now it is no longer so smoothy   
and the videos are now 32bit like the game and no longer 24bit

So we don't longer need a solution for the black screen problem, because the black screen is only with DirectDraw5, but now we can use Direct3D 9 without losing quality   

Thank you for your help 

[Trent R]

But by ignoring the DirectDraw problem, you're limiting the number of people that can play your game. I assume you don't want that, no?

If a computer or graphics card is too old for D3D, then they need to switch over to DirectDraw.


~Trent
PS-And for the last time, it's called anti-aliasing!