Instant room change without flickering? (IMPLEMENTED)

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Yeah, it's probably not possible to do anything about this, but what the hey, no harm in asking, hey?

So, any way, any possible way, to remove the "flickering" when changing between rooms if "Instant" is set?

http://www.lumpcity.co.uk/~skimbleshanks/Compiled.rar

To demonstrate what I mean, I provide my project at it's current status. If you download it and run it, and then press the button that looks like "+" in the "Verbs" box, and type in "Open", and then proceed to open the door, you can freely navigate north and south. And notice, as you do, the way the screen flickers - hardly noticeable in most games, since the background changes anyway, but here everything more or less remains the same, so it's quite obvious.

Yeah, I know there's probably no way to do anything about it, since stuff has to get redrawn (although the only thing I'm using are GUIs), but like I said, no harm in asking...

[SSH]

You could maybe grab a dynamic sprite screenshot, put it on a high-z-order GUI on top of everything else, turn on the GUI and then change rooms, see if that helps...?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I'm gonna try it out when I finish updating my sitey (about time, too), but I dunno... I mean, I understand the logic, but what you see there are 6 GUIs who never turn off, and if it doesn't work for them I don't think it'd be any different for that other GUI...

...but I'll give it a go. It does sound like a good idea.

EDIT - Haven't tried it yet, but noticed it looks better with a "Dissolve" transition. I'm still keen on INstant, but if it doesn't work... well, it's a fallback.

EDIT 2 - Indeed, the sprite idea didn't work...

[Pumaman]

In 8-bit games, the screen is blanked during Instant room changes  -- this is to avoid the strange palette effects that you can see switching between rooms otherwise.

However if you use the same palette throughout this wouldn't pose a problem, I guess some sort of option to alter this behaviour would be useful?

[strazer]

Please use descriptive thread titles next time.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I would find it useful, ayuh.

Strazer - sure, I just didn't quite know how to put it, and actually expected to be told it was un-workaround-able, so I didn't spend a lot of time on it.

Edit by strazer:

AGS v2.72 Beta 2:
* Added game.keep_screen_during_instant_transition option for 8-bit colour modes.