Adventure Game Studio

Spoiler

VC 2015 redistributable needed for AGS Editor on Windows (https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/A/A/6AA4EDFF-645B-48C5-81CC-ED5963AEAD48/vc_redist.x86.exe)

Download Dark UI Theme for the editor (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/download/v.3.5.0.31/VisualStudioDark-3.5.0.31.zip)

[close]

Spoiler

Android launcher (APK signed with Debug key), suitable for running any compatible AGS game (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/download/v.3.5.1.6/AGS-3.5.1.6-debug.apk)

Native engine libraries, for making your own signed APKs (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/download/v.3.5.1.6/AGS-3.5.1.6-android-libs.zip)

[close]

Spoiler

AGS source code central repository (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/tree/v.3.5.1.6)

Debug symbols database (for analysing crash dumps) (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/download/v.3.5.1.6/AGS-3.5.1.6-pdb.zip)

[close]

Current stable version: AGS 3.5.0 P10 forum thread (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=59109.0)



This release is brought to you by:

- Alan v. Drake
- Crimson Wizard
- eri0o
- James Duong (implemented "--console-attach" option for Windows)
- Morgan Willcock
- Nick Sonneveld
- rofl0r
- Thierry Crozat (bug fixing)


Summary

3.5.1 is a minor update after 3.5.0, which contains mostly utility additions, fixes and perfomance improvements.
There's one minor change to game project, and one change to savegame format which had to be made to fix one old issue with overlays. This means that you will likely be able to downgrade your project from 3.5.1 to 3.5.0 with a simple manual edit in Game.agf, but saves made with 3.5.1 engine will not be compatible with 3.5.0. (You can still use old saves with 3.5.1 engine of course)

This is likely to be the last full version before transition to SDL2-based engine, which is currently in works and is planned to be released as 3.6.0.


What is new in 3.5.1

Editor:
- Added "Attach game data to exe" option to General Settings. This lets you to package game data separately from the game.exe (only important on Windows at the moment).
- Deprecated "Limit display mode to 16-bit" property in Runtime Setup as it's no longer used by the engine.
- Display aspect ratio in game resolution dialog.
- Implemented classic Color Picker dialog for the Color type values in the property grid, instead of the default one which does not allow user-defined colors.
- Improved tab switching performance for script windows.
- Deprecated "Limit display mode to 16-bit" property in Runtime Setup as it's no longer used by the engine.
- Editor will now enforce full game rebuild after upgrading an older project, this ensures that all scripts are recompiled with the new version rules.
- Fixed room lists in property editor were not updated after room number is changed.
- Fixed importing pre-3.* projects broken by incorrect assignment of "Game file name" property.
- Fixed importing Characters and GUI without sprites still created empty sprite folders.
- Fixed crash when exporting/importing Characters with no Normal View.
- Fixed translation compiler did not correctly save some of the escaped sequences, such as "\n".

Scripting:
- Implemented correct parsing of a "const string" function return type.
- Fixed implementing imported functions was forbidden in the room scripts.

Script API:
- Added GUI.Shown readonly property that tells whether GUI is active on screen. This is primarily for GUIs with "Popup At Y" style, because they hide themselves regardless of Visible property. Note that since 3.5.0 GUI.Visible only tells a script-set value.
- File.Open() now supports $CONFIGFILE$ tag which will try to open user config file for reading or writing regardless of where config is located on disk.
- Added System.SaveConfigToFile() which writes current engine settings to the user config file. Only the options that can be changed at runtime are written back at the moment.
- GetTranslation() now returns "const string" (was "string"). This is to prevent modifying returned string using old-style string functions, such as StrCat(), as this string may be allocated in the internal engine memory for its own use.

Engine:
- Support loading audio and video from data packages larger than 2 GB.
- Improved game data loading times by introducing buffered file stream. Initial tests showed 3-4 times faster file reading.
- Improved game perfomance by not reupdating all of the GUIs each time anything changes, instead only affected GUI will be updated each time.
- Some improvement to general script perfomance.
- Some improvement to script Dictionary and Set types perfomance.
- Room Object's Graphic property now can be assigned a sprite with index over 32767 and up to 65535. This restriction is due to internal data format, which cannot be fully fixed without breaking compatibility with plugin API. This may still be worked around by assigning a View, as View's frames may contain sprites of any index available.
- Similarily, Object's View, Loop and Frame can now be assigned a value over 32767 and up to 65535; not that this was ever an issue...
- Removed arbitrary limit of 1000000 dynamic array elements (now supports over 2 billion).
- Dialogs with no enabled options left will be now stopped, instead of raising script error.
- Engine will not longer quit the game when failing to write a save, but simply display an error on screen (...why this was a thing in the first place?!).
- When restoring a save engine will now try to match game pack by GUID rather than using exe/pack name. This resolves potential problems when game package may have different name in distribution to another system. Also makes saves in multi-game collections more reliable.
- In Debug game mode allow to toggle infinite FPS mode (prior it could not be turned off).
- Expanded text parser error messages for easier debugging.
- Adjusted all the command-line options to have consistent prefix convention, where all full-name options must be preceded by double-dash, and one-letter options by single dash.
- Added "--localuserconf" command and similar global config option which tells engine to read and write user config in the game's directory rather than using standard platform path. Game dir must be writeable for this to work.
- Added "--conf" command which forces engine to read only explicit config file on startup.
- Added "--user-data-dir" and "--shared-data-dir" commands for setting save game directory and shared app data directory from command line (this corresponds to existing options in config).
- Fully configurable log output (in both game config and command line) allows to set up which message types and groups are printed by which output methods (sinks), including: file, system console, in-game console. "warnings.log" is now created only if file log was not requested by user.
- Added "--log-" set of command line options for setting up log output.
- Added "--tell-filepath" option for printing known engine's and game's file locations.
- Added "--tell-gameproperties" option for printing some of the game's general settings.
More information on log config and --tell commands currently may be found in following text file: OPTIONS.md (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/v.3.5.1.0/OPTIONS.md)
This has to be added to the manual eventually.
- Support proper lookup for Allegro 4 library resources (such as its own config and digital MIDI patches) in the game directory.
- Engine will no longer precreate directories for common files: saves, user config, shared files and so forth, - before actually having to write these. This ensures that no new directories are created on your disk without actual need. Also this fixed a problem that could happen if someone deleted e.g. a game's save directory while game was running.
- Fixed running game from another directory by passing its relative filename as command-line argument: in this case engine was incorrectly using its own directory to search for external game data, opening files for reading by script command, and so on.
- Fixed some of the engine's own hotkeys (such windowed/fullscreen mode toggle) not working during certain skippable game states.
- Fixed overlay was set to wrong position if it were using TextWindow gui and either its text or X, Y properties got changed.
- Fixed crash occuring when the speech is using text window gui with zero Padding and the speech text is an empty line.
- Fixed characters and room objects were not updating their looks if their current graphic was a Dynamic Sprite, and that sprite was modified with ChangeCanvasSize, CopyTransparencyMask, Crop, Flip, Resize, Rotate or Tint function.
- Fixed Views' frames keeping reference to deleted Dynamic Sprites causing crashes. Now they will be reset to dummy sprite 0 for safety.
- Fixed engine crash when button's graphic is set to sprite out of range.
- Fixed animated cursor's normal graphic reappearing in between animation frames if mouse mode is being repeatedly reassigned, for example in rep-exec script.
- Fixed certain interactions did not work with GUI if it was made fully transparent.
- Fixed ListBox.FillSaveGameList() search pattern, it included files which contain save filename pattern but do not exactly match; for example: "agssave.001_".
- Fixed engine was ignoring audio files in game directory when running games which use old audio system.
- Fixed crash in Direct3D and OpenGL renderers that occured if game uses a plugin that performs software drawing on screen, and one of the rooms is smaller than the game's resolution.
- Fixed Direct3D was assigning wrong fullscreen refresh rate sometimes, slowing alt-tabbing.
- Fixed "--test" mode was lost upon restoring a save.

Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSEngine::GetRenderStageDesc() function which returns current render stage parameters. As of this version these parameters include 3 transformation matrixes, allowing any 3D render plugin to stay compliant to engine's scene rendering.

Compatibility:
- Fixed engine was trying to read unnecessary data when loading pre-2.72 games.
- Fixed "upscale" mode for old games (was broken in 3.5.0). Also engine will now try to detect if "upscale" mode wanted by reading old config options (if they are present).
- Fixed GUI.Visible not returning expected values for GUIs with "Popup At Y" style in pre-3.5.0 games, breaking some older games logic.
- Fixed potential buffer overflow when reading pre-3.1.0 games with old dialog script texts.
- Fixed engine was applying player's position too early when ChangeRoom was called for 2.72 and earlier games, which could result in wrong placement in the new room if the character was walking right before the transition.

Android:
- Corrected game scanning in AGS launcher, now it will work consistently with the desktop ports, and detect any compatible game data files named "*.ags" or "*.exe".

OSX:
- When looking for game files engine will no longer use hardcoded filename, will search for any compatible pack file instead.

Windows:
- Windows version of the engine now reads global configuration file. It is looked up in "%USERPROFILE%/Saved Games/Adventure Game Studio/acsetup.cfg"
- Default log file location is now also in "%USERPROFILE%/Saved Games/Adventure Game Studio".
- Added "--no-message-box" command line option to hide message boxes when alerts are raised. These messages will be still printed to log (if one is enabled).
- Added "--console-attach" command line option to try attach to the parent process's console. This is useful if you run game from command line and want to see engine's log in the console.

WinSetup:
- Fixed changing fullscreen mode from "use current desktop" to explicit resolution on save.



More info...

New config and command-line options are documented in OPTIONS.md (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/v.3.5.1.3/OPTIONS.md). They have to be added to manual eventually.

Awesome, Thanks for the update CW and others. Nice job!

It's amazing how much hard work you put into this...

I can launch my game but when I run a test I get the following error message:

QuoteERROR: Unable to determine game data.
Engine was not able to find any compatible game data.
Searched in: d:/Marc/ Brothers & Wreckers/Speech

There's no speech in the game so this folder is empty.

Creamy, have you installed in a separate folder on top of existing editor?

I have AGS 3.5.0 installed yes. And the game works fine with it.

Quote from: Creamy on Sat 27/03/2021 10:22:01
I have AGS 3.5.0 installed yes. And the game works fine with it.

No, I mean, have you installed new editor into a new folder, or on top of previously existing editor's installation?

I see the same error when Running (F5) the game. If I rebuild all files, it seems to be ok.

- Beta downloaded as zip archive into a new folder (not on top of previously existing editor installation)
- Copy of game last compiled with 3.4.1
- I do have speech in the folder

This happens when there are spaces in the path to game. I'll fix it.

QuoteNo, I mean, have you installed new editor into a new folder, or on top of previously existing editor's installation?

I don't know if it's still relevant but the new editor is into a new folder.

QuoteIf I rebuild all files, it seems to be ok.

I can compile the game just fine but it doesn't solve the problem for me.

So, there are two new known problems:

1) Running games in test mode from editor does not work if you have spaces in the path.
2) Custom dialog option rendering has a mistake that literally halves FPS. This is just a timing mistake in the engine, not a perfomance issue.

Soon will be updating 3.5.1 and 3.6.0 with fixes.

Updated to Beta 2
(use download links in the first post)

Editor:
- Fixed Editor could not run game for test if there were spaces in path (regression in 3.5.1).
- Fixed importing Characters and GUI without sprites still created empty sprite folders.
- Fixed crash when exporting/importing Characters with no Normal View.

Engine:
- Fixed game update speed was halved during dialog options (regression in 3.5.1).

WinSetup:
- Fixed changing fullscreen mode from "use current desktop" to explicit resolution on save.

Great! Thank you

Updated to Beta 3
(use download links in the first post)

Engine:
- Improved game perfomance by not reupdating all of the GUIs each time anything changes, instead only affected GUI will be updated.

(This changes how GUI image is updated, please report any related glitches if you notice some)

OSX (Mac port):
- When looking for game files engine will no longer use hardcoded filename, will search for any compatible pack file instead.

Would it be possible to add

/?

as command line parameter to acwin.exe?

I didn't think of trying -? and couldn't find anything in the help or forum.

Quote from: cat on Wed 07/04/2021 20:51:49
Would it be possible to add

/?

as command line parameter to acwin.exe?

I didn't think of trying -? and couldn't find anything in the help or forum.

I think it already should work. The problem is that engine is a graphical application and on Windows these do not print to console by default. You have to pass "--console-attach" parameter to make it do that.


EDIT: oh, btw I found a mistake, it only works if you put "/?" after "--console-attach".

Ah, my bad. Then would it be possible to add the info you gave me in the other thread about how to use acwin.exe in the help.chm or somewhere else?

Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Wed 07/04/2021 20:40:09
Variant 1. Place acwin.exe into game folder and simply run it. You may need to do "acwin.exe --setup" from command line to run newest winsetup if the game is too old.
Variant 2. Run acwin.exe from any folder, but pass path to game folder as an argument in command line.
More info on command line here: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/OPTIONS.md#command-line

I had an idea that don't know if it makes sense or not, but maybe on windows, after explicitly passing a help command (like /? or --help, but not in the case one of these is not passed), when console attach is not set, could instead show the help in a message box.

Edit: or maybe not, the help is really long.

Quote from: eri0o on Thu 08/04/2021 12:59:01
Edit: or maybe not, the help is really long.

That's the biggest reason I was reluctant to do this... But this gives and idea, maybe display message about using "console-attach" instead?

Ah, yeah! That would work!

Actually... need to think this over, because user may be rerouting output to a file like "acwin.exe --help > 1.txt" in which case message will be unnecessary. There may be other cases too.

It would be bad to block the process from closing when it wasn't expected. I think how it works now may not be convenient but it is logical and correct given that this is not a console application and it doesn't know exactly where the output handles are pointing. These are the same reasons that it doesn't attempt to attach by default, which is very convenient but also introduces edge cases where it does the wrong thing.

Other idea, add a little help text about this console-attach in winsetup (I don't remember if winsetup had a bar on top with things like file, about, ...), since it's a thing that happens only windows, could maybe help with discoverability. Again, not sure if a good idea, but it's the graphical accessible place I can think of.

Quote from: eri0o on Fri 09/04/2021 17:07:24
Other idea, add a little help text about this console-attach in winsetup (I don't remember if winsetup had a bar on top with things like file, about, ...), since it's a thing that happens only windows, could maybe help with discoverability. Again, not sure if a good idea, but it's the graphical accessible place I can think of.

I am afraid we are making this too complicated. What is the purpose and use case of this anyway? If the idea is to provide technical information, then the manual is the first choice.
If the person is using command line, then they might be savvy enough to search in documentation if something did not work.

Of course having a message appear with a hint would be nice, but then there's a question whether this may prevent other options from working. This may be interesting to investigate more later, although not a priority imho.

On winsetup, console commands are unrelated thing, and placing them in setup GUI would look confusing to majority of people who use it. For instance, in the past commercial game developers were requesting to remove or hide numerous parameters in winsetup, because they were strange to most players who made mistakes trying to change them.
I'd even say setup app could have all these arguments as options under some "Expert" tab instead, because it's purpose is to provide graphical interface to these things.

BTW, I just wanted to mention this somewhere because people are keep stumbling into this problem, here's finally an article on breaking savegames with game updates and some ways to work around that:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags-manual/wiki/GameSavesCompatibility

(this will be included in the manual too)

Sorry for having caused such discussion. I think a manual entry should be enough. I searched the manual but couldn't find any info on how to use acwin.exe to run a game. Just a single manual page (that can be found when searching acwin) should be enough.

Well I just realized we have a command-line explanation but it's in a big article called "Runtime Engine": https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/RuntimeEngine.html
It was quick remake from an older article, and has random bunch information put there. Also commands are not updated to latest 3.5.1 beta yet.

Updated to Beta 4
(use download links in the first post)

Editor:
- Added "Attach game data to exe" option to General Settings. This lets you to package game data separately from the game.exe (only important on Windows at the moment).

Script API:
- Added GUI.Shown readonly property that tells whether GUI is active on screen. This is primarily for GUIs with "Popup At Y" style, because they hide themselves regardless of Visible property.
Note that since 3.5.0 GUI.Visible only tells a script-set value.

Engine:
- Added "--localuserconf" command and similar global config option which tells engine to read and write user config in the game's directory rather than using standard platform path. Game dir must be writeable for this to work.
- Added "--conf" command which forces engine to read only explicit config file on startup.
- Added "--user-data-dir" and "--shared-data-dir" commands for setting save game directory and shared app data directory from command line (this corresponds to existing options in config).
- Fixed engine crash when button's graphic is set to sprite out of range.
- Fixed certain interactions did not work with GUI if it was made fully transparent. (This appears to be a regression since 3.5.0)

Engine Plugin API:
- Added IAGSEngine::GetRenderStageDesc() function which returns current render stage parameters. As of this version these parameters include 3 transformation matrixes, allowing any 3D render plugin to stay compliant to engine's scene rendering.

Compatibility:
- Fixed GUI.Visible not returning expected values for GUIs with "Popup At Y" style in pre-3.5.0 games, breaking some older games logic.
- Fixed potential buffer overflow when reading pre-3.1.0 games with old dialog script texts.

Windows:
- Windows version of the engine now reads global configuration file. It is looked up in "%USERPROFILE%/Saved Games/Adventure Game Studio/acsetup.cfg"
- Default log file location is now also in "%USERPROFILE%/Saved Games/Adventure Game Studio".


New config and command-line options are documented in OPTIONS.md (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/v.3.5.1.3/OPTIONS.md). They have to be added to manual eventually.



I think this is coming close to final release. Most of the things planned for this update has been added, as well as few things that were not planned initially.

Updated to Beta 5
(use download links in the first post)

Script API:
- File.Open() now supports $CONFIGFILE$ tag which will try to open user config file for reading or writing regardless of where config is located on disk.
- Added System.SaveConfigToFile() which writes current engine settings to the user config file. Only the options that can be changed at runtime are written back at the moment.

The above was added mainly to complement new setting that lets player to have user config in the game directory, and also the fact that engine does not save config automatically on exit (this behavior was present in a previous version, but was causing confusion to people in some situations). This way if you script changing certain config options in your game you may write these back to standard user config without guessing where it's located. Note that assuming that it is always located in "$SAVEGAMEDIR$" would be incorrect now.

For those who would like to work with config file, there's a good IniFile module (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=46631.0) that can load and save it back in a correct format.

New config and command-line options are documented in OPTIONS.md (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/v.3.5.1.3/OPTIONS.md). They have to be added to manual eventually.

I think this may be the last update that *adds* new things. Currently only updating the manual is in plans. And of course bug fixing, if someone finds anything serious.

I'm duplicating this message from another thread hoping to increase amount of feedback.

Current Color Picker for the properties in the Editor is almost useless because it provides selection among some standard lists of colours only. Selmiak was nagging us to make a better one, so I made this in an experimental "ags4" branch as a test.
The new one is a classic Colour Picker you see in Paint, for example, with full range of colours, and even ability to save colours (except they don't save between Editor launches).

The code changes were rather minor, so I also thought about porting these to 3.5.1 release, but it slipped out of my mind.

I'd like to receive some feedback before doing this though, because existing Picker appears as a non-modal panel below the Color property, but the new one is a modal dialog (requires to press OK).

This is a custom build of a 3.5.1 Editor with this colour picker (you may copy these files over 3.5.1 installation):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7iyidlbnmeiu8tf/ags-3.5.1--colourpicker.zip?dl=0

If for some reason you think that's a too radical change and improvements are necessary before it may be used, we could also leave this for 3.6.0.

Updated to Beta 6
(use download links in the first post)

Editor:
- Implemented classic Color Picker dialog for the Color type values in the property grid,instead of the default one which does not allow user-defined colors.

Updated to Beta 7
(use download links in the first post)

Updated with fixes from 3.5.0.32 (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=59109.0).

Editor:
- Fixed translation compiler did not correctly save some of the escaped sequences, such as "\n".

Engine:
- Fixed crash occuring when the speech is using text window gui with zero Padding and the speech text is an empty line.
- Fixed crash in Direct3D and OpenGL renderers that occured if game uses a plugin that performs software drawing on screen, and one of the rooms is smaller than the game's resolution.
- Fixed "--test" mode was lost upon restoring a save.

Compatibility:
- Fixed engine was applying player's position too early when ChangeRoom was called for 2.72 and earlier games, which could result in wrong placement in the new room if the character was walking right before the transition.

Android:
- Corrected game scanning in AGS launcher, now it will work consistently with the desktop ports, and detect any compatible game data files named ".ags" or ".exe".

This version seems to be stable enough to declare a release:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=59192.0

The release also contains a fix to a serious problem of this version not pausing when player switches away from a window. There were no other new problems found since though.