Running old games with 3.6.2 engine

[MoonBird]

One more oddity found: While using the acwin.exe in game named "The Goat Crone" (version 1.0.2) you cannot exit from the recipe book once you open it. Through normal exe-file the recipe book works fine.


Moderator note: This topic was split from here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/adventure-related-talk-chat/text-speed-in-ags-games/

[MoonBird]

More tests: Some games have problems with fonts breaking (they interline or get cut off. Sometimes changing the graphic output fixes them, sometimes it doesn't. Also some games have freezing or crashes with cutscenes. Some games do not work with acwin.exe at all. I'd say that 80% of games work wonderfully, though.

[Crimson Wizard]

One more oddity found: While using the acwin.exe in game named "The Goat Crone" (version 1.0.2) you cannot exit from the recipe book once you open it. Through normal exe-file the recipe book works fine.

Could you please either give a link to the walkthrough, or, even better, a saved game made prior to the problem?
I never played the game, and I don't know how long would it take to get to the spot in order to test this.

Also some games have freezing or crashes with cutscenes. Some games do not work with acwin.exe at all.

Which games?... at least an example, please?

[MoonBird]

I'll report games that have issues when I find some time to write them down.

[MoonBird]

Here's 3 examples:

The Man From The Fugue State:
Protagonist's walking animation doesn't work, he just drags forward. Through normal exe it works right.

Entrapment (v.2.1)
Magenta backgrounds, that appear during cutscenes. They should be black. This same issue appears in multiple other games too.

Off The Clock
The subtitles do not appear correctly when running through acwin.exe. Only small upper part of them can be seen. This is not fixable by changing graphic output or any other settings.

[eri0o]

@MoonBird thank you for this nice bug list!

[Crimson Wizard]

I fixed the "The Goat Crone" problem where you cannot close the cook book,
the temporary build may be downloaded here:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/4520144712499200



This was the weirdest thing, apparently the game was ordering Wait(50000), which translates to ~20 minites of waiting. I have zero idea why would that be in the game's script and what could author's intentions possibly be.
But it "worked" in the original game because old engine could not store that timeout value and it converted into a random negative one (because how computers work), and waiting stopped instantly.


I will look into other problems afterwards.

[MoonBird]

Stargate adventure
Crashes after the intro scene when starting new game: Error message:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adventure Game Studio

An error has occured. Please contact the game author for support, as this is likely an error in game logic or script and not a bug in AGS engine.
(Engine version 3.6.2.2.)

in the active script:
in "room 6 script", line 90

Error: RemoveOverlay: invalid overlay id passed
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no workaround through any settings. It always does this. There is something wrong with this game in general, because it doesn't run properly even from original exe. It just stops responding with a black screen and music on.

[Crimson Wizard]

There is no workaround through any settings. It always does this. There is something wrong with this game in general, because it doesn't run properly even from original exe. It just stops responding with a black screen and music on.

Hmmm.... but this Stargate Adventure is marked as the winner in AGS Awards, so it worked at some point...

In the comments section the people note that they had some issues with the AVI intro video. Have you tried pressing Escape during the black screen at start?

Note that AGS does not support playing AVIs since v3.6.0 (maybe temporary), so it will not play in 3.6.2 anyway (the video will be simply skipped), unless you convert these avi files found in a game folder to ogvs.

[Crimson Wizard]

An updated 3.2.2 temp build, having almost all of the reported problems fixed:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/4747560278032384
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6436769841807360

(I think i haven't touch only the fonts problem)

[MoonBird]

Wonderful, thank you! Everything except Off The Clock's font problem was fixed. Stargate works beautifully now too.

One more thing, which is not a bug but kind of annoying. There's some resolution challenges in some games, like Apprentice 2. No matter what output you use for the graphics, there is always black bars on top and bottom of the screen. They appear even in windows mode. Is there anything that can be done to that or do I just have to get used to it? I really don't like when I can't use the whole screen in my games. I've even tried to use Magpie and BorderlessGaming softwares, which usually fix this kind of issues, but even those couldn't stretch to fill the screen in this case.

[MoonBird]

One more bug found:

Terror Of The Vampire

Music does not work at all. (Apparently this is due to drop out of the MIDI support, and thus, nothing can be done to run music in newer engines.) Lightning animation at the menu start doesn't appear. Game logo is completely white while it should be colorful.

[eri0o]

There is a way to play midi files, but it requires a sound font file

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/MIDI-playback.html

The library we use for it (SDL_Sound) has a modified version of Timidity that won't work with some specific commands in some specific packages - I don't remember all of the details right now...

[Crimson Wizard]

I've already posted this information about MIDI earlier, in regards to another game. Yes, it's not "dropped", it requires additional installed data to work.

Once you install these files on your PC, that should affect all AGS games which use MIDI (when running with the newer engine).

[Crimson Wizard]

Lightning animation at the menu start doesn't appear. Game logo is completely white while it should be colorful.

"Terror of the Vampire" is a 8-bit (palette-based) game. Such games currently do not have an accurate display with Direct3D and OpenGL renderers. I suggest using Software renderer for such games instead.
(may be selected in the new engine if you run "acwin.exe --setup" from the command line)

[Crimson Wizard]

I made another temp update to 3.2.2, found a bug where the tabbed winsetup could reset advanced config settings to unexpected values when saving, unless you opened these tabs during setup.

Most noteable case is that it keeps disabling audio in config (not only annoying, but may cause some games to have errors in script).

Download link:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/6436769841807360

[MoonBird]

More bug reports found today:

All The Way Down
Subtitles don't appear correctly. They go on top of each other. Developer logo doesn't show at the start

Bustin' The Bastille
Subtitles force auto advance some way. They do not stop with acwin settings.

Sphonx
The game softlocks after the first scene, in the sleeping chambers. Mouse is movable, but hotspots do not occur. Menu can be called but not interacted with.

Xmas Nightmare
The game doesn't start through acwin.exe at all. Normal exe works okay, but there is of course auto-advancing subtitles.

[Crimson Wizard]

Off The Clock
The subtitles do not appear correctly when running through acwin.exe. Only small upper part of them can be seen. This is not fixable by changing graphic output or any other settings.

This game uses a variant of "SpriteFont" plugin that can no longer be reliably supported by the engine.

This may be only fixed by replacing the "agsplugin.spritefont.dll" in the game dir.

I've uploaded an archive containing a collection of 3 variants of plugins which are fixed to work with contemporary engine:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dus50yra6bcfjyza25nov/ags-spritefont-collection.zip?rlkey=9thelubpjplm5iwgy1lwrqxkt&st=rcngkcwp&dl=0

This contains variants:
1. classic
2. clifftop games (it's called so because "Clifftop Games" devs have created an extended plugin)
3. autodetect (tries to detect if the game needs classic or clifftop games variant, but it's not 100% reliable)

For "Off The Clock" game you need "clifftop games" variant. For any other game that uses this plugin and has similar problem, try each on of them until you find one that works.

IMPORTANT: plugin file may be called slightly differently in other game distributions. If game has it under a different name, then rename the one from archive to have a match.

All The Way Down
Subtitles don't appear correctly. They go on top of each other. Developer logo doesn't show at the start

This uses spritefont plugin too, so same solution applies.
The developer logo does appear, although it's strangely more pixelated compared to when running an original game exe.

Xmas Nightmare
The game doesn't start through acwin.exe at all. Normal exe works okay, but there is of course auto-advancing subtitles.

This uses superior version of the engine (early AGS 4). You may find that out in winsetup, or in game if you press Ctrl + Alt + V.
The build that I send only runs games made with 3.6.2 and below.

[MoonBird]

Okay. Got All The Way Down and Off The Clock working correctly. Fantastic. How about that resolution thing with black bars on top and bottom in some games? Is there a way to stretch them to whole screen? Settings don't do it even if there are adjustments to that.

[Crimson Wizard]

How about that resolution thing with black bars on top and bottom in some games? Is there a way to stretch them to whole screen? Settings don't do it even if there are adjustments to that.

Which games for example?

In older versions of AGS there has been a setting called "letterbox" mode, where game would display 320x200 scenes in a 320x240 frame. That's done "by design" and cannot be changed, at least not easily, as the same game in theory may have both 320x200 and 320x240 scenes, and switch between them; and engine cannot know that beforehand, so it has to assume 320x240 game when displaying a window.