AGS 2.71 Final 2 - Politically Correct Edition

[SSH]

Does the compression automatically turn itself off on a sprite-by-sprite basis if it would make the srpite bigger?

[Pumaman]

No, but that's a possibility for future. Because almost all sprites have a transparent area of some sort, it's likely to have at least a minor impact on them.

[GarageGothic]

Thanks for the replies CJ. They were very helpful.

I'm very happy with the new DynamicSprite functions. I am wondering though, if it would be possible to add a character.LockGraphicOffset command?

If you mean a way to set the character to a sprite slot rather than a view, it would require fairly major changes to AGS. It is currently assumed that all characters have a current view/loop/frame so it's not an easy addition to make.

I understand. That's pretty much what I thought. I wonder if it would be possible then, as a workaround, to add a function that changes the sprite number of a specific view frame at runtime? Such as SetFrameSprite(int view, int loop, int frame, int slot)?

[strazer]

1.) The X and Y properties of a SayBackground overlay return strange values. In my test it had X=30000 and Y=0.

2.) Is there currently a way to determine if an object has "Use walkable area scaling" enabled or not? If not, may I suggest Object.IgnoreScaling.

[Pumaman]

I wonder if it would be possible then, as a workaround, to add a function that changes the sprite number of a specific view frame at runtime? Such as SetFrameSprite(int view, int loop, int frame, int slot)? 

I'll look into it.

1.) The X and Y properties of a SayBackground overlay return strange values. In my test it had X=30000 and Y=0.

Ah yes, well spotted. This is because SayBackground overlays are attached to the character and follow them around the room so the x&y are stored differnelty in the engine. I'll fix the properties to return the right values.

2.) Is there currently a way to determine if an object has "Use walkable area scaling" enabled or not? If not, may I suggest Object.IgnoreScaling.

Not currently, but it would make sense to add that property so that it's consistent with characters.

[Cyberion]

well, sorry for bothering with such unimportent thing, but i though that i would say it. nothing too serious or anything, but it would be nice if you can make the "talking color" field a little bit wider, cause when i'm using a high color mode, i'm adding 5 digit numbers in there, the last number isn't seen or half seen, cause the field is too small. So would be nice if you can increase the width of the field.

[Pumaman]

Ok, beta 2 is now up. This is a relatively minor release but it fixes the crashes that have been reported in the editor, as well as adding a couple of new features.

Let me know if you have any problems.

nothing too serious or anything, but it would be nice if you can make the "talking color" field a little bit wider, cause when i'm using a high color mode, i'm adding 5 digit numbers in there, the last number isn't seen or half seen, cause the field is too small

Sounds reasonable to me, I'll see what I can do.

[Etcher Squared Games]

Hi all,
This is my first time suggesting something for AGS, so please be kind if I'm not doing this right.

Using all the resources I know about, I didn't find anything about global searching of scripts.

I've had recent need to search all my scripts for certain text, but as of right now, I know only how to search a script at a time.  Is it possible to add in a feature to search through all scripts for a certain text?

I don't care about, say, double clicking on a link and it automatically taking me there.  Just as long as I know how to get there.  Something like
Global - line 25
Global - line 52
Header - line 34
Header - line 34    // in case it is on the line twice
Room3 - line 77

etc etc....

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

That's impossible to do because when the rooms aren't loaded... er, they aren't loaded, period. The most you could hope for was something that looked in the global script, script header and the script off the currently loaded room.

Mind you, you can export all your scripts, there's an option to do that, and then use Word or whatever to find whatever you want... not perfect, but it'll do ya.

[TheMagician]

* Added DynamicSprite.Rotate function.

Super! As soon as I'm home tonight, I'll try fooling around with it!

* Editor now uses "Speech" and "Music" sub-folders to store speech and music files in to reduce the clutter in the main game folder.

Very nice, as well! I suppose there is a reason why you didn't create a sub-folder for sounds?

* Hi-colour palette pane now allows you to type in a colour number and see its RGB settings.

Very useful for me!

* Pamela lip-sync allows multiple phenomes per frame.

Er ... whatever ... ?? What exactly is this good for? And who is Pamela?

Great update! Thanks Chris!

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Pamela is a third-party app you have to use if you want to lip-synch your characters' talking animation with voice. It's all there in the manual. :

I'm curious now - what does that mean in layman's terms? What can we do now that we couldn't before?

[Kinoko]

Minor, but I just realised in the manual under SetIdleView you say DELAY is a measure of seconds, but it's actually a measure of the standard fps default in a game. Mine's different so I just got caught out wondering why it was only waiting half as long as I specified.

Actually, wouldn't it be better to specify the frames rather than "seconds" given that people can change their game speed?

[GarageGothic]

* Added DynamicSprite.Rotate function.

CJ, you're my hero!!!

I should probably go home and test this, but I'd might as well ask: It says in the help that the degree must be between 1 and 359. But the crop mode sounds like a very useful tool for other things as well. Would it be possible to either make it work for angle 0, OR add a specific crop mode for dynamic sprites? Thanks.

[Pumaman]

Using all the resources I know about, I didn't find anything about global searching of scripts.

Thanks for your suggestion, I can see how it would be useful.

However, in the mean time you can use the "Dump Game Text To File" option on the Game menu to dump everything into one big text file that can then be searched.

Very nice, as well! I suppose there is a reason why you didn't create a sub-folder for sounds?

Well, the Music and Speech folders each correspond to a VOX file (music.vox and speech.vox, respectively). This logically seperates the files that will be bundled into the vox's, and those that are in the exe.
However, I can see the argument for a seperate Sounds folder to seperate them out from the rest of the game, if people think that would be useful?

Er ... whatever ... ?? What exactly is this good for? And who is Pamela?

Don't worry about it, I only put this on the changelog for completeness -- as far as I know only one game is currently using the pamela lip-sync feature and if you're not using it, then this doesnt affect you.

Minor, but I just realised in the manual under SetIdleView you say DELAY is a measure of seconds, but it's actually a measure of the standard fps default in a game. Mine's different so I just got caught out wondering why it was only waiting half as long as I specified.

Good point, I'll update the manual. Specifying it in game loops would probably have been a better idea, but it's too late to change that now, unfortunately.

I should probably go home and test this, but I'd might as well ask: It says in the help that the degree must be between 1 and 359. But the crop mode sounds like a very useful tool for other things as well. Would it be possible to either make it work for angle 0, OR add a specific crop mode for dynamic sprites? Thanks.

Hmm, using a rotation of 0 as a way of cropping the sprite seems very hackish to me, so I'd prefer to add a seperate Crop method.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Don't worry about it, I only put this on the changelog for completeness -- as far as I know only one game is currently using the pamela lip-sync feature and if you're not using it, then this doesnt affect you.

Arr(tm), but I like knowing how AGS works, and have fiddled a bit with Pamela, and don't rule it out in the future. So I'm curious -

what does that mean in layman's terms? What can we do now that we couldn't before?

[GarageGothic]

The rotate sprite function is awesome, and not at all slow as I feared. However, it crashes whenever I use angles of 135 degrees and above. Problems start between 135 and 140, and this increment seems to depend on sprite size, although tiny sprites also crash the engine. On large sprites I get an Out of Memory message, on smaller ones just a generic error message.

I wrote the simplest possible script just to test it, so I doubt the problem is in there:

Code: ags

DynamicSprite* hest;
hest = DynamicSprite.CreateFromExistingSprite(289);
hest.Rotate(140);
hest.Delete();

And here's a couple of the error messages:

Rotating 20x20 sprite 138 degrees (no problem at 137):
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x004DF068 ; program pointer is +6, ACI version 2.71.869, gtags (289,16)
in Global script (line 5365)

Rotating Roger sprite (default sprite 2000) at 137 degrees:
Error: Out of memory: failed to allocate -76 bytes (at PP=6)

Rotating several MB large sprite at 135 degrees:
Error: Out of memory: failed to allocate -1364 bytes (at PP=6)

Edit: I should add that this was tested on 32-bit color 640x480 resolution. I haven't tried it with other settings.

[SSH]

Very nice, as well! I suppose there is a reason why you didn't create a sub-folder for sounds?

Well, the Music and Speech folders each correspond to a VOX file (music.vox and speech.vox, respectively). This logically seperates the files that will be bundled into the vox's, and those that are in the exe.
However, I can see the argument for a seperate Sounds folder to seperate them out from the rest of the game, if people think that would be useful?

Actually, if sounds, music and speech are all in separate folders, then you could allow Dialog/Speech lines to have something like "&GREET Hi there, my name is Roger" which would look for speech\greet.ogg/mp3/wav/etc....

To have meaningful filenames would make adding speech much easier! You always have to go through the game after adding speech and test every line in case you got your numbering wrong!

[TheMagician]

^^ YES to everything SSH said.

In my opinion: the more organized the game folders are the easier it is to keep track of everything when your game gets complex.
So I think a Sound subfolder would be very nice.

[Pumaman]

Arr(tm), but I like knowing how AGS works, and have fiddled a bit with Pamela, and don't rule it out in the future. So I'm curious

It means you can attach an AGS view frame to multiple pamela phenomes rather than the one you used to be able to attach a frame to.

The rotate sprite function is awesome, and not at all slow as I feared. However, it crashes whenever I use angles of 135 degrees and above. Problems start between 135 and 140, and this increment seems to depend on sprite size, although tiny sprites also crash the engine. On large sprites I get an Out of Memory message, on smaller ones just a generic error message.

Heh, serves me right for forgetting my trigonometry, and only testing it with small angles. Thanks for spotting it

Actually, if sounds, music and speech are all in separate folders, then you could allow Dialog/Speech lines to have something like "&GREET Hi there, my name is Roger" which would look for speech\greet.ogg/mp3/wav/etc....

That's a good idea, actually. Though it still wouldn't stop you having to play test it to make sure all the files were there, it's still easy to make a typo in &GREET

[SSH]

Couldn't AGS produce a log file/warning of any missing speech files? I guess you'd want it to be easily dismissed if you just hadn't got round to doing them all yet, but you'd also want to see indetail which files it had managed to pick up