AGS 3.5.1 - Patch 3

Started by Crimson Wizard, Sat 14/08/2021 05:39:44

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Crimson Wizard

AGS 3.5.1 - Patch 3
Full release number: 3.5.1.10


For Editor
Spoiler

For Android
Spoiler

For Engine/Editor developers
Spoiler

Released: 14th August 2021

Previous stable version: AGS 3.5.0 P10 forum thread


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.

For the reference, we currently have another major version in works, which is already usable although may be not as stable, and introduces a SDL2-based engine, planned to be released as 3.6.0. If you're interested you may find it here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=58976.0



Changes in the Patch 3:

Editor:
- Fixed sprite file over 2 GB could not be loaded (regression since the last patch).

Engine:
- Further improvement to GUI perfomance: don't redraw GUI when the mouse cursor is hovering over or interacting with controls not leading to an actual visual change.
- Fixed ListBox items could become unaccessible if its font or height is changed leading to a disabled scrollbar.


Changes in the Patch 2:

Engine:
- Fixed speech lipsync getting disabled after loading another game with RunAGSGame().
- Fixed MOD/XM clips fail to play (regression).
- Fixed certain OGV videos fail to play (regression).
- Fixed software renderer was not updating game screen correctly when running a game with legacy "letterboxed" feature (regression).


Changes in the Patch 1:

Editor:
- Fixed script compiler sometimes was not specifying actual Dialog number when reporting errors in the dialog scripts.

Engine:
- Fixed Game.TranslationFilename always returning empty string (regression).
- Fixed GUI controls which were toggled from disabled to enabled state not responding to the mouse clicks until the mouse is moved (regression).
- Fixed OpenGL did not apply a Linear filter when "Render sprites in screen resolution" option is off.


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.
- 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
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.







Thanks to everyone who contributed to and tested this version!




nightmarer

Thank you for this update! Everything works fine.

Cassiebsg

Okay, thanks a bunch for the new version. I'm using it for the current MAGS project.  (nod) :-D

But I just noticed something that is driving me nuts. When importing sprites, it doesn't keep my previous import setting. It's defaulting to "Top-left pixel" instead of "Leave as-is".  >:( Am I missing something, or is this another "feature" of the new import?
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Crimson Wizard

#3
Quote from: Cassiebsg on Sat 21/08/2021 15:51:05
But I just noticed something that is driving me nuts. When importing sprites, it doesn't keep my previous import setting. It's defaulting to "Top-left pixel" instead of "Leave as-is".  >:( Am I missing something, or is this another "feature" of the new import?

I wish someone told me earlier, it's been like this since 3.5.0 probably.

Note that you may change default value in editor's Preferences. This is where the sprite import takes it.
Prior AGS worked like this: it would take the default value at the startup, but then kept remembering the last one. Now it only takes one from the preferences.

We could probably add a tick "remember last import options" there.

Cassiebsg

good, so I was missing something, glad I asked. :)
I would have said it earlier, but I only noted it today and I haven't made a game since last year, and that one had very few graphics for me to have noticed.
Anyway, adding that tick "remember last import options" would be a great idea. I did look for one. What I didn't thought about was check the preferences.  :-[
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Cassiebsg

I'm not sue this is the right place for this note/request, but...

I've noticed, again, that dialogues still do not save.  :-\
Meaning I just spend some time adding dialogues, then close the dialog and when I opened it again all was gone! Empty.  :~(
Now I'll need to go check all the other dialogues to make sure they're not empty/missing changes.
Can we either set them to autosave when closing it, or at least come with a warning that is hasn't been saved yet, and if I want to save it??? That would save me so much lost time.

Bizarrely, if I add a new option it does save, but not any text added on the right won't.
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Crimson Wizard

#6
Quote from: Cassiebsg on Sun 22/08/2021 21:23:31
I've noticed, again, that dialogues still do not save.  :-\
Meaning I just spend some time adding dialogues, then close the dialog and when I opened it again all was gone! Empty.  :~(

I dont remember hearing about this before. But this is happening, and is definitely a bug.

This seem to have started somewhere after 3.2.1, because it keeps dialog contents in memory in 3.2.1, but not 3.4.0 and later.

Cassiebsg

I complained about it some years ago, probably at the time I did my first game.
But no idea where exactly I posted it, thought. Likely the wrong place.  (roll)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...


Cassiebsg

Sorry, I seemed to have found another bug (not sure if it has been reported before).

I needed to replace some characters by another (text wise, not playable ones). So I just did a "Replace All" entire project.... and it worked, it replaced 92... but it did NOT replace all. Apparently it can't replace in dialog options?

Well, at least the rest has been fixed, so less for me to manually fix.
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Crimson Wizard

Quote from: Cassiebsg on Tue 24/08/2021 22:09:46
I needed to replace some characters by another (text wise, not playable ones). So I just did a "Replace All" entire project.... and it worked, it replaced 92... but it did NOT replace all. Apparently it can't replace in dialog options?

"Replace All" only works in regular scripts as of now.

Cassiebsg

Could we place a small text in the replace all GUI warning about that?
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Eon_Star

#12
I just tested the patch 3. Works fine. Thanks for the efforts guys.  :-D

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