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Could you send us the save? I think it may be easier to find out what's wrong under debugger.

Sure. Here you go: agssave006.zip

Wow, haven't looked in here for a long while. It seems that some nice improvements have been made. Well done!

So, I downloaded the latest beta today and tried to compile Mage's Initiation (which was last compiled in AGS 3.4.3.1). I loaded an old savegame from v3.4.3.1. It restored and played just fine. I then immediately saved over another existing savegame file and quit the game. When I next loaded it and tried to restore this most recent savegame I had created, it crashed with this fatal exception:

Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00431C78; program pointer is +2050, ACI version 3.5.0.16, gtags (52,0)

An error file CrashInfo.dmp has been created. You may be asked to upload this file when reporting this problem on the AGS Forums. (code 0)

Here's the CrashInfo.dmp file if you need to investigate it.

[Mages Initiation: Reign of the Elements]

After a decade of development, we're excited to announce that our RPG/Adventure hybrid Mages Initiation: Reign of the Elements has been released!

Current Version: v.1.1
Click here to view a full list of bug fixes and features added since v.1.0. Most notably, the inclusion of a "No Combat" mode (except for boss battles), in order to benefit more casual adventure game players who don't want to deal with random battle encounters and RPG stats.




Trailer

The Story
D'arc is sixteen years old. He has trained extensively in the Elemental arts for the past decade, under the discerning eyes of the Mage Masters of Iginor. Confined to an existence of academics and magical mastery in their tower, the inquisitive Initiate often wonders what it would be like to explore the secluded outside world.

D'arc's moment of reckoning arrives and his Masters put him to the test. The young Initiate is tasked with retrieving three items, which will test his magical and mental strength to full capacity:

• A lock of hair from a powerful Enchantress.


• The unspoiled shell of Griffon's egg.


• The three-pronged horn of the legendary Trinicorn.

Join D'arc on a perilous journey across the medieval-styled land of Iginor. Brave the perilous Bloodbark forest where the Redcap goblins stalk. Trek across a barren desert wasteland rife with lawless Bandits and fierce Burrowers. Navigate over a vast lake where evil masquerades as beauty. And ascend beyond the lofty mountain peaks where the mysterious and hostile Flyterians dwell, suspicious of all outsiders. It is time for D'arc to prove himself.

Three quests. One chance. Will D'arc succeed and take his place among his fellow Mages?

Features

• A uniquely-crafted RPG/Adventure game.
• Gain new spells as your character improves. No stat grinding!
• Replay as one of four Mage classes (Water, Air, Fire, and Earth), each with unique spells, puzzles, and solutions.
• Beautifully detailed pixel-art character animations.
• Over 30 detailed character portraits. Over 9,000 voiced and lip-synced speech lines.
• A complete digital music soundtrack, brimming with magic and mystery.
• Battle against a horrid horde of monsters or avoid combat and focus on adventure.
• Multiple story paths, depending on your in-game choices.
• More than 50 magical gemstones to enhance your magical power.

Price: $14.99 USD

OS: Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Where to Buy It? From these Fine Places (Steam, Humble, GOG)


Screenshots

Hey, thanks for the kind words, guys!  Sorry, I haven't dropped in around here for a while. Been flat-out keeping up with release stuff.

I'll definitely post an announcement the completed games forum soon. Just give me a bit to get the proverbial ducks in a row.

Wow, this is looking great! Who's doing your character sprite design? The details are really nice.

Best of luck with this!

[January 30th, 2019]

After a decade of hard work, Mage's Initiation finally has a release date!
Set your calendars for January 30th, 2019.

We also have a new preview teaser video to whet your appetite for what's to come.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CKW-32Qki_k

The game now has a page on Steam and you can start wish-listing it. So be sure to do that and help us spread the word!
We're also (still) in talks with GOG.com about releasing on their platform.

Last but not least, we are currently working on native Mac OSX and Linux ports and hope to have them ready for release day. Fingers crossed.

Here are a few up-to-date screenshots:

Yeah, it turns out that I needed to have all of the achievements referenced in my game code also set up in the Steamworks back-end. From what I could see, the AGSteam documentation mentioned nothing about this, so I was adding the achievements to Steamworks gradually, as time permitted. I had about 34 of 45 achievements added to Steamworks. But when I added them all, the crashes stopped happening.

So, it's not a bug with the plug-in. Just something to be aware of.

Has anyone here released a game on Steam with AGSteam v3.4 yet and had it functioning stably?

My beta testers keep getting "Null String Referenced" fatal crashes on seemingly random achievements when SetAchievementAchieved is called. The same code didn't crash the game in previous versions, and I can't see anything in the AGS code or in my Steamworks stats/achievements settings that should cause this crash.

Sometimes I'll recompile the game and tweak some unrelated AGS code (and not edit any of the achievements or stats on the Steamworks side), then push the update to Steam, and suddenly the "Null String Referenced" fatal crash stops occurring for that achievement, but starts happening for other achievements.

Been trying to solve the issue for a few weeks now, but it seems v3.4 is possibly unstable and I may need to return to an older version.

Can you shed any light ton this, Monkey?

I'm getting a few reports from beta testers that with AGSSteam v3.4, there's an issue with the Steam overlay (Shift + TAB), which I have also observed myself.

While the Steam Overlay is active, if you click anywhere (for example clicking on your friends list or looking up guides etc.) the game reacts as if you had clicked in-game with whatever icon was active at whatever placement it had when you opened the Steam Overlay. For example, if you have the walk icon selected, EGO starts moving to the spot where the cursor was pointing in the game. If you have the eye icon selected, EGO comments on whatever the cursor is pointing at behind the Overlay.

This happens with both the Open GL and Direct3D 9 drivers. (With the Software renderer, the Steam overlay does not appear at all when ALT + TAB is pressed).

You have either missing opening quotemark or unnecessary ending quotemark at the second parameter.

Damn, how the hell did I not notice that? It's one of those days, I guess. Thanks, CW.

Okay, that's solved both issues after I rebuilt all the files.

[AGSteam.]

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong here, but I'm using v3.4 (Windows) with the "unified" dll. I went through all my game scripts and changed all instances of AGSteam. to AGS2Client. I also changed all the wrapped code from #ifdef AGSteam_VERSION to #ifdef AGS2Client_VERSION.

Previously, it compiled and the game played just fine. But with the new dll and the amended code above, I get the following issues:

1) With the Steam plugin enabled. If I compile the game, I get a compile error (which doesn't happen if I compile with the AGSteam.dll plug-in is disabled):

Hero.asc(1778): Error (line 1778): buffer exceeded: you probably have a missing closing bracket on a previous line

The offending code is:

Code: ags

   #ifdef AGS2Client_VERSION
   AGS2Client.SetIntStat("WAFE_FIRE_POINTS", giWAFE_Points_FIRE");
   AGS2Client.SetIntStat("WAFE_AIR_POINTS", giWAFE_Points_AIR");
   AGS2Client.SetIntStat("WAFE_WATER_POINTS", giWAFE_Points_WATER");
   AGS2Client.SetIntStat("WAFE_EARTH_POINTS", giWAFE_Points_EARTH");
   #endif

It still crashes if I wrap each of the above four lines individually.


2) With the Steam plug-in disabled, entering any game room that contains the code AGS2Client.SetIntStat will crash the game with:

An internal error has occurred. Please note down the following information..
(ACI version 3.4.1.15)
Error: Unable to create local script: Runtime error: unresolved import 'AGS2Client::SetIntStat^2'

I updated all script instances of AGSteam. to AGS2Client. and it worked fine when they were AGSSteam. instances.

Am I missing something really obvious here?

["Unable to initialise audio hardware. Problem:"]

I don't think it makes a difference what kind of sound file it is (ogg, wav, mp3), because he was getting a pop-up message when running the game from winsetup, regardless of which combination of audios settings he selected. He had to change it to the "no Music" and "no Sound" winsetup options to prevent that message from appearing every time he launches the game.

What "popup message"?

Sorry, just a follow-up on this issue. The person who was experiencing the issue said that it seemed to resolve itself after he downloaded an older AGS game (i.e. compiled with an earlier editor version) and ran that. The sound worked in the older game, and then when he went back to try running the game compiled in this latest beta, it suddenly started working (using exactly the same audio winsetup settings that didn't work before).

The error message he had been receiving was: "Unable to initialise audio hardware. Problem:" That's it. No details given.

He also said, regarding the issue with sound not playing, that the game would sometimes crash out on the title-screen with a scripting error message. The line being referenced in the crash was a simple instance of AudioClip.Stop();.

I know it happened in the beta version before this current one. But I don't think he tried the game that was compiled in any earlier 3.4.1 builds. He had tried it under the the 3.4.0 compiled version, with no sound/music issues, though.

I don't think it makes a difference what kind of sound file it is (ogg, wav, mp3), because he was getting a pop-up message when running the game from winsetup, regardless of which combination of audios settings he selected. He had to change it to the "no Music" and "no Sound" winsetup options to prevent that message from appearing every time he launches the game.  I know he's running Windows 10 now, but may have previously been running Windows 7 when it last worked. I thought it may have been a windows 10 incompatibility/driver issue with his on-board sound card, but that doesn't explain why old (3.4.0 and earlier) AGS games still work on his system with full sound and music...

One of our team members is having an issue with sound and music not playing in games compiled with the latest AGS betas. It used to work in previous builds (3.4.0 and earlier), and still works in older AGS games (he tested it with some titles).

He doesn't have a sound card, just an on-board one. And he's already tried changing all the different sound and music-related settings in winsetup, to no avail. Has anything changed in the latest 3.4.1 that might cause this?

I'm curious if there are any updates on the issue that the DirectX 9 driver doesn't work on certain Windows 10 systems?

I've not tested it out, but apparently installing the full DirectX 9 runtime package can restore compatibility with Windows 10.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

Just thought I should mention that I installed this and it didn't resolve the black screen issue for me with the AGS Direct 3D driver under Windows 10.

Thanks for your diligence in investigating this issue, CW. This fix works like a charm, and the music drop volume seems to now transition across perfectly in all the locations I have tried it in.

If your speakers have independent volume controls, try turning those up (or otherwise in Windows). Works for me.

Interesting. I usually always hold the escape key to skip the introduction sequence (room 99), which must have bypassed the Game.SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop call in that location (it was located inside a StartCutscene/Endcutscene block) and thus, I didn't notice it before. The recent betas must have started calling the function, despite me still holding the Escape key to skip past it. I've now shuffled some of the lines around to work around this.

Anyhow, after resolving that, I'm still getting the issue with the music audio volume level spiking back up, when a queued music piece starts playing, rather than staying at the value set in Game.SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop(eAudioTypeMusic). I'll PM you some instructions on where to test that.

PS. Completely unrelated, but engine also logs thousands of sprite cache errors while running this game. There is some bugs in the sprite system of AGS which were never properly attended, they do not seem to cause any direct issues, but I am a bit worried. It seem to start behave strangely when a very big sprites are loaded and then unloaded during the game (probably dynamic sprites). Setting sprite cache to higher values (I tried 512 MB) made those errors go away.

Yeah, this is probably due to the combat system, as it uses a lot of dynamic sprites. I'll just distribute the game with the sprite cache set to the highest possible value by default.

Meanwhile, I made a fix to console, but that required a tricky workaround, because it has to detect dynamic change to "game.debug_mode" variable, so I thought I better upload it for quick test:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/j59xyk20jev3lx7/acwin_dynamicconsole_fix.zip

Just tried it and yes, this resolves the issue. Thanks!

Well, it works for me when I set it in game_start...
Could you send me a compiled game which has this issue?

Check your PMs.

[game_start]

I think I've narrowed it down.

If I move the line:

Code: ags

Game.SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop(eAudioTypeMusic, 45);

...from the globalscipt's game_start function, into my Title-Screen's room script (room_Load function), then everything works as intended with no issues at all.

It seems that the game bypasses Game.SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop commands if they're put in game_start function.

I also have a Game.SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop line that calls SetAudioTypeSpeechVolumeDrop in the on_event eEventRestoreGame script, which doesn't seem to work either. Might want to check that, too.