Messages

New version is great with many useful additions. Nice work to all who contributed to this! 

I did notice a few issues with the new Find/Replace text editor (Windows XP if it makes any difference):

1) In a script, press CTRL+F to bring up the Find dialog. Type something and click "Find Next". The next instance will be found and highlighted. At this point you can press CTRL+F to bring up a second Find dialog. Keep repeating the process to open infinite Find dialogs.

2) An option to use the previous functionality would be handy. That is, being able to disable the semi-transparent window and making the Find dialog retain focus after finding an instance. In the latter case, you used to be able to quickly press ESC after finding an instance to close the dialog. Now you always have to manually click it closed.

3) Bring up the Find dialog and then navigate away to another program on the taskbar. The Find dialog will be have priority, appearing in front of the new program's window.

4) Searching for an instance with "Current Project" selected doesn't seem to do anything. Should it be opening all .asc files in the editor where it finds the search term?

5) In your global script, search for a common instance like "int". It will be found. Close the Find dialog and re-open it again by pressing CTRL+F. Type something like "gsdsfsfs". It won't be found. Close the Find dialog and open it again with CTRL+F. In the "Search For" box will be the last found term ("int") rather than the last term searched for ("gsdsfsfs"), which is the way it has always worked in the past.

Here are an assortment editor tweaks that would be handy: 

GUIS
----
-Not sure if this one's possible, but a way to drag the "Text" field on a button/label more precisely into place (or type in coordinates to position it) rather than relying on TextAlingment being TopMiddle, Middleleft etc. which isn't always accurate.

-Would be useful if you could specify what double clicking a GUI control does. It's easy to accidentally double-click on GUI buttons (which you don't want to run a script), and this auto-creates a new event in the global script for that button/control, which you may then need to manually delete if you didn't intend for it to be created. Personally, I'd find it more intuitive if double-clicking a GUI control opened up its Normal Image in the Sprite Manager.


ROOMEDIT
---------
-If you have "Use low-resolution co-ordinates in script" set to True in the General Settings>Backwards Compatibility section of the editor, AGS should always display 320x200/320x240 coordinates next to "Mouse Position:" when you move your pointer across the background to see the current mouse x/y pos. This would be useful when hi-res games (made with AGS 2.x) are converted over to AGS 3.x but the scripts still maintain their old 320x200/320x240 positioning coordinates for backwards compatibility.

-Currently you can only right-click to bring up the "Copy coordinates to clipboard" menu when the "Show this room's: Nothing" panel is displayed. It's a tad inconvenient having to change back to that specific panel just to copy the room coordinates to the clipboard. Would be nice to have this ability when objects/hotspots/regions etc. panels are active too. (On the Objects panel, a new entry could be placed under the "New object here" item on the menu).

-When working on a walkable or walkbehind area, the Eraser tool notification message keeps popping up in the text bubble every time you click it. It gets quite annoying. I guess this notification message should only appear the first time you erase something. Otherwise, just have the notification message appear in a stationary position below the background image (in the grey area of the editor) so that it can't interfere or visually block the area that you're drawing.

-When moving room objects around, providing an option to temporarily hide all other objects (except the one that's currently selected). If you have a large or full-screen-sized object, it obscures everything behind it, making it quite cumbersome to click on or move any smaller objects in the room.


SPRITE MANAGER
----------------
-Bug fix: if you right-click in the sprite manager to find a specific sprite by typing the sprite number, but you have 2 sprite folders, or a sub-folder, with exactly the same name (not case-sensitive) the editor will jump to, and open, the first sprite folder found with that name, even if that's not the folder where the sprite that you searched for resides.

Just gotta say that I'd also be more than willing to pay for AGS updates, regardless of whether it'd be a once-off payment, or an ongoing subscription fee for each new version released.

In consideration of all the great free work CJ has done on AGS over the years, I'd actually feel better about reciprocating in a financial sense if this would enable him to keep working on engine improvements in a timely fashion as well as keeping it "closed source", if that's his preference.

But again, I'm good with whatever decision is made.

I agree with making AGS open source for the reasons Calin mentioned. So long as CJ continues to maintain quality assurance by overseeing all of the features/fixes that get implemented into each "official" AGS build, the release process wouldn't really be any different than how it already works. This way, a panel of hand-picked assistants could implement additions that are approved by CJ, while at the same time, innovation emanating from beyond the panel would be given a chance to flourish (and the really good things could be considered for inclusion in the next official build).

I guess the main argument to be made is whether or not CJ actually feels comfortable releasing all of AGS's code to the masses. I recall him mentioning once that on a previous Open Source project someone tried to claim his work as their own. That may have some bearing on his decision.

Well, whatever approach is taken, the main workload will be lifted off CJ's shoulders while other people contribute to making frequently requested changes happen faster, as well as shrinking the bug tracker list down in size.  Whatever decision is made, AGS will be on-track to getting things done in an efficient and timely manner, which is great.  Thanks CJ for all the excellent work you've put into AGS over the years, and for being-forward minded in thinking about the best way to handle the engine's future so that we can all continue doing what we all enjoy.

PS. About commercial games and reverse engineering etc. I think the benefits of Open Source outweigh the risks. As others have mentioned, there's always someone who will find a way to crack, rip resources from, or copy your game if they really want to. If you make a commercial game, it's going to be uploaded to a plethora of torrent and rapidshare links within days regardless. There's little you can do about it, and this is arguably more damaging than someone simply being able to rip your resources (which they could already partially do with the printscreen key and Windows Sound Recorder anyway). At the end of the day, the large majority of people who buy games will buy them, and those who copy and hack them will always do that. You just want to stop casual pirates and hackers as much as possible. Doesn't really make sense to stifle AGS's improvement in an effort to prevent people from doing what a skilled hacker is already capable of.

That's interesting. Did you develop that "wrapper" by yourself or is it some kind of public software that can be used for other AGS games too?

No, we didn't develop the wrapper. The games are using the CXZ wrapper/engine and any AGS game could make use of it. We received an offer from a guy who handled the conversion for us. You can find more information on CXZ here:

http://portingteam.com/category/news/cxznews/

[WARNING: GAME SPOILERS AHEAD]

Ascovel: It's not a port, as such. The PC version of the game has been wrapped (similar to Cider) so that it's basically the same as running it under Wine, but without the need to dual boot. This way, it works out-of-the-box, so to speak. On Mac, you just need to drag the King's Quest I or II Game Application to your application folder. Once installed, you can run the game by clicking on the King's Quest I or II Application in the application folder.


Here's a full list of changes made to the latest versions of each King's Quest remake:

CHANGES TO KING'S QUEST I VERSION 4.1
-----------------------------------------------------
WARNING: GAME SPOILERS AHEAD

- Fixed: a bug that caused the invisibility ring's expiration message to appear during the end credits
- Fixed: the Magic Chest sometimes disappearing behind trees when killing the giant with the slingshot
- Fixed: a bug where Graham could eat the mushroom while invisible, despite being unable to find his mouth
- Fixed: graphics filters in the winsetup.exe program crashing the game
- Fixed: a crash when loading save-game files by double-clicking on them and then clicking restart
- Fixed: a bug where opening and closing the Restore GUI on the title screen caused the icon bar to appear
- Changed: the appearance of Graham's hair in the dialog portrait without his adventurer's hat
- Fixed: a bug where CTRL+Q and TAB could cause glitches after the Sorcerer freezes Graham.
- Changed: the way the dragon behaves when the protection spell expires within close proximity to it
- Changed: the 'drowning' death GUI picture to one of Graham kneeling when eating the mushroom too early
- Changed: the appearance of the hole in the base of the slingshot tree, making it more visible
- Changed: save-games to be saved in the game directory again, rather than in My Documents/My Saved Games
- Changed: the game's installer to use Inno Setup for better compression and performance
- Added: an Apple Mac port of the game
- Added: a checkbox to the installer asking whether the user wants to create a game desktop icon or not

CHANGES TO KING'S QUEST 2 VERSION  3.1
------------------------------------------------------
WARNING: GAME SPOILERS AHEAD

- Fixed: a crash on the title screen triggered by reloading the game in Vista and Windows 7 without Admin privileges
- Fixed: a crash when loading save-game files by double-clicking on them and then clicking restart
- Fixed: a bug where character and object tint/shade levels displayed incorrectly under Direct3D mode
- Fixed: potential freezing of the video stream in the introduction Magic Mirror movie sequence
- Fixed: a bug where the mouth icon became active in the final Cloud Spirit test instead of the arrow
- Fixed: a bug which made it possible to walk using the arrow keys when the walk icon was disabled
- Fixed: a bug when reading the bible which caused the wrong background frame to appear behind the page
- Fixed: graphics filters in the winsetup.exe program crashing the game
- Fixed: an oversight where the Count could appear during the swamp wolf ambush scene.
- Changed: the visibility of Graham and the seahorse as they near the fake wall in the Sharkee's realm
- Changed: the appearance of Graham's hair in the dialog portrait without his adventurer's hat
- Changed: save-games to be saved in the game directory again rather than in My Documents/My Saved Games
- Changed: the game's installer to use Inno Setup for better compression and performance
- Added: an Apple Mac port of the game
- Added: a checkbox to the installer asking whether the user wants to create a game desktop icon or not

Most importantly: If you're still running v3.0 of King's Quest II, you really should uninstall it and upgrade to v3.1 instead.  Version 3.0 had the potential to crash on the title screen in Windows Vista and Windows 7, due to the way Microsoft became more strict about privileges and file permissions. v3.1 resolves this issue so that both Admin and normal user accounts can run the game interchangeably.

I didn't want to create a new thread for this announcement, so I thought this would be the best place to post it:

King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones (Version 3.1) has been released for both PC and Mac.  You can get the latest builds from the King's Quest 2 page on the AGDI website.

Also, King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown (Version 4.1) is now ready for both PC and Mac. You can get it from the King's Quest 1 page.

Important: Remember to uninstall any previous versions of both games from your system prior to installing these new ones. Since we have changed installer software, the latest versions shouldn't be installed over an existing installation of the games, as this has the potential to leave ghost files behind when you later uninstall. Also, note that save game files aren't compatible between different game versions.

Buckethead: Ah, I wasn't aware that you'd already taken a shot at this type of game. Mixing a 3D environment with traditional HOG gameplay is an interesting style and a nice way of making the genre seem more original.

In regards to your feedback, yes, the game is what it is, really - an experiment to see if I could mimic the gameplay style of some other HOG games using AGS, and without having to invest too much into it as a side-project. The casual audience can be a difficult crowd to please, because thousands play these games and most players offer different feedback on the ideal number of hints granted, time allowed etc. Strangely enough, most feedback indicates that players prefer not to have a timer at all (in combination with having unlimited hints that recharge after a certain amount of time). Personally, I think this level of hand-holding reduces all challenge to being merely an interactive walkthrough. But you can't argue with the majority... and apparently that's what they want.

Peder: I have to check our agreement again to see if it allows us to sell the game independently. But if so, sure, I'll make it available via Plimus for affiliates.

Chicky: Almost like a cancer, eh? I must admit I was taken aback the last time I set foot inside a large chain store and saw mostly HOGs lining the shelves of the PC section and a complete absence of AAA titles -- especially when a cursory glance at the Wii section resembles the Great Wall of China. I have no desire to "sell out" to this genre, but if releasing the occasional HOG can generate some extra cash for us to fund more original adventure games in the future, then it's a means to an end.

[Story]

Just wanted to drop a note here that we've released a Hidden Object Game named "Postcards from Anozira". I started this side-project as an experiment, purely out of curiosity to see how effectively the AGS engine might handle a Hidden Object game capable of storing multiple user profiles etc. 

This is a "straight" Hidden Object Game, meaning, it's not an Interactive HOG with adventure-game elements. (As far as I'm aware,  it's the first HOG developed using AGS?)

Story
The Mayor of Anozira needs your help to drive tourists to the town! Explore the vast desert land and learn about the local stops and interesting wilderness areas as you use your Hidden Object skills to attract new people to the area and help local business survive. Explore the exotic world of the Wild West and discover a host of unusual treasures. (Okay, most of it's junk, but still...) Enter the homes of the town's many colorful inhabitants. Descend into the fabled Lost Dutchman's Mine and uncover riches beyond your craziest imaginings. Do all this and more as you challenge your perception and observation skills.

Select from 5 playable characters: Al Emmo, Rita Peralto, Kevin the Bartender, Koko the General Store Manager, or Mayor Herbie Trinkwasser. Choose to play casually in "relaxed" mode, or challenge your quick-thinking with the timer on. Dare you venture into the world of sand, sun, and silliness?


Screenshots







FEATURES
---------------------------------
-Explore the desert land of Anozira and challenge your observation skills.

-5 Playable characters: Rita, Kevin, Koko, the Mayor... and, of course, Al Emmo.

-Thousands of Hidden Objects, randomized each time you play.

-145 Postcards to collect.

-Collect Bonus Tokens to boost your score and enhance your game.

-Solve a variety of entertaining mini-games.

-Full voice acting & lipsyncing.

-Timed or Relaxed mode. Choose your playing style.


Obviously, this title is aimed predominantly at the casual gaming market, and I'm not sure how much interest there is for Hidden Object games amongst the more cerebral adventure-gaming community, but if you're actually into these kinds of game (or would just like to see AGS do something else it wasn't intended for), then take a look!

The game costs $6.99 USD. It's exclusive to Big Fish Games, so the demo can only be downloaded from their site. You can read more detail and view some screenshots at the links below:

Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira Information Page

Download Demo (1 hour free trial) & Buy Game links

Had a few Russian players report this in our games as well.

I believe this bug was fixed in AGS 3.2 beta 1. You could install the latest 3.2 RC to a new directory, copy a backup of your game's source code into a sub-directory, and compile it to test whether the issue persists or not.

Thanks for the offer, but it's alright now. The puzzle I needed to implement wasn't overly complex so I was able to script it from scratch.

As for the 3.2 compatible version: nothing comes to mind in terms of new features, aside from perhaps having the ability to alternatively pick up jigsaw puzzle pieces by single-clicking them and then single-clicking again to drop them (i.e. so that the mouse button doesn't need to be held when dragging them around).

Looks great, from the demo! Thanks for taking the time to implement this effect. I'll definitely check it out soon, when I get the chance, and give you some feedback.

Psssst.... we're over here:

http://www.agdiforums.com/forum



Thanks for your comments, nonetheless! Glad to know that the 8 years of development were put to (questionably) productive use.  It's also interesting to know that new players are still discovering the remake for the first time.

Regarding the 'bug', did you actually witness the Air Elemental yourself? For some "tell about" topics in the game, there's a knowledge flag where you need to physically see the subject of conversation with your own eyes before it will appear as a "Tell About" topic on the Hero's Point and Click menu trees. From memory, I believe that the Air Elemental is one such topic.

This happens to me also during room changes, but only with the DX5 driver. The Direct3D one works fine.  I have an Nvidia GTX 295 video card and an Intel Core i7 920 CPU.

Seems like it could have something to do with DX5 being slower to draw graphics to the screen, while simultaneously being compounded by the process of the room loading.

I think the issue isn't a matter of "fixing" the DirectDraw scaling per se, but rather to make AGS capable of detecting whether the user's system is capable of Direct3D, and if not, automatically making the game's display use the DirectDraw driver instead.

It's somewhat redundant, having to make two versions of a game and maintain them both when a (presumably) simple auto-detection of the system's graphics capabilities would eliminate this. This way, the game's optimal settings (Direct3D driver) can be set in the .cfg and released with the game, but if a particular user's system doesn't support these optimal settings, then rather than receiving a crash error, the game would simply run with the alternate DirectDraw driver without requiring any intervention from non tech-savvy players.

--EDIT--

An afterthought: What might actually be cool is the ability to set up a number of (completely optional) alternate "configurations" in the acsetup.cfg file. These would be listed in order of preference. When executed, the AGS game would try each "configuration" until it finds the first one that's compatible with the user's system. The benefit to this approach would be multiple attempts at getting the game to look as intended (or at least half decent) in the eyes of the designer.  It would only default to using "bare bones" settings (i.e. the DirectDraw driver) if no alternate "configurations" were found in the .cfg file or if none of them are compatible with the system.

This could be taken a step further by having certain configurations only applicable if the user's processor and/or GPU meets a certain speed - permitting filters to be enabled for hi-res games in the event that the user's CPU/GPU will be fast enough to handle the game without slowdown.

I've ran into this hurdle too. It's often ideal to run hi-res games with the 2x filter in order to benefit from the improved scaling (especially at very small scaling sizes). However, due to the fact that the Direct3D driver doesn't work on all systems, this pretty much forces you to make the DirectDraw driver the default one, which results in the issues you've mentioned. The problem is that a lot of people are unaware that they can change the graphics options in winsetup.exe to make things look better.

The ideal solution would, indeed, be if AGS detected Direct3D capability at run-time. (In fact, I think it'd be great if all the current winsetup.exe options could be altered from an in-game "options" menu rather than having to access winsetup.exe -- it'd be more intuitive.) But since that's not possible at the moment, the only potential solutions I can think of are:

1) Ship your game with a launcher menu .exe file, but don't include the winsetup.exe file. Allow several different "pre-set" configurations to  be selected from your launcher menu, and include a corresponding acsetup.cfg file for each one.

2) Similar to the above, but program the various options into a GUI menu inside your AGS game. Then use WriteRawLine to write each setting as a new line into the acsetup.cfg file. The DirectDraw driver would be set by default (to ensure that the game loads). And if a player tries changing to the Direct3D driver, you could display an in-game message giving them instructions on how to reset the DirectDraw driver if the D3D one crashes the game on them. For this to work, the game would need to quit and be reloaded after the new .cfg file is written to ensure the new settings take effect. A bit sloppy.

3) I know next to nothing about this, but according to the Microsoft site there is a function (DrvGetDirectDrawInfo) that can be called to determine a computer system's capability to use the Direct3D driver.

"The DrvGetDirectDrawInfo function returns the capabilities of the graphics hardware."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms793204.aspx

This goes beyond the scope of my knowledge, but perhaps it's possible to write some kind of batch file or plugin that gets called before your game's .exe file is loaded and returns a value, regarding whether or not the system can utilize D3D capabilities. Perhaps someone with more knowledge is able to shed some light on whether this is possible...

Also useful, would be if AGS's System.HardwareAcceleration; function returned whether the user's system was capable of running the AGS game in D3D mode, rather than just reporting if the game is currently running in that mode.

Sorry about the delay. I just got a chance to test this, and it seems that changing the value to 1.5 is still too fast.

I think the problem is simply a matter of what you mentioned -- the distant objects moving in such small increments that there's no way to avoid it appearing jerky (even with the sub-pixel movement).  Not a problem, though. The parallax effect still looks nice with even just the foreground objects moving.

Oh, one other feature that I thought might be useful is the ability to call a function that temporarily 'locks' the screen's viewport and parallax objects into their current positions and allows you to walk around without any screen-scrolling movement or parallax object sliding. This could be useful for cutscenes where you'd like the character to walk around the middle area of a scrollable room, but you don't want the screen/parallax objects to shift by a few pixels and distract the viewer. Of course, it could be turned on/off at will.

Or maybe having some way to specify the x-pos that the player must stand at before the screen begins to scroll left or right. This way the player could cross the halfway point (x-axis) of the screen without having it start immediately shifting. It would allow the player a little buffer zone in the middle of the screen where nothing moves while you walk around in that area.  The point where the shift occurs could be altered from room to room. Don't know if something like that's possible or not?

Hey, GG. This module is excellent and seems like it could be very useful!

Sadly, I, too, have run into the glitch when using hi-res coordinates. A quick check of the forum time/date stamp reveals that it's been quite some time since you last touched this module, and I was just curious whether you still intended to address that particular bug?

Either way, Nice job. 

I edited all the same instances as you, changing 4.0 to 26.0 and achieved the same effect. Changing the pluses to minuses in these lines :

Code: ags

PxObj[objectpass].X=PxObjOriginX[objectpass]-FloatToInt(IntToFloat(viewx)/26.0);

PxObj[objectpass].Y=PxObjOriginY[objectpass]-FloatToInt(IntToFloat(viewy)/26.0);

...makes the mountains object scroll the other way, but the frames/sub-pixel movement is jerky, like the frames are displaying in the wrong order. However, if I set the mountain object's PxView Property to 0, it gives me the effect I want (just without using the sub-pixel View/Frames, which, as you mentioned, can't really be noticed at that slow speed anyway).

I know that changing the pluses to minuses isn't really what's intended for negative PxPos values, but it seemed to work before without making the sub-pixel movement jerky, so I just thought I'd mention it, in case something had broken between versions. Either way though, I can still achieve the effect I need.

As for what I'm trying to do. Take a look at this video of the Amiga game Shadow of the Beast and skip to the 2:30 mark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnHY7qUPPro

As the character walks in one direction, the distant mountains appear almost static. But if you look closely,you can see that they're slowly scrolling in the opposite direction than the one the character is walking in.

Granted, the screen I'm working with isn't a direct side-on view like Shadow of the Beast. It has more of an isometric angle with more depth. But due to the diagonal angle the character is moving at, it just looks "right" for the mountains to be traveling away from him, rather than in the same direction.

I'll try to make the module support this better in the future, but I can't work it out just now. For the time being, that workaround is your best bet.

Sounds good, and thanks for the suggested code. Works a treat!

First I should mention that I previously edited all of the 4.0 values under this section:

Code: ags

if (PxObj[objectpass].GetProperty("PxPos")==-1){

... to values of 26.0.  I wanted to have distant mountains scrolling very, very slowly as the character walks.

However, when walking to the LEFT, the codeblock above makes the mountains scroll from right to left. I needed them to scroll left to right instead.  In previous versions of the module, it seemed that if I altered the following lines:

     

Code: ags

PxObj[objectpass].X=PxObjOriginX[objectpass]+FloatToInt(IntToFloat(viewx)/4.0); 

PxObj[objectpass].Y=PxObjOriginY[objectpass]+FloatToInt(IntToFloat(viewy)/4.0); 

..and replaced the instances of + with a -  this would make the mountains scroll the opposite direction instead.  In the latest module version, doing that seems to mess up the smooth scrolling View/Frames, though.

I guess what would be handy, is if you could implement a new PxPos number for distant scrolling objects (like mountains) that scroll left to right, rather than right to left. Either that, or allow the user to somehow specify which direction a distant object should scroll.


Another question:

If I put the following code in the room_Load() function of a screen with parallax scrolling:

function room_Load(){
player.x=20;
player.y=327;
SmoothScroll_PxOn();
}

..if the previous room's background was scrolled to the right, and the player character is then moved into the new room and positioned on the left side, the new room's background will initially be scrolled over the the right too (the inherited position from the previous room). However, after fade-in, the background & parallax objects quickly scroll over to where he's standing on the left.  

What's the best way of ensuring that both the scrolling background and any parallax objects are already set into their correct positions, relative to the player's x/y pos, prior to the screen fading in? So that the player doesn't have to watch them scrolling into position every time a new room loads?


Thanks!