Messages

Oh, and consider this: a YEAR in this fantasy world has 14 days.

The Winter is Coming!

Spoiler

Sorry, could not help myself

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I too know the answer :-)
Although in the puzzle I knew it wasn't the rain (hint alert)

Spoiler

, but certain item he carried (not related to weather).

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Personally, I think the Jester is reliable. My reasoning is that if the EVIL KING held him in a dungeon, he must have been NON-EVIL. That, or the EVIL KING hated jesters.

You miss the unfortunate possibility that

Spoiler

Jester is THE evil king in disguise

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(lol)

[@Dirt McStain]

@Dirt McStain, threaded audio was disabled by default since 3.3.0.1146 (see list of changes); that's why skipping starts from 1146. Not sure why "threaded=1" doesn't help in 1146 though.

Currently JJS is looking into music stuttering issue, that occurs with threaded audio. He already found what causes that, hopefully this will be resolved.
I will look into skipping on room load problem as soon as I get more free time; the game should still play well without threaded audio too, because it is not compatible with Pamela lipsync yet (as AGD2 mentioned). I think this might be easy to fix: just adding few more intermediate music updates; but I will need to make some tests to see which internal operations take most time during room transition.

The AGS compiler, AFAIK, has no optimisation and uses no advanced CPU instructions.

Unfortunately, that's true. It produces very formal sequence of instructions, mimicing how real x86 processor (IIRC) works: putting values to registers, getting them back, calculating, putting result to register, getting it back once again for other use, etc, etc., and every action is processed separately. I think it does at least about 3-5 things more than needed per each primitive operation.

Scavenger, I can suggest for you to look into Calin's Blend and SpriteFont plugins: they work with bitmaps, so you could have an example.
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/Plugins/agsblend/AGSBlend.cpp
https://github.com/CalinLeafshade/ags-spritefont

Regarding your code, you are not using a pointer type:

Code: cpp

unsigned char * serialised_image; // see the '*' added here
serialised_image = new signed char [engine->GetSpriteWidth (id) * engine->GetSpriteHeight (id)];

More importantly

Code: cpp

serialised_image = engine->GetRawBitmapSurface (temp);
engine->ReleaseBitmapSurface (temp);

when you assign the result of GetRawBitmapSurface to your pointer, you are not making a copy of bitmap, but a copy of bitmap's address in memory.
The following call to ReleaseBitmapSurface will destroy bitmap, leaving you with a pointer addressing freed memory. Using that address further won't do any good (if not crash your game right away).

On another subject, is it possible in future versions to be able to set the cachemax size directly in the Game Settings panel? (as apposed to manually modifying the acsetup.cfg file)

You don't have to manually change it, you can do that on winsetup window too (after you press "Advanced >>>" button).
But I suppose this will be not hard to add such kind of option to game settings too.

-hicolor => downgrade 32-bit game to 16-bit
-letterbox => wiki describes this better

This is how it was done originally in AGS, it just tried all variants in certain range from the actual game size, because custom display resolution was not implemented.

I see now that it fails only after trying everything. I'll check if it is possible to detect that d3d9 does not support anything at all prior to all those attemtps.

UPD: Fixed version:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/7ttqhtaau86rgal/acwin1150_26nov2013.7z

Hmm, now, that's not good.
What are differences between 2008 and 2012? Compilation options?

There was an issue with MinGW compiler, not sure if related: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47766

I download a 0-bytes zip file .
Also, I'd need a matching game executable to use this, can you send me too, please?

Hmm, this is something different, I was expecting that it cannot create D3D9 interface at all, but it looks it could.

Do you have a crash dump?

1. Fallback to software driver if hardware one could not be created.

Thank you. Is that related to Dx5/Dx9?

I realized I dropped the word "graphics" in "software driver". Yes, it is about graphics drivers.

New engine for testing:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/6pe80o5bzkctcxg/acwin_1148plus_25nov2013.7z

1. Fallback to graphics software driver if hardware one could not be created.
2. Couple of overriding config options, to be added manually to config file:

Code: text

[override]
multitasking=0/1
os=dos/win/linux/mac

* Multitasking - overrides game's multitasking mode. Useful if game has lengthy unskippable sequences. Keep in mind that this will lock game in the given mode and make it ignore script commands that change it.
* Os - overrides System.OperatingSystem return value. Useful for ports when game disables some feature for the system because it thinks it's not supported.
To be frank, this property is not very useful for AGS at the moment anyway, and it enumerates platforms that are not really supported, such as DOS and MacOS. Android, iOS and PSP ports emulate Windows by internal means. So, this is mainly for running games on Linux.

Also, what happens "in "GlobalScript.asc", line 121"? Is it "String content = getBookContent();" or something else? Just to clarify.

Quite a few things should be redesigned. For example, "Fonts designed for XX" could be replaced by more clear "scale factor". Same for sprites, probably.

I was thinking.. With custom resolution would I be able to enter some arbitrary resolution that "doesn't exist"

Yes.

I posted a 200x800 example few posts above:
http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/7669/528s.png

This still needs testing though, there are many hacks in AGS, I have a slight fear they may screw things on some cases.

Awesome! Works nicely so far, one more stupid question though: is there no way for it to recognize the monitor's resolution? does screenwidth/height in the acsetup.cfg always need to be edited when the game is played on different monitor setup?

I am supposed to rewrite the setup program when I get time, in plans it should display a list of resolutions supported by your gfx card.

At the moment you can type in some ridiculously large number (like 5000x5000) and the engine will likely lower that down to the nearest supported, as it does when it cannot apply the given one.

Spellbound?