Messages

Please, always post the relevant part of your script when asking about scripting errors. Without that we may only guess what you could have done wrong.

In regards to this, though, I suppose that instead of DialogName.Start you typed CharacterName.start.
Starting the dialogue requires a created Dialog first, and you use its name to start it.
In AGS script letter case is also important (it's "Start" and "Walk", not "start" and "walk").

If it's only an exchange of few lines, you may also use "Character.Say" command without creating a Dialog script. But with that you won't have any dialog options.

Also, does anyone have a copy of the manual? that'll be greatly appreciated.

The offline manual that comes with AGS may be accessed by pressing F1 in your editor, or Help -> Dynamic Help in the menu.
The online manual is available here: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/

[Download AGS 3.5.1 installer]

AGS 3.5.1 - Patch 18

Full release number: 3.5.1.25

Download AGS 3.5.1 installer

Download AGS 3.5.1 as a .zip archive

For Editor

Spoiler

VC 2015 redistributable needed for AGS Editor on Windows

Download Dark UI Theme for the editor

[close]

For Android

Spoiler

Android launcher (APK signed with Debug key), suitable for running any compatible AGS game

Native engine libraries, for making your own signed APKs

[close]

For Engine/Editor developers

Spoiler

AGS source code central repository

Debug symbols database (for analysing crash dumps)

[close]

Released: 5th February 2023

Previous stable version: AGS 3.5.0 P10 forum thread


This release is brought to you by:

- Alan v. Drake
- Crimson Wizard
- Donovan Watteau (fix for big-endian systems)
- eri0o
- fernewelten (fixes)
- James Duong (implemented "--console-attach" option for Windows)
- Morgan Willcock
- Nick Sonneveld
- rofl0r
- Pablo Navarro (fixes)
- Thierry Crozat (bug fixing)
- vga256 (bug fixing)



Summary

3.5.1 is a minor update after 3.5.0, which contains mostly utility additions, fixes and perfomance improvements.


Changes in the Patch 18:

Engine:
- Fixed background speech and textual overlays may disable GUI when being continuously created in repeatedly_execute* kind of functions. (Regression since previous patch).


Changes in the Patch 17:

Editor:
- Fixed GUI.Visible property was resetting to false when PopupStyle is switched to Modal.

Engine:
- Performance improvement in Direct3D/OpenGL renderers, related to plugins which subscribe to render events.
- Fixed renderer error occuring if room background frames are of different sizes.
- Fixed software renderer may have an unpainted black line at the bottom, if there's a GUI or Overlay positioned partially offscreen.
- Fixed GUI buttons could retain mouse-over pic after interface is disabled then enabled (this is a regression since recent patch).
- Fixed crash occuring when user creates too many Overlays in script; will report a scripting error instead.
- Fixed memory leak occuring when the TTF font is drawn partially outside the DrawingSurface.
- Fixed Parser.Said() could lead to a program crash in case there are space-separated words following the comma (e.g. "climb,get in bed").
- Fixed crash occuring if a plugin tried to call SetVirtualScreen().

Plugins:
- Fixed SnowRain plugin drawing particles only in 320x200 bounds.


Changes in the Patch 16:

Editor:
- Fixed autocomplete crashing the editor if there was an import declared with type and variable having identical names, and user tries to type that variable's name and a dot to access its members.
- Fixed newly created Views taking free IDs in the middle of the list in random order instead of a straight one (after you previously deleted some Views).

Engine:
- Added missing "DrawSprite" function for "agsblend" plugin stubs.
- Fixed loading pre-3.5.0 games on big endian systems.
- Fixed GUI buttons not displaying the mouse-over image if the interface state was toggled to enabled state while the mouse was over the button.

Updated the manual with certain fixes and corrected examples of using Camera and Viewport structs.


Changes in the Patch 15:

Editor:
- Fixed crash that could occur when changing View's ID to an unused number in the middle.
- Fixed comments and string literals were styled incorrectly in dialog scripts.
- Fixed unterminated string literals in script were not considered as errors when processing scripts for translation update and autonumbering of speech lines, leading to wrong results.
- Fixed Editor was updating translation file even if errors were found while scanning the scripts, which could cause a TRS corruption.
- Fixed Editor could overwrite changes done manually to TRS while the editor is open and if you run a translation update right after.
- Fixed potential program crash on exit in case an editor's plugin has mistakes in "shutdown" callback. Instead editor will report a component's error, but still close properly after.

Script API:
- Removed a rule that Viewport and Camera with ID 0 can't be deleted.


Changes in the Patch 14:

Editor:
- Do not error when compiling a 256 colors game if Direct3D or OpenGL are selected as a default graphics driver (display a warning instead).
- Fixed crash when trying to import pre-2.60 game projects.


Changes in the Patch 13:

Engine:
- Fixed room object does not update its texture if it had a dynamic sprite assigned to it, and that sprite was unassigned, modified or recreated with same ID, and then reassigned again, - all within the same game frame.
- Fixed normal font renderer is not reinitialized correctly in the engine if a plugin uses IAGSEngine::ReplaceFontRenderer(), passing original renderer's pointer (which it received from the previous ReplaceFontRenderer call).


Changes in the Patch 12:

Engine:
- Fixed GUI textual controls don't redraw when the game translation changes until player clicks on GUI (regression since previous 3.5.1 updates).
- Fixed multitasking mode persisting if the game was switched from windowed to fullscreen mode (even though it's not supposed to work in fullscreen).


Changes in the Patch 11:

Editor:
- Fixed batch sprite export with "Set exported file as sprite source" option was assigning new source paths without file extension.

Engine:
- Perfomance fix: GUIs changing Transparency or Visible state should not redraw their surface.

Compatibility:
- Allow AudioClip.Play to to place clips on a crossfade channel, which is normally unaccessible from script. This prevents errors in some games that relied on this behavior.


Changes in the Patch 10:

Engine:
- Fixed crash when visible viewport does not have any linked camera.
- Fixed ListBox.FillSaveGameList() may include save slots with negative slot number (e.g. when the save file has "*.-01" extension).
- Fixed potential crash after failed RunAGSGame() call.
- Fixed search for the game data by GUID when restoring a save belonging to another game;
  this was implemented in 3.5.1, but appeared to not work correctly.


Changes in the Patch 9:

Editor:
- Removed restriction on max dialog topics in the project. The dialog limit in the engine was removed in 3.4.1, but remained in the Editor by oversight.
- Fixed Audio Clip items in the project tree not displaying their IDs right after being renamed.

Compiler:
- Fixed crash occuring when compiler tries to report "Already referenced name as import" error.

Engine:
- Added "--translation" and "--no-translation" command-line arguments.


Changes in the Patch 8:

Engine:
- Clearer error messages for Get/SetProperty functions.
- Fixed PlayFlic() command fails to start the video (regression in 3.5.1).
- Fixed DrawingSurface.DrawSurface() not applying transparency parameter correctly if the drawn surface has alpha channel.
- Fixed OVERHOTSPOT is not updated immediately when character's name changes while cursor is above that character.

Templates:
- In BASS template fixed right click not dropping currently selected item if cursor was hovering over another item.


Changes in the Patch 7:

Editor:
- Added "Layout -> Reset to Defaults" menu command.
- Editor will now reset panel layout to default state if loading layout fail for any reason.
- Default config is now saved also when the game is run in debug mode (F5). This ensures that the test run is using the latest Default Setup, if the user's config has not been created yet.
- Editor will now display an error if user tried to reserve too many channels for audio types.
- Fixed Editor failing to start if user preferences file is corrupted.
- Fixed "Use old-style custom dialog options API" was not set when importing pre-3.4.0 projects.
- Fixed comboboxes' drop-down arrows were not painted with the right color from a color theme.

Engine:
- Fixed program crash occuring if the game reserved too many channels for audio types.
- Fixed potential crash occuring when player loads a save made in a multi-frame room, but the room was since edited and no longer has as many frames.
- Fixed character may have incorrect Frame (property) values while turning.


Changes in the Patch 6:

Editor:
- Added line numbers in the dialog script editor.
- Fixed Dialog script loosing changes if the pane is closed or redocked.
- Fixed controls arrangement on the Dialog pane getting broken when it's redocked.

Engine:
- Fixed filepaths in scripts that have backslashes ('\') fail on non-Windows systems.
  All the (script) File functions will now convert backslashes in filepaths into forward slashes for compatibility.
- Fixed engine was still creating standard directories for game saves and data, even if user provided the custom paths for these.
- Fixed TextBox control crashing the game if it's empty and player presses Backspace.
- Fixed controls on a fully transparent GUI were not interactive (this is an original AGS behavior, which was unintentionally changed in 3.5.0 by mistake).

Compatibility:
- When running 3.5.0 games, treat fully transparent GUI as non-interactable.
  In AGS transparent GUIs may be still interacted with, but 3.5.0 introduced an unintentional (and undocumented) change to this, which was reverted in 3.5.1.

Android:
- Support global engine's config file when the game is run from the Launcher: it's located in the AGS games' parent directory, same place where android.cfg is.

WinSetup:
- Added "Custom game shared data path" to complement "Custom save path" option.


Changes in the Patch 5:

Contained no changes and was a formal re-release with only fixed program build instructions for Linux.


Changes in the Patch 4:

Editor:
- Fixed swapping of inventory item's numeric ID could lead to errors.
- Fixed crash when importing pre-3.* games with multiple script modules.
- Renamed "Enforce object-based scripting" setting to "Enforce post-2.62 scripting". This is for clarity.

Compiler:
- Fixed potential memory corruption when user script reaches max nested if/else blocks.

Engine:
- Also tell module name and approximate source line when reporting script import errors for the variables and local functions.


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!

But I have realized in one of my classic medieval fonts if I use a capital letter that stretches like capital K at the end of a sentence the right side still gets cropped, though top and bottom is fine. I might never need to use a capital letter at the end of a sentence in my game, I don't know yet, but I thought with all your hard work, it might be worthy to mention it, or maybe not.

Could you post a link to let us download your font?

[Editor:]

I re-released RC7 (3.6.0.42), including one extra fixed reported by @rongel yesterday. Please download again.
(use download links in the first post)

Editor:
- Allow to find Android's sdkmanager in alternative directories when building the game for Android.

Engine:
- Fixed GetTextWidth would still return a size of an outline for an empty text string.
- Fixed preload.pcx is not displayed properly.
- Fixed legacy letterbox mode in Direct3D/OpenGL renderers.
- Fixed idle animation speed is increased by 5 on game load (regression since one of the previous RCs).
- Fixed background speech and textual overlays could disable GUI if continuously created in repeatedly_execute.
- Fixed certain MPG videos will skip if played with audio disabled.
- Fixed crash when restoring a minimized Direct3D fullscreen mode.

Android:
- AGS Player now has preference button per each game, which opens individual game's settings.
- Fixed global settings not working correctly for AGS Player.
- Fixed screen rotation setting ("unlocked" option was not working).



Reported issues remaining:
* Direct3D is said to still be not fully stable when alt+tabbing in exclusive fullscreen mode: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-0-release-candidate-rc1/msg636650995/#msg636650995

Ah okay I understand why that error appears thanks for explaining it to me Snarky. One question about the saved state where it is located, that is, I save the game but where is that save located?

On Windows it is located in %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\<Your game name>.

[header]

You need to put the "import" line in the script's header; only then it will be "seen" by other scripts.

Related article in the manual:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/ImportingFunctionsAndVariables.html

The question is, is your game built as 3.6.0 and run as a new game, or have you built it with 3.5.1 previously and restoring an older save made in 3.5.1?

It happens with the RC 6 and RC 7 when starting a new game. Weird thing is that I think it has well worked before, like a month ago or something. Just now noticed this behaviour when testing my game.

This might fix it:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5515636294549504

This sounds like a good idea, but just to try to figure out how is the "video sprite" size specified, does it uses the video resolution or is the dynamic sprite something we would create separately with whatever size and pass the dynamic sprite pointer to it? (VideoPlayback* vp = vcIntro.Play(dyn_spr);)

There is also a question of ownership. If user passes a dynamic sprite to the Play function, that means that the user also owns the sprite. This means that user may delete the sprite or edit it anytime by accessing its DrawingSurface. That may cause conflicts with what video is trying to do. For that reason I'd consider an alternative method of passing width and height into Play function, and let video object create its own sprite.

About the decoding, somehow the frame has to be set at the beginning or at the end of the game frame, so the contents of the dynamic sprite is predictable so people can assign it to things.

The decoding must happen on a separate thread to not unnecessarily load up or block the game's thread. Also, the video playback may work with its own fps setting, not necessarily matching the game's fps.

The solution I could come up with at this point is to implement a back-buffer mechanism for this sprite. That means that instead of having 1 bitmap (or texture), the sprite has 2 associated bitmaps (or textures). One of them is considered to be sync with the game, and another is the one that video decoder writes to. Upon entering a game frame update, these bitmaps switch: a previous back-buffer becomes an active sprite's surface, and the previous active surface becomes back-buffer, that a video decoder will write to when necessary.

I noticed a possible new issue with the latest RC version with the idle animation delay. I have set it to 2 in the editor, but when I start a new game, it's actually 7 for some reason. I can manually change it to 2 with the IdleAnimationDelay command, and the idle animation plays like it should.

I think this issue is with the new version, but I'm not 100 % sure about it. There's always a possibility that it's my doing. Can someone else confirm this?

This probably is related to the change in 3.6.0 where you can have an explicitly set idle delay. The old version was making idle delay equal to the animation delay + 5, and this is where 5 comes from, likely.

The question is, is your game built as 3.6.0 and run as a new game, or have you built it with 3.5.1 previously and restoring an older save made in 3.5.1?

[EDIT:]

EDIT: 3.6.0.42 is re-released, to include one extra fix, please scroll few posts below for details.

Uhm, do the builtin types (Character, Object, ...) also have this type name? And say, a built-in type from a plugin.

Just trying to figure out what happens with things that have no "script unit" - imagining rtti is already in and I am looking at a variable through the new rtti powered AGS debugger.

Their "unit" is actually called a "BuiltinScriptHeader" (or something like that).
I imagine plugin's "unit" will also have some generated name like that.

By the way, it is already possible to see these names through a program debugger, if using my new wip branch:
https://github.com/ivan-mogilko/ags-refactoring/tree/ags4--rtti

There's a number of debug fields I added that work as a cross-references between types and fields, and let explore the table after it's built by compiler.
(I think I move these to separate struct later)

Is there a way to have the table of names be built separately so it's not part of the release build? I think the names are not needed unless the game is being debugged? Maybe not consider this on the first interaction of the feature, but something to consider at some point.

Technically, the strings may be skipped, because with the updated format (as described in the latest comment in the ticket) the strings are saved in a separate table, so it's a matter of not generating this data during compilation, and skipping the step during writing.

The problem is though that the full type names are used as global keys when merging rtti tables from different script units. Either something else should be used to identify types globally, or these names may be obfuscated.

[sprite]

My opinion on this, shortly:

1. I believe there should be a sort of VideoPlayback type (name is an example), which is returned from PlayVideo, and lets you control the video, similar to how AudioChannel lets you control the audio playback.
On a side note, as we discussed this previously, we should consider introducing AudioPlayback type, representing a playing audio instance, which is returned from AudioClip.Play, instead of returning AudioChannel. Maybe AudioPlayback and VideoPlayback could have a parent type (MediaPlayback?) which shares common properties and functions too. This will make both video and audio handled similarly.

2. The video should be updated on the main game loop, regardless of whether it's blocking or non-blocking. The difference between these would be simply that some of the game parts are not run during blocking video, similarly to how some parts are paused during blocking Walk or Say command.
NOTE: the video decoding may be performed on a separate thread even. By "updated on the main loop" I mean that the playback state and displayed image should be updated when the rest of the game updates.

3. The video should be decoded onto a dynamically created sprite, which may then be applied to any object. This will allow to play video on anything, and sort among other game elements on screen. VideoPlayback will have a Graphic property, or similar, to let reference this sprite. The sprite likely should be "owned" by the video until it is stopped, after which the sprite is disposed automatically.

4. The video's audio should be played through standard audio system, VideoPlayback should have a reference to AudioChannel it plays its audio on.
Maybe AGS will let configure which channel to play on, but that's a secondary question.
There are other details to decide here, like, should the video's audio have its own configurable "audio type", and so on.

My suggestion would be to make a minimal version of TheoraPlayer and have the source files of it in the project itself

I may look into this if I have spare time.

There's already some issues with building TheoraPlayer on linux, as it does not have a proper lib installation.

1. No.
2. Definitely yes.

As for auto-saving do you just call the SaveGameSlot(1, "Autosave"); in a repeatedly execute function or is there additional code that needs to be done for an autosave feature?

The code should follow game design. First of all, you decide when you want your game to autosave. If you really prefer it autosave each game frame (40+ times a second), then sure put it in repeatedly execute function. If you like it to autosave in particular moments only, then you'd need to code that accordingly.

As a heads up, I consider the RTTI (and expanding the managed pointers support in particular) my priority task after 3.6.0 release. So, I return to this issue, and posted an update on a RTTI table format in the ticket:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/1259#issuecomment-1412573652

Hello
I found this bug on my game compiled with AGS 3.6.0.41. It can be easily reproduced:
1) Play the game in full screen
2) Press Alt+Tab to switch to another program (the game gets minimized in the taskbar)
3) Click the game title in the taskbar to restart playing.

The game crashes badly.

Possibly fixed in this temp build:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5463418820362240

It does not fix the previously reported problem, where Direct3D full screen may "hang" randomly if you alt+tab multiple times.

It should not make the first test for (acPropaganda == null) at all, since that does not matter, and it seems that sound must restart every time player enters the room. (It is stopped when player leaves the room).

The Khris's code will fail starting from the second time, because AudioChannel's pointer never gets null after being assigned for the first time.

Code: ags

function propagandaPlay() {
  acPropaganda = aSpeech_close.Play();
  if(acPropaganda != null) {
    acPropaganda.SetRoomLocation(866, 252);
  }
  SetTimer(1, 1200);
}

There's another problem in room_Leave, where you test for acPropaganda.IsPlaying before testing that acPropaganda is null. If acPropaganda were null at that moment, there will be a null pointer error when checking acPropaganda.IsPlaying. So the order of conditions should be different.
Besides that, this probably is not related to the problem, but I think you should also stop the timer when you leave the room in order to avoid potential conflicts with other rooms, which might use same timer ID:

Code: ags

function room_Leave() {
  if (acPropaganda != null && acPropaganda.IsPlaying) {
    acPropaganda.Stop();
  }
  SetTimer (1, 0);
}

The crash is trivially reproduced in any game that has a GUI. It is related to gui textures getting disposed when the display mode changes. I'm not completely certain yet, but either something is not reinitialized correctly, or this may happen in the middle of the render pass (and then renderer happen to access a deleted texture).