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I was probably confused about the situation. Somehow I assumed that these fireflies are a part of the older assets, created years ago, and that you have to cut them out from those old assets. Are these on contrary new assets created right now by an artist?

As for whether to have these animations on a transparent surface, or having them with parts of background, I suppose that depends also on artistic features. For example, if the fireflies cast light on some object in background (such as trees), then the animation frames should also include trees (or parts of trees).

If that's not a issue, then of course it may be better for an artist to create fireflies on a transparent surface, separate from room background, and save them as 32-bit ARGB images to let keep half-transparent pixels.

But then, before that, we'd also have to clarify this: what is your game's color depth? is your game actually 32-bit, or lower (16-bit, 8-bit)?

No, and currently engine does not process player input on GUI while there's a waiting script.
The only way is to
- Show GUI
- Finish the current script
- Let player interact with gui
- Detect when GUI is closed and run the continuation of a script, either from GUI's event, or from rep-exec which tests for gui visibility.

If I opted to do the cutting how do I get them cut on coordinates?  Is this a graphics program with a grid or something like that?

- cut the pieces defined by even coordinates (multiplies of two).

The trick is simply to choose even positions when you drag a rectangle to select the portion that you want to cut.
Choose a point with even coordinates when you start dragging, and make sure that the selection has even width and height.
Normally the graphic software should display the coordinates you are selecting when you're dragging a rectangle, somewhere on a status bar or a tooltip.

That being the case, is sounds like the objects have to be cut out a certain way?

If you have "low coordinates" on, then you must either
- cut the pieces defined by even coordinates (multiplies of two).
- create images that have only fireflies on a transparent surface, and not parts of the background. In that case any coordinate mismatches will be less of an issue. But of course that's much more work (depends on how this background's source is done, i.e. as a layered image or not).

One used to use only even coordinates for objects in highres games to avoid precisely the "one pixel off" problem, but newer versions don't use lowres coordinates internally any longer.

Hmm, if this game was upgraded from a very old version of AGS (which it is, I think?), then this setting is kept after upgrade.

You may double check this in General Settings -> Backwards Compatibility -> Use low-resolution coordinates in script.
If it's turned True, that means that you are using old-style coordinate logic, where in high-res games the actual object position is halved. For example, in 640x400 games the object positions are in 320x200 resolution, so you can only have them on even coordinates.

@lafouine88 the fix was added in 3.6.2 Beta 6:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-engine-editor-releases/ags-3-6-2-beta-1-a-wip-3-6-update/msg636668738/#msg636668738

It's not entirely perfect, as pathfinding remains the same, but it moves character to the nearest walkable pixel in case it ended up on a non-walkable one.

Note that this behavior has already been present for the regular Walk command, it was only WalkStraight that did not have it. So in effect this fix is for WalkStraight.

Hi, I am back on the fireflies now.  The fireflies were painted onto a background and then I am cutting out the area to make it as an object.  When I lay the object onto the game background, it never aligns correctly.  It is either a byte to high or low or a byte to far left or right.

I do not understand this, and screenshot does not really help, as I am not sure what I'm seeing there. What is the red outline, is this the place you need to put object on? Do you mean that you cannot position an object on certain coordinates, or that the image looks unaligned even if coordinates are precise?

If former, then have you tried adjusting object's position with keyboard (arrow keys) or setting X,Y properties in the properties grid?

If latter, then please tell: what is your background resolution, and what is the image's resolution? Does the object image contain only fireflies, or it contains a part of background as well?

If I toggle the object off and on it will shift on the screen.

Um, please elaborate, toggle how (is it by using the "eye" button in the room menu?), and do you mean that its position properties (X,Y) actually change when you make it visible or not visible?

3. Doing file>restore from source did not work

Could you elaborate on that, what happened? Were there any errors, or they just were not replaced?

How does the user import sprites, and where from, is it from files, or using clipboard?

Note that you may select any game sprite, and check "SourceFile" in its properties.

4. The backup sprite sheet was TINY like 7 kb, and obviously did not work when used.

Besides a possibility of error, this may mean that there were no game re-saves. Like, the user only saved the game after importing all sprites. So previous backed up version contained only initial ones, for example.

Hey @Khris (and and everyone else), I'm wondering if maybe there should be an official and/or stickied tutorial thread on how to do this.

There's a sticky thread:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/advanced-technical-forum/setting-publisher-and-authenticode-signature-for-game-exe-and-winsetup-exe/

Still, animating / view frame locking an NPC in another room before queuing a reset a) shouldn't actually play the animation b) shouldn't move the game into a dead state. So there seems to be an engine issue here, too.

I suspect this may be similar to an issue with animating a disabled character (Character.on = 0), engine does not progress an animation so long as the character is disabled, so it will never finish (unless you enabled character again).

Every time it happens, the student STARTS OVER FROM SCRATCH, and does enough work to make their game function. They save their work, then when they open it the next day, they see this error and all (or most) of their sprites are black rectangles.

That is horrible. There's usually no reason to start from scratch.

1. AGS keeps sprite file backup, called "backup_acsprset.spr". You may rename the file to "acsprset.spr", and try loading the game.
2. AGS has a function called "Restore all sprites from sources", it's located in File menu and also in the Sprite manager's context menu. This function completely restores a sprite file so long as the original images (from which you have imported the sprites) are present on their locations on disk. For this reason it's advised to keep all original images somewhere in a game project's subfolder, then it will work even if you move the project folder elsewhere (to another computer).
3. Lastly, one can make a backup, either as an archive, or use a source control tool (SVN, git, etc).

Regarding the problem itself:
1. Does this happen only next day? have they tried reopening the project right after saving and exiting AGS?
2. Where on disk is the project located (user documents, or elsewhere)? is it a hard-drive or removable device like a flash drive?

Well that's what I thought too. However changing the room number to an existing room fixed the bug.

This means that likely there was something else affecting the situation.

I think it was just an invalid room number

Non-player characters are allowed to be assigned a non existing room number, even negative ones. That's one of the ways to hide them, and should not cause any trouble.

But isn't that just normal behavior when the game hits a breakpoint? It hangs because that's what a breakpoint does: make the engine stop at that instruction. You have to step through or unpause it in the IDE to make it respond again.

Indeed, I was about to post a similar note.

The breakpoints work like this: as soon as the game reaches a breakpoint, the engine will halt, and will remain halted until you order it to run with F5 in the editor. If it would not halt, then that would defeat breakpoint's purpose.

I don't think that marking this as "solved" is correct though. It was found that the issue is not caused by RestartGame, but the crashing or hanging is still a bug, and changing character room is a simple action that must not cause such issues, so there's nothing solved yet.

1- I have some regions with things happening when the player walks on and off. The thing is that when you're inside that region and the event is triggered (playing a sound, i.e) if the player clicks on a hotspot that changes the room, then the 'walk off' code is ignored

So, from my memory, these region events are not run during blocking actions, which makes them unusable with the blocking Walk. You have to either make walk non-blocking (and run a while loop with Wait(1) if you like to wait until it finishes), or use some other way to detect walking in/out the location.

I'm sorry, I found one silly mistake in the beta 6, which probably may cause game to crash. I'm rebuilding the new version now, and download links will not be working for some time (an hour or so). I will post an update when it's done.

UPDATE: ok, done, can be downloaded again.

Besides the breakpoints, something that you could try is to comment parts of the code and see if it starts working at some point.
TBH just looking at the code I cannot see anything critically wrong with it.
Maybe we'll need to make a test and try to replicate this, but given it's a part of a larger script, the error could be elsewhere.

Other than this, this code looks something done very weirdly

I cannot agree that this code is "very weird"; besides the missing UnlockView it is a typical code style that people write in AGS.
Majority of users don't know why not to use "function", and 95% of code examples on this forum likely were using it.

[IMPORTANT:]

Updated to Beta 6
(Please use download links in the first post)

IMPORTANT: starting from this version Editor will require a different VC Redistributable to run.
Installer contains the VC Redist, but if you are getting AGS in an archive, and the necessary component does not happen to already be on your system, then here's a download link to Microsoft's site:
https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/5319f718-2a84-4aff-86be-8dbdefd92ca1/DD1A8BE03398367745A87A5E35BEBDAB00FDAD080CF42AF0C3F20802D08C25D4/VC_redist.x86.exe


Contains all fixes from 3.6.1 P9.

Own changes:

Editor:
- Added "Game Speed" property in General Settings.
- Support importing 32-bit BMP files of extended formats (this support is formal at the moment, and does not guarantee that any of the extended data will be interpreted).
- Support importing indexed images which palettes contain translucent alpha as sprites with alpha.
- Fixed Button getting resized to the image's size when user cancels different sprite assignment.
- Fixed Editor may display a "save project" confirmation when run with "/compile" command-line parameter.

Script API:
- Fixed some script functions in AGS API were declared with "int" return value, while they are supposed to be "void".

Engine:
- Updated to SDL 2.30.11 and SDL_Sound 2.0.4.
- Support calling StopDialog() inside any regular script, even when dialog options are displayed.
- Fixed character may get stuck inside a non-walkable area after Character.WalkStraight().
- Fixed a potential lockup that may occur when the engine is run from the editor, and is told to stop at a breakpoint.
- Fixed 48khz OGG clips may have extra silence added to them in the end, causing "hickups" when the sound playback is looped.

Windows:
- Windows version of AGS is now built with MSVS 2019 and higher.

Compatibility:
- Fixed "Quest for Infamy" infinite scripted walk retriggering in certain areas (this was happening because of some changes to the 3.6.2 engine).

Since the phone is a GUI, you can create hidden objects as Buttons on the same gui, and change their position as the phone moves around.
Buttons are automatically clipped by the GUI's border, so there's no problem in them being only partially in-view.

You probably will need to make 2 GUIs: the first has the phone's frame on it with transparent spot in the middle, and has a higher sorting order; and the second one positioned below is a fully transparent gui with buttons for hidden objects.