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And finally, with more ambitious/commercially minded developers like Wadjet Eye or even Andail increasingly abandoning AGS as an engine, much of the "problem" is going to solve itself without intervention.

Just FYI we are still using AGS. 

Excellent news! Thank you!

I just read this. So sad to hear. I haven't chatted with him in a long time, but I was a big fan of his art and we once discussed collaborating on something together. RIP.

Slightly biased because it co-stars a blond guy in a coat named Eli.

Sorry I didn't see this until now. I don't know why I didn't get the usual notification!

Anyway, no it's not time critical. I am only just starting a project so it will be awhile before I need voiceover. Is this something specific to my computer/setup? Is there anythign I can do in the interim to get it working? I imagine others will be having this problem as well.

I don't know myself. Hopefully @SpeechCenter can answer.

So even though I got the plugin to load, the sound files no longer play properly. I press the "play" button, then an "error playing" message appears and no sound plays. Here's a screenshot of what happens:



All the speech files are present in the speech folder. The game runs fine when I compile it.

I am using the latest version of the plugin and the latest version of AGS 3.5.

Any help appreciated!

-Dave

Sorry! I thought I replied here. I figured out the solution. I right-clicked on the speech center DLL, went to properties, and selected "unblock."

Hello! So I decided to try out the latest version of AGS today and snuck the latest version of this plugin into the installation directory. When I load up AGS, I now get this error:



Any ideas on why this happens?

Thanks!

-Dave

Course I solve the problem five minutes after I post about it. On a whim I disabled MIDI sound devices and now it works.

Howdy folks! Long time no see.

So Unavowed is slated to join the Xbox Windows gamepass service. We had a devil of a time getting their client to recognize it. There's only one hurdle we are trying to overcome.

The game launches with the error message: "Unable to initialize your audio hardware. [Problem: ]"
Usually when I see this error, an actual problem is listed but this one is blank.

When we press "okay" to click through the error window , the game starts up perfectly normally with all the sound intact.

I tried playing around with the audio settings (setting it to Default Waveout, etc) but the same thing happens.

The game was compiled using AGS version 3.4.1.14, and is being run from within their Xbox-for-windows client, which has layers upon layers of security and things on it. I'm sure these security measures are conflicting somehow, but I'm not sure what sort of questions I should ask my rep there. Any ideas of where to start troubleshooting? Or is there a way to suppress the error message since the game plays normally anyway?

Thanks in advance!

Hello! Thanks for doing this. But when I uncompressed the .7z file for mac, it created a folder instead of an .app file. Could you upload as a proper .zip instead? That usually does the trick.

Edit: never mind! Editing the folder name with an .app extension filed the problem.

Hm. I can't seem to get this to run on my mac even using Windows Parallel (yes I'm a mac user now). I will try to get it working, but if not I won't be able to take part.

UNAVOWED IS AN IGF NOMINEE!!†¬

†ªIt's nominated for “Excellence in Narrative” and got an honorable mention for the grand prize.

I've been dreaming of getting into the IGF since I started this silly company. It's taken 13 years and over a dozen games, but we got here.

Now I'm going to freak out for a bit.

I can think of dozens of ways this can be organized. It really depends on what kind of game you're making. Since my game Unavowed involved progression through various story missions (as opposed to going through a puzzle dependency chart) I used global enums to designate where in each story mission the player was. For example, here's what I used for the chinatown section of the game:

Code: ags

enum eChinaPoint
{
  eChinatownStart=0, 
  eChinatownSawVision=1, 
  eChinatownLearnKevin=2, 
  eChinatownAuthorized=3, 
  eChinatownSawEvidence=4, 
  eChinatownEnterTree=5, 
  eChinatownReadWing=6, 
  eChinaTownLearnGhost=7, 
  eChinatownReadGhost=8, 
  eChinatownInVision=9, 
  eChinatownKevinCop=13, 
  eChinatownComplete=20, 
};

I created a global integer called ChinaTownPoint, and I'd set it to whatever point I needed it to. Like if the player passed the "saw vision" plotpoint, I'd use the command "ChinaTownPoint=eChinaTownSawVision;".

Various ad hoc checks were inevitable, but this helped keep it organized by story beats.

The dll files we used for Unavowed are dated May 26th, 2018 and we've had no problems on PC. We've had issues with achievements not being unlocked on Mac, but nothing that crashed the game.

I can say it sounded like it was happening while I was playing Unavowed, I was in the section outside the police station talking to Donny, I could hear the ambient sounds, the musical track that was playing in the room, and then all of a sudden underneath those another musical fanfare started playing over and over again (just as what happens in my game) beneath the other tracks, while I was in the middle of a dialogue. It happened more than once but again I cannot predict exactly when and where it will occur.

If it's in that location, than it's by design. Donny is playing a game on his phone and the music plays when you get close to him. You'll hear the same music in Unavowed HQ when Logan is playing the same game on his phone.

One final thing though, after I wrote in my post on AG "Dave I do not hate you" and he then tweeted about "hatred" toward him. I do not hate on people.

Just to be clear, that was not about you.

We used to do physical editions for all our games, including a really fancy box for Resonance.

They all turned out great.

We lost money on every single one of them.

After Blackwell Deception, we finally decided not to do them anymore for several key reasons:

- They are expensive to make
- They are expensive to ship
- They are expensive to store
- The demand for them is really low
- Most manufacturers will insist on a 1000 unit minimum

So we were forced to pay for a thousand physical units to be made, and only a few hundred people actually bought them. That alone lost us money, but since most of the orders came from Europe (and we are located in the US) the shipping costs were astronomical. Not only that, but we always underestimated the cost of shipping. Either the shipping costs would go up, or the physical items were a bit heavier than anticipated which moved it into a higher price range. 

On top of THAT, we had a whole bunch of unsold items to deal with. For awhile, we paid the warehouse to store them. But after about a year of sitting on them, I just asked the warehouse to get rid of them.

To be fair, we're not a logistics company and there's a lot we could have done differently. But the sad fact is that only a vocal minority of people actually WANTS a physical edition these days. So it's not really worth it.

Yayyy! Ivan is fantastic. An excellent choice.

Do you know him too?

I've only worked with him on almost every project of mine since 2014.