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I recognize that voice! Shelly called me up a few days ago to ask how to pronounce "integer" and "boolean."  And lo and behold, I hear her say it in this.

This looks incredible. I've been putting off learning unity for ages. Perhaps I'll change that.

@M0ds: The actress is Shelly Shenoy. She's one of my regulars. She played Sayuri in Gemini Rue, Yuriko in Puzzle Bots, Josie in Blackwell Convergence, and Clarice in Da New Guys 2. Among others. If you want an intro, let me know!

Tass Times in Tone Town?

In the early days I optimistically thought I could make a new game every 4 months or so. That proved not to be the case. I did have a story arc in mind, and I could theoretically stretch it out as long as I wanted to ( a "spook of the week" serial, as it were), but I could see the series getting old and tired before too much long longer. Plus with the long (long!) waits between installments, I can imagine the fans' patience wearing out long before the series does.

As I said, it's just time. Rather than stretch it out and dilute it over several installments, I'm going all in - putting everything into one big game and going out with a bang. Or at least, I hope so.

Yeah but I wasn't so obvious about it. No big deal, though. I've mentioned the possibility in a few other interviews so it's not like it was such a huge secret.

There will always be Crackwell.

[Blackwell Epiphany is going to be the final Blackwell game.]

Since the beans was spilled in a recent interview (and on this forum!) I figured it would be a good time to announce on this thread that Blackwell Epiphany is going to be the final Blackwell game. My reasons are many, but they all boil down to "It is just time." Suffice to say, we are putting all our effort into making this installment the best installment yet and giving it the sendoff it deserves.

More info soon!

-Dave

Hah. I hoped he would leave that revelation out of the interview, but oh well!

Yeah, Blackwell Epiphany will be the last Blackwell game.

He was posting on Facebook and Twitter as of yesterday, so I can only assume no.

Ben and Dan of Size Five Games ("Time Gentlemen Please" etc) are from the UK and have games on Stean, so if anyone knows it would be them.

Yep, that sounds about right.

OK, I finally managed to get this bug to replicate.

The crash ONLY happens when these conditions are met:

-The notebook is turned on for the first time
-The mouse is on the listbox area of the notebook GUI

I'm guessing that the crash happens because the notes are generated the first time you turn on the GUI, and the game is trying to find the listbox item at the cursor position during that fraction of a second when the listbox doesn't exist. I changed the code so the listbox is generated BEFORE the gui turns on and that seems to have solved it. Yay!

Agreed. It's a hack, and not the best solution either. When you take achievements, multiple paths, and various states of the game, it becomes a massive muddle. Not only that, but you will have to test each save point (from the point it starts till the end of the game) to make sure it works properly.  It's much more preferable to play through the game once and make savefiles as you go - that way you know for sure that they all work.  There's also the logistics of telling everyone about the hack. Answering emails and telling them about the hack, or answering emails to give them a link to new save files - same thing.

Neither of these methods solve the core problem, though. Short of re-writing how saves work, it's difficult to get around.

The problem with that is that the average user will have no idea what DirectDraw even IS. When I first started having issues with DirectDraw and called tech support, even THEY were surprised I was still using it. They even recommended I use dosbox.

My sister could not play some of the bakesale games because her old laptop didn't support Direct3D
So probably it would be a good idea to support both modes...

I used to have this problem too! Older computers don't support Direct3D, while newer ones don't support DirectDraw. But the older ones are getting fewer and less relevant. And while a Direct3D game can be switched to DirectDraw mode with relatively few problems (assuming the computer can run DirectDraw), the reverse is rarely true. It's impossible to create a game that uses DirectDraw features which can also be run in Direct3D, so if you just focus on Direct3D you should be (theoretically!) fine.

I'm primarily referring to region light levels, not tinting (my fault - I always confuse the two) - The light levels simply don't work in Direct3D but work flawlessly in DirectDraw.

Really? I use region light levels all the time as well! Now I'm really confused.

Why is there issues with the Direct3D walkbehinds/tinting?

Short answer: Because AGS.

Longer answer: Computers and hardware change, and AGS hasn't really kept up. I love using it, and it gets so many things right. But what it gets "wrong" is sometimes so aggravating that I'm tempted to switch to another engine.

There's a thread over on the Tech forum about this issue, which explains why the walkbehind issue happens and how to avoid it: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=48907.0

As for tinting, what problems are you having there? Sadly there are some DirectDraw features that Direct3D just can't do.

Yeah, the game runs but not much else.

You can read the whole DirectDraw saga (the discovery of the issue, and our crazy attempts to solve it) over on the WEG forum.

It could be those two objects have the same baseline number? I know that caused a lot of havoc in Puzzle Bots (which I made in Direct3D mode!) and object baselines would often react very unpredictably. I didn't realize what was happening at the time, but I did notice that using different baseline numbers for every object fixed the problem. I've made a habit out of using different baseline numbers for objects ever since, which would explain why this has never happened to me (or - at least - why I never NOTICED it happening to me!).

That... makes perfect sense! There's no practical reason for the player character to have the same Y position as an object, and be behind that object at the same time. I suppose this would only be a major issue when you have one object in front of the other. If the character is at the Y position of the object in front, the front object will jump behind the object in back. Theoretically, anyway?

The issue with that screenshot is that Ed is scaled down, and in Direct3D mode it tends to smooth out the edges. In other locations where he is full-sized he would be displayed completely fine. It's hard to notice the smoothing in that image, at least for most people. It's REALLY noticeable when the characters are scaled down a lot, but most of the time it's hard to notice unless you are a big pixel art purist, which it appears you are!

I do "get" why most people prefer DirectDraw, but with AGS the way it is now it can only be Direct3D for practical commercial purposes. Unless you don't mind losing around 1/3 of your sales.

It sounds to me like a z-sorting issue of some kind and it would make sense that certain drivers resolve z-sorting differently.

One the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand... I don't see why I haven't gotten this complaint before. Ten games, all using Direct3D, sold to at least ten thousand people. Even if this only affected a small number of drivers, it seems like this would have come up at least once in one of WEG's games. Either I'm doing something differently when I set up my objects, or I've been very very lucky. It makes me think that there is something specific in the way that those objects are being set up  - in addition to the driver issue - that is causing this problem.