Messages

Just FYI, I wrote a little something here about re-playing this great game:
https://chezsoi.org/lucas/blog/1213-an-indie-video-game-from-16-years-ago.html

[heltonjon]

Ahaha, yessss!
I'm stuck no more!



Thank you heltonjon!
I was indeed quite dumb, and expected the doors visible at the bottom of the elevator to open,
whereas I just had to exit on the left...

Thanks also to you eri0o and Crimson Wizard for your kind help and suggestions.

[stuck]

Hi!

I've played many AGS games over the years.
However I'v never used the engine myself, though I have created an adventure game using different tools.

Recently, a bit of nostalgia made me want to play again to 1213,
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw 3-episodes AGS game from 2005, inspired by Prince of Persia & Flashback:



I had really nice memories from playing it, and I really enjoyed playing episode 1 again!
(the download link for this episode is broken, but I found it on another website).

Sadly, while playing episode 2, I got stuck.
I checked a game walkthrough on IGN
and realized that the game was not behaving as it should.

Hence I'm posting here, looking for some help to beat 1213 episode 2.
Through cunning, reverse engineering, or any other way!

The potential bug
Quickly at the start of the episode, we can reach a lower level with a terminal that can be activated,
seemingly just "switching" some green light on:



From the walkthrough I learned that this switch should open the level 7 elevator doors,
so that 1213 (the main character) can reach this level.

The following screenshot show the screen just right of the previous image.
We can see that the elevators doors are open.



Now, to get to the elevator conduit, the player has to progress on a few more screens.
After entering the elevator conduit (by pressing the UP key in the corridor), this is the screen that I see:



Hence my suspicion for a bug.

What I tried so far

Retrieving the AGS version used to build the game

Being a programmer myself (❤️ open-source),
I downloaded AGS source code from GitHub, and compiled it on a (screen-less) Linux environment.

Using some CLI parameters, I was able to extract some information from the game:

Code: ags

./ags --log-stdout=all:debug --tell 1213_ep2.exe

Resulting in this: ags.log

Seems like the game was compiled with AGS v2.62

Launching the game with the latest AGS version

I also tried to launch the game with AGS v3.5.0.31-P9 Windows binaries:

Code: ags

acwin.exe 1213_ep2.exe

But the game did not start, and I just got this error:



Launching the game with AGS v2.7.2

Code: ags

acwin.exe 1213_ep2.exe

The error is a bit different this time:



This is strange because I used the same "acsetup.cfg", and "1213_ep2.exe" launches fine when run it directly...

What next?

AGS Community, you are my only hope!

I'm a bit out of ideas right now...

Even if I manage to launch the game using an old version of AGS 2,
how could I debug this strange bug?

Would you have any idea on what could be causing it?

Do you see another way to beat the game?

Any suggestion is welcome!