Messages

GREAT! It works!
Thanks CJ

You were QUICK!
Death Star Games people thank you from #sote and feel more relaxed... trust me!

Epic!

D.

Hi there people.

During the SOTE Tech Demo beta 1 testing one grave bug emerged, and I'm here to investigate and solve it before the final release.

Basically, a crash occurs:

---------------------------
Illegal exception
---------------------------
An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x004CA3E4 ;
program pointer is +5, ACI version 2.62.772, gtags (2,2)

This happens IF:
- the game is running in 640x480
- you are in the only scrolling room of the demo
- you stay with an inventory item selected for some seconds somewhere

...the screen starts distorting around the inventory-cursor, like an area of the screen is replicating in loop, and after some seconds the game will CRASH.
If you're quick and you know it, you can release the inventory item (right click in our GUI) before the crash and continue playing, but this isnt's something that can go in a public release.

This is definitely not machine-dependant, because it has been replicated on every system we tried to, and many tester reported it too.

The game is compiled with AGS 2.62 AGS.

Help us Chris Jones, you're our only hope. [cit]

Additionally, we've got a strange segfault running the game on linux,
in two defined points of the game that run correctly under Windows.
I hope EvilTypeGuy can help us in solving this. The segfault message is a not so explicative signal from Allegro.

If you want to see/try the beta to test the bugs, just say it and I'll send you privately a link for downloading the archive.

Thanks in advance from Death Star Games

...and even ATi's and NVidia's are atrociously slow compared to their Windows counterparts.

It's strange, but I'm running the upcoming Shadows of the Empire Tech Demo under Linux at 60/60 fps, hi-color 640x480... it runs a lot FASTER than under Windows 2000, on the same computer. I'm using the NVidia's driver... mmm, I think that my pc must have some problems under Windows... any ideas?
I've installed recent DirectX...  and the card works smoothly with other apps...  mumble mumble... the same game, on less powerful machines, runs better (under WinXP, that I hate and will never install ).
bye,
D.

Debian testing/unstable, kernel 2.6, no allegro installed, works smoothly
Thankyou!

Regarding ags-setup, I think that static linking libxml1 too is a good idea, we're talking about affordable download sizes for slow connections (as mine) too.

Greetings and thanks from the whole Shadows of The Empire team, and waiting for the updated binary : )

release the tech demo now!

Ehm, we'd like to, but it's not ready yet
script and dialogues: 100%; graphics and sprites: 90%; ags programming: 70%

I'm busy in this period, but I've to script some stuff *essential* for a TECH demo, and a pair of animations by BobaFonts are "in progress".
We hope that another 10-15 days of work should be enough for all.

bye, and thankyou for asking!
D

Simply wonderful!
I think that OO scripting will be a giant step forward for AGS.
Thankyou CJ!
I'll try the "experimental" beta as soon as I have a bit of spare time (sigh)

I hope this can help you:

http://www.thecodeproject.com/csharp/graphs_astar.asp

bye
D.

Ah, I see a demo coming up. That great, I'm wondering can you give us a progress report or what is being done and add that to your original post (First one)?

The original post will be updated soon with an "official"  Tech Demo announcement,  we have to decide a pair of things about it first

By the way, talking about progress, my scripting proceeds slowly but well, BobaFonts is ultimating the Luke and R2 sprites and the objects/items needed for the demo, and Prof Epic, who tries to apper too busy to post here , is reviewing the demo "script" based on a completely fool idea we decided all together to base the demo on, a night on IRC...

* Fixed AnimateCharacterEx not working properly when playing a multi-loop animation backwards.

Thanks
I'll try the new beta as soon as I can...

D.

Is AnimateCharacterEx supposed to work with long loops (you know, the "checkbox" ones), when called in "reverse play" mode?

I'm having trouble with it, but maybe its due to other errors.... by the way if I change the function call from AnimateCharacterEx(c,0,0,0,1,0); to AnimateCharacterEx(c,0,0,0,0,0);   
the animation performs, so I'm posting this

Bye and thankyou

By the way, dusk, is your "drawing-man" ... god ?

Naaah, is BobaFonts, two posts up... 
By the way, we're working hard on a Tech Demo.  If all goes the right way, it will be released at the end of this month, as an italian/english win/linux compatible archive.
Bye

It sounds original, I'd play it!
I like graphics too.
Good luck!

D.

Just a quick post to show an example of SOTE sprite art...  it's a half-size and compressed jpeg of the original bmp of our R2-D2 loops - I hope you like it

Sure that it's unnecessary!
Pixel perfect detection for scaled sprites, great.. thanks a lot, CJ!

D.

We checked that to have smooth animations of a character, due to scaling approximations, it's not always sufficient to center sprites on the y axis: you must import views with the same width. So, you have to choose as width the largest one, that usually involves having some views with a quite large transparent area.
I can imagine that implementing pixel perfect detection on scaled sprites is not easy, and probably not many users need it.
But I was thinking: what about providing each view with two properties activation_x/activation_y, better if graphically (as the baselines) that would form a virtual rectangle easy to check for "mouse over" purposes? I suppose that the actual code to check interaction on a scaled sprite uses a rectangle formed by sprite.width*getScalingAt(sprite.x,sprite.y)/100 and sprite.height*getScalingAt(sprite.x,sprite.y)/100.
To mitigate the transparent area detection problem, at this point the sprite.activation_x and sprite.activation_y would substitute sprite.width and sprite.height.

How many stupid things have I written?
Bye,
D.

* Added option for objects to use region tint and light levels, and an option for objects to use walkable area scaling.

Wonderful!

* Added AddInventoryToCharacter, NewRoomNPC, RemoveInventoryFromCharacter.

Good, I did them myself but it's always better to have engine functions.
Just a quick note: why RemoveInventoryFromCharacter and not LoseInventoryFromCharacter?
Sounds bad in English? By the way, not important, I think I'll keep my functions  AddInventoryOfCharacter and LoseInventoryOfCharacter as one-line wrappers of your ones, to avoid substituting the calls in all the scripts

D.

Anyway, here we go. Sketchbook Boy e la casa sull'orlo del Nulla

I'd be glad to have feedback, but the language barrier is high enough to assure me I won't get any unless I put together a traslation.

Seen... nice
You'll probably find someone to help translating when the game will be complete, no fear : )

And remember you're not the one...
...greetings from Salerno

D.

AGS 2.61 Final runtime has been posted the Linux AGS website here:

Great! With the previous version I had a segfault (signal 11 by allegro,  if I remember) probably due to misconfiguration of my system, but this seems to work smoothly.

As far as progress on AGS Launch? I'm about halfway done writing it, but there's still a lot of testing to be done. I've been swamped with school and work combined, but you will continue to get updates from me in the future.

If/when you need "external" testing, here's my Debian box...
thanks again, bye
D.

As you say, not high priority, but an useful editor improvement.
I'd also like to see something like

#sectionstart CHEWIE_LOOK
and not
#sectionstart character6_a

but I put something similar as comment and use the Find function... a little patience, and no problem, at the end

I think it makes more sense to go for a more generic approach and allow people to script whatever they want, rather than trying to keep adding more and more particular features in.

Great! I agree
thanks,

D.