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As I mentioned before, I'm using a borrowed laptop these days. It runs AGS games fine in DirectX 5 mode, but it seems to have some problems with the Direct3D mode. No matter which resolution I choose, windowed mode or not, my 640x480 game crashes on startup with this message:

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Adventure Game Studio
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There was a problem initializing graphics mode 640 x 400 (32-bit).
(Problem: 'Failed to create Direct3D Device: 0x8876086C')
Try to correct the problem, or seek help from the AGS homepage.

Possible causes:
* your graphics card drivers do not support this resolution. Run the game setup program and try the other resolution.
* the graphics filter you have selected does not work. Try another filter.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

DxDiag doesn't find any problems. The chipset is a Mobile Intel 945GM (which is crap, I know, but it runs Hitman: Contracts and GTA: San Andreas fine). It has pixel shader 2.0 so that shouldn't be an issue either. I've installed the latest updates available through the "HP Update" downloader (again, I know, I know, you don't have to tell me, but since it's not my computer I'm not going to install any drivers not directly provided by the manufacturer).

I should mention, it always refers to "640 x 400" (or "320 x 200" if set to lores), not "640x480" which is the proper resolution for the game. "Force alternate letterbox resolution" is checked and greyed out in winsetup.exe, which I think is standard for 640x480 games.

Edit: Oh yeah, it's running Windows Vista and DirectX 10.

I was going to do "Baby Jesus Conquers the Abortionists", but it seems I won't have time.

Strangely, game.disable_antialiasing doesn't actually read the current state of anti-aliasing. It always returns 0 until you've changed it yourself.

However, you could use File.ReadRawLineBack() to check acsetup.cfg for the line "antialias=1", and - if it exists - display a message about the antialiasing being deactivated for technical reasons. Something like this:

Code: ags

File *cfgfile = File.Open("acsetup.cfg", eFileRead);
if (cfgfile != null) {
   while (!cfgfile.EOF) {
      String cfgline = cfgfile.ReadRawLineBack();
      if (cfgline.Contains("antialias=1") != -1) {
         Display("You've selected smooth character scaling, but for technical reasons this feature has been disabled.");
         }
      }
   cfgfile.Close();
   }
game.disable_antialiasing = 1;

You could set another variable to finish reading the file as soon as the correct line is found, but since the .cfg is so short and "antialias=1" is often the last line, I didn't bother.

So the user would tick the box but nothing would happen?

Exactly. The game would behave the same whether the box was ticked or not.

Well, although you can't remove it from the setup, you can override it by setting "game.disable_antialiasing = 1;"  in the game_start script.

Looks awesome, Grundislav. It's great to hear that the game will have voice acting - I must admit I've been missing that since BJ1 Deluxe. The audio commentary is also an excellent concept that I've been enjoying so much in Dave Gilbert's games. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing you ramble about the design process. And I think I spotted a clue in the crime scene...

Personally I would find a ZIP version preferable, but as I said, it's ultimately up to CJ on this one.

I'd prefer a .zip version too. Since all the betas were posted as .zip there's little reason why an installer should be necessary (for those who know what they're doing). Perhaps the best way of limiting distribution would be just to link to a .zip of AGS 3.0 final in the beta thread, and link to the installer version on the main page and in the final release thread.

I'm temporarily using a computer with Windows Vista installed (my own laptop unfortunately went the way of the dodo), and when I first installed RC3 to the default directory and tried to test the demo game, I was met by a compiler error about the folder not being accessible. I'm sure this has something to do with user rights, but I wasn't asked to elevate to admin status like other programs do.

After this, I uninstalled and re-installed to a different folder, outside Program Files, and the test ran perfectly. Perhaps the demo files need to be installed to My Documents/Program Data instead, depending on the user's Vista setup?

Really looking forward to this one. It's a shame that Sande wasn't available, and I must say that I prefer the previous cover illustrations - this one seems to lack some of Dan Lee's unique "painterly" style. But the plot sounds absolutely intriguing (haunted movie? welcome to the club ) and the screens are gorgeous. When I first saw the character sketches in the unlockables for Unbound, I thought the guy in the tie was supposed to be the ghost of Joseph Mitchell, but it seems to be a new character, which only makes things more interesting...

The reason that "Best voice acting" hasn't been a separate category before is that there simply were too few games with voice acting - and to be honest there still aren't that many. I think "Best voice actor" might work better, though I'm pretty sure half the nominess will be people from Blackwell Unbound.

Nothing to cry over. As far as I know, Photoshop Elements isn't mainly a paint package but rather made to correct contrast and other stuff in your photos. It's lacking a lot of functionality (see a list here) so you'll probably be sticking with Paintshop Pro for your art needs anyway.

Any chance that you have RawSaveScreen() running in the global EnterRoomBeforeFadeIn event? That function is quite slow when using Direct3D mode, so trying to skip past multiple instances of it could cause problems. Just a thought, but most likely it's something else.

Ah, very true. I hadn't thought of the .vox file sharing the name of the text translation 

Edit: Actually, now that I think of it, it could be argued that some users might want to play the game with English audio but localized subtitles. But of course then they could just delete the localized .vox file.

Looks great. Comparing your painted background to the final result, I would say this technique could even be used to convert photographic backgrounds to pixel-art.

Actually Chris, if there  was some way of detecting which language is running within AGS, you would then just be able to script this somehow right???

You mean such as checking Game.TranslationFilename ?

I definitely support the localized speech files idea, since it seems to be quite a simple fix (just changing the filename that AGS reads voices from). I guess the only major programming task would be to implement winsetup support for it.

I love the concept. This sounds like a series of games right up my alley, and it's great to see the series arc actually planned out from the very beginning.

Re 1: What about The Third Man? If you're not sticking too much to the original plot, the sidekick character could play the Harry Lime role, as the friend who goes missing/is assumed dead. It would allow for a lot of independent sleuthing while later catching up with the sidekick. Also, it could be interesting for the first episode not to be entirely sure if the sidekick is a friend or a foe.

Re 2: The detective/novice sidekick working together could allow for some Name of the Rose influence. You already have a Hitchcock reference in ep. 5, otherwise Rear Window could be an interesting source of inspiration, with the detective somehow restricted from moving around too much and the sidekick having to do the legwork.

1) Is there a way to access room local variables from another room?

Nope! 

As RickJ says, this isn't directly possible, which is why we also have Global variables. However, you CAN access certain local variables such as hotspot status and object positioning using the OtherRoom module.

Well, it seems obvious that you can't FadeIn before the room has actually "faded in" since there would be no background to fade to. However, if you use my suggested workaround of a fading black GUI, you could certainly call this custom FadeIn function from eEnterRoomBeforeFadeIn (since the function would only change a variable, and the actual fading would be handled in Repeatedly_Execute_Always once the room is loaded).

I do agree it's weird we don't have a eEnterRoomAfterFadeIn event though.

The cryptic message and nature background for some reason made me think this could be an ad for an Indian casino.

On a more helpful note, if you insist on keeping the heavenly rays of light, you should definitely work on the rim lighting of the character and the upper edge of the casino table.

The BMP format uses multiple encodings depending on color depth, and is generally a pain (not to mention a waste of disc space). Try saving your background as a PNG instead and see if that helps.

(As a sidenote, it's not much help uploading your background as a jpg if the problem derives from the BMP format)