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I get this when starting the 3D accelerated version of beta 3. It makes no difference whether I run windowed or not. DirectX 5 mode works fine.

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Adventure Game Studio
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An internal error has occurred. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, contact Chris Jones.
(ACI version 2.80.942D3D)

Error: Unexpected error occurred

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OK   
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Edit: To Recluse: If RawDrawing to sprites becomes possible, it will be quite easy to code a satisfactory particle system (not like the current modules that draw all particles behind the player).

Edit 2: Unlike joelphilippage I'm not using any plugins when getting this error message.

I don't mind the pants. But I have a problem with his protruding forehead in the side-view. Here's my idea of how it could look:

Looks great. But what does the M mean? If it is indeed the letter M it seems very out of place among the purely visual icons.

Code: ags

player.ActiveInventory = inventory[activeinventory];

Where activeinventory is the name of your int/short.

Yup, the preload.pcx was the problem. Thanks for solving it. I'm glad I hadn't started to commenting out pieces of code yet.

Re: RawSaveScreen - what if you kept it in duplicate, once in the video card memory, once in the RAM. RawRestoreScreen would then a) Copy the screen in video memory to the background texture in video memory b) Draw the saved background in RAM onto the "RawDraw buffer screen" in RAM. If, as you said, the texture in video memory isn't updated until the end of the game cycle, this would in most cases mean that it didn't have to be updated at all, since in many cases you RawRestoreScreen() after using RawDraw functions for things like these. And if the duplicate was kept in memory, there would be no need to read the screen back from video memory.

Edit: I located the problem of a black screen on startup. This was my full-screen black GUI which I use for fading effects. It seems that setting GUI transparency to 100 actually sets the transparency to 0 in the Direct3D engine.

2.72 is the latest stable release. We're currently beta testing the 2.8 version which uses an entirely new interface. The final should be out soon.

The easiest solution, if possible, would be to just turn off antialiasing in Poser's renderer.

Oh, I see - then I REALLY must find out what makes the DirectX 5 engine crash my game when using the new .exe file.

And yes, RawRestoreScreen() does seem to be the main issue. On second thought - is there anything that keeps the RawSaveScreen() image from being stored in the graphics card memory rather than in the RAM?

The break in music happens in most hi-res games due to a framerate drop while the game loads the room. Especially if you also have a RawSavescreen() or similar CPU heavy command in the player_enters_room event. If you are running a lot of commands in player_enters_room event, you could try putting a Wait(1) between them to let the system proceed to the next cycle.

You will find that this happens less frequently on faster computers.

I'd be interested to see a few example cases of where people are RawDrawing on every game cycle. Perhaps there's a faster way?

Here's a few examples of that from my game.

Dynamic Shadows (please disregard the pre-rendered shadow of the horse):


Arguably, this could be done without RawDrawing, but it would be a pain in the ass. The shadow module crops the floor,wall and ceiling shadows according to predefined wall lines by RawDrawing the geometry using RGB(255,0,255). The only workaround that I can think of would be to define detailed walkbehinds for every single room that uses shadows. This is not a satisfactory solution.

Edit: Oh, I just remember why it can't even be done with walkbehinds. You'd have to make sprites of every single floor surface, which is even worse

Optical effects:




These are examples of a couple of lens refraction effects. They use RawDrawing for 1) compositing many differently scaled pieces into one single sprite and 2) for cropping the DynamicSprite to a non-rectangular shape. I don't think there's a simpler (or even any other?) way to do this.

I think RawDrawing to sprites is a great idea, especially if it can help on the Direct3D situation since it would mean not having to use RawRestoreScreen every loop (which - to be - honest, even simple RawDraw effects like the dog leash in Blackwell Legacy needs). For my purposes the SpriteRawDraw would need to support all the same functions as the current RawDraw routines, and it would be nice with a few more (for instance copying the alpha channel of an existing sprite to a DynamicSprite of the same size).

Edit: Will the new DirectX 5 mode replace the current graphic rendering in future versions of AGS? I really hope I won't be stuck with 2.72 for my future games 

Wow, this was some game. I played non-stop after downloading it, completed it at 5 in the morning, then when I got up around 11, the first thing I did was restart the game to listen to the commentary track. I'm honestly surprised that the price is only two-thirds of Legacy, seeing as this game had at least as much gameplay (in fact I think I spent longer on Unbound - but it could also be that Legacy had a lot of exposition before launching you into the investigation). Plus it has lots more bonus features - which were as funny and inspiring as always.

Spoiler

I even liked Lauren better than I liked Rosangela - perhaps because she's a more tragic character. I actually had tears in my eyes at the end of the game - which truly proves the quality of the story and dialog writing. The other characters were also great. My favorites are probably Isaac Brown and Joseph Mitchell (who I was actually surprised to find out you did the voice for, Dave. A great performance). Voiceacting was overall great, and The Countess genuinly freaked me out.

The narrative flow was much better this time around (the "Lauren has a cigarette on the balcony while Joey talks to her" scenes got a little repetitive, but they actually helped the by providing act breaks and allowing a moment of reflection on the themes of the game. As voh said, I also enjoyed the two cases coming

I loved the phone book and the puzzles that came from it. I have a very similar feature in my game, except there you use an online phone directory. To be honest - and not to say "my approach is better than yours" - I think interfaces like this, where the player has to input the solution themselves (also the textbox for the aparment number), is a lot more intuitive way of letting the player put together the clues than the notebook inventory-combinations.

All in all a great game - your best so far, if I may say so. And I hope to see Lauren and hear her raspy smoker's voice again soon.

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About the overall plot:

Spoiler

Whoa, so the guy in Ben's dream is actually Marcus Wilkins who wrote about Zortherus in the Paranormal Investigator's handbook? Will the last game take us to New England, I wonder?

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I think it's a great idea. And making a prison game where you're playing the correction officers rather than an escaping inmate is certainly original. Since the location is so restricted it would need a set of interesting and layered NPCs (inmates and other officers) that you would get to know throughout the game. You could perhaps use the character control plugin to have NPCs walking around minding their own business. Conceptually it actually reminds me a bit of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (except for the fact that there you DID play an inmate).

Is there any chance, that RawDraw could be implemented with a set of hybrid commands that allow the CPU to handle all RawDrawing in a screen buffer and only transferred to the GPU when actually displayed (at end of game cycle)?

I've spent 3 years coding different subsystems for my game (html module, dynamic shadows, lens refraction, even the custom dialog system), that all use RawDraw. Since they all operate by RawDrawing images or text onto the background, deforming and cropping the area and then grabbing it to a DynamicSprite, which may then be assigned to a character or an object, there is no easy workaround. It's really a shame if I can't take advantage of the hardware-accelerated engine, since my game is in hi-res using 32-bit, alpha channeled sprites which is exactly what it was made for.

Edit: Regarding the DirectDraw engine crashing on game-start, I'll see if I can isolate the problem and remove the game content that's not involved. Then I'll upload it.

As long as there isn't the chance that somebody else abuses the system with the purpose of having your stats reset. I think overall a download count system must be quite lenient - and the numbers should of course not be read uncritically. It's pretty easy to triple your download count by releasing a buggy game and then 2 or 3 subsequent updates.

NOTE: I didn't actually compile the game. I just ran the new acwin.exe in my game data folder, as I usually do when testing my game. Therefore you should probably take the comments below with a grain of salt.

I only tried it briefly, but I didn't see any framerate improvements in my 640x480 32-bit color game, despite using an anti-aliased player character. In fact, I get somehow worse performance for a couple of rooms. On the other hand, most of the effect stuff that sometimes slow my game down (dynamic shadows, lens distortion etc.) just use plain RawDraw routines.

EDIT: I looked further into this, and it seems that rooms that use RawDraw/DynamicSprites intensively have a 10 FPS lower framerate than when using the normal acwin.exe.

When teleporting to a very big room (a 640x4000 pixel black background), the game crashed with the message: "Error: Bitmap too large for texture memory". My machine is a laptop with a 128MB Radeon Mobility 9700 and 1 GB RAM.

Also, the game now starts with a black screen where only the GUIs are visible. I have to open another GUI (inventory, save menu etc.) for the background and character to show up.

If I select DirectX 5, the game crashes on startup with the message "An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x0047612F ; program pointer is -179, ACI version 2.80.940D3D, gtags (0,0)" for some reason.

As strazer says, check out arrays and structs. If you declare a global array like this:

Code: ags

int inventoryproperty[AGS_MAX_INV_ITEMS];

You can import it in the script header, and do stuff like:

Code: ags

inventoryproperty[iShovel.ID] = 5;

or

Code: ags

if (inventoryproperty[iShovel.ID] == 5) player.Say("I have no idea why the property for the shovel needs to be 5, but it is!");

in room script.

Edit: I recommend you to work this out by yourself, since it will be a valuable lesson in scripting. But if you should need to change a large number of properties for different inventory items, objects or characters, you could also check out monkey's properties module.

Steel Drummer, what you could do is record a reggae version of a traditional song, perhaps a spiritual. These songs rarely have known composers or lyricists and are thus copyright free (and even so, most of them pre-date the 20th century, so you're in the clear). Just make sure that you base it on the original version rather than a later variation, which could be copyrighted (one example of this issue would be the many versions of Sinnerman that contain the changes and additions made by The Weavers in the 1950's).

Mike:

Spoiler

The instructions are all in the mural. If you picked up the glowing seaweed and a rock it should be a piece of cake

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Hey, Grundislav - how come you haven't pimped your developer diary in the forum? I only discovered it by accident today. Interesting reading, and that background for BJ7 looks awesome. Does the San Silvestro church actually play a part in the game, or is it just a setting for more Vatican intrigue? I researched it a bit and saw that they allegedly have the head of John the Baptist there (hmmm, "The Baptist's Head" would fit with number of letters for the title, though it rather conjures up images of decapitated rednecks). The head of Baphomet, the Knights Templar... I guess we'll just have to wait and see.