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Messages - JJS

#281
Case 5 recording: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8WQ821NR

Unfortunately there were some technical difficulties, so there is no sound and video from minute 9:20 till 28:00 and no sound from about 1:49 h on. That means the whole day 1 is missing and parts of the after-game QnA. Sorry about that. But at least you can experience all cat wrangling that took place before the game started.

I guess I will try to record case 6 too btw. Simply because I don't feel like staying up till 2 am ;)
#282
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Mon 26/09/2011 07:10:06
Actually plugins are supported by the PSP port and there are already the AGSBlend and ags_snowrain plugin available. I am at the moment working on a recreation of the flashlight plugin, you can expect a new release in one or two weeks I think.

What will also be fixed is Ben Jordan facing the wrong way after entering a room. The cause for this was that the new engine doesn't put a character immediately to the new location after a script call to change the room but does so on actually changing the room only. This is why the FaceLocation() call didn't produce the desired result as the character was still standing on the old coordinates.

If I cannot figure out how to make it possible to draw after a screen fadout without glitches in other games, I will add a setting in the config file so that A Tale of Two Kingdoms becomes fully playable without disappearing text.

Edit: Almost forgot, the score sound will also be fixed (for real this time ;)).
#284
Unfortunately I missed all sessions up to now, but I thoroughly enjoyed the recordings. So may I ask if anyone has recorded BJ 3 too?
#285
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Tue 09/08/2011 08:18:12
Extracting the data files is pretty straightforward with the engine source, but I don't feel comfortable with providing an extraction tool.

The delay should not be as bad as you describe though because the audio cache should have the footstep sounds loaded after the first two steps. I will try to completely get rid of the memory stick access on playing cached sounds though.

A tale of two kingdoms doesn't actually "hang". The problem is that the game tries to draw messages while the screen is faded out. Seems like this was possible in 2.x but it is not anymore in 3.x. In the current engine, the screen fading is done by a graphic filter until the screen is completely faded out. Then the engine just stops drawing anything. My guess is that the fadeout was applied differently in older versions. A quick workaround for ATOTK is to always draw the screen, even when faded out. But this causes other screens to fade out completely and then after the filter is done, switch back to full brightness. I am really not sure how to handle this.
#286
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Mon 08/08/2011 17:19:26
New release R6.

This one brings mainly one thing: Compatibility with AGS 2.60 and up. ;D

There are a few glitches that occur in older games though. They are the same as running the games with the 3.1.1 Windows engine and are most likely caused by bug fixes and subtle data format changes.

A strange bug is that drawing order calculations in 2.x seem to be done differently than in the current version. This is very much noticable in the intro to Garfield. Also in Ben Jordan 7, after the Ben walks into his room in the intro he is drawn on top of the door while it is closed instead of behind it. Both Ben and the door have the same baseline value that is calculated from their y-position. Therefore is is probable that the order in which objects and characters are added to the "things to draw" list is inverted in 3.x compared to 2.x.

Also in the Ben Jordan games, especially in the deluxe versions: Ben often faces the wrong direction when entering a room. There is a script call to FaceLocation just before the room changes that turns the character around. It looks like that call is supposed to happen after the room change though. Very puzzling.


On the technical side, what was done to achieve the compatibility is adding the legacy formats to the loading function and writing a parser for the old dialog scripts. You can check that in the commit log.

As always, the download and source links are in the opening post.
#287
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Thu 04/08/2011 06:54:39
We are talking about 2.x compatibility here  ;).

Anyway the interaction stuff is figured out because the engine still has support for the old format (I was wrong with my previous assesment). So the only big part missing is a dialog script interpreter now. There are also a few glitches (e.g. games running too fast).

Edit: Ok, I think I understand the dialog format now.
#288
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Tue 02/08/2011 17:51:43
The only data file difference I see between 3.2.1 and 3.1.1 is that the older file lacks the game.audioClips and game.audioClipTypes data structures. So my code reads in all music and sound files present in the data files and  generates those structures from them. And with that the game runs (there is a tiny bit more to it, but read the source for that).

Amazingly you are right and the 3.1.1 acwin.exe seemingly can run 2.72 games :o. I will look into that.

Edit: Looks like whatever backward compatibility code there was in 3.1.x is gone in the current version. For example, I don't see how the old interaction system was defined/stored.
#289
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Tue 02/08/2011 08:18:26
R5 released now!

This one adds compatibility for 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 datafiles. 8)

Also a bit more memory is available because the MOD player is gone (anyone knows a game that uses this format?) and the hq2x3x filter is removed as there is no filtering available on the PSP port anyway.

TTF text is now always drawn without anti-aliasing because this option corrupted some text before.

Quote from: Jinx1337 on Fri 29/07/2011 23:21:27
2) Could you consider making a 'cursor slowdown' button? ScummVM uses the right trigger, which - when pressed and held - slows the "mouse" cursor movement down, making it much more comfortable to hunt for one-pixel-items.
This is implemented too. In the default configuration is is mapped to the right trigger.

Enjoy! And please let me know any bugs/crashes/major slowdowns!


Download as always from the links in the opening post.
#290
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Sun 31/07/2011 07:20:58
Thanks for the suggestions!

Not sure if the ScummVM guys can help as they would have to dig into the engine themselves first. I will keep that in mind though.

Unpacking the files might provide a small speedup. In fact this is not too hard to try because the engine looks for the file outside of the packfile first anyway. I will experiment with that.
#291
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Sat 30/07/2011 12:39:26
I already touched on the subject of virtual memory here. The PSP lacks hardware support for it so it would be painfully inefficient and slow. Nevermind that the memory stick speed is low anyway even if it was technically possible.

The only way to decrease the memory footprint is to change the way AGS handles the game resources (delay loading till it is really needed and free everything immediately afterwards). Not an easy task though.
#292
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Sat 30/07/2011 12:10:05
If using an already made keyboard I would go with Danzeff, yes. Probably with an extended charset and with button combination like in PSPVLC. But Danzeff uses several PNG images for its display and this will make the memory situation worse.

Do you know that you can create custom button mappings with the psp.cfg configuration file? I posted an example file for Gemini Rue (so that you can fight/push boxes here). Available keys are listed in the Readme file.

Memory stick performance is indeed a bottleneck but I don't see any way to fix the delay before a spoken line unless I would implement some "reading ahead" mechanism that loads the next dialog lines while the current ones are spoken. Of course this would not work too well with dialog trees and it would again consume precious memory. As for the PRO Memory Stick cache, I have no experience.

QFG II is really a very tight fit memory wise. Without the extra memory you cannot even watch the whole intro cutscene. I don't know if that can ever be made fully playable.
#293
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Sat 30/07/2011 06:02:22
You're welcome!  ;D

To your questions:

1) Fullscreen mode is not implemented right now because it indeed clashes with the onscreen keyboard. But it will be implemented eventually, I just have to switch to double buffered drawing so that it doesn't flicker (as it would now).

2) As Studio3 said, the DPAD can be used but I will consider your suggestion.


Compatibility might improve soon actually because I noticed that games down to 3.1.1 are compatible with the 3.2.1 engine except for the sound system. It doesn't seem too hard to create the necessary SoundClip data structures on loading the game though.
#294
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Thu 28/07/2011 18:00:34
Domithan, just make sure not to get a PSP-1000 because the port doesn't run well on it. A PSP-2000 with datecode 8B and below offers you the most options in terms of CFW.


Anyway, here is another update to R4.

This one adds midi music playback and sound caching for WAVE files. You might want to check out the Fountain of Youth demo again for the soundtrack.

For midi playback you need GUS patches. The best option is to download "Richard Sanders's GUS patches" from the Allegro website. Rename the file to "patches.dat" and place it in the same directory as the Eboot.

Links to the download and source are in the opening post.


Updates will probably slow down from now on until the older engine sources are released (*fingers crossed*).
#295
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Thu 28/07/2011 07:07:19
Actually every PSP can now run (L)CFW/HEN including those with firmware 6.39. PRO, TN and ME are available for 6.39 and there is also the option of downgrading.
#296
General Discussion / Re: AGS on the PSP
Wed 27/07/2011 20:05:39
Yes, I got a thread on here too: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=43998.0

But anyway thanks for your support  := . If the port helps to spread the word about AGS that cannot be a bad thing, can it?
#297
This is shaping up to be awesome. I'm psyched for it and I sure hope it will be released in English too.  :P
#298
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Tue 26/07/2011 07:57:15
Update time!

Version R3 adds support for engine plugins! At the moment only AGSBlend by Calin Leafshade and my recreation of the SnowRain plugin are available. But this makes e.g. Gemini Rue fully playable. A video of it can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kmyTYzG0w

If anyone is interested in compiling the open source ags_snowrain plugin for Linux or Mac or making improvements to it, be my guest. It is not 100 % the same as the Windows plugin, especially savegames are not compatible.

The source is on Gitorious and the binaries are found on my website as always (check the opening post).

(Sorry for double posting, but I thought this update warranted a thread bump.)
#299
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Wed 20/07/2011 19:54:57
Uploaded a small update. It fixes some bugs and adds more compatibility options. You can now force the engine to clear the sprite cache on every room change which helps reducing the memory footprint. Also there is an option to enable additional 4 MiB of RAM. While enabled, you cannot use the suspend function or Go pause feature.

Have fun! :=
#300
Engine Development / Re: AGS engine PSP port
Tue 19/07/2011 08:31:31
"bin" folder? Are you using the old version that I initially posted in the engine thread?

Please download the current one from the URL given in the opening post.
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