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So I've been working my way through Yahtzee's old games on something of a nostalgia bend lately. Reached Trilby's Notes a few days and started it up. And then .... uh ....

Well, see for yourselves.

     

   
It's a very strange visual effect - the screenshots presented here are not the complete image that I see on screen. Instead, it's like these weird max-saturation colour patterns have been overlayed on top of the regular visuals, so I'll see a usual screenshot such as the opening cinematics but with lots of colourful circles covering parts of it up.

My best shot-in-the-dark guess would be that there's some sort of lighting or overlay effect (hence the radial patterns and prescence along edges) that's gone wrong, which would also explain why my screenshots just look black except for the errors. But ofc that's just a guess.

I've run the AGS winsetup.exe and tried every combination of options present, with no effect thus far. It's only effecting Trilby's Notes and no other AGS games that I've played / am playing recently.

Is this a known (or even remotely common) error in AGS games, or old ones at least? All input appreciated.

[(SPOILERS INCOMING)]

Hi, new user today, with a specific question to ask everyone. Hope you're all doing well. I'll get stuck in with the hows and whys of the question topic.

I've been replaying through Yahtzee Croshaw's old games lately out of a bit of nostalgia. Today is 7 Days a Skeptic, and I started playing about two hours ago. About one hour ago in between drinks breaks and such, I reached the part where (SPOILERS INCOMING)

Spoiler

the escape pod door opens to the vacuum and you have to very rapidly press a lever to shut it in time.

[close]

Now I remembered from my previous playthrough/s that this action occurs right after an extremely lengthy and unskippable cutscence, which was correct. So I had the bright idea of saving very quickly first when this event began so I won't have to sit through all that in the event of a retry.

So when the event started, I scrolled up to the top and hit save. When the mouse is hovered over the top bar in 7DaS, the action pauses, as is aptly demonstrated during other action sequences in the game. But it turns out, this is the one exception! So on finishing my save, I found that I have 0.5s to complete the challenge before getting a game over.

Try as much as I might, reloading and reloading again and again, I couldn't complete the challenge in this format. This was my only save file, and I had every reason to believe that this save sequence was fine given the prior standards established. A bit of a gip, you may say. Was I expected to simply sit through the massive horrible cutscene again and again? Was I not expected to work around this? It's a 15 year old AGS game so actually I don't really mind.

BUT what I do mind is playing through the entire game again to reach my old position. That's a nag, especially since I plan on replaying the entire thing anyway to read Yahtzee's commentary. I'm not playing through it three times, I have a life.

So what to do? What struck me as immediately viable would editing the save file itself. That would be a simple enough mechanical operation, identifying the variables in a hex editor and tweaking them to set the game back.

Equally viable, would be downloading a save file completed up to the point where I was at and then starting off from there. Both of these approaches would solve the end goal of sparing innocent me a third playthrough, thwarting the dastardly problem once and for all.

-

So I spent the next hour browsing throughout the internet for solutions, and eventually after google et al proved useless (they've all dropped so shockingly in standards lately), I found myself washed up on these shores. Hello again! 

I took the time to search through the forums before making this post and have seen many people before me with variations of this problem. Some kind of glitch or game scripting oversight occurs and this results in a bugged or lost game file, and because it's late in the game it's wrong to play back through it all. So I know that I am among kin in this regard; very frustrating.

Yet full of hope all the same, because AGS is old software for pc and can be tweaked in a fashion much more easily than, say, a console video game. Hence, I submit my query to the forum for help and guidance.

TL and DR: I'm looking for a way to manually edit save files (specifically for 7 Days a Skeptic), and/or a save file for said game up to

Spoiler

the bit right before the escape pod sequence

[close]

, in order to work around an error rendering my save file inert. All knowledge and insight welcomed with the utmost gratitude!

Just joined today in order to search for an answer to a question that is absent from the rest of the internet. That will be posted in its relevant forum.

The section at the end of the signing in process is very poorly designed. Terrible even.

1) It asks three questions, which are actually picked from a set of four and arranged in an arbitrary order every time you load the page.

2) Three of these possible questions have straightforward yes or no answers, but one of them rejects any such answer in favour of a different format altogether

3) Every time you guess a yes or no variant (maybe or neither etc.) and inevitable get a rejection, BOTH of your passwords are deleted from the type in box at the top, requiring you to type them BOTH in again every time to you need to make a guess

4) A final kick in the teeth, the questions swap around in orders with each reload, yet the answer boxes don't. So you'll have typed in say "yes" in the top box to the question "Are you a human?", but when the missed guess comes up next, that question is dice-rolled into "Are you a robot?" and so you get another failure this time because you didn't change the "yes" into a "no".

Thus the joining member must end up typing in their own password about 16-20 times repeatedly with each arbitrary retry because of a silly hokey-hokey system of questions with a dishonest shifting set of criteria. This system is crackers and very frustrating.

Now the first bit though, I liked that. Actually quizzing people on the forum's rules makes perfect sense, even if some of the examples were wank. But that last bit has got to have some adjustments.

AGS is a great piece of software and I look forward to talking about it, but that was annoying (especially since I am in a hurry atm) and it would've been wrong to bury it.