Messages

The only tip i can say is to save more than one file of your projects

<story of my life, volume II -- soon in your favorite bookstore>

Spoiler

That's what I usually do, but I do it at the beginning of the session. That's what I did yesterday : I opened my file, and I was expecting to immediately do a "File-->Save As" to create a backup and start painting in the new file. But the file was screwed up and wouldn't open.

It's not that bad, I mean, I just have to start over from the last image I posted in the forum, but you know how it is, the motivation takes a big blow when you have to re-do for 4 hours what you did just the day before. Dammit.

I'm currently trying a hard drive recovery tool to see if it finds the previous version of the file -- I suspect that if Windows got mixed up when flushing file streams to the USB drive (to the point where it wrote an entirely different file!), then it might have started using an entirely new data area on disk. So if I'm lucky, the previous file bits are still there somewhere.

I'm still baffled by what happened. How a PSD file could have become an (incomplete) AGF file inside is beyond my comprehension.

[close]

[EDIT: What. The. Funk.]

My Photoshop file got corrupted after a 4-hours long painting session I can't open it.
It's the first time it ever happens to me. I'm currently trying some PSD repair tools.

EDIT: What. The. Funk. I've just opened the PSD file with a text editor to see how corrupted it is, and it turns out.. It's an AGS .agf file inside!!! I don't know what happened with Windows, if it got mixed up when flushing the data to the USB drive where I keep my files, but... That's it. My PSD file is now a broken AGS game file. It's all gone. I'm gonna cry.

Two extremely important things to say : 1) Ponch is funny 2) I love the idea of this game (the scale and the scales)

@Yakatakatulla : Wow. Just wow.

@adventuress : My last post wasn't empty, probably you can't see the image

[imgzoom]https://33.media.tumblr.com/585bb3bf1fb04feb5605bd7701d00f4b/tumblr_ng1g016nFV1tsfksfo1_1280.png[/imgzoom]

The only thing I'm not sure of is why you're using SmoothScroll_SetTargetCharacter(cCamera). Is that your own function? I had to use targetCharacter = cCamera; in its place.

Silly me, I forgot to mention I added that function. That's the only change I made to the module, it does exactly targetCharacter = cCamera; (I just don't like global variables floating around, that's an OCD thing).
Hmmmm, if you say you can't reproduce it, I'm in trouble. I hope there's no other call to one of your module's functions somewhere else in my gigantic code. I'll investigate more and come back.

Really really cool.

[19]

 

Sorry for digging up, but I'm having issues for controlling the smooth scrolling, and I thought that the answer could be beneficial to everyone, that's why I'm posting here instead of PM'ing.

First I'd like to say that this module is really sweet. It's a neat effect, and it was made without relying on the Tween module -- that's a cool achievement, technically speaking.

My issue : (I'm detailing steps to reproduce it)
- Create a 320x200 game
- Create a 600x220 room (it's slightly higher than the viewport's height)
- Bring your main character in it, let's say at (50,100).
- Create a dummy character (I'll call it cCamera) which uses a transparent sprite. This one will be used to control the viewport.
- Also bring it into the room, at (1,219). <-- you agree with me that it's at the very bottom of the room.
- In the room script, call

Code: ags

  SmoothScroll_SetTargetCharacter(cCamera);
  SmoothScroll_ScrollingOn();

What should happen: The viewport should move down and "stick" to the bottom of the room.
What happens: The viewport stays stuck at the top of the room.

I've run tests :
- the issue does not happen when the script moves cCamera left or right: the camera scrolls left and right accordingly.
- I thought it might come from "EdgeY" (defined in the module) so I moved cCamera far down : cCamera.y=400; but it didn't hemp.

What am I doing wrong?

EDIT: this is a tiny bug that Ali explains below. You will experience it only if you make a low-resolution game AND the camera needs to make only a small move (for example, it the room is only slightly larger than the viewport. For example your room is 32x220 and your game is 320x200). It's easily worked around with the solution given by Ali.

Every now and then I am getting an error when starting AGS:

There was an error loading plugin 'agssock.dll'.

Unable to load plugin 'agssock.dll'. It may depend on another DLL that is missing.

After some time (or maybe some actions) it loads fine.

A small update on this problem.
I was working on my project on different computer for few days, and this error never occured to me (although it was reoccuring every now and then before).
The difference is that it has Windows Vista installed (as opposed of Win7) and not a part of any net (nor connected to Internet).

I have the same issue. It appears from time to time, then I make it disappear by opening./closing/rebuilding/rebooting/etc. I'm never sure what fixes it. It seems to happen randomly and disappear randomly. I have Win7, I use AGS 3.3.0 RC1.

[.Net]

@Monsieur OUXX - looks great! What program are you using for the workout, please?

That's just good old Paint.Net, used exclusively for drawing lines. If you're asking about the perspective/3D...then I'm afraid all the magic happens inside the head

[imgzoom]https://31.media.tumblr.com/66912a7b82268b86fcd02da3a9d2e8db/tumblr_nfyrqdjduO1tsfksfo1_1280.png[/imgzoom]

At the moment I'm sketching. I need to put a lot of thought into it because we intend on reusing that bg for our game, so it's not just a drawing, it has to be functional and it has to match the cutscenes that shall happen in it.

Regarding the light coming from behind: Sprite DLight's normal maps have the same range like those of Sprite lamp and other tools.
Are you referring to the preview shader?

On your site there's a video of a platformer that takes place in a cave, with torchlights. Whenever the character walks in front of the torches, he does not obstruct the light, and he doesn't appear all black. Quite the opposite: he's fully enlighted, like he's standing behind the torch.

In prior versions if you'd draw a sprite w/o alpha channel over destination with alpha using DrawingSurface.DrawImage, the "transparency" parameter would not be applied. Now it should be.

Ok, thanks a lot.

* In 32-bit games DrawingSurface.DrawImage() now properly applies overall transparency when drawing opaque sprites over surfaces with alpha channel.

Could someone explain to me what that means exactly, with an example of what it did before and what it does now?

Continuing from those threads :
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=46223.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=46220.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=46471.0

The help file is getting more and more out of sync with the actual Editor. It's no big deal for most script functions, but there are many new features recently (e.g. : multiple platform builds).

The issue with the help file is that it's generated from some old LaTeX dialect, which in turn creates an old-school Windows help file (.chm files).
A few years ago I converted the .chm file to some Html-based online help, using a professional tool. That's great, but I don't think that's a good long-term solution. CHM files are a mess because that's starting to be a really old format (see the kind of trouble I had). Others tried other things along the years.
We need to find a solution.

Nice and clean game!
The only small annoyance are the areas to leave the rooms, they're too small, sometimes you miss them.

EDIT: for example I realize I probably didn't see how to reach the room seen on the screenshot.

Rather than saying "this cloud should move that-many pixels every that-many loops" you have to say "this cloud should cross the screen in 30 seconds."

You are right, that's a completely different approach. I just mentioned it for exhaustiveness's sake. The issues are usually solved by just checking every game loop if the tween's movement is over.

[This demo]

Please note that more and more people go for the "Tween module" solution. You'll probably start using it at some stage in your project, even though you thought you could spare it at the beginning.
This demo uses the Tween module to scroll a background image continuously right-to-left.

I didn't realize there was a new compiler. Where can I learn more about that?