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How about that resolution thing with black bars on top and bottom in some games? Is there a way to stretch them to whole screen? Settings don't do it even if there are adjustments to that.

Which games for example?

In older versions of AGS there has been a setting called "letterbox" mode, where game would display 320x200 scenes in a 320x240 frame. That's done "by design" and cannot be changed, at least not easily, as the same game in theory may have both 320x200 and 320x240 scenes, and switch between them; and engine cannot know that beforehand, so it has to assume 320x240 game when displaying a window.

Edit: Yeah, the demo does not have this issue at all. Works like a charm.
Examples of those games with resolution issues:
- Apprentice 2
- Astranded
- Bar Runner

As for the Sphonx issue, I'm playing a full version of the game. Did not try the demo yet. I have tried almost everything I can think of, I've exhausted tens of different configuration combinations, deleted the cfg files and saves, and even all files and unzipped them from the original package again. Nothing helps.

Edit: Yeah the demo doesn't have this issue at all. Works beautifully.

Okay. Got All The Way Down and Off The Clock working correctly. Fantastic. How about that resolution thing with black bars on top and bottom in some games? Is there a way to stretch them to whole screen? Settings don't do it even if there are adjustments to that.

[All The Way Down]

More bug reports found today:

All The Way Down
Subtitles don't appear correctly. They go on top of each other. Developer logo doesn't show at the start

Bustin' The Bastille
Subtitles force auto advance some way. They do not stop with acwin settings.

Sphonx
The game softlocks after the first scene, in the sleeping chambers. Mouse is movable, but hotspots do not occur. Menu can be called but not interacted with.

Xmas Nightmare
The game doesn't start through acwin.exe at all. Normal exe works okay, but there is of course auto-advancing subtitles.

[Terror Of The Vampire]

One more bug found:

Terror Of The Vampire

Music does not work at all. (Apparently this is due to drop out of the MIDI support, and thus, nothing can be done to run music in newer engines.) Lightning animation at the menu start doesn't appear. Game logo is completely white while it should be colorful.

Wonderful, thank you! Everything except Off The Clock's font problem was fixed. Stargate works beautifully now too.

One more thing, which is not a bug but kind of annoying. There's some resolution challenges in some games, like Apprentice 2. No matter what output you use for the graphics, there is always black bars on top and bottom of the screen. They appear even in windows mode. Is there anything that can be done to that or do I just have to get used to it? I really don't like when I can't use the whole screen in my games. I've even tried to use Magpie and BorderlessGaming softwares, which usually fix this kind of issues, but even those couldn't stretch to fill the screen in this case.

[Stargate adventure]

Stargate adventure
Crashes after the intro scene when starting new game: Error message:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adventure Game Studio

An error has occured. Please contact the game author for support, as this is likely an error in game logic or script and not a bug in AGS engine.
(Engine version 3.6.2.2.)

in the active script:
in "room 6 script", line 90

Error: RemoveOverlay: invalid overlay id passed
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no workaround through any settings. It always does this. There is something wrong with this game in general, because it doesn't run properly even from original exe. It just stops responding with a black screen and music on.

[The Man From The Fugue State:]

Here's 3 examples:

The Man From The Fugue State:
Protagonist's walking animation doesn't work, he just drags forward. Through normal exe it works right.

Entrapment (v.2.1)
Magenta backgrounds, that appear during cutscenes. They should be black. This same issue appears in multiple other games too.

Off The Clock
The subtitles do not appear correctly when running through acwin.exe. Only small upper part of them can be seen. This is not fixable by changing graphic output or any other settings.

I'll report games that have issues when I find some time to write them down.

More tests: Some games have problems with fonts breaking (they interline or get cut off. Sometimes changing the graphic output fixes them, sometimes it doesn't. Also some games have freezing or crashes with cutscenes. Some games do not work with acwin.exe at all. I'd say that 80% of games work wonderfully, though.

One more oddity found: While using the acwin.exe in game named "The Goat Crone" (version 1.0.2) you cannot exit from the recipe book once you open it. Through normal exe-file the recipe book works fine.


Moderator note: This topic was split from here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/adventure-related-talk-chat/text-speed-in-ags-games/

Not at the moment, but I was planning to add this along with the existing options.

Please inform me if there is any further changes to the situation.

can you adjust TextReadingSpeed or MinimumTextDelay from ags acsetup.cfg? And if it can be done, what would be the commandlines for them?

Anyway, thank you very much at this point already! You've done a wonderful favor for me, and opened tens of new games, which were subtitled too fast before. I mean, lot of games work beautifully with this Speechskip=input command. Some games have minor glitches, but it's a small price for a controllable dialogue! Those small glitches include some temporary freezing / long delays (for example in Infinity Strings) and some magenta-colored backgrounds in logos and menus (Murder In A Wheel as an example)

Tested Resonance by Wadjet Eye just a moment ago with new beta. Speech is interupted, yes. But not the tought-bubbles, unfortunately. Maybe they use some different thing there.

Also tested Cedring And The Revolution again. Not all text is waiting for clicks. Only spoken lines. Also: music doesn't work trough acwin.exe.

This seems really great! Got it to work. It works well in the spoken dialogue, but as far as I tested, it doesn't stop the text in the environment or item descriptions. Would it be possible to strech to them too?

Edit: Actually this seems to be depending on the game. Some do work with all the text, some don't. For example Cedric And The Revolution works with only spoken dialogues. Cirque De Zale works perfectly with everything,

Since this post I've added a second option called "textskip" which works for the message boxes.
This feature is now included in 3.6.2 Beta release, where it may be also selected inside a winsetup dialog (you have to run "acwin.exe --setup" from command line if you are using it to run other games).

Then I tried to Play Shards Of God, but acwin.exe crashes most times when you try examine things with right click. When running the game through normal exe, it doesn't crash.

I suggest trying game using the latest posted 3.6.2 Beta then, as it may contain some bug fixes.
I'll try myself later too.

Actually, I updated the Shards of God to version 1.2 and the problem disappeared. So the game was faulty, not the acwin.exe.

@MoonBird

So, here's an experimental version of the AGS that has a text skipping config setting:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5372902994870272

if you download a link called "archive" it would contain the whole Editor, but you only need a file called "acwin.exe" to run the existing games.

Place "acwin.exe" in the game folder, and then insert following into the config file (acsetup.cfg):

Code: ags

[access]
speechskip=input

Then run "acwin.exe" to start the game (not the original game exe).

Other possible values are:
"any" - will skip speech by input and time
"time" - will skip speech by time only

This seems really great! Got it to work. It works well in the spoken dialogue, but as far as I tested, it doesn't stop the text in the environment or item descriptions. Would it be possible to strech to them too?

Edit: Actually this seems to be depending on the game. Some do work with all the text, some don't. For example Cedric And The Revolution works with only spoken dialogues. Cirque De Zale works perfectly with everything,

Then I tried to Play Shards Of God, but acwin.exe crashes most times when you try examine things with right click. When running the game through normal exe, it doesn't crash. The crash report reads:

Illegal exception:

An exception 0xC0000005 occured in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00410059; program pointer is + 1004, engine version 3.6.2.0, gtags (14, 14)

AGS cannot continue, this exception fas fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and contact the game author for support or post these details on the AGS techincal forum.

Most versions of Windows allow you to press CTRL+C now to copy this entire message to the clipboard for easy reporting.

An error file Crashinfo.dmp has been created. You may be asked to upload this file when reporting this problem on the AGS Forums. (code 0)

Second one is the only way to play those "tens of games" I mentioned, so I guess I'm just out of luck. Oh well. Have to play soemthing else then, unless someone makes those changes in the engine.

This really needs to be a setting you could change from the.cfg file. With tears in my eyes, I've been forced to abandon TENS of games because I just don't manage to read half of their dialogues.   I really would want to play them, but it's impossible, until someone does something to this huge accessibility problem. It just can't be that playing adventures is a priviledge of native english speakers who read fast.

This would really mean a world to me, if it would even be possible. I understand that not every written text is possible to make clickable or even slow down, but if it would be even partly possible in most of the games, it would mean tens of more games to play for me 

Hi AGS community. I've enjoyed tens of AGS-produced games. Some more, some less. The biggest problem for me is that I'm extremely slow reader. And because AGS-games rarely offer a setting in options to slow down the subtitles, I am practically unable to play a huge pile of great games just because my inability to read fast. It doesn't help that English is not my native language, nor the fact that I have dyslexia. Will there not be any chance to update the AGS engine for already released games which could add that kind of setting? I've also tried to play AGS-games through ScummVm, so that I could adjust the text speed from there, but unfortunately ScummVm's Subtitle speed setting doesn't work with AGS games, so I'm out of luck there
Would there ever be any possibility, that I could enjoy those tens or even hundreds fantastic games, which now are practically unaccessible to me, because I don't manage to read half of their text.

Thank you kindly for answers in advance

Antti