Messages

[NOT]

Thanks for all your feedback, guys!

Just to be clear, AGS will NOT be going commercial; the target market for a tool such as AGS is simply too small to make it a profitable business -- which is probably why there is no equivalent commercial product.

Based on the anonymous usage stats, I can tell you that AGS currently has 2260 active users. If AGS went commercial and charged $30, if we work with a generous assumption that 10% of people would buy it, that would bring in $6780. As a lump sum that would be enough to fund development for a few months, but the number of new registrations each month would be nowhere near enough to fund it as a business.

So let's just say, if I went on Dragon's Den and pitched BigBlueCup LTD, there would be only one response -- "I'm out"!!

So, what are we going to do? Well, from your feedback it sounds like people are generally in favour of opening up the source code in some way, so I will prepare a release of the AGS Editor Source Code.

AGS as open-development (not open source) - Inform 7 broadly follows this model. It is still, ultimately, under the control of Graham Nelson (and the code for the compiler is closed source), but there are also a team of developers, working on the UIs (which are open source), standard libraries etc. This might be the best compromise concerning Chris's mistrust of open source licenses and loss of control. This would allow the community to be more broadly involved with the project.

Yes, this sounds good and is probably the license model I will choose.

Interesting, looks like sometimes the daylight savings offset is included in the saved time, and other times not.

I might look into it at some point.

So, over the last year or so it has been becoming increasingly clear that I no longer have the time to maintain and improve AGS like I did back in the good old days.

I feel particularly guilty about the bug reports that are filed here in the Tech Forum but I no longer actually have time to go away and investigate them and fix them.

So I've been trying to work out what to do about this; and I'm still not totally sure what the right answer is.
I certainly don't want to just give up and say "AGS is cancelled", because that would be throwing away 10 years of hard work, and would betray everyone who's developing games here.
On the other hand, I can't continue to pretend that nothing has changed, because it's evident that new versions and patches just aren't being released within any sort of reasonable timescale any more.

So, what are the options?

Well, ideally I'd like to recruit an assistant, somebody to help with development of AGS. But it would probably be practically impossible to find anyone with the skills and dedication to do it (after all, it's my baby, so it would be very hard to find anyone else who would have the same level of dedication to it).

Another option is to open-source all the code, and hope that some sort of open source community takes over. But then I would completely lose control of it, and it's not certain that any open-source developers would want to continue developing it or taking it in the right direction anyway.

So considering the lack of any obvious way forward, my current thinking is this:
As a first step, open up the .NET source code of the AGS Editor.
Whilst ideally I would like to see AGS Editor enhancements done as plugins, I appreciate that the current plugin API doesn't provide all the functionality that would be needed for this. So preferably I'd like to see somebody take the editor and enhance the plugin API, so that plugins become more powerful and the need to actually modify the core editor code is reduced.
I would still have control of official AGS Editor versions and releases, but other people could go and add features and fix bugs, and then submit these code changes back to be incorporated into the core.

If this works out well, then go on and open up the majority of the AGS Engine source code. I'm still not sure what to do about the code that handles the AGS file formats, because opening that up would make decompilers very easy to write. But that's a small amount of code in the grand scheme of things, and something we can discuss later on.

So, I'm curious to hear your feedback. Would anybody actually want to make their own changes to the AGS Editor, if the code was available? Do you think this would work as a process going forward?

I start the game. Play. Load. Then mp3, would load and play, wav would just end.

Interesting, I'll see if I can reproduce this.

Ok i've isolated the problem.
If an audio type has a fade defined, the fade will override any scripting commands.

Ah, I see what you mean. It should probably cancel the fade if you manually set the Volume of an audio channel while it is fading.

If two or more animating object's baselines is set to a variance smaller than 4 pixels, the animation of all objects behind the closest one one will pause indefinitely.

Can you provide an example? It's more likely to be some sort of scripting bug.

The System.Volume property does not effect the MIDI file I have playing as music, but it does effect the ambient sound playing. Is there some trick to making sure that no audio files or audio types remain uneffected by setting the System.Volume property?

Interesting, it should do. I'll look into it.

This happens when importing guis from previous ags versions (including the immediately previous RC) and trying to make them visible.  It results in an insta-crash even with a blank gui (tested).  I tried manually cloning the guis that were crashing in the same game and they open fine with all the same functionality and graphics of the imported ones.  Dave has confirmed that he has run into this issue as well.

Hmm thanks for the report, I'll look into it.

I think I figured out what was causing the rooms to get corrupted.  I use Carbonite to backup all my files and I have it set on automatic so that whenever it detects a file change, it goes and copies the file to the server.  When I put the Carbonite on pause, no more corrupt files.  There must of been some conflict when AGS was saving the file and Carbonite was trying to upload it. I was getting really frustrated because room after room was getting corrupted.

Glad you found the problem, and glad it wasn't an AGS bug

That looks like some sort of daylight-savings-offset problem with the times, it probably shouldn't be happening. Does it increase by an hour every time you save it, or just the first time after adding the sounds?

I want a video (ogv) to be played at startup, which works fine in window mode and when switching to Direct Draw in Fullscreen.
But if i change it to D3d9 it won't show up in fullscreen mode.

What happens? Do you get a blank screen, or an error message?

No, there is no functionality to change those things at runtime.

I had a crash again 

I posted already here but it was probably overlooked.

It happens sometimes when I click the exit button of the game when started from within the editor. Does noone else have this problem?

When this freeze-up happens, can you still see the game window, or does that disappear but the editor still won't respond? Has it only started happening with 3.2, or did you get this problem with 3.1.2 as well?

Has anyone else had this problem?

Help.  I've been working on this game for about 2 - 3 years, so it is pretty big by now.  I've been using the latest version of AGS, prior to this new release.  Lately, I've been getting errors about memory and roomload messages when I try to open a room in the editor.

Did you get any error messages the last time you saved the room when it became corrupt?

LoadRoom: unknown block type 0 encountered in 'room14.crm'
LoadRoom: unexpected end of file while loading room

These errors both indicate that the room file is corrupt. You should have had some sort of error saving the room before this...

Is your game on your hard drive, or is it on some sort of USB stick? Having the files on a USB stick is the only time I've heard of the data not getting written properly.

Is there any special reason why the release candidates come as installer EXEs and the RAR file is released later?

Beta versions come in a zip file only. The RC releases come in an EXE to test the installer. In theory there should only be one or two RC releases before the release becomes final -- though in practice, it never turns out that way!

Ummm, you say 3.2 has been released but the main site's frontpage still says 3.1.2 and it's only 3.1.2 available for download, not 3.2...

I'm waiting for Calin to confirm whether there is a problem with the audio in 3.2; although time has passed now, and as the other issues reported in this thread also affect the previous version, I don't think there's anything outstanding now that should stop 3.2 from becoming an official release.

[before]

Scripts can only reference things exported from other scripts before them in the list.

So the global script can access things that a module exports, but a module cannot access something that the global script exports.

The solution is to move your code into a higher up module script instead of having it in the global script.

I can appreciate that this is annoying if you're using a source control diff. The way that AGS writes the Game.agf file, there is no gaurantee about the order that elements will come out in this sort of situation; so there's no easy way of changing it.

The main IAGSEditor interface has a RebuildAutocompleteCache() method which you can use to do this.

That's certainly possible for a future version.

By the way; I downloaded the program, installed it and uninstalled the old one. Then I tried opening one of my game projects and it gave an error because of some names like "view names" included letters like "ö, ğ, ı, ü, ç", etc. (I used that characters in names with no problems with the old version.) It didn't even give me a chance to change the names so I had to download ags 3.1 which I uninstalled 2 minutes ago... I installed it and changed these names in my games. There were hundreds of them so that I was becoming really mad because of clicking, checking for little letters in lots of names and changing them.

Hmm, these were working ok for you in 3.1.2? The reason this restriction was added to 3.2 was because people were having problems where the game wouldn't compile properly in that scenario.

edit: I deleted a music that I used for a room before and I imported another one to use. but as it writes at the first message, there is no room music thing anymore. So I called it from the after fade-in script. But now it says "Unable to find aMusic1 which was set as tihs room's start music".
How can it be set? There is no setting as room start music! So I can't change it either.

The music file must be there when you open the room for the first time in 3.2. So, put the Music1 file back, then do a Rebuild All Files. The editor will then automatically add a "aMusic1.Play()" line of script to the room script, which you can then remove/change/etc afterwards and you won't get the error any more.

This is because the Room Start Music setting has been removed, and now you can just add a line of script to do it instead.

Actually, I've just checked the editor code, and the Plugin API IAGSEditor.GetSpriteImage() method should give you a Bitmap with the correct colour depth, even for 8-bit sprites. Was this the method you were trying to use?

D'oh! It's been a bit since I was looking at the plugin API. There's the IEditorComponent.BeforeSaveGame event. That may actually be sufficient for my needs then..

Ah yes, that should work for your purposes

I've been iterating the CurrentGame.Rooms list (which I've found to be UnloadedRooms), but whether I access it using a generic IRoom object or an UnloadedRoom object it seems that the Script property is always returning null. I'm trying to access the room script files to add/update the on_call function as needed.

The room scripts aren't loaded until the user tries to access them. The IRoom interface has a LoadScript() method which you can call if the Script property is null, which will load it for you.

Can you provide an example of the problem?

The AGS Editor internally stores the sprite images in a raw memory format. When one is rendered to the screen, it converts it to a 32-bit Bitmap.

This is because the .NET framework has various limitations with 8-bit bitmaps, and even internally the editor doesn't have any functionality to deal with 8-bit .NET Bitmap objects. Potentially the plugin API could expose this raw format, but it wouldn't be easily handled by .NET code.

The option is there in 2.7 too, on the General Settings pane.

When you add, edit or delete a global variable, AGS should mark all rooms as 'edited' and force a recompile whenever you try to compile the game.

Fair point, it probably should.

You might be missing one of the standard Windows fonts for some reason. Try the advice here:
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistaprograms/thread/80ad7a97-230f-41d4-9101-107a0bfa986a