Messages

CJ told me off for using reflection to access things that aren't directly exposed in the plugin API, so I have a question. Is there any sort of precompile event exposed?

Not at the moment, no. I'll look into it for a future version.

Also, I'm curious whether there's any way to access AGS event handler names, specifically for GUI event handlers. I don't need to invoke them (which I know editor plugins can't do of course), I just need to know the names. If possible, getting the parameter list as well would be nice.

Yes, this is accessible.

The IAGSEditor.CurrentGame.GUIs collection has all the GUIs in it, if the GUI is a normal GUI (rather than a Text Window) then it has an OnClick property (which is the only event that a GUI exposes):

            foreach (GUI gui in _editor.CurrentGame.GUIs)
            {
                NormalGUI normalGui = gui as NormalGUI;
                if (normalGui != null)
                {
                    string onClickHandler = normalGui.OnClick;
                    // TODO: use the onClick handler name
                }
            }

Hey, I've got this problem with The Journey Down. Twice now I've had to restart because when trying to load saves, cos the game crashes and I get:

An exception 0xC0000094 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00483D9D ; program pointer is +220, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (1,0)

Can someone confirm if this is because of the room I've saved in? This has really annoyed me as last time I got far and now I will have to start again, so I'd prefer to know how I can avoid crashing in the future!!!

You should be able to run Setup, turn off sound and music, then run the game and restore your save game.
Then, re-save the game in a different room, and you should be able to turn the sound/music back on and get it working again.

Yes, in scrolling rooms it can be higher, and as monkey says in a 320x240 game the max would be 240.

What the docs are trying to say is that if the game is 640x480, the walk-behind baseline is still in low-res co-ordinates thus its max would be 240, not 480.

Try using the "Rebuild All" option on the editor's build menu.

Glad to hear that we've isolated the cause.

It's annoying that this happens, it only seems to happen with some specific MP3 files, there must be something about those files that AGS's decoder can't handle.

If you use any D3DX functions in your plugin, you need to distribute the D3DX DLL with it. This is why AGS doesn't use D3DX but just uses raw D3D.

I've tried this but it works fine for me.

What type of audio file are you using?

Are you using MP3 music in the rooms where this crash happens?

There have been cases where the AGS MP3 decoder can't handle the seeking required after loading a save game, and crashes. If this is the case, could you try converting that track to OGG and see if the problem goes away?

Interesting, probably the only way to investigate this is if you could upload a copy of the game that I could reproduce the problem with?

That's some sort of crash inside the clipboard routines, probably some sort of bug related to teh WINE clipboard implementation. I don't think there's anything I can do about that.

I don't mean to piss on anyone's strawberries but I may have a slight bug:

when an audioclip is played the volume doesnt seem to be set correctly if you set it immediately after the play command.
I imagine this is because the audioclip is actually played and initialised at the start of the next game loop.
so the following code doesnt seem to work as expected:

Code: ags

AudioChannel *chan = aSound1.Play();
chan.Volume = 50;

This should work fine, what was the initial volume of the channel before you changed it to 50?

Does this mean that AA fonts now work with lucasarts style speech?

They should do, yes.

On the general settings, under 'Windows Vista Game Explorer', there isn't a box to type in developer name anymore. Is this deliberate or me being stupid?

It has moved from the 'Vista Game Explorer' section to the main 'Setup' section at the top, since it is no longer solely used by the game explorer.

Well, it's been a long wait (18 months in fact) but version 3.2 of AGS is finally here!

The main change is that the audio system has been rewritten to get rid of the number-based sound and music, and replace it with a more modern, easy-to-use system based on sounds having names.

Changes since 3.1.2:

* Rewrote audio system. The old number-based sound and music are gone, replaced with new named audio clips. Added AudioClip.*, AudioChannel.*, Game.IsAudioPlaying, Game.SetAudioTypeVolume, Game.StopAudio, System.AudioChannels, System.AudioChannelCount, System.Volume, ViewFrame.LinkedAudio script commands.
* Added Game.IgnoreUserInputAfterTextTimeoutMs, Maths.Exp, Maths.Log, Maths.Log10, Maths.Cosh, Maths.Sinh, Maths.Tanh
* Added option to automatically add side borders when running 4:3 games on widescreen monitors
* The generated EXE version information is now set to your Game Name and Developer Name instead of "Adventure Game Studio" and "Chris Jones"
* Added new LEC-style template by abstauber
* Added Applies To feature to custom properties, so that you can have properties that only apply to Rooms or Characters, for example
* Added menu option to remove old Global Messages from the game, to stop them coming out in translation sources
* Added support for anti-aliased TTF fonts in all situations where they weren't previously supported.
* Added $APPDATADIR$ support to File.Open to allow you to write files to an accessible folder that is not the Save Games folder
* Added eMouseMiddleInv support to on_mouse_click
* Added editor plugin API methods IGUIController.ActivePane, IRoomController.PreSaveRoom
* Added plugin API events AGSE_PRESAVEGAME and AGSE_POSTRESTOREGAME
* Improved graphics mode detection so that the screen doesn't keep flickering when trying to start up a low-res game full screen
* Improved colour quality of mini-sprites displayed in sprite manager
* Improved the user-friendliness of some error messages, thanks to Error Reporting
* Improved editor robustness to recover if the Game.agf.user file was corrupt
* Winsetup now displays the game name in the title bar instead of "Adventure Game Studio"
* Disabled editor option to save changes whilst the game was running, since doing so  could cause sprite file corruption
* Editor property grid now displays a drop-down list instead of a text box when selecting a font or room
* Changed the pathfinder so that the character cannot get stuck if he ends up outside one of the room edges
* Removed limit on number of text parser words
* Renamed the "handle inventory clicks in script" general setting to better reflect what it does
* Removed room properties Play Music On Load, Music Volume and Save/Load Enabled since they are now obsolete
* Mouse.IsButtonDown now works with eMouseMiddle
* "Export all sprites in folder" command now exports 32-bit sprites as PNGs to prevent losing the alpha channel
* Improved error handling if you passed an int to a string argument in String.Format
* The Restart Point save file (AGSSAVE.999) is no longer deleted when you quit the game,  to fix a problem where RestartGame didn't work if you started the game by double-clicking an Enhanced Save Game file in explorer
* Disallowed accented characters like é in script names in the editor, because they wouldn't compile
* Dynamic sprite deletion warning is now only displayed on exit if Debug Mode is turned on
* Fixed sprite entry getting duplicated if you dragged a sprite to the end of the list
* Fixed crash with Hq2x and Hq3x graphics filters (3.1.2 regression)
* Fixed character/object tints and light levels in D3D not matching DX5
* Fixed TintScreen in D3D so that it looks the same as DX5
* Fixed Sierra-style speech box moving if the room was scrolled while it was displayed
* Fixed error running game and problems with save games if there were unicode characters in the folder path
* Fixed GUI controls not updating properly if the control moved under the mouse, but the mouse didn't move
* Fixed theora video being permanently muted after you played one video with muted audio
* Fixed Dynamic Sprites causing memory corruption if a mouse cursor was set to sprite 0
* Fixed Compress Sprites setting not taking effect until you next edited some sprites
* Fixed GUI AdditiveOpacity mode not working properly if you tried to have a non-alpha sprite on an alpha GUI
* Fixed light levels >100% not working with Direct3D driver
* Fixed Object.MergeIntoBackground not working with Direct3D driver
* Fixed IsKeyPressed not working with the following keys: [ ]  ; ' , . /
* Fixed struct member functions with more than 9 parameters giving run-time error
* Fixed File commands looking in the wrong directory if you launched the game by double-clicking a save game in explorer
* Fixed SetBackgroundFrame in Player Enters Screen event causing old frame to flash up briefly with D3D driver
* Fixed Make Default Language command crashing if two different source lines mapped to the same translated line
* Fixed run-time error if you returned a string from a function that was a member of a local dynamic array
* Fixed sprite cache corruption if you had a single sprite larger than 20 MB
* Fixed Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground and Character.PlaceOnWalkableArea to give error message instead of crash if you called them from game_start
* Fixed GUI label text not being anti-aliased if there was a background image but the BGColor was set to 0
* Fixed editor crash creating new game if your Windows username had unicode characters in it
* Fixed Views tree collapsing after renaming or drag-dropping a view
* Fixed editor crash on startup if you made the editor window very small before closing it down last time
* Fixed editor crash if you set an object's image to -1
* Fixed character gliding if he bumped into another solid character and the character's MovementLinkedToAnimation property was false
* Fixed DynamicSprite.Rotate cropping 1 pixel off the left side when rotating an image with an odd width/height
* Fixed ShakeScreenBackground not clearing letterbox borders properly if you switched from a large to a small shake
* Fixed "Internal compiler error: table overflow" if there were a lot of imported functions/variables
* Fixed when importing an 8-bit image, if there was another palette slot in the image with the same colour as the transparent slot it got changed to black
* Fixed Game.SpriteWidth/SpriteHeight returning the size of the blue cup instead of 0 if you supplied an invalid sprite number
* Fixed script editor issue if you typed some text, switched to another tab, then came back and did Undo
* Fixed autocomplete editor crash if there was a line break inside an array indexer
* Fixed compiler crash if a dialog script just had a @ on a line on its own
* Fixed editor crash if you tried to use a non-icon file as TEMPLATE.ICO
* Fixed sprite import window crash if you right-clicked in the second stage of tiled import
* Fixed mouse cursor being drawn in dialog options in DX5 mode even when Mouse.Visible was set to false
* Fixed no line number provided when DynamicSprite.CreateFromDrawingSurface threw an error
* Fixed script editor crash if you saved the script while the final function was missing its closing brace
* Fixed the editor Preferences window only allowing you to type 5 characters in if you wanted to manually enter a path for the New Game Directory or Import Directory
* Fixed "Close all other tabs" crashing if a room editor with unsaved changes was one of the other tabs
* Fixed changing a walk-behind baseline not marking the room as modified
* Fixed editor crash XmlException: An error occurred while parsing EntityName.
* Fixed compilation errors if you named a character with only numeric digits, eg "c500"


http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/AGS-3.2.exe

(if you were using the betas, this is the same release as 3.2 Final 5).

If no major issues are reported in the next week or so, I'll create the RAR release and update the website.

Ok, thanks.

So does anyone actually have any problems with 3.2 Final 5, with things that used to work ok in 3.1.2?

If not, I think this finally ready to be an official release!

Glad to hear it! Hopefully they'll build that into the next version of WINE.

well just set the render target to something other than the back buffer.

It would nicely tie in with this:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=40132.msg533721#msg533721

Thanks, yep that fits together nicely. So if that was done, your request would become quite easily possible.

Does the AGS API have a feature whereby I can create DX textures of existing sprites in the sprite cache?

There are no D3D-specific AGS API functions at the moment.

If you just made it a warning that would be of great help as an instant fix - I also spoke to wine developers and they did some work on this game explorer thing in wine 1.3 (which is the upcoming version, 1.2 is current) which might help, but 1.3 is yet to be released.

The problem you are having is not related to the actual Game EXplorer itself, it is an error in the Win32 API UpdateResource function which is (or should be) supported on all versions of Windows and provides a means by which EXE files can be updated.

Therefore the actual cause of your problem is that this is not functioning correctly on your WINE installation, but is a fairly core bit of Windows API so I'm not sure why.

It would be useful if somebody else who has used AGS on WINE can confirm if they got this problem also?


EDIT: In fact it looks like this is a WINE bug:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14882

Hi. I don't know if this is a bug, but when a character is performing a blocking walk (with the method Walk), he seems to ignore the regions (the region walk-onto event).

This is due to the way the script blocking works, it has always been this way and isn't an issue specific to the 3.2 release.

I double checked the original bug I mentioned. i.e 8bit alphas not working on buttons and it seems I was wrong.

They work when the background is transparent (i.e colour = 0)
but they dont work on a coloured background or a background image.

But can you please clarify if this used to work in previous versions and is now broken in 3.2 Final 5, or if it has never worked in AGS?

The recent fixes related to GUI alpha have been related to if you have an alpha-transparent background image on the GUI -- however if you have an opaque background and draw an alpha-transparent button on top of it then the alpha channel will be lost with both Classic and AdditiveOpacity, as far as I know AGS has always done this.
This is definitely an area for improvement but I don't think it's anything that used to work and is now broken?

Thanks, what people usually do is create a script module with handy bits of script in, which then makes it easy for other people to use.

Yeah that's very odd, not sure what would cause that. Well, let me know if it happens again.

Looks like something has become corrupt in the registry.

Run REGEDIT, and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adventure Game Studio
Delete the "AGS Editor" key there.

That should fix the problem, but you will lose all your preferences so you'll have to go back into the File -> Preferences dialog and set it back up afterwards.