Messages

Yes, you can only have either a Tint or a Light Level. However, when you use a Tint you can set the Luminance which is the light level, but can only darken and not lighten the character.

It sounds like what you want is a Character.LightLevel property, this sounds reasonable and is something I'll consider for a future version.

Looks like the editor is getting confused by a string in one of your scripts somehow. If you'd like to upload the game files I can trace the problem and find out why.

Glad to hear it!

Any ETA on how long it'll take you to stamp out the regression?

After further testing I've confirmed that the problem was already fixed by Final 4.

Cut down the compatibility (the sooner the better). You've made too many changes to the engine and having to carry on that carrion is forcing you to make bad compromises and working more than necessary

I agree with Alan.. although I phrase my agreement in a less aggressive fashion.

It would have been much easier to develop the new audio system if I had just removed all the old commands like PlayMusic and PlaySound, and said "tough, change all your scripts to use the new commands".

But I can't do that. Put yourself in the position of someone like Dave Gilbert or AGDI who have very large, released games to support. For example, if Dave needs to upgrade to 3.2 to get an unrelated fix, it's not reasonable to expect him to re-code his entire game in the process.
One of the reasons people use AGS is that it has always had good backwards compatibility support, and as much as I'd love to just ditch all the old commands, nobody would ever upgrade to new versions if I did that.

Is it me, or are the automatic font outlines less thick than they used to be in previous?  I'm making a 640 x 480 game and the outline is only one pixel thick, which is barely noticeable at all.  Is this a new feature or was it like this all the time and I never noticed? 

This hasn't changed, though there might be some difference due to improved TTF anti-aliasing support. Do you have Before and After screenshots?


Anyway, I have uploaded a Final 5, which is important as it fixes a memory leak. I know I've been saying this a lot, but I really do plan to release this if no issues are found in the next couple of weeks.

First of all, thanks for spotting a reliable way to reproduce that "XmlException: An error occurred while parsing EntityName" crash. I've had quite a few Error Reports submitted but not managed to reproduce it until now -- I'll fix it.

As for Character.Tint, you can't use it to lighten the character, only re-colour and darken it.

The Light Level is a separate option which can brighten the character but doesn't support colour tinting.

Well spotted, thanks. 3.1.2 used to disable TTF anti-aliasing in this situation; 3.2 doesn't but then doesn't support it properly either.

Please try 3.2 Final 5 in the release thread, it should fix this.

However versions 3.1 (I think) and above allow scripts right in the dialogs which will save you a lot of headaches.

Yes, this is important. Don't use dialog_request, it is ugly and obsolete. Just put the scripts in your dialog scripts which makes them much easier to follow.

The 1,000,000 element limit on dynamic arrays is completely arbitrary and is designed to stop people accidentally using up all the RAM without realising it. Of course, I appreciate that sometimes you might be doing something advanced where you would actually need this, so would a 10 million limit be more reasonable?

Is that even possible to do in Vista?  My understanding was that savefiles have to be in the My Documents folder because of its draconian security measures.

By default they do, but you can configure the installer to grant write permissions to the game folder, which would allow the save games to be saved there instead.

The following link for AGS 3.2 is broken, can somebody post the newest? Thanks.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/AGS-3.2-Final2.exe

Where did you get that link? People shouldn't be directly linking to beta versions, as Gilbet says they should link to the thread itself.

The simplest solution to this is to configure the installer to grant Everyone Write permissions on the acsetup.cfg file, which will allow the Winsetup program to work.

But as it sounds like you're not allowed to do this, unfortunately removing the winsetup program or getting people to right-click, Run As Administrator are probably the only viable options.

I agree that all these suggestions would be useful, hopefully I'll have some time to implement them at some point.

Well, hidden properties shouldn't really be used because they're not officially tested and supported. In this case the Character.on property generally works, but when I get round to it I want to properly test it and make it a formal Character.Visible property.

Were the folders like Compiled already there on your disk? ie. did you unzip it into an existing game folder that you already had?

If so it could be related to the timestamps and AGS not realising that the file has changed; running a REbuild All from the Build menu should fix it if this happens.

Make sure you haven't enabled the Hq2x/3x filter, because there is a bug in 3.1.2 that causes these to crash.

Otherwise, if you are still getting this problem can you upload the compiled EXE for me to investigate?

That seems to have done it - thanks Chris!
Memory keeps growing until all effects have played once (I guess that's what's happening), then it stops.

PS Is it safe to distribute a game with this acwin compiled in

Glad to hear it! It should be safe to use that EXE, it is just Final 4 with that extra fix.
I'll roll it into the next release.

EDIT: I realized the error comes when trying to access the channel returned by the .Play() function, the same things happens also with sounds enabled, while skipping a cutscene that contains a code such as follows:

Yes, the value returned from Play() should always be checked to see if it is null. However, I do see Steve's point that this could be a major headache and maybe returning a dummy channel would be better.

Should this be downloaded for all versions of 3.x? (Or maybe that's a really stupid question)

No, it only affects 3.2. If you're using an earlier version, you don't need it.

I know Graphical Variables are an old concept. However when compiling a game from 2.72 to 3.xx, AGS manages to convert all of them into IntVar_ecc. Which is great, except for those

SetGraphicalVariable("NAME");
or GetGraphicalVariable("NAME");

Ah ok. Yeah, it would be nice for that to happen automatically, but there are so few 2.x games that use GRaphical Variables at this point that it's probably not worth the hassle now.

On a serious note, just release as is.  And work on all the next bugs and features for the next release IMO.

Yes, this is my plan. However, there's still an issue with backwards compatiblity with the audio system that I need to investigate; I don't want to release a Final version that has a regression and breaks old games that are still using the old audio commands.

With the tablet, do you also get strange behaviour with other full-screen games, or is it only AGS games that have this problem?

Yeah, game.top_inv_item is obsolete now, one of the reasons it is obsolete is because it isn't properly checked. Therefore, it is no longer supported.

The problem is that for the side borders to work, your monitor has to support a suitable resolution -- in this case, your 640x480 game should ideally run at 853x480, but AGS will try resolutions close to that such as 800x480 or 900x480. In this case, it looks like your monitor doesn't really support any 480-height resolutions.

You could try enabling the 2x Nearest Neighbour filter and see if it can find a resolution then.