Messages

Interesting, thanks, I'll look into it.

Yes, I agree. This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, it will be added at some point.

I was thinking maybe it would be possible to do the scaling in two steps. First do the sprite scaling by 65% or whatever to shrink the character, then take that temporary sprite and scale it up to 2x, 3x or 4x to match the game resolution.

That's basically what it does in software mode with the DX5 driver. But as far as I'm aware it's not possible to do something like that with D3D hardware acceleration, as there is no concept of a temporary sprite.

To simulate a blockier scaling couldn't you just alter the D3DXVECTOR  scaling factor to some multiple of 2 rather than smoothly scale the texture as it moves along the walkable area?  This would make the resulting texture scale in 'blocky' units and may achieve a similar, if not visibly alike, result.

Even if the target width/height was rounded to the nearest multiple of two, the way it scales would still look out of place due to the "half-size" pixels in the scaled graphics. It would be good if there was a solution to this...

Can you post the contents of the script function that has this command in it?

Currently the suffixes given to the event handler functions are fixed, and are not based off the name of the mouse cursor mode. I agree that this is a bit confusing, and should probably be changed for a future version.

I suppose it would be possible to add this, but is there really any harm in writing any additional files to the save games folder?

Yes this is a known issue, if a GUI changes under the mouse, it doens't update until the mouse moves. It will be addressed in a future version.

This might be the flipside of Dave Gilbert's problem. Is it possible to fix the Direct3D scaling so it respects the game's original resolution when it's running with a 2x, 3x or 4x filter (at least the nearest-neighbor filter)?

The problem is that the scaling is done with hardware acceleration in D3D mode, and as far as I know it's not possible to tell D3D only to scale to a certain resolution.

The only way of fixing this would be to do the scaling in software mode instead, but then you lose the benefits of using D3D in the first place.

Are you talking about using the Automatic Outline feature, or having a separate outline font?

If it's a separate outline font, the letters must be the same size as the main font; if the outline characters are wider than the normal characters then the text won't line up properly.

Ok thanks. If it happens again, please keep a copy of the broken game for me to take a look at.

[please confirm now whether you're definite and can afford the price]

Thanks for trying to get this sorted, AGA.

It's strange that they're quoting a price higher than the Max listed on their own website, if we decide to go for this one then you could try sending them an e-mail offering EUR 7000 to start with and see if they accept!

I'm happy to just go with this and get on with getting it booked, because time is ticking by now ... so can everyone else who mentioned an interest in coming please confirm now whether you're definite and can afford the price!

I'm sure if a couple of the attractive female AGSers cosied up to Berlesconi, he'd give us the use of a villa or two for the week!

Could you upload a sample game that causes the crash so that I can investigate?

That should work, yes. It's not particularly recommended, but if you want to be able to use AGS temporarily on another PC without having to install it, it should be ok.

save games should go.

Say, Chris, I believe not only Linux would benefit from such a change. Right now the windows versions also put the savegames in a fixed location which can be a little obscur to the player.

This needs some more thought to make it more uniform on all platforms.

Well, although a properly customizable location might be a good for a future version, for now AGS already handles this issue on Windows by saving games to the My Documents/My Saved Games folder.

For the Linux port, the Linux platform driver could override the virtual method AGSLinux::ReplaceSpecialPaths and replace the $MYDOCS$ tag with a standard writable location that it would be safe to save games to.

Ok thanks, I'll address that for a future version of AGS.

Running AGS itself from a USB drive should be ok, but be careful if you save your actual game files there; make regular backups because there have been some instances of the USB drive being disconnected before the game files have been properly saved, which can corrupt the files.

I take it there isn't a way of playing a game at a lower resolution than the intended one, then, even by editing acsetup.cfg?

The game creator can change the game resolution in AGS, of course, but is there a risk of corrupting the game if they do this?

Correct, you can't play at a resolution lower than the resolution that the game was designed for.

If you change the resolution to make it lower, then your room backgrounds will start scrolling around and your GUI positioning could mess up, I strongly advise against doing that.

I'm not really clear exactly what each object is set to and what the problem is.

Objects are drawn from top to bottom in Baseline order; if an object has no explicit baseline defined, its Y co-ordinate is used instead.

BaselineOverriden is a property in the editor that sets whether you are overriding an object's Y co-ordinate with an explicit baseline. At runtime this is represented by the object's Baseline property being 0.

Okay, so my previous favourite place is unavailable on the dates we decided on. This place: http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p305585 looks pretty good though, and is €265 per person with the 24 person limit. We could probably squeeze an extra couple of people in if necessary though.

Looks nice -- would the cost be a problem for people? What was the per-person cost of renting the Miami house last year?