Messages

When renaming Global Variable, list is not automatically sorted.

Thanks for the report, I'll look into it.

I have quite an issue with the Tint() function in this version of the engine.

This is because the Tint function in 3.2 has been fixed to be the same in Direct3D as it always has been in DirectDraw. AGS 3.1.x had a bug where Direct3D tinting gave a different result (as you've discovered).

However, some people preferred the "buggy" D3D method of tinting, so for a future version I'm planning to add an option to select between the two, if I can get DirectDraw to correctly mimic this type of D3D tint.

It's a pity that the Linux port crashes at that point, it would be preferable if it just continued anyway. With WINE, it probably depends on what codecs are installed, I'm not sure what the DirectShow support in WINE is like.

That's to be expected -- if your desktop resolution is 1024x768 then to play it windowed the window won't fit on the screen (since it would be more like 1100x850 to take account of the borders, title bar, etc).

- .crm files are a weird source/compiled hybrid. This was a huge issue because if I was working on the script and Grundislav was spicing up the room, we couldn't do it at the same time. It would be nice to split between what's source and what's compiled.

Yes, this is true and is something I definitely want to change for a future version.

- Global and Module script changes (I think it was the script headers?) would seem to require that all the room recompile.

This is deliberate, since any room script could be referncing something from a global header, the only safe way to make sure the game doesn't screw up as a result is to rebuild all the room scripts.

- To lock/manage the sprites, you needed to handle three files (as mentioned above)

You don't need to add the backup_sprset.spr to your source control, there's not really any point having that checked in as it's just a backup copy.

- I wasn't too sure about what seemed to be two project files for the project (game.agf and game.agf.bak) I'm guessing that bak is the backup, but I don't know what would happen in case it would merge.

Yes, again game.agf.bak is a backup file so there's no need to add that to source control.

- We couldn't both add rooms at the same time, obviously because of the numbering... it would cause a conflict.

You can manually change the new room number in the Add Room dialog, which can help with this.

- It would have been nice to have the characters, guis, and objects mirror a similar system to the rooms where each has their own script, perhaps their own data file as well.

Perhaps, though then you'd end up with hundreds or even thousands of files in the game folder for all these different things. Not sure if it's worth it.

Goldmund! How is parentland treating you?

Your raise a good point about how SetRestartPoint works in this sort of situation. I suppose a workaround would be to disable the "Undo" button if you restore a game, until the next autosave happens. I'll have a think about if this could be done better for a future version of AGS.

Can you provide the exact error message that you get, rather than "an error about drawing the image"?

Can you be more specific about the error message? I don't think the Linux port supports playing videos, does the game continue anyway?

Yes a Watch window would be really useful, it has been requested before but is non-trivial to implement and is on the long list of things that I want to add to AGS when I get some time.

The usual cause of that problem was the setting of the edges, so if you have moved them and you can't reproduce the problem, it is probably fixed.

I'm not sure if I quite understand what you're trying to do, but could you do a Replace on the input string to replace the unknown word with a blank string, and then run it through ParseText again?

Thanks to bicilotti for running the Awards this year!

Congratulations to all the winners, nominees, and indeed everyone who made a game in 2009! I'm sorry I couldn't make it to the ceremony, maybe next year

One quick question, will the new design feature perhaps an expandable list of games recently commented on? Checking out new comments is something I do regularly, but only 5 seems a bit limited.

Not sure about this, some people seem to think the Recent Comments shouldn't be featured at all, others want a bigger list. Maybe an expandable list is the answer, as you suggest.

also I think that the team involved is being overlooked here, I kinda dont like the fact that the team can only be viewed thru a link ..

Well, from the point of view of the casual player coming to the Games page, they probably don't care who made the game, they just care about the game itself. Once they've played the game, if they liked it and want to know more, they can come back and click the expandable link to see who made it.
So I think bearing in mind the target audience of the page, it makes sense this way.

How is that different from gender reASSIGNment? Does it mean (s)he had the right bits, they were just pointing in the wrong direction?

Hey! When I asked you to take a look at my problem, I thought we agreed it would stay between the two of us...

Anyway, I just moved the edges closer to the real edges of the BG (they were off, admittedly, so that may have been the problem?), but I'm not sure if the problem was fixed, as the bug is very hard to reproduce. Here are some images just for clarification.

Before you moved the edges, was the place where the character gets stuck outside of them?

I seem to remember there was a problem with a couple of the MP3 files in Prodigal where they were corrupt and AGS would crash when it tried to play them.

Try disabling the sound & music in the Setup program and see if the crash goes away. If that works, play on for a couple of minutes and save the game again, then hopefully you should be able to switch sound & music back on and get around the crash.

If the file is named .OGV, AGS uses its internal Theora decoder to play the file. If this is giving a black screen then that sounds like AGS is unable to play the file for some reason. If the file is a reasonable size, would you be able to upload it?

If you name it .OGG, AGS will just use Media Player to play it, which may work for you but will not work for other people if they don't have a Media Player Codec installed for Theora.

This is actually a "feature" rather than a bug, but this example is one case where it doesn't work very well!

Anyway, the new website won't have this problem so we'll just have to put up with it until then.

Thanks for reporting this, I'll fix it as part of the new website.

I have now fixed this for you, you should be able to edit it.

I'm not sure when this changed but in the current version, if you set the Room.BackgroundAnimationDelay to 0 it's equivalent to setting it to 1. Previously setting it to 0 would halt the animation. Some versions of my modules rely on the old behaviour.

I don't think this behaviour has changed, but yes there should be an option in the editor to disable the background animating.

Well, I just hope there will be updated version of this template in final AGS 3.2 release.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll make sure to include the latest version of the template in the 3.2 final.