Messages

1. No
2. It happens only when using DX5.

If you have multiple characters/objects with the same Y co-ordinate, AGS does not make any promises about which one is drawn in front. If you are relying on one being in front of the other, can you not change its Y co-ordinate?

Oh sorry, I didn't notice that you're using 2.71.
AGS 3.x has fixed a lot of bugs and issues, and AGS 2.x is no longer supported.

You might try upgrading to 2.72 as a low-risk move to see if the problem is fixed by that.

Well, do you always get the same behaviour with each particular game, or are you getting random errors with one particular game?

I wasn't aware that the object array was global. That actually makes everything much easier now. Thanks!

Well, it only allows access to objects in the current room. What it does allow is for non-room scripts to access those objects.

Interesting that you've had this problem too. I wonder what the component is that it can't find...

Is the game on your hard drive, and not on a USB stick or anything like that?

Has anyone else had problems like this?

I've fixed that for you, at the moment there isn't a proper process for reporting that the link is fixed because it mainly applies to old games where the game author has long since disappeared

So other than the magnifying lens graphic being changed, you don't know of or need any other graphics?  I may as well attack them all at once if you have other graphics you need.

The only other graphic I know that we need is a "Download Demo" button for commercial games, as you can see here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/Newsite/Games.aspx/Detail/1172/Time_Gentlemen_Please
it's a temporary graphic I knocked up at the moment.

As much as I love the look of the blue/orange cups (with or without coffee) I have to agree that the percentage rating nature of the Player Ratings sort of clash with the 5 cups ... maybe if the avg. percentage was also displayed (perhaps centered under the cups or under the "help' from the blue cup rating above)?

Good work guys, I really like these new graphics. I've put them onto the test site, you can see an example here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/Newsite/Games.aspx/Detail/1243/The_McCarthy_Chronicles_Episode_1
For now I opted to have the number of votes and percentage displayed in the tooltip when you hover over the player rating cups, do you think this works?


I've also done some further development work on the site:
* Lucky Dip won't pick 1-cup games
* Award Winners, Picks Of The Month and Tabular List options now work
* Added Seach By Name option (the result page is not finished yet)

What still needs to be done:
* The search results page
* The main "Search" page (this will be like the main Games page on the current site)
* The Post Comment form, and the game editing form for game authors


Carry on discussing ideas for the Awards display, one problem with having specific images for specific awards is that the categories tend to change slightly each year so these would need to be kept up to date.

[How is it fair that only 1 person on the panel rates each game?]

I'm going to try and respond to some of the points raised so far:

How is it fair that only 1 person on the panel rates each game?

In an ideal world, we would have a panel of 10 people, who all played every game and came to a consensus for the panel rating. This would be possible if the AGS Website was a company with lots of money that could employ full-time reviewers to do this.

In reality, all the panel members are volunteers who have other things to do, and if we had to get several people to play each game through before rating it, they would never have the time to rate all the games that get released.

If you don't like the rating, just get over it, it's not that important

I don't think it's that simple. One major difference on this website is that we have the game developers and the game reviewers as part of the same community. Normally, you have several websites that review games (eg. Adventure Gamers), and each of them give their own opinion on a new game.

The AGS Panel is different because it is seen to be the "official" opinion of the AGS community, and is featured on the website of the development tool that the game author was using. So in that respect, the implication is that it is more important than ratings given elsewhere.

For that reason, I think it's important that the Panel always tries to be as polite as possible with their comments, bearing in mind that they are peer reviewing other developers work, and the last thing we want is to put people off making games, or drive them to leave the community.

One other thing to bear in mind is that the AGS Panel is much harder to please than many review sites -- for example, the panel have so far rated 827 games, and only four of them got a 5-cup rating. You can see the spread of ratings here:



The 2-cup rating is by far the most common, and 2/5 is not a "bad" rating as it would be on some review sites.

Did you get any errors when you tried to save the game prior to that happening? Or did your computer crash or turn off?

Which version of AGS are you using?

Have you had this problem before? Have you tried renamign the Game.agf.bak file to Game.agf?

You'll have to be more specific about the error message. I don't know which error report on the server corresponds to the problem you are having.

One thing I will say is that somebody is still using a pre-RC2 beta version of AGS 3.2, which had the memory corruption bug -- that can lead to AGS saving corrupt files.

So whoever is still using 3.2.0.93, please upgrade to RC2!

ok thanks, i'll look into this

I had a room with very thin walkable area (couple of pixels in height) and some object, that stood right "on top" of that area, it's Y coordinate equal to Y of highest walkable line of pixels. There were characters, that had same Y coordinate.
Object's basline was NOT overriden.

Do any of the objects/characters have the Ignore Walkbehinds property set? Does the problem happen with both DX5 and D3D drivers?

while (IsSoundPlaying()) Wait(1);

The thing is that if I disable the music and the sounds from the game setup, the game hungs up. It just stays there, animating things in the background.

Interesting thanks, I'll look into it.

I noticed, there's is a mistake in code tips that show function prototype. When return value is of managed type, it shows no pointer sign (*), like

Ok thanks, I'll bear this in mind. I don't think I've got time to change this for 3.2 though.

I'm experiencing some StartCutscene/EndCutscene problems. I have a small script with a door opening, a character walking in, two characters having a conversation, and the door closing again. At the start I've put a StartCutscene(eSkipESCOnly); and at the end there's an EndCutscene(); And it works fine. The only problem is that when I skip the cutscene it skips to the end but it plays all the sound effects I've used in the cutscene (someone knocking on a door, the door opening, and the door closing) at the same time. It skips all the conversation etc. but it still plays the sound effects. I only have this problem in the 3.2 RC2 edition. I quickly recreated a similar scene in 3.1.2 SP1 and it works fine. So perhaps it's something with the new audio system?

Thanks, I'll look into it.

I would like a System.MusicVolume, System.SoundVolume and a System.AmbientSound setting, in addition to the general System.Volume

AGS no longer has a concept of "sound", "music" or "ambient sounds" -- these are just some default Audio Types but you don't have to keep them.

However, I do plan to address this volume issue by adding a SetAudioTypeVolume command that will allow you to adjust the volume of all audio clips of a particular type. This has already been requested and I would say it is essential to be added before 3.2 can be released.

PlayAmbientSound, PlayMusic, PlaySound are not marked as old style.

I set the general setting to 'Enforce new-style audio scripting' and those commands were still considered valid. (Even though the help says they're obsolete)

Thanks, I'll check this.

Yes the D3D driver already uses a pixel shader to do sprite tinting. It might be possible to allow you to use a custom pixel shader -- obviously this wouldn't work in DX5 mode but it depends if anyone else would actually use this feature?

Yes, in a future version I plan to add a Z-Order setting for the speech text so that you can define which GUIs it goes in front of/behind. But that won't happen for AGS 3.2 I'm afraid.

Can you upload something that demonstrates this problem?

Thanks for reporting this, I'll see if I can reproduce the problem.

If your computer is unstable and prone to randomly switching off, then you really need to start making regular backup copies of your entire game folder, since AGS could be in the middle of saving any of the files there when your computer turns off.

If this is happening with a room that you created with the latest version, then it sounds like the file is corrupt. When this happens next, could you upload the CRM file for the room that's not working?

What's dropbox and what does it do to your files?

Which version of AGS are you trying to run?