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Good to hear!

The MP3 file for that room is probably slightly corrupt, so it still sounds ok but is causing the player to crash. You could try re-encoding it, but the better option is just to switch to using OGG for your audio

Thanks for uploading.

It looks like it might be a problem with the MP3 decoder ... could you try converting the music to OGG (or just remove the music temporarily) and see if you still get the problem?

Thanks for posting the crash dump... I can see where it is crashing but I'm not sure why.

Is it one particular room where this happens?

Would you mind zipping up and uploading the game source code? (PM me the link if you don't want it public)

The drawing surface commands operate on the current background, so it would have been continually switching between which background was being drawn onto, as the animated backgrounds switched.

Glad it's sorted!

Strange, I'm not sure why you would be getting a problem like this, it seems to indicate that the game files haven't been saved properly ... but if you didn't get any problems saving it then I don't understand why this would happen.

Has anyone else experienced any problems like this?

You say you still get the crash with 3.1.2 SP1?

Could you upload the crash dump file from when it happened with this version?

Which version of AGS are you using?

Have you tested this on a properly set-up widescreen monitor? I can play 4:3 games on my widescreen monitors without any funny stretching, and it would be a pity if that no longer were the case because of a new feature. Any decent set of drivers and monitor allows to set up stretch-to-fit so it doesn't change the ratio.

The new option is configurable in the setup program so you can turn it off if you've set up your graphics card drivers to do the work instead.




Now, I'd like to move 3.2 on to the final release stage, but there are two outstanding bug reports that I haven't been able to reproduce:

There seems to be a bug in the new sound logic somewhere.  It was happening in the most recent beta, and it's happening in RC1 as well.  

When I play the same sound repeatedly, very fast, the sound is replaced by sounds that were previously playing

We all know that to have a character's talking view portrait appear on SierraWithBackground, the character must be in the same room, otherwise only the text window will appear. Now if you use DisplayTopBar function and then use a Character.Say for the first Character.Say played after DisplayTopBar it will have the TopBar in it, the second will have no problem.

Has anyone else had any problems like this?

If anyone is reading this and hasn't yet tried out upgrading their game to 3.2 RC1, please do so now (after making a backup copy, obviously) so that any issues can be fixed before the final release.

Thanks for uploading the crash dump file. However, AGS 3.0.2 is no longer supported, so any fix would only be done in the latest version.

Why are you trying to use the backup copy if the main copy is working?

This problem should not surface at all, let alone re-surface. Are you sure that the latest error you're getting is identical to the first one? Have you been using the "Send Error Report" button?

The error indicates that the game files haven't been saved properly. This should never happen, so I'm not sure why it's happening to you. Is the game on your hard drive, and not on a USB stick or anything like that?

I know that AGS requires the use of Views as a container for all sprite loops.  That's fine.  My question is why that's the case.  It would be equally as valid (or would it?) to have in the character properties, say, a field "WalkUpAnim" which referenced a unique walking up sprite loop number.  I'm just trying to understand the benefits, from an engine design perspective, of bundling up these specific sprite loops into a View. 

I think you're overestimating the amount of design that originally went into AGS.

You need to remember that AGS has been around for over 10 years now, and originally it was just designed as something to make Sierra-style games with. Because Sierra used Views, it was natural that AGS used them too. It's a system that works and there hasn't really been a need to change it.

As has been mentioned by others, views allow you to easily package together sprites that are used for a particular costume or set of animations... it's just a way of organising sprites really, and allowing characters to easily switch between costumes by just changing a single property.

That's strange, what AGS version are you using?

I'll see if I can reproduce it.

So the situation is this:

The Character.IgnoreWalkbehinds and Object.IgnoreWalkbehinds properties don't work properly with the Direct3D driver.

It may not be possible to get them to work due to the hardware acceleration that D3D uses.

My question is, then, if these properties were removed, what would be the impact on you guys? What do you use them for?

The most common use of these properties that I'm aware of, is for simply making something appear in front of a walk-behind ... but you could also do that by setting the object's baseline to 99999.

So are there any situations in which you use this property, but just setting the object/character's baseline wouldn't do the trick? Any situations where you want the object to appear in front of a walk-behind but behind a character with the same baseline?

There was another anti-virus app that reported AGS as a trojan a while back, I think they fixed their definitions shortly afterwards.

This is a possibility -- obviously when installing a new version it would have to automatically find and inherit settings from any previous version as its initial settings.

Would anyone else find this useful?

Are the player and the follower both set as Solid?

Please can you make a backup copy of your game, then upgrade to the latest official release of AGS (3.1.2 SP1), which you can find on the website: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/acdload.htm

3.1.2 fixed various issues that could crash 3.1.1, so see if that fixes the problem.

If you still get crashes after upgrading 3.1.2 SP1, please post the error message here.

Make a backup copy of the game folder, then delete the Game.agf.user file and try again.

Well spotted, thanks, that seems to happen if the template is from a previous version and has Sound or Music files. I'll get it fixed.

So no chance of emulating these algorithms in DX9 Mode Chris?

It might be possible to emulate these in D3D using custom pixel shaders, however it's not something I would see as any sort of priority in the near future.

Perhaps another suggestion: full-screen + black border instead of scaling? This is a long-time request so.....BUMP! 

Would you really want to run a 320x200 game at normal size with a black border around it filling up the rest of the screen? If would be like watching the game through a telescope...