Messages

Ah ok, I think I see what has happened. There's a bug with the support for crossfading with old-style PlayMusic commands -- and as the crossfading was updated to the new audio system in beta 3, that explains why it broke at that point.

Please try this engine:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/acwin.zip
and let me know if it fixes the problem.

Ah ok, yes I think I hear it now. I'll look into it.

If you disable crossfading (which is now in the Music Audio Type properties) does the problem go away?

Thanks for uploading. I imported your game into Beta 4 and ran it, and it seemed fine. The intro played through and then the game started and I didn't hear anything strange.

Can you be more specific about exactly when the problem happens?

Ok, maybe I didn't make this clear.

Yes, I know that this layout as-is looks sloppy and rubbish.

I was hoping that by posting something that was technically working, somebody here with some graphic design skills would be kind enough to convert that into some sort of mock-up that looks half-decent.

The main titles like "Showcase" and "Pick of the Month" should ideally be image titles in the same font as the "Make Games" and "Play Games" ones on the main page.

The "Help and Support" title is a placeholder and should say something like "More Games" but in a font that matches the right hand pane title on the main page.

So what I'm asking is, is anybody with some design skills prepared to help out moving the Games pages from working prototype to slick final design?

Here is a screenshot of the compiled game with different graphic drivers...

As you see the characters do not get colored in Direct 3D but in DirectDraw...
Can someone else reproduce this?

What are the region tint settings for that region?

As far as I can remember I got this error report from a Linux user who played the game on Wine.
Could this be the reason?

That's possible I guess, if the WINE Direct3D emulation is a bit dodgy.

Hmm, well as you're having this problem such a lot, would you mind making a backup copy of your game, then trying out the AGS 3.2 Beta 4 release? It has a few fixes and it would be interesting to see whether you still get the problem with the new beta.

Looks good. One comment I'd make is that this line:

while (player.Moving) Wait(1);

shouldn't be necessary, since the previous line is a blocking Walk command; therefore the Walk command won't finish until the character has finished moving.

Are there any duplicate sprites in your Sprite Manager window? (ie. you see more than one sprite with the same number?)

I'm not really sure what you mean, I don't think there have been any designs for the Games page.

This is the page that you get when you click "Games", this is not the main page (you can see that here).

If anyone wants to contribute a design for this Games page, you're more than welcome.

Right, I thought it was time to try and inject some energy back into this.

So, I've been doing some work behind the scenes implementing the back-end code for the main Games page here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/Newsite/Games.aspx
so it's now all running with real data instead of being a mock-up.

What do people think about having that layout as the Games page? It definitely needs some tidying up so if anyone has any ideas on how to make it look better, or has any alternative layouts, your feedback is welcome.

There are two ways to do this, you can either:
(1) intercept the mouse click by adding an on_mouse_click handler to the room script. Then you check if the player is trying to walk somewhere and if the character is sitting down, and if you do your standing up logic
(2) let AGS handle the move automatically and capture the fact that he has started moving, as Ghost suggests.
Rather than checking the X co-ordinate you can just check the character's Moving property in the Repeatedly Execute handler.

But Chris...wasn't this the only indication (unless the author discloses the information) that the game was made with AGS? :o

Not really -- if you right-click on the EXE and do Properties, you'll still find a couple of things telling you it was made with AGS.
Originally when AGS was written, Windows 98 and 2000 didn't display the version info in the main explorer window so it was fine, but since XP came along and started showing the Company Name and Program Name in explorer, it has looked a bit silly having all AGS games claim to be made by me.

I've been meaning to fix it for a long time but only now finally had some time to do it.

Does this mean the limit was increased to 3000 characters for String.Format? Either way I understand that to build it longer I can use String.Append, just want to clarify has that internal limit been moved up?

Correct, I also used this opportunity to increase it to 3000. The only time you'll ever get near that will be if you're using Strings for something non-standard such as data storage, like you're doing

I sat out on the beta until now... and now I see you're using IrrKlang! There's now offically GERMAN stuff in AGS- and everyone knows that this makes it immune to gremlin attacks!

I'm sure that German efficiency will make AGS run twice as fast!!

Sorry for the delay, I have replicated the problem and it is now fixed in 3.2 beta 4.

Ok, beta 4 is now up. This includes a couple of things that people have been asking for for a while, so I'd appreciate any feedback on whether everything works as expected.

I've confirmed this as a bug with the D3D driver, and I'll get it fixed.

- The function MergeObject seems to work only in DirectDraw in Direct3D the object disappears when it gets merged.

I have confirmed this as a bug and I'll get it fixed in the next version of AGS.

- The region based UseColorTint does not affect the characters in Direct3D. It just seems to affect the brightness of the characters. (I just read that this also affects the TintScreen functions.)

I can't replicate this, the region tint seems to work fine for me with D3D. Remember that if you have used SetAmbientTint or Character.Tint then they will override the region tint.

- I got message from some players that the transparency functions like Object.SetTransparency create some flashlike effects or that Objects get displayed in a different brightness when they are partially transparent in Direct3D, but I could not reproduce this on my systems...

I can't reproduce this either, if you can get somebody with this problem to post a screenshot of what they're seeing, then we can investigate from there.

I began reading this post because I was having the same issue.  Low and behold, I read about the edges, checked my room, and sure enough the edges were set WAY off, so that essentially none of the walking area ended up within the boundaries of the edges.  After fixing them, I have not been able to repeat the bug, so that's a good sign.  I only got stuck on that room occasionally, so time will tell if it truly worked or not, but I have a very good feeling that was the problem all along.

Glad to hear it -- since it seems like this problem is fairly widespread, I think I'll make some changes to the next version of AGS so that it doesn't rely on the edges so much for the pathfinding.

I did a 640x480, non scrolling room, and the pathfinder moves the character instantly to a random place in the room, if I click it fast enough. The reason for that, I think, that I was overburdening the cpu by rendering ~4800 16x16 sprites every game loop (gamespeed(60), it ran at~15fps).
Maybe it's not about screen size?

Were your room edges definitely set correctly?
It shouldn't matter how burdened the CPU is, the pathfinder should still behave the same way. If you can upload something that demonstrates this problem I can look into it.

Ah ... while Strings themselves have no length limit, various internal AGS functions assume a maximum length of 2500 chars, and String.Format is one of them.

I'll see if I can improve this, but in the meantime the best thing to do is use String.Append when you're creating very long strings like this, which doesn't have any length limits.

Ok, well from the crash dump I can see where it crashed but not why, so would you be able to upload a game that demonstrates the problem?

I'm still planning on coming, I'll probably arrive on Monday 24th as per the original plan.