Messages

So, I've had a problem reported whereby the results of TintScreen are different in DX5 and D3D modes.

In DX5 mode (and this is the way AGS has always done it), it applies a 50%-transparent "film" over the screen, tinted to the specified colour.

In D3D mode it re-colourises the entire screen to the colour you specify.

This means that the results look different, significantly so in many cases.

So, my question is -- how many people actually use TintScreen? And which of these results is the "correct" look that you're trying to accomplish?

I ran the demo on a pentium 4 of 3.3 ghz and about 90% of the times they were synchronized but i also ran it on a pentium 4 of 1.8 ghz and the result is different. In this case, in most of the times they weren't synchronized.

I'm sending you this game as a demonstration, I used the new sistem I told you about on it. Because of being only 2 instruments there shouldn't be any problem. Just like the last time I repeated the same instrument to notice if they are synchronized. If you press F9 you'll notice that sometimes it loads more synchronized and other times less.

I downloaded and ran your demo but I'm not really sure what the problem is.

Can you post what lines of script you're using, and what you're trying to accomplish? As it is I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be listening out for.

I tried this with a vertical scrolling room but couldn't replicate the problem.

Please make sure you're using 3.1.2 SP1 -- if not, upgrade and check if it still happens.

If it does, can you upload a sample game that demonstrates the problem?

Which version of AGS are you using? A bug with TintScreen was fixed in 3.1.2 SP1...

Where's my check? The Screen Actors Guild will hear about this!

Hmm, but I thought you were a member of the Film Actors Guild ... or is that just AGA?

Glad you guys enjoyed the video ... sorry about the soundtrack still playing during the 4th July fireworks singing, every release always has a bug!!  

Oh, also, I've finally updated the Mittens titles on the forum here, the meanings are the same as before:
1 = Mittens Initiate
2 = Mittens Faithful
3 = Mittens Regular
4 = Mittens Liege
5 = Mittens Addict
6 = Mittoholic
7 = N/A (nobody has been to 7 mittenses!!)
8 = Mittician

Is this with the DX5 or D3D driver, or both?

Is the game folder on your hard drive or are you trying to run it off a USB stick or something? I seem to remember somebody having strange problems when they were trying to develop the game on a USB drive...

[PLEASE NOTE:]

Ok, the Mittens Video is finally here!

Thanks to everyone for putting up with me constantly shoving the camera in your faces, I hope it was worth it!! Thanks also to everyone who helped out with the filming, and of course to you all for starring in Mittens 2009!

Here are some mirror links, please choose one at random to help spread the server load (it is 450 MB):
http://94.76.212.146/Mittens2009.avi
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/Mittens2009.avi
http://esseb.com/temp/Mittens2009.avi

PLEASE NOTE: This video is not suitable for children. Everyone at Mittens was over 18, and therefore you should expect there to be adult themes, language and content in the video. DO NOT DOWNLOAD this if you are under 18 or have sensibilities about this kind of thing.

Some people have expressed interest in a DVD of this; I do have a higher quality DVD version that's too big to upload, but we can probably arrange some sort of DVD copy-and-mail-it-on thing if other people are interested.

So... where do we go?

Every year after Mittens we have a big excited thread about next year's Mttens.

And every year we then forget about it and pick it up again in January when people actually have a better idea of what else they're going to be doing in the summer

[Regarding tracker music:]

Regarding tracker music: Is there any way to control the volume of the individual tracks on IT files while you're playing them in AGS, or is the MOD-etc playing library a black box

As far as I know, the library that AGS uses is a black box in this respect, and can only control the overall volume of the IT.

Regarding 8-bit graphics: Exporting a background in 8-bit mode seems to export a 24bit bitmap rather than an 8bit one, which struck me as kind of counter-intuitive when I tried exporting a background to change its palette.

I appreciate that this is not ideal, but there simply aren't enough people still making 8-bit games to justify fully implementing functionality like this.

Also, I used to be able to export a complete palette file by opening a room and changing the room-specific palette slots to gamewide, thus giving me a full 256 colour palette to work with in case I needed to add objects to the room that weren't interactable. Unfortunately, the new versions of AGS seem to keep the palette slots black.  And I don't know a proper workaround for this - is there any way to merge the game palette with the room palette? Exporting backgrounds doesn't work, and the colours panel has lost this functionality?

You can right-click the colours area to export the palette, but the easiest thing to do here is use the in-game SaveScreenshot function as Gilbert suggests, which should give you an 8-bit bitmap with the palette intact.

Well, I think that would make people complain that it had closed the game they were in the middle of debugging .. besides, in order to run the game it will have had to save it at that point, and you're unlikely to be making extensive changes in one debugging session.

Ah yeah, that's not the PS1.4 problem. That has been reported before with some notebooks, I think it's where the graphics card on the notebook doesn't support some 3D features like Pixel Shaders at all, thus causing the game to fail on startup.

If you google for 0x8876086C Intel 950 there are several reports of getting this error with various different games; I don't think there's much that can be done unfortunately.

My graphics card is the Intel GMA 950 (part of the fairly common Intel 945 chipset). And while I certainly agree with you that it *should* be backwards compatible with 1.4, unfortunately it doesn't appear to be. I've been looking for a way to determine exactly which shaders my card can support, but so far to no avail.

Do you get an error with D3D AGS games saying that it doesn't have PS 1.4?

2.0 should definitely be backwards compatible with 1.4 -- at least, AGS just needs 1.4 or higher, which includes 2.x.

It would be possible to change AGS to use software-based tint effects if PS1.4 is not available, but this isn't something I'm planning to do because the DX5 driver is there as a fallback.

I've often thought, though, that any D3D problems should make the engine automatically fallback into DX5: would that be a possibility?

That's a good idea yeah, it's probably worth doing that.

Oh, if you've replaced the sprite file with one from the demo game I wouldn't expect that to work.

Is it possible you tried to save the game in the editor while it was running? This is a known problem that can break the sprite file, and in the next version the Save option will be disabled while you're running the game.

any chance you could put this video on YouTube Grundy?

It's 14 minutes -- probably too long for Youtube without your super-powers, Mark

Anyway, editing together the Mittens video is taking longer than I expected, so in the meantime you'll have to make do with a quick teaser trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2aEKGAh-pk

Amazing work! The Wembley emerging scene will undoubtedly become the stuff of legend

No, there are no plans to change this. Older PCs can use the DX5 driver.

It sounds like your game's sprite file is corrupt, though I think I've only seen this happen before where there was some sort of error saving the game, and then this message started to come up whenever you tried to load it in future.

If you can zip up and upload your game folder I can take a look, though it's likely you'll need to restore from a previous backup version.

Did you use the Send Error Report button when this message first appeared?
Which version of AGS are you running?

What happened before you saw this message for the first time? Was there an error saving the game before it started doing this?