Messages

Personally I dislike the logo itself, and even more so the "improved" icon, and feel we should rather do a more retro style logo focusing on the origins of AGS and pixel art
(even though many of us, including me, want AGS to evolve to become a more modern friendly engine with multi platform support etc).


CaesarCub did this one in less than 5 minutes yet I feel this one portrays AGS much better than the current one.

I like this icon and would be happy to see it in the next non-beta version of AGS.

Too late for this release. Also there are people with opposite opinion:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=54726.msg636560198#msg636560198

Interesting. In that thread, Peter and Danvzare suggest a more retro-style icon (and nobody in the thread objects to that). I agree that that's a better choice.

So the previous big release of AGS was in the Windows 8 era, and correspondingly the editor splash page and icon were re-drawn in the style of Windows 8. Since we're currently at Windows 10 instead, for the upcoming release I suggest changing the splash and icon to either something resembling the Windows 10 style. We have plenty of good artists in the community, after all

Talking about audio in AGS... is it possible to somehow cache or buffer some 5-10 seconds of the current music playing when a screen transition is about to happen? This music stuttering when changing rooms is making me uncomfortably angry every time

This should not normally be necessary; unless your computer is already heavily overloaded and/or obsolete or you're doing something really weird with AGS memory requirements, I've never had complaints about music stuttering on a room change.

Hmm, I was hoping for something that doesn't require rewriting 50-odd existing dialogs

Ok, so it's possible to run a regular script from a dialog script, by using the 'run-script' command which invokes dialog_request().

Is it possible to do the reverse, i.e. from a regular script do something like "call dialog X as if option Y was clicked"? (instead of Dialog.Start which starts it from the beginning)

Thanks, but what I'm looking for is to dismiss the portrait and text.

When Sierra-style speech is playing, a portrait is shown; underneath, room/character animations continue normally. During this time, the function repeatedly_execute_always() also gets called. Is there a way from this function to end the current speech animation that's being displayed?

[Edit:]

Latest builds

There was an issue reported by Dave Gilbert that has been patched in this version, but I got distracted before I updated links and such. This is only the "unified" build (use "AGS2Client.Function()" instead of "AGSteam.Function()"), but I can make sure that the "disjoint" build is uploaded as well in case you're using that. The issue Dave reported may have been the same one regarding a null pointer, which would occur if Steam failed to initialize (namely, if Steam wasn't running).

I will make sure that GetCurrentGameLanguage is added back to the plugin(s).

Edit: As of this writing, I am uploading the latest builds, which have GetCurrentGameLanguage added back in.

Aside from the above, there appears to be an issue with your latest version of the Steam plugin (the one from the quoted post). Specifically, it prevents the game from accepting keyboard input, when ran from Steam. If I log out from Steam and run the game directly from Windows, it works normally. Earlier versions of the plugin did not have this issue.

I'm curious if there are any updates on the issue that the DirectX 9 driver doesn't work on certain Windows 10 systems?

Wow, I'm impressed! That's some serious code puzzling there

Ok, so if I understand you correctly, AGS3 games using any kind of plugins will no longer run under Windows XP. Is that correct? Given that XP is fifteen years old by now, I'm actually ok with telling people to do an upgrade, since we now know what's causing it. Thank you both for looking into this issue.

I don't suppose it would help to build the plugin against the same VC++ runtime as the AGS main executable?

Your second point is just not correct, sorry

In that case, it should be easy for you to answer: what, specifically, has the current government done that has increased the Dow?

I listed a few of the notable things I'd heard or read in the media recently

So please read up on the background of these notable things. I mean, earlier you called it a specific accomplishment to make North Korea back down from its threats, but if you look at their history you'l note that NK has always backed down from its threats in the last decade.

I don't want to argue about these things. I don't think you're refuting what I'm saying, I think we just disagree about what's important.

We can certainly have different opinions about what's important.

But we do have the same facts. And two facts about the Dow Jones are that (1) it's a measure of the stock market, not the overall economy; and (2) it is not directly influenced by the government.

So the question is, are you (A) starting from the assumption that you like this politician, and searching specifically for data that supports that, or (B) looking at all of the data and use that to decide whether or not that politician is doing a good job.

The question is, could that be the problem, like an outdated version of DirectX, missing dll files or something?

Yes, absolutely.

Also, I'm not the techy guy, but all AGS games are built, like, in the same manner, right?

Actually no. For example, it depends on what version of AGS they're using. Among numerous other things, older AGS games tend to run in 16-bit color mode under DirectX 5, whereas newer games (such as Heroine's Quest) run in 32-bit color mode under DirectX 9.

Thank you, I've invited him to this thread.

Dereferencing a null pointer won't actually throw a C++ exception, so a try/catch block wouldn't help.

Ok, other idea: add a short function that opens a logfile, writes a line, and flushes/closes (to ensure it's on disk) then have a debug build of the DLL that calls this between every two lines of SteamAPI_Init(). That's the best I can think of short of borrowing the computer of the guy that has this issue

I believe the .dmp file is essentially a stack trace. Given either the application's source code or a debug build (or a .pdb file that contains line number info) of both the .EXE and the .DLL it should be possible to pinpoint which function (or even which line number) caused this nullpointer exception.

CW's earlier post suggests it's inside the DLL's engineStartup function. I'm going to assume that calls AGSteamPlugin::Startup, which calls AGSteamPlugin_Initialize, which makes three calls to the Steam API, i.e. SteamAPI_Init(), GetListener(), and RequestCurrentStats(). Maybe one of these three functions causes an issue, and adding a try/catch block in SteamAPI_Init could help locate this.

Something else that may be worth checking is whether steam_api.dll is outdated; apparently this is version 3.92.72.58 which has a copyright stamp of 2007. Looking over my Steam library I find numerous versions of this file, but none with a higher version number, and they all have (c) 2007.

Hopefully this will help track down the problem, because as I said, I can't seem to reproduce it myself.

Well, so far the issue occurs only on one guy's computer; I cannot reproduce it myself either. We do have the .dmp file but other than that I don't really know where to go from here. Suggestions welcome.

Thanks. Here's the EXE, http://crystalshard.net/test/Heroine's%20Quest.exe (did you need all datafiles with that?)

The first things the game tries to do are

Code: ags

      if (AGS2Client.Initialized) {
        String n1 = AGS2Client.GetUserName ();
        if (AGS2Client.GetIntStat ("endCount") > 0) { ... }