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The problem is that it's hard to tell where the problem lies. The error thrown is an internal .NET Framework error so the problem could be:
1. A bug in the .NET Framework when running in VirtualBox
2. A bug in Windows when running on VirtualBox that returns an invalid error code
3. A bug in the VirtualBox network/mapped drive driver, that returns an unexpected error code
4. Any/all of the above

Thanks for the info.  I have done a little research and it would appear that the "No more files" exception is thrown when .net attempts to get a list of files from an empty network maped directory as illustrated in the code below.   I found this mentioned in this  MSDN Forum post describing the same problem.

Code: ags

String[] files = Directory.GetFiles("\\localhost\myfolder","abc*.exe", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

I have discussed this with smiley, who created the audio manager plug-in.  He and I ran a number of tests to confirm that this is indeed the behavior.   It would appear that ignoring the "No more files" exception on a network drive is, more likely than not, acceptable and would allow the .NET Directory.GetFiles function to work the same on both networked and local drives. 

I hope this info is useful to you.  I'll leave it up to your own good judgment as how to proceed from here.   I will be happy to volunteer as a tester or volunteer to create an old style C dll if you decide to pursue this issue further.  Thanks for all your hard work;  it's greatly appreciated.   

Rick

Hi Martijn, long time no see .  Send me a download link and I'll take a look at it.  I've upgraded a ton-o-stuff so i should be able to help out easily. 

Cheers
Rick

I am in agreement with Babar about the puzzle thing.  Optimal interest is generated by immersing  the player in the game world and in the game plot.  Adding Rube Goldberg type puzzles only frustrates the masses and only disrupts the players' experience of the game world IMHO.   

A possible compromise is to include easter egg puzzles that aren't necessary to solve in order complete the game or to access any of the plot elements but will instead give bonus points, reveal secret non-critical information, or other reward.   According to the "hard core" puzzle solvers here it would seem that solving difficult, non-plot related puzzles is a reward in and of itself.   I do, however, harbor a suspicion that the enjoyment of solving overly difficult and/or convoluted puzzles, for some folks, is derived from other peoples inability or difficulty in solving said puzzles. 

Don't feed the troll.   

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you mean, your using a linux computer with a virtual box add-on?

VirtualBox is not hardware if that's what you're asking.  It's a software package that allows you to install guest operating systems such as Win2k on a Linux computer.    It's similar to the above mentioned parallesl.   From virtual box's website they describe their product ...

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

They say it will run on a Mac and it's free.  I am quite happy with using the linux version.  It's part of the current Kubuntu distribution so it was simply a couple of clicks to get it installed.   It was more trouble installing windows and .net to be honest.  After that I googled for some advice and found a little howto guide to enable seemless integration.   VirtualBox allows one to map a Linux directory to a windows networked drive.  There are only a couple minor problems I have found so far.

• The AGS editor will open, edit, and save games residing on the networked drive but will not compile or run/test such games.  This has been reported but it's not clear if can be fixed.
  
  
• When running the game in test mode it is necessary to use windowed mode.  VirtualBox/Linux don't seem to be to keen on changing video modes from within the Windows VM.   I guess this kind of makes sense that this isn't possible but it doesn't fail gracefully.
  
  
• Moving the test window so that a portion goes off the bottom of the screen cause a problem where the off screen part is displayed at the top of the screen.  The widows task bar is messed up as well when this happens. 
  
  The last two items are annoying but easily avoidable  If the editor was able to use the network drive I would be as happy as a pig in poop. 

Let me give a little background first.  We have four cats (all rescued from shelters) and David, our neighbor, has three cats (rescued from nature, feral) .  One of his cats is a long haired, all black male, named Catsquatch.  We call him Squatch for short.    Squatch being formerly feral is very skittish with people but he does come over on our porch once or twice a week to have a helping of tuna.   Usually he will run away when I take the dish out to him, so I usually just put the dish on the porch and then after I go in the house he comes back to eat. 

Squatch came over a little early last night for dinner, perhaps a little after 8:00 pm (we are not certain).  He waited outside patiently (we bribed him with food once to come in but very quickly wanted to leave; as I said he is very skittish) until we got around to feeding our cats their dinner.  When I took out the dish for Squatch he didn't run away at all; in fact he came to me before I put the plate down.   He let me pet him with out complaint.   I can sometimes pet him while he is eating but he starts growling even though he has a mouth full of tuna.  It sounds funny when he does that.   

He normally eats his dinner and then goes home.  But last night was different.  He was very friendly with me and was soliciting my affection.  My wife and I went out to pet him a number of times and he never ran away like he normally does.   He stayed and stayed until my wife finally went out and brought him in the house.  She held him in her arms well over an hour, until midnight when he jumped down and went to the door to leave.  Again this was highly unusual for him to do this as he was so very skittish of people.   it seemed to us that something was bothering Squatch but we couldn't figure it out.   My wife even look him over for wounds, crap in his eyes, etc but found nothing.

We found out a couple of hours ago that our neighbor David passed away last night around 8:00pm at the hospital.  Looking back at last night it seems like Squatch knew what had happened.  The family was at the hospital so he couldn't have picked up anything from their behavior etc.  Also when the family called us a few hours ago with the news, they said they hadn't seen squatch since yesterday afternoon.

I usually don't believe in ghosts and crap like that but I spend a lot of time with our cats and I am pretty good at knowing when they are trying to tell me something.    I am pretty sure Squatch knew something bad had happened and was looking for some friendly reassurance. 

Please take a moment to say a prayer for our good friend and neighbor David.  He was a very kind and gentle person who will be greatly missed.   

Thanks for listening to this....
Rick

Thanks Dusk.  I have already tried Samba as you suggest and haven't been able to get that to work with virtualbox.   The problem with your other suggestion is that the windows VM may not be running all the time and so any backups it is scheduled to do may not happen when they are supposed to. 

Just to clarify my point a bit more:  The AGS editor, itself,  is able to navigate to the network drive and get a directory listing when doing an open operation or importing resources.  I am able to get a directory listing from the windows command prompt and using the windows file manager.   The other windows applications I have installed seem able to use the network drive without any problems.   The previously encountered and insurmountable problems encountered using WINE would appear to not exist because WINE isn't being used (unless of course if there is a common library or code base).   If AGS were able to build/run games residing on a network drive then it would be fully integrated with linux and work just like any other application in linux, windows, or virtual os hosted on my machine.   I would be willing to help conduct tests so as to collect debug information so that we may have a better understanding of what is  actually going on.  I would be willing to try an experimental build that ignored some or all the directory listing errors to determine what the practical consequences are.   I am curious as to the nature of the directory listing errors and what code was executed to generate them.  Perhaps there is another way of performing a directory lookup without getting errors.   

Sorry for being long winded but just to be clear I haven't posted in this thread to ask for help creating a cumbersome and/or complicated workaround, although Dusk, your ideas and comments are greatly appreciated.   I am posting here to provide CJ with  a clear explanation of the problems I have encountered using AGS, why I think they are important, and what advantages/disadvantages they were fixed/not fixed, so that he is able to make intelligent decisions about he wants to take AGS.  Peace everyone ...

As Gilbot says this is by design, it's because optional parameters are an unofficial feature that were never designed to be used in custom scripts; had they been then the range would have been 32-bit.

Fair enough.  I have figured a way round    and I'm sorry for mucking up this trhread with such twitter.

I had the same need as Monsieur OUXX in the thread Gilbot posted, a null value for an int/short to determine if the parameter was specifed or not rather than using it to get a default value that would actually be used for something..  Thanks Gilbot, CJ...

The problem you're reporting seems to be specific to running under WINE, and the only way for me to get around it seems to be to basically ignore any errors that occur when getting a directory listing. This isn't something I want to do, because potentially important errors could end up getting ignored as a result.

I'm actually running under Windows 2000 virtual machine in VirtualBox on Kubuntu 8.04.   The current beta works splendidly in this environment as long as I keep everything on the virtual c: drive. 

VirtualBox uses a network mapped drive as a means of sharing files between Linux and Windows.   Files stored on such drives are accessible to both linux and windows applications while files on the virtual C: drive are accessible only from the windows virtual machine.   The virtual c: drive is just one massive file that exists on the linux partition.  I am not comfortable  keeping all my source files on C: because if something should ever happen to the virtual machine or to virtualbox  it could mean curtains for my bits.   If everything were accessible from the linux side then it would be a simple to have linux periodically make secure backups of everything on other machines in the house and this is why I am so interested in getting this to somehow work. 

Anyway with regard to your comments about this,  do you suppose that these problems are the result of some code or library that is common to both  VirtualBox and Wine or to some quirks, differences, or compatibility issues between windows and linux.   If it's something that could be fixed on the virtualbox end perhaps it would be worth passing on a description of the problem to the virtualbox folks and asking them to fix it or to suggest an alternative solution.   

Is there any possibility of having an experimental build that would  dump the errors and any other useful info into a file or something?  I would be glad to run any such experiments on my machine and gather the resulting data if that would that would be helpful in any way?   What do you think?

Problem using optional parameters??

I can't seem to set an optional int parameter value to less than -31999 or greater than 32000.  I get the following error

Code: ags

Failed to save room room0.crm; details below
Thread.ash(152): Error (line 152): default parameter out of range

Line 152:  import function ThreadVar(short vx, int value = -32000);

Is this normal or a bug?  There is  nothing in the manual mentioned about it? 

[Module Script]

1.  The manual seems to describe an earlier version of game abort.  It's a minor issue but I thought you would like to know anyway.   

What do you mean? It seems ok to me.

I was referring to the bit about the call stack and no mention of the script editor opening on the offending line.  But since the stack dump is going to be added back then I guess what's there is fine as you say.

2.  It's pretty slick how it now opens the editor on the line where AbortGame() is executed.   This is perfect when executed in a Room or Global script.  It would also be useful if AbortGame had an option to open the script where the call is made to the function containing the AbortGame statement.  A module designer could use this option to call attention to incorrect usage in the module's users room and/global scripts rather than to the module code that detected the problem.   It's perhaps something to think about though...

Well, what I do want to do is add support for the editor to display the call stack and let you browse through it, which would address that. Not sure which version that might make it into, though.

That of course would be very useful and necessary.  I don't mean to belabor the point here but would like to take the opportunity to clarify my previous comments.   Suppose the example function given in the manual was part of a module and it was called from a room script as shown below.

Module Script

Code: ags

function SomeModule::MakeWider(int newWidth) {
  if (newWidth < 10)
    AbortGame("newWidth expects a width of at least 10!");
}

Room Script

Code: ags

function SomeFunction() {
   SomeModule.MakeWider(20);
}

If the same person wrote the module and the room script then having the module script open and a stack dump isn't really a problem since the author will immediately recognize the module's code, would have an idea of what just happened, and would be able easily follow the stack dump to where the problem actually is.   If the module is adequately complex and is written by someone other than the game author then receiving the abort message and being directed to the innards of a complicated module could be more confusing than helpful (depending upon the game author's level scripting ability and experience).

My only point is that it would really be slick and cool if the module author had the ability specify that that particular AbortGame() open the script where the function is called from rather than where the function is defined.  In this example the room script is where the problem is and where one needs to go to fix it. For this particular example this will always be the case.   I think this situation is more common than not.   Perhaps when you get around to implementing the stack dump you may discover an easy way of adding this feature as well, but I'll leave that up to your good judgment as always.

AGS3.0 editor doesn't work with Linux+wine AFAIK. I am currently using Kubuntu 8.04 Linux + VirtualBox with pretty good results.  This requires a windows disk as was mentioned with BootCamp on the Mac.

GameAbort() Couple of minor observations

1.  The manual seems to describe an earlier version of game abort.  It's a minor issue but I thought you would like to know anyway.   

2.  It's pretty slick how it now opens the editor on the line where AbortGame() is executed.   This is perfect when executed in a Room or Global script.  It would also be useful if AbortGame had an option to open the script where the call is made to the function containing the AbortGame statement.  A module designer could use this option to call attention to incorrect usage in the module's users room and/global scripts rather than to the module code that detected the problem.   It's perhaps something to think about though... 

You need to find a pesticide that they will carry back to their nests.  I think these are usually in the form of a powder.  They walk in the powder and it gets on them, they go back to their nests to die and whatever powder is on them remains in the nest. 

The other thing you might want to try is one of those ultrasonic bug chasers.  I think Black&Decker makes one that plugs into the wall. 

* Fixed error trying to save a game to a network share

There still remains the same problem when creating a new game, or compiling, running, building a game that exists on a network share.  Everything in the Build menu does the same.  Save game now works fine so if the same could be done for these other commands/functions that would be super!  Thanks

Hehe, that sounds hilarious.    Post it here if you ever find it.  I did a google for it but only came up with these two.

Little Girl vs The Monster
Little Girl vs Claw Machine

I hope this gets noticed and doesn't fall through the void left by Mittens.   

GG I disagree with a couple of  your points here.  I suppose it's mostly a matter of personal preference  but I think that then easiest way of supporting a 16:10 background image on a 4:3 monitor is to use the full vertical height of the monitor and allow the room to scroll left/right, which is AGS's default behavior.

Likewise, IMHO, the easiest way of supporting a 4:3 background on a 16:10 monitor is to again make use of the full vertical height and leave black bars on either side of the  background.  This is what normally happens when a 4:3 video is played full screen.   

If this kind of approach is used pixels will remain square and many other issues will evaporate. 

It should also be noted that 4:3 monitors have permanently disappeared from retail shelves and now can only be found on craig's list for free or at yard sales.   They are destined for the dust bin of obsolete technology and so I am wondering why anyone is still developing for that format?  If someone started a 4:3 game today I doubt there would be any 4:3 monitors left to play it on by the time the game was finished.

Just my 2 cents anyways... Cheers.