Topics

Hello everyone!

It's been a long while since I came back to the AGS forums. Lots of stuff happened that shifted my focus onto other work projects. It put a damper on the development of my AGS game "Nefasto's Misadventure: Meeting Noeroze" even though I wasn't that far from finishing it.

And it's DONE!

I eventually got help from colleagues in Aurora Game Studio and the publisher Pix'n Love to resume the work. However there was a prerequisite that the game had to be ported to Unity. This is why I'm posting about it here, instead of dusting off the original thread which is more reserved for AGS only games. I was not sure if I should have necro-posted either after almost 10 years.

The game is now on pre-order for a release the 24th March, on
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491660/Nefastos_Misadventure_Meeting_Noeroze/
and Nintendo eShop for the Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/nefastos-misadventure-meeting-noeroze-switch/

Pix'n Love also has a limited physical edition on their website for pre-order as well.

So I wished to share the news here. Members of the AGS community who playtested the AGS version of the game were a great help while it was actively worked on back then.

Hope to come back with another Adventure game project now that this one is behind me.

I've found a pretty strange behaviour while tinkering with the computer clock and compiling room scripts. This was done with the Draconian version of the AGS editor, but I suspect it is in every version past 3.0.

I was testing a feature in my game which needed to check the clock. So what I did was this :

I set my clock and date four days later than the current time the test was done. In this case I set the time at the 5th October while I did the test the 1st october (the real actual date). It worked fine. I forgot the set the date time back while I went on working on some other parts of the code.

I added a global variable in a script header and launched the compiler recompiling all the rooms, and everything worked fine. I didn't change anything in the room scripts at this stage.

I quit the editor. Backed up the game files. And I noticed I didn't set the time to the normal date, so I did put the date back to the 1st.

The next day I began working on the game again, on a room script this time. And that's when something went wonky.

When I launched the game to test what I added (room global struct instances in this case), the room script didn't work. And by didn't work, I mean the script ran without taking into account the changes. At first I was surprised. Maybe I wrote something wrong. Does the struct instances do something weird in the script? But whatever I did the script didn't seem to take into account my changes. So I tried breaking the script on purpose by writing wrong syntaxes like < thisisanotdefinedfunction{);==null >, removing variable definitions, even commenting the whole script. And to my surprise, the compiler didn't return any error and the game ran everytime. The room worked fine, but as if it was using a version that was never changed. I tested the same in the other room scripts. It was the same.

My first response to that was to "Rebuild all files" and so I did. After that was done I launched the game. Though it was recompiling all the rooms again(?), the game ran but it still didn't save my changes. So maybe the editor glitched somewhere, and I restarted it. At restarting the editor crashed, and crashed at every attempt. So suspecting something was wrong memory side, I restarted the computer.

After restarting the computer, the editor ran again and I loaded my game. Everything looked fine, so I pressed F5 to check further. And for some reasons, it was rebuilding all rooms again. Then, the horror, everytime I ran the game, everytime it was rebuilding ALL rooms AGAIN. Even if I didn't change anything, it was rebuilding all rooms. I can't stress that enough how annoying that would become. So since it was impossible to work on the game like that and suspecting I broke something, I had to use the backup I did the day earlier.

So I began working on a copy of the backup, and the problem reproduced. The room scripts didn't save the changes, while in the non-room scripts the changes were saves. Trying to figure out the reason, I discovered all the .CRM files for the room were timetagged at the 5th october; the fake date when I did the test the previous day. So I began to hypothesize : "Wait. The editor doesn't seem to save the changes I do in the room scripts. Is it possible it only looks on the dates to check if a script was changed?"

Therefore I set my date time clock at the 6th october, and lo and behold, the compiler finally saw the syntax errors and saved the changes I did in the room script again!

I guess I can tell this can be a critical bug and somewhat I can guess how AGS knows when a script had changes. Though it has a kind of convoluted way to reproduce (convoluted stuff are my thing to be honest).

I've found the solution to my problem, though I have to wait until past the 5th october before I can work on the game without breaking the editor.

[Nefasto's (Mis)Adventure - Meeting Noeroze]

Nefasto's (Mis)Adventure - Meeting Noeroze

Download Demo (~58 Mo)

I wish you'll enjoy it and feedbacks are more than welcome.

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/v/nF41ehKir84

Premise

Nefasto, a game data, after the crash of a broken game he was living in finds himself within the depths of your computer. However this unwanted presence is creating a major memory leak that will provoke a crash of your system with epic proportions. Find a way to help that game data to avoid that demise with the help of the local datas and eventually meeting Noeroze.

Story

A playable game data going with the name of Nefasto - although he doesn't know that yet - is the main protagonist of a really bad game named "Kick The Can". While doing what any game data is supposed to do - beat the game with the player's help - said game glitches out and crashes. The game is so broken and badly coded it even fails at properly crashing, at dumping itself and at garbage collecting the playable Nefasto. The game data falls into the depths of your computer. The presence of the game code opens a window of the public protected data world where Nefasto lands. This unallowed anomaly creates a major memory leak that unstabilize the system. It is only a matter of time before your computer crashes entirely and Nefasto needs to find a way out so that he isn't deleted. For doing so he needs your help, the local datas and especially Noeroze.

Overview

This is projected as a commercial game. Well... It snowballed into a projected commercial game I should say.
I'm doing this on my free time for 4 years - mostly for creating the template. I will probably do an episodic game, unless I have the possibility to create the game entirely from begin to end.

Features

• "Beneath The Steel Sky" style interface
• "Zack and Wiki" Click and Drag style walking
• Pure exploring
• A huge colourful world
• More than 40 characters to talk to
• Sarcastic, cynical comedy
• Item, Dialog and Binary based riddles
• Jumping mechanics
• Multiple ways to solve a puzzle
• Branching plot and endings

Current Status

Part 1

Graphics: 75%

Music and Sound: 90%

Story: 99%

Scripting: 93%

Alpha testing: 96%

Beta testing: 0%

Technicalities
Optimised on a computer with DirectX 9, 1024Mo of RAM and 1.2GHz processor.
This game uses the AGS build 3.2.2.11 R6 beta Draconian Edition from Alan v.Drake with some added custom tweeks in the engine.
It also uses the AGS Blend plugin from Calin Leafshade.
Have my greatest thanks for your work, you both.

//--------------------------------------------------//

Updates

02-10-2012

A demo is in the making. Please stay tuned.

Overall progress of this step: 100% !!!.

//--------------------------------------------------//

07-10-2012

The demo has been released.

//--------------------------------------------------//

22-10-2012

New screens.

//--------------------------------------------------//

27-05-2013

New screens and Characters Designs.

//--------------------------------------------------//

10-12-2013

Added a gameplay video.

//--------------------------------------------------//

I was debugging my RGB to HSV function for compatibility issues between 3.1.2 and 3.2 version of the Tint function that was reverted back to its original behaviour from previous versions.
I discovered, when incrementing or decrementing one the rgb parameters, the colours "jump" instead of a smooth change of the hue.

The "bug" happens if either the blue value or the red value are less than the green value, and only if the green value is lesser than 255 : ( (g > b || g >r) && g<255 ).

For example :  Character.Tint(255,255,0,100,100) gives the genuine Yellow hue;
But when I decrement green by 1 :  Character.Tint(255, 254, 0, 100, 100) gives Red unexpectedly, as if I typed Character.Tint(255, 0, 0, 100, 100);
When decrementing green by 4 : Character.Tint(255, 251, 0, 100, 100) gives the expected really slightly redder Yellow;
After that, every 7-10 decrements, it either jumps between the pure Red or the expected redder hues of Yellow to Orange;
Except, after 128, it doesn't change from orange to red, it jumps between hues of Magenta and Red : Character.Tint(255, 1, 0, 100, 100) gives Magenta instead of a Red with 1 of green, as if I typed Character.Tint(255, 0, 255, 100, 100).

For me intuitively those jumps look like a bug, but maybe the Tint function works within a different pattern. But if that's so, can someone tell me how the parameters of the Tint function are processed?

When shutting down the game I'm working on (either with QuitGame() or Alt+X), in windowed mode, launched from the editor (debugging enabled), sometimes the game freezes. Most of the time I need to kill the process.

Sometimes I get this error :
  'unknown software exception (0x40000015) at location 0x00465b4b;'

Or sometimes it doesn't and shuts down properly.

Due to its random nature I couldn't find out if it's a problem coming from my computer, or the engine, and what exactly.

Until now it didn't happen when fully compiled, and/or full screen. It isn't a major hindrance, just annoying sometimes  while I'm working on it.

I have this issue on Windows XP SP3, while on Win2000 it works fine. I remember it didn't occur before version 3.1.2 of AGS.
DirectX 9 is the most up to date.

Thank you for helping me on this one.