Messages

Great work!
I especially love fixed movement stuttering between 60% and 80% zoom and the alpha blending improvements.

Only, there are some problems preventing me from using your edition:
- drawing character shadows onto the background doesn't properly work, using DrawImage with a transparency below 100% draws the sprite fully opaque for me.
- heavy fps drops, around 30 fps instead of 40 of the original version, i tried messing around with VSync, Fullscreen and Windowed mode, nothing really helps.

So, i would greatly appreciate it if you could upload the compiled acwin.exe with only the fixed zoom again, i checked the thread http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=44406.msg592756#msg592756 , but the file is no longer available.

At least, if there was a way to send any variable's value from one instance of the game to the other.
Imagine Action-RPG-Adventures with Coop-Mode and Duels
Void, maybe you could make the user of the plugin decide what actions will be synchronized and when ?

I know it's a bit late to post in a 4 months old thread, but hopefully this is still being worked on.
First of all, I have to say that this is a fantastic thing and you did a great job, void.
Having multiplayer features in AGS games would be so wonderful.

After copying some *.dlls to the project folder, everything but the chat function (GlobalScript.asc(104): Error (line 104): undefined symbol 'PopArgInt'
) worked for me.
I would really love to work with this in my game project, but I have no c++ programming skills. Is there a way to access the plugin or to make a module out of it?
It would be great to synchronize custom events, like NPCs entering the room and walking around when a specific action is used, but I don't know if there is a way to do stuff like that in the normal script files without having to access the plugin directly.

Thanks, dkh, you are giving me hope again
Yet I'm afraid, it is not my specific problem, as Khris said, there are some bugs like this one known in D3D, nobody seems to have a solution to it and I tried my game on several PCs with different hardware, though the problem persisted

D3D users, please share your personal experiences with gamma behaviour
I didn't mean to negatively affect somebody, although I am negatively affected
And I still prefer D3D over DD5, because of the smooth sprite appearance.

Nice to see that your problem is solved, but it seems to me that nobody should be using D3D anyways.
Nobody wants to play a game where everything gets dark on restarting the game. This bug seems to be unsolvable as seen in this thread:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=44442.0

I know this is a bit off-topic, but have you tried to restart the game in fullscreen mode and encountered the gamma problem ?
If yes, will you keep running it in D3D ?

It would be great if anybody knew a solution to solve the problem and help me avoid being forced into Direct Draw.
It is wonderful to see that there are other guys also working with Direct3D, I just stumbled into Alan v.Drake's thread about fixing the scaling in D3D, so D3D doesn't actually seem to be dead due to the existing bugs.

The sprite difference between DDraw and D3D is huge, as you can see:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/221/draw3d.png

Thank you very much, Khris, bist eh der beste

No Direct3d, that leaves me quite sad, I was so happy to find a workaround that fixed framrate problems and other issues I had with Direct3d.
The sprites and basically everything looks much more smooth and fluid in Direct3d, Direct Draw is just a soup of pixels

Hello,

Sorry if I am being redundant, but the search function doesn't work.

Problem:
When testing my game in windowed mode, everything works properly.
Now when I test it in fullscreen Mode (Strg-F5), it all looks fine at first, but when i change the gamma-value and set it back to 1.0, everything gets way too dark.
The same problem appears when I restart the game with the F9 key in fullscreen Mode.

Graphic device : Direct3d

Does anybody know a solution to this or has anybody encountered the same problem ?
I would really like to implement a gamma slider to give the user the opportunity to tune things perfectly, but changing the gamma value in AGS always leads to an odd outcome : 1.0 is too dark overall and setting it higher causes the lighter areas to become too bright while the darker areas still are too dark.

Thanks very much. This seems to be a great method to improve the performance at runtime and I WILL use it for some of my script parts
However, in this case, the on-the-fly-creation of sprites does not seem to be the problem. Just like i wrote, the framerate seemed to be better when rawdrawing a lot.
By now, i have found out, that is has nothing to do with the rawdrawing and i am still not sure what is really is, that makes my FPS go up when certain events occur.

Differences:

Direct Draw 5:   ~38 FPS when running around, ~40 FPS when detecting the range between the player and the mouse (for spellcasting) and showing the maximum range as a circle around the player (by rawdrawing a a sprite at scaled size, dependant on the actual player scaling)

Direct 3D 9:   ~27(!) FPS when running around, ~40 FPS when detecting the range between the player and the mouse

I guess, in the case of rawdrawing resized sprites, your method makes no sense, pencil, because we need no modified sprite, as the drawimage-function allows the user to set the width and height.

best wishes

*Update: activating/deactivating of smooth scaled sprites and vertical sync has no effect on the FPS when running the game in Direct 3D
**Update: Finally found the problem. There was a function in rep_exe, creating a backup of the background-drawingsurface every game cycle (so the old drawn range sprite could be removed when updating).
This one really ate my frames when running it in Direct3D mode.
Solved it by adding a bg_restored flag that is being set to true after the function in rep_exe is called once, and setting it back to false when the background is being drawn on again.

Thanks again for the help

Hello everyone,

I have tried out both Direct3D 9 and DirectDraw 5 Graphics Drivers with the game I am working on (AGS 3.2.)

Direct3D provides way better optical results in displaying the characters with the option "smooth scaled sprites."
So I wanted to keep it running with Direct3D. While testing the game and the debugging features, I just came across the FPS and saw that the game was running very slowly with Direct3D (~26 Frames, whereas in DirectDraw, I always had an average of ~40 FPS.)

The weirdest thing in Direct3D is: while a function is active, that draws an image onto the background surface every 3rd game loop (first, it was every game loop, but i reduced it to every 3rd, because of the performance), the FPS goes up to 40 and the overall speed of the game just seems accurately smooth.
Does anybody know a solution to this issue?
It would be great to have the game running under Direct3D, but there must be a better workaround than using drawimage (maybe with an empty sprite) every game loop, or there must be a reason why the game is running that slowly while not using drawimage every cycle.

Greetz,

Deee

There is... I also use dummies but I just run a piece of code on game_start to assign their properties. Like view, position, room ecc.

That is just what i do. I have a procedure for resetting a character before it is used for a new purpose and a procedure to select a character that is currently not in use.
The problem is just getting a lot of characters into the editor, for there is just the possibility to add/import 1(!) new character at a time. We need a button in the editor, allowing the import x instances of the exported character y.

I don't know if this has been posted before or if there is actually a solution to this problem.
Anyway, here's my wish:

- There should be a way to quickly create new characters in the editor or at runtime.

I need a lot of characters (most of them are dummies for spells or particles) in my game and the only way i saw to get that done, was creating a new character, exporting it and mindlessly importing it a hundred times in a row.
With these dummies, i use a "select first free dummy"-script when i need a new character ingame for the visuals of a spell or something.
There must be a faster way.

Greetings, D