Messages

I think the templates still have a reliance on 'player.on' because there is no direct equivalent. It is very confusing.

Are you sure that it is non-responsive forever rather than just non-responsive while the blocking actions are running?

I believe that you can do it with this plug-in but it brings some restrictions (Direct3D only) and I've not tried it myself.
PLUGIN: Direct3D v1.0 (Sprite and Theora video rendering)

If it can read the data faster then the scanner is potentially doing more work in a shorter amount of time, which will generate more heat. To work out whether there is a problem you need to look at the temperatures when idle and when under load and how this relates to the fan speed. The virus scan in itself isn't a good load test, and the fans working at a high speed isn't necessarily a bad thing.

This was actually a mistake in the template that the cursor sprite wasn't set.

To fix it you can set the sprite for the 'cursor' pointer to sprite 2061.
Or you can download the newer templates from here.
Or you can upgrade to the latest AGS version which includes the updated templates.

As far as I know, you need to be using the newer (and custom) Allegro version from the repository in order to have the colours work correctly:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/lib-allegro/tree/allegro-4.4.3.1-agspatch

One issue I struggled to test is whether the signing for an app bundle is invalidated when the game data file changes:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/pull/1083#issuecomment-650588478
I don't suppose you know the answer?

Does this make any difference?

Code: ags

make USE_BUILT_IN_LIBSRC=1

Is there a way to write functions which apply to all characters universally, not just specific ones?

You can just define an extender function.

Yeah I'm sure, i tried to increase the size of my sprite and my background and the animation stills irregular...

You would probably need to choose a scaling mode that keeps the pixels square to rule it out, rather than change the sprites. From the video you captured it wasn't obvious to me that anything is blurry or irregular, so I'm having trouble recommending what to do. The movement within an AGS game is different to Unity because AGS updates everything (logic and render) on a fixed frame rate. Movement in Unity tends to be based on time, so objects will normally have smoother movement but the animation framerate is independent of this (characters may appear to slide as they walk).

I'm guessing the first two lines should also be python2 and python3, respectively?

No, the first two check if True and False are integers. They aren't integers, but the boolean type was created as a sub-class of integer, and so the function says they are.

If it helps, here is my 4 statement crash course.

Code: ags

$ python -c "print(isinstance(True, int))"
True
$ python -c "print(isinstance(False, int))"
True
$ python2 -c "print(3/2)"
1
$ python3 -c "print(3/2)"
1.5

Hopefully I've just saved you several hours.

As for the IDE, a light-weight one is Visual Studio Code (which is awesome for programming in general).

This is the best environment that I have used when I have made something in python. It pretty much sets itelf up with an integrated debugger and doesn't try to force its own concepts on you.

I would only add that:

• The documentation on the python website is pretty good and there are normally lots of examples. It won't walk you through building something, but there is a tutorial to get you started.
  https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
• If you start making something that requires additional packages to be installed it is fairly critical to understand where these get installed. Typically you want to use something like a venv so that you can work on more than one project at a time, without needing the python and package versions to be compatible between the two projects. This can also affect things like the Visual Studio Code automated setup, because it will probably want to install some packages on your behalf. So typically a good starting point with Windows is to make sure that when you run the python installer you choose to install it per user and not globally for everyone on the computer, and then create a venv per project. I think PyCharm likes to get move involved and also manage venvs for you.

I liked Rope.

It used to come with macOS, but I'm not sure if it still does or it is safe to rely on on it always being there. For Linux it wouldn't be safe to rely on it being there and you will also need to ensure that the build you supply can run on slighly older systems (normally by building it on one), otherwise you end up with errors like this:

Code: ags

$ ./program
./program: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.27' not found (required by ./program)

Are you sure it isn't just that you are scaling the game to fit the window size?

It comes out in INI format (to avoid the dependency on a JSON parser), so I think the OPTIONS.md page must be wrong.

It is probably worth noting that recent builds of Windows 10 come with a version of curl, and that AGS doesn't change the working directory when it starts, so potentially you may actually be running a separate copy and not the one which you have supplied. Also this shouldn't be confused with the curl alias in Powershell, which is a horrific attempt to map the symbol 'curl' to Powershell's web request functions (which are dependent on other system/IE components, which are potentially not operational).

I've just created copies of the audio clips that need to be played at two different volumes

To be honest, I think I would do the same, just to remove the extra complication in the scripting.
Probably by applying some extra processing on the source and convincing myself that it sounds better than simply turning the volume down

Mostly, I'm curious about how there are properties that can only be accessed through the editor but not through script, or if they are, they are read-only. As a non-programmer, my intuition is that, if something can be set in the editor, it should be avaliable in-script too. But I guess there are technical reasons to keep some stuff like this?

I think there are still some properties which aren't exposed to the editor, but in cases like this it is normally that the game engine had some hard coded behaviour to take some shortcuts or apply specific operations on your behalf (rather than a discrete property), but there is no return path for any references to be passed back to you to take further actions on. The options to lookup what happened retrospectively aren't great either, you would probably have to poll all channels to see which clip they are playing and try to work out if one of these is your new one.

Yes, I think the alternative is to not use use the frame->audio link, which would likely end up with you doing something similar on a grander scale. I guess the risk in either case is that there is not a free channel and you accidentally adjust the volume of the wrong sounds, so maybe a higher priority is safer, as well as checking if the channel reference is null before operating on it. So as long the blocking behaviour is OK for you, the approach you've taken is probably more straightforward then any alternative that springs to mind. Maybe someone else knows better though...

Forgive my inaccurate comparison, but is it (roughly) the Mac equivalent of producing an .exe file without an installer/zip/msi file to contain it, except that in the case of Mac it's critical because the .app file also sets the correct permissions to what it contains?

There is the engine binary and then the surrounding directory structure which can make it into a .app bundle. The former you have to run from the command line (maybe with some wrapper script), the latter can have an icon and you can double click to run it (subject to signing requirements). The issue with the file permissions is the same in both cases.

Perhaps we could include these to release downloads on github too, since Android unsigned launcher is also included?

Yes, this is probably a good idea.