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[The Story]

Parking Goat presents:



The Story

Life is hard when you're a prisoner, wrongly accused.
When you're pregnant in prison, life can be even harder.
You will want to give up.
But when you are then accused of a new crime, the murder of one of the inmates,
you finally get the desire to fight back, and prove your innocence once and for all!

The Trailer

The Screenshots





Features

�A Twisted Story
�A Grabbing Atmosphere
�Beautiful Artwork
�Full Voice Acting
�Multiple Endings
�Original (yet small) Soundtrack

The Team

Background Art- gameboy
Character Art- noavana
Music & SFX- noavana
Cast- noavana, Saren, cat, Ron Anshel, Mati Goldstein, Reut Goldstein.
Testing- david, Ron Anshel, cat, Ponch, Saren, gameboy.
Modules- Tween (by Edmundito), Smooth Scroll (by Ali) and Credits (by SSH).

The game was originally made for the AGS Bake Sale, but now it's available for free!

Download the game!

Wow, I was having a family dinner and missed all the drama!
I guess the website going down is a good thing.. Very exciting stuff!

LET'S DO THIS!

Happy birthday! 

If I try to take what Khris said, and put it in other words, I guess my answer to the original question is:
Stuff that you think are obvious, are not so obvious to other people.

Every man has his blind spots, and the only workaround here is testing. By giving people to test your game (and if possible, sit by them as they play), you can easily see stuff that you didn't think of.

It doesn't have to be either maintaing backwards compatibility completely or breaking it completely.
How it usually works, is when you advance to a new version you may break compatibility only with the oldest supported version of the bunch.
So for instance, with AGS 4.0, we may break compatibility with AGS 2.7, while still supporting AGS 3.0.
When we create AGS 5.0, we'll stop supporting AGS 3.0 while supporting 4.0, and so on.

It's like playing a game of Snake. When the head advances, so does the tail. If you decide to eat something and make you body bigger (i.e support more versions), the snake will get harder to control, and eventually it will crash.

There are so many good candidates available, I tried to narrow down my list to a few selected people that proven to me the most that they're capable at co-ordinating big projects while remaining team players (for the "Community Leader") and people which have technical knowledge, devotion and an ability to see the big picture (for the "Tech Leader").

So:
Community Leader:
1. No.
2. Baron, Ponch, Dave, Ben

Technical Leader:
1. No.
2. Snarky, Wyz, Khris, Monkey, Calin

This is possibly the best looking website ever created! 

I'm willing to take a fairly active role in the editor development since C# is where i cut my teeth so to speak. I'm confident that Tzachs would be willing to back me up with that and possibly lead the editor coding efforts.

Yes, I will definitely back Calin up with active development of the editor. The word "leading" is a scary word, and so I will not say a definite "yes" to that. I will help with the decision process, provide guidance if needed, and do whatever I can within the time and resources that I have.

As for project manager, if we have someone here with actual experience with managing an open source project (and dedication to improving AGS), then that's the guy we want.
If not, then any of the names mentioned here sounds good to me.
That includes Dave. I don't see any real issues with commercial game developers involved in the development of AGS. IMO, what's good for the commercial games is good for the free games.
And besides, this will not be a dictatorship. There will be a lot of people involved which will have a say, so there's really nothing to worry about (not to mention that with the nature of open source, you can't really force anyone to do anything. You can ask, and you can refuse to accept code changes if it's not going with the accpeted vision, but that's pretty much it).

Ideally I want it to support games made with AGS 2.72 as well, so if the defaultres option does not exist in there, that's a good enough reason for me to switch to your library.

Thanks for the offer Calin.
Like Dualnames said, I already parsed the data from the cfg file.
I wonder if there are any advantages of extracting the data from the exe instead of using the cfg.
One thing that I can think of is that the cfg file can be changed by outsiders while the exe data is safe, though I doubt that anyone will actually change it.
Is there any other advantage? Why did you decide on that instead of the cfg file?

Happy birthday Dualnames & FSI! 
And also happy belated birthday, mods! 

[Introduction]

Introduction

This utility is supposed to help in situations where you deploy your game but it won't start for some of the players since the configuration you chose initially is not supported on their computer.
It allows the developers to configure a pre-set list of desired configurations for their game, from the one that will provide the best experience to the least favorable one, to try only if all other configurations are not supported.

How does it work?

1. Put the AGS Auto-Detect executable in your game folder (the executable is located in AGSAutoDetect\bin\release, only the exe file itself is needed).
2. Instead of running your game file, run AGS Auto-Detect.
3. AGS Auto-Detect searches your system for the installed DirectX version on your computer, and for all supported resolutions on your computer.
4. It then reads the existing configuration file and checks if the existing configuration (both DirectX and resolution) is supported by the hosting computer. If the existing configuration is supported, it simply runs the game.
5. If not, then it goes over a pre-set of desired configurations, from the most wanted to the least wanted, until it finds a configuration that is supported by the local computer. If it finds it, it will edit the configuration file, save it, and run the game.
6. If no supported configuration is found on the computer, it will default to the safest configuration possible (that I know of): DirectDraw & windowed, save it to the configuration file and run the game.

System Requirements

The only requirement for AGS Auto-Detect to run is DotNet 2.0 installed on the local computer.

Configuration

The source code is provided, so that you can configure several or more of the following items. You'll need Visual Studio 2008, and then double click on AGSAutoDetect.sln to open the code.
When you finish doing your changes, right click on the solution and click build, the executable in the Release folder should change to include your changes.

1. Icon. You'll probably want to set an icon and rename the program to your game name, so that people will double click on AGS Auto-Detect to play the game (renaming the original game with AGS to an obscure name will follow).
To set the icon, select the project, right click on it, select Properties, select the Application tab, and you'll see an option to select the icon.

2. Set the desired configurations for your game. I've provided a default list of preferred configurations for each resolution as I saw fit. My knowledge on the subject of how to make the game look the best is limited though, so if you want to change you can do it via changing the source (also, if you have better knowledge than me, please share it so I can upload a better version with better defaults).
Each game resolution comes with its own set of defaults, so to see the default list, you must know your own game resolution.
Let's take for example the 320x200 resolution. In the project you'll see the Desired Configurations folder, open it and then open the Resolutions folder under it. Double click the R320x200.cs file, and you will see the following code:

Code: ags

public List<ConfigFileData> GetDesiredConfigurations()
        {
            return new List<ConfigFileData> 
            {
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = true, Filter = FilterType.StdScale2},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = true, Filter = FilterType.StdScale2, Letterbox = true},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = true, Filter = FilterType.None},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = true, Filter = FilterType.None, Letterbox = true},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = false, Filter = FilterType.StdScale2},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = false, Filter = FilterType.StdScale2, Letterbox = true},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = false, Filter = FilterType.None},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = false, Filter = FilterType.None, Letterbox = true},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = true, Filter = FilterType.StdScale3},
                new ConfigFileData { IsD3D = false, Filter = FilterType.StdScale3}
            };
        }

The first item in the list is D3D and x2 filter, so that's the first configuration that AGS Auto-Detect will try (assuming the one in the configuration file was not supported).
If that configuration is not supported, the second item will be tested, which is D3D, x2 filter and letterbox (which effectively changes the 320x200 resolution to 640x480 resolution).
If that fails, the next item will be tested, and so on.
You can add, remove and change those items as you see fit.

ConfigFileData is the object that contains the desired configuration, and besides the properties that was set in the default, other properties that can be set include:
ColorDepth, Windowed, RefreshRate, SmoothScaledSprites and DowngradeGraphics.
All of these has appropriate settings in the setup program we all know and love.

Each property of these that was not set, will be taken from the existing configuration that was saved to file.
That means that in my example, if the letterbox was checked when you deployed your game, there isn't really any difference between the first item and the second item in the default list.

3. How the game will be found and run.
AGS Auto-Detect assumes that besided itself and the setup file, the only other executable in the folder is the game file, and so it will run it. This will probably work for almost all AGS games, but if you happen to have another exe file in your folder, you might want to change that logic. Simply double click the Game.cs file, and alter the Run method with the logic of your choice.

What's not in there (yet)?

1. Adding side borders to wide screen monitors. AGS has a more complicated logic when this option is checked. It somehow searches itself for a fitting resolution and adds the borders. Since I don't know how this logic works, I can't deduce if a configuration with this option on is supported or not, so for now I didn't add it.
If someone here knows how it works, please tell me, so I'll include this option as well.

2. Smooth scaled sprites (and probably other features as well) require a "fast CPU" in order to run. Since I don't know how fast the CPU should be so that I can reasonably assume that it will work, I don't check against it at all.
If someone here knows what is a reasonably fast CPU, please tell me and I'll see how to add those tests as well.

3. Older AGS versions. Ideally I would want to support AGS 2.7 and upwards, but I haven't really done tests, and I don't know what changes the configuration files have between those versions. If anyone knows (or wishes to test), please tell me.

Testing
Since there are tons of available system configurations in the world, there is a 100% percent chance that it won't always work as intended.
So please, if you can run it on your computer, on your game (or other games), and with different initial setups and give me feedback, I would appreciate it.
If you do find something wrong, please send me the following:
1. What's your game resolution?
2. The original configuration file your game has (acsetup.cfg).
3. Did you make any changes to the source?
4. There's a log that's generated called AutoDetectLog.txt, which I will also need.

Since almost no testing has been done so far, I recommend not to use it on actual released games as of yet, until I will get sufficient feedback to assume that it works in most cases.

License

I think I'll go with Creative Commons License.
Meaning you can use it in freeware and commercial games, credits will be appreciated but not necessary.

Future Plans

In following versions, I thought of also including a new setup program, that will only present to the player with the options that are supported on his computer, and will also be configurable so that unwanted items can be hidden (while still maintaining a nice look to it).
Any thoughts on this are also welcome.

Download

Get it here:
AGS Auto-Detect
 

Ding!

What's that sound? Is it coming from the oven?
Is the game ready?

Why yes, I think it is! 

I tried to search but failed miserably. The one tracker that I did see has bugs up until 2009...
Where is that magical tracker you're talking about?

I've encountered a bug with the new audio system.
If the user is skipping a cutscene which plays a sound, it can crash AGS (it has like 50% chance to crash).
If you use cutscenes, and the new audio system, you can workaround it by creating a workaround function in the global script:

Code: ags

AudioChannel* PlaySound(this AudioClip*,  AudioPriority priority, 
  RepeatStyle repeatStyle)
{
  if (Game.SkippingCutscene) return null;
  return this.Play(priority, repeatStyle);
}

Declare it in the header:

Code: ags

import AudioChannel* PlaySound(this AudioClip*,  AudioPriority priority=eAudioPriorityHigh, 
  RepeatStyle repeatStyle=eOnce);

And then replace all usages of the kind aMyAudio.Play, with aMyAudio.PlaySound.

Well, I have it from a good source, that she indeed took a byte of his draculator.
After that, he scourged her underworld.
She said that she enjoyed the heroics, but too bad it was done in the nick of time...

Bumped for another teaser screenshot (and also last screenshot before the release)!



Also, one last call for a voice actress.
All roles have been filled with the exception of one.


Please help Alice find her voice...
PM me with a voice sample if you're interested.

I want to be in too!

Username: tzachs

AGS scripts has "repeatedly_execute_always" and "repeatedly_execute" functions.
Whatever is in "repeatedly_execute_always" will happen even when the game is paused, as opposed to "repeatedly_execute" that will only happen when the game is not paused.

So you have two options: if you want the tweens to pause then just go to the tween script file and replace "repeatedly_execute_always" with "repeatedly_execute".
If you want your other animations to not pause, then you have to switch all your animations to "repeatedly_execute_always" instead of "repeatedly_execute".

About the button, I remember the hovering but with all the people logging in and out all the time, it's hard to keep track, especially since I want to know where Ponch is at all times.
A button would actually probably be too much, but perhaps pressing Ctrl+F would open a "Find" dialog with a text box, and when you insert a name, if the user is in the crowd, his character will glow or flash or do something pretty for a few seconds.