Messages

The Straight Story?

Current mood: dancing my ass off to these goddamn hippies in my kitchen while making pizza. That klarino!

Cool track, but not what I would think of as hippies!

The album is called "The Age of Aquarius" and they have lyrics such as "Singing along / Along with the angels / With all the spirits and animals / Become one with the universe" or "We are dreamers of a different world / Surrounded by eternal love / And peace with perfect harmony / The dawn of age of gold". Sounds like a bunch of hippies to me

(Edit: also, I stand corrected. I just found out that the wind instrument is a Gaida (a type of bagpipe), not a Klarino!)

Current mood: dancing my ass off to these goddamn hippies in my kitchen while making pizza. That klarino!

Fight Club.

(If I got it right, which I'm pretty sure I did, you can have another go at it.)

Fixed!

Thanks for those, Laura!

Indeed.  I've listened to Elephants quite a few times already.  Probably my favorite of their tracks.

Happy to hear!

Now:
Phantogram - When I'm Small

Nice! I've been working on my Super Sad Piano Piece all afternoon, and this has been a great palate cleanser. I'm with Cat Power now:

[love]

Aw I love Warpaint! But not this track, lol. I liked their first couple of albums a lot better, when they were more guitar/bass/drums-centered and they hadn't introduced so many electronic elements in their music:

A couple of friends have told me I look like Theresa (the guitar player) in that last video. Must be the fringe and the black circles under my eyes from not sleeping, because I can't see the resemblance otherwise, hahah.

It's about Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter, no?

Yup, it's a swipe at the "all lives matter" crowd.

Wow, so edgy. btw, did you remove the avatar to make it less obvious that this is an "alt-right" account?

Great news! I'm so hyped for this

So this creepy meme is trending on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/h8a0po/spare_a_hug_please/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb

Laura Hunt, is your avatar a clip from a meme? Or has this meme style been made from your avatar? I figured Jack’s earlier posts in this thread were using your avatar in the meme but maybe this isn’t the case?

Actually, I originally designed it for a comic-book version of Death and the Maiden that was never finished, but someone on reddit came across the sketches and used it in a meme, so I sued Reddit and now I'm a millionaire who hangs out with the plebs on internet forums so I don't forget what it was like before being a millionaire, which I totally am.

I feel so called out right now.

In 3.4.3 you could do a big switch, but you'll have to manage and update it by hand:

Code: ags

String GetAudioClipName(AudioClip* clip)
{
   switch (clip)
   {
       case aMusic: return "MyMusic";
       case aSound: return "MySound";
   }
}

That's what Snarky did in his example, but I simply have too many clips to do this. It's ok though, simply being able to showithe audio types and whether the channels are playing something or not has already helped me a lot

[only]

Looks like AudioClip.ID is a very recent addition; it's in the 3.5.0 manual but not the online one.

Whoops. I'm using 3.4.3. Crap.

Thanks for checking!

(One thing this AudioDebugUI, primitive as it is, has helped me realize, is that there are moments in which the high movement speed of my character, combined with too-long footstep audio clips, means that at times all 4 free audiochannels -- reserving one channel for speech, one for music and two for ambient sounds leaves me with only 4 channels available for other sounds -- are occupied only with footstep sounds. Ugh. No wonder I was having sounds that would not play or would get mysteriously cut off. Need to work on fixing that!)

[EDIT]

1)
weird, that check looks perfectly fine and should prevent null pointer errors

What's really weird is that I added if (tickingclock != null && tickingclock.IsPlaying) and it works, and then I went back and used the original check if (tickingclock != null) and... it also works now. No NPE. I have no idea what was going on, and I swear I don't drink If something like this happens again, I will double and triple check that there's nothing else going on that's keeping the check from running.

2)
I'm reading that manual part as the 3rd sound not being played, since there's no free channel and no occupied channel with a lower or equal priority.

Ah, that's certainly a way to read it! The way it's written is kind of ambiguous, but I see what you mean and yeah, you may be right.

3)
.PlayingClip returns an AudioClip*, so from a purely technical standpoint you cannot assign that to a String property. What you can do is something like

Code: ags

  else {
    AudioClip* ac = System.AudioChannels[i].PlayingClip;
    gAudioDebugUI.Controls[i+8].Text = String.Format("ID: %d, type: %d", ac.ID, ac.Type);
  }

Maybe AudioClips will get a description in the editor we can access using .Name in the future?

Hmm I'm still getting the same error at

Code: ags

AudioClip* ac = System.AudioChannels[i].PlayingClip;

EDIT: Oh great, there's no AudioClip.ID for some reason. This is the best I've been able to manage:

Code: ags

if (gAudioDebugUI.Visible) {
    
    for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
      AudioChannel* testtest = System.AudioChannels[i];
      AudioClip* ac = testtest.PlayingClip;
      GUIControl* testguicontrol = gAudioDebugUI.Controls[i+8];
      
      if (ac == null) testguicontrol.AsLabel.Text = "Nothing";
      else testguicontrol.AsLabel.Text = String.Format("Type: %d", ac.Type);
      
    }
  }

It works perfectly but only shows me the audio type. It's kind of useful, but it would be great to be able to access names or at least IDs 

[1) How do I properly check for null pointers?]

Hey all,

Apologies in advance for throwing three issues into a single post, but since two of them are pretty short questions and they're all kind of related, I thought I would save time this way.

1) How do I properly check for null pointers?

For example, let's say I have this in room 2 of my game (tickingclock has already been defined through the global variables panel):

Code: ags

tickingclock = aClock.Play(eAudioPriorityNormal, eRepeat);
tickingclock.Volume = 50;

And this in room_load() in room 3:

Code: ags

if (tickingclock != null) tickingclock.Volume = 10;

I still get an NPE if tickingclock has not been initialized (for example, if I teleport from room 1 directly to room 3 via the debug key combo Ctrl+x). Is this not the correct way to check if an audiochannel is null? I seem to recall I've done it this way before and it worked


2) This section of the manual confuses me (talking about the Play command):

This command searches through all the available audio channels to find one that is available for this type of audio. If no spare channels are found, it will try to find one that is playing a clip with a lower or equal priority, and interrupt it to replace it with this new sound.

So if I have reserved 2 max channels for "Ambient sound" audiotype clips and I do this (again, assuming myatmo1, myatmo2 etc are defined in the global variables panel and all these audio clips are "Ambient sound" types):

Code: ags

myatmo1 = aAtmos1.Play(eAudioPriorityHigh, eRepeat);
myatmo2 = aAtmos2.Play(eAudioPriorityHigh, eRepeat);

And later in the game I do this:

Code: ags

myatmo3 = aAtmos3.Play(eAudioPriorityNormal, eRepeat);

I would expect for aAtmos3 not to play at all, since the two slots for ambient sounds are already occupied and both have a higher priority. However, what I gather from the quote above is that AGS will simply look for another empty slot and play it there. Am I reading this correctly? Doesn't this defeat the purpose of limiting the amount of clips of a certain type that can be played simultaneously?


3) Creating an audio debug GUI

In order to help me sort out these issues, I'm trying to create a simple GUI that I can bring up with a key (say, F2) which will display which clip, if any, is playing in each of AGS' audio buses. So I would simply have 8 labels saying "Channel 0", "Channel 1", etc, and next to each, a label that would be populated with either the name of the clip (aAtmo1, aMusicTrack, aClock, etc) or "Nothing" if there's nothing playing.

But I'm totally lost, as I have no idea how I would get the audio clip that's playing on each channel and then display its name in the label. I tried this (in my global script's repeatedly_execute_always)

Code: ags

if (gAudioDebugUI.Visible) {
  for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
      if (System.AudioChannels[i].PlayingClip == null) gAudioDebugUI.Controls[i+8].Text = "Nothing";
      else gAudioDebugUI.Controls[i+8].Text = System.AudioChannels[i].PlayingClip;  // (using "i+8" because the relevant label indexes go from 8 to 15)
  }
}

...but I'm getting a "GlobalScript.asc(249): Error (line 249): must have an instance of the struct to access a non-static member" error. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any tips you can give me!


EDIT: I found this post by Snarky in which he does something similar, and apparently it's not possible to get the name of an audio clip? If that's the case then... I guess what I want to do is simply not possible? (I have several dozen audio clips in my game, I'm not going to index them one by one like Snarky does in this example.)

Pasolini?

Jesus Christ Superstar.

Choose another one, Frighter. I have nothing

Oh come ON! You google searched the image, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?

*grumbles* Your turn!

OK, there it goes. I've already posted at least one film from this director before. Should be easy: