Messages

Can you elaborate what is the use of playing videos in non-blocking? (Like, what's intended to happen simultaneously with the video)


The libogg, vorbis and theora are already dependencies in ags, and say in the future we want colored emoji fonts that are PNG based or adding reading PNG files to AGS itself, so libpng would be there too.

Somewhere in the future, it feels like a good idea to have this plugin sources around the other compatibility plugins in ags project itself. 

I 100% recommend going through the conversion path and working with ogg files, since this will save from a world of pain. In this way you can use AGS own sound system and it'll be the easiest and best path for portability.

That said, there's an adlib plugin that I never tested and don't know if/how well it works: https://github.com/FTPlus/AGSadplug

Just for reporting, I looked into but there's a dependency (TheoraPlayer) that I have no idea how to build. My suggestion would be to make a minimal version of TheoraPlayer and have the source files of it in the project itself, but this looks like a ton of work. There it seems to be some sort of Android Studio project of that library there in TheoraPlayer sources, but I don't understand it, and there's a CMake file, but it's not written with anything beyond Linux in mind, so I didn't push it further. 

- each time the game's plot moves forward (i.e. the global game state changes)

I think this is the correct and best single place for auto saving. Make a function for your auto save and call it everytime the plot moves forward.

The game looks like, except for the navigation battle, uses mostly still images and GUIs.

If you can come up with some way to maintain cohesion across images, through keeping color in some range or maybe using some effect or something, the thing that appears to be more important is the UI.

So you could perhaps pay for someone to just design the ui, which you would use in the AGS GUIs. Then, later, leverage something like stable diffusion AI (perhaps one of the available on itch) for even if not the final product, advance quite a lot in the game development.

I don't remember the details of why, but the Tumbleweed template uses a lite version of the CustomDialogGui module instead of the default interface.

Perhaps it's a limitation of that?

You can try making a backup and try switching to the full module to see if that has the functionality you want?

What OS you have and what game are you trying to run?

There should be a file called acsetup which you can modify it to set how the scaling works. If you are on Windows you can invoke a GUI to modify the settings more easily, if the game comes with it's Winsetup executable you can use that or just run the executable passing a "--setup" parameter in the command line. The settings will be saved and run from possibly the Saved Games directory, depending on the version of the engine the game used.

You can run an older game with a newer engine, if it's on Windows you can just place a copy of a new acwin.exe in the same directory as the game and double click it to run. Using "--setup" parameter on Windows will invoke the setup gui where you can set the scaling or you can edit a new acsetup.cfg if you are on Linux, it's the game_scale_fs under [graphics], and you would set it to stretch so the graphics stretch. More details for the current acsetup.cfg here.

Finally, current ScummVm versions are also compatible with old AGS games, so you can probably run the game with ScummVm and benefit from ScummVm options.

@Manu thank you!

@lapsking you can set the rotation you want in the default setup, there's a setting for it. The default unlocked mode though was broken but it will be fixed in the next release.

In my experiments with it, it makes too many mistakes still, often mixing AGS Script with some other languages (C, C# or JS), and also AGS API with other apis (even Game Maker stuff). Maybe at some point in the future but not right now.

One thing I had success with it is to pass AGS Scripts I had written and asking it to explain what the code did for me. This it works better, and can be helpful if you are trying to understand some code you made it yourself - but sometimes things are written deep in the night you forget about in the morning.

It's probably something not reinitialized correct, if I remember the code display mode change should cause a device lost exception which then causes the reinitialization of the textures. Or in the middle of the render pass would not be trivial to reproduce - it doesn't take that long and alt+tabbing in it would be hard.

Edit: for some reason I can't reproduce this specific issue at all.

Edit2: ok, if I set the fullscreen = native in acsetup.cfg I don't get a crash but it hangs AGS, and because of the low resolution I can't figure a way to exit it. But I think this is the previously reported direct3d alt+tab issue.

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/CustomDialogOptions.html#dialog_options_get_dimensions

According to the documentation, once width and height are different than zero, the custom system is activated, but I think if dialog_options_render is not present it will be rendered by the default system still, just with the new positions.


There's a page on the manual with two examples that may be easy to choose one to copy and paste it and experiment with.

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/CustomDialogOptions.html#example-a-classic-mouse-controls


There is also a module for custom dialog options that can be helpful if you want to play around with the concept in a different interface, with some pre-builts that you can play with.

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-customdialoggui-1-9/

The easiest way I can think is to make a copy of your game project and load it in the unreleased less than alpha ags4. In it, the room project file is a xml and the images are kept as separate png files, so naturally, it would be already exported after loading the project.

You can get an unstable prebuilt here: https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5793443872505856

@Manu can you share your crash dump again? The file disappeared from the host.

Congratulations on making the new game!

Spoiler

for it to work correctly on modern computers.

@Joacim Andersson AGS has really good backwards compatibility, there is a chance it still runs your older game. Just copy acwin.exe (and sdl2.dll) in the same directory as the game, and double click acwin.exe and it should just run your game.

[close]

I am not sure what that error specifically means, but usually if the file is considered in use, AGS Editor cannot access it, in this case the exe of your game (the editor copies acwin.exe and customizes it as your game).

If you have the game open, or sometimes just leaving the Windows Explorer with the Compiled/Windows directory opened in it, and other similar types of access to the exe in that directory may hang when you tell AGS Editor to build the exe.

Ah, sometimes Antivirus software may also cause the issue since they see a new executable and will try to access it for scanning.

To just run it's simply add the pre-builts of the plugin in the same place where pre-builts of the engine are placed, note there's a directory for each different architecture, so you want to build the plugin for all those individually.

The way I find easier to build is to add the plugin in the AGS cmake project and make sure the project is a shared library. Then it should create the additional plugin as a library in each architecture directory.

You can theoretically make your own Makefile, make sure it uses the same sdk and ndk AGS uses and all that but my experience was that keeping that updated with all the changes in Android was a much bigger burden if you want binaries that can actually be approved in Google Play.

Edit: ah, that would be all easier if there was a cmake project already in the plugin directory.

Thank you! If a game is mobile friendly you can mark so in itch.io, for the game in question it isn't since it needs a keyboard. Make sure you didn't check this accidentally - usually itch notifies if it detects someone is using a phone and trying to play a non-mobile friendly game, but for your game it didn't.

I just played this game with a friend right now, we were sitting in sofas one across another and relaying what each of us were seeing to the other. The Lite version is 20-30min, but there is a paid version that is longer. We didn't had much time so we played the lite and it's pretty interesting.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.RustyLake.ThePastWithinLite

It was a similar experience to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Just starting a thread to accumulate a bunch of little games that are interesting, in case it's useful for you know... Inspiring and making games.

@Manu , good thing it worked out! Send a link to the game later so I can play 

[Can you share me your acsetup.cfg]

@Manu , there isn't anything much, if the game is not fullscreen, it should follow your windowed game configurations. Can you share me your acsetup.cfg? (specifically the one uploaded in the zip file)

Here is an example config in itch.io itself

Spoiler

[close]

Here is the game from this config (the password is: webtest)

https://eri0o.itch.io/agsjs-test




The acsetup.cfg (I can't use spoilers in code in the forums or the code misses the line ends for some reason)

Code: ini

[misc]
game_width=320
game_height=200
gamecolordepth=32
antialias=0
cachemax=131072
user_data_dir=
shared_data_dir=
titletext=TestWeb Setup
show_fps=0
[graphics]
driver=D3D9
windowed=0
fullscreen=desktop
window=desktop
game_scale_fs=proportional
game_scale_win=round
filter=stdscale
vsync=0
render_at_screenres=0
rotation=0
[sound]
enabled=1
driver=
usespeech=1
[language]
translation=
[mouse]
auto_lock=0
speed=1
[touch]
emulate_mouse=1