Messages

[PaxAnimo]

Close, very close, LameNick! But PaxAnimo nailed it

This show looks so strange!

Oh, you have NO idea of just how strange

The last image with the beds made me think of Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason cover.
Anyway, I obviously have no idea of what show it is

Definitely!

I see that this is going to be a tough one to crack There goes another one!

Sorry, I totally forgot to check in to this thread.

It's a miniature set? Even if I go to full-size it's very hard to tell. If it's a miniature it's incredibly good!

Not quite a miniature, but I read that the adult puppets are around 25 cm, which is about the standard size for stop-motion I guess?

Here's another shot:

Finally! Wishlisted, can't wait!

omg this is JAM!

BINGO!!!  To me its an absolute gem. Though anyone who wants to check it out I tell ya, beware! its sharp, its heavy, its dark and its probably cursed.

That's what makes it so amazing though And the music choices were such a huge part of the unsettling, dreamy, unreal atmosphere! Really a one-of-a-kind series.

I'm going to go with another bizarre, off-the-wall show. Probably an easy guess for anybody who's watched even one episode:

One of my most beloved artists passed away today. Rest in peace, Mark.

To the stars, my love
To the sea
To the wheels, my love
'Til they roll all over me

omg this is JAM!

The Third Policeman was really good though I'd have to read it again to know if I'd count it among my favourites.

The Third Policeman is a-ma-zing! One of my top 5 books ever, no doubt I recently read At Swim-Two-Birds and I found it a lot more "academic" and way less fascinating. I'm happy I gave it a chance, but it paled in comparison, for sure.

I don't have a favorite genre, but I do have favorite authors and books. Here are some of them:
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

We seem to have a lot in common! I guess that if I had to mention a favourite genre, it would have to be the excessively broad category of "weird fiction", which ranges from the classic ghost/supernatural/madness tales of M.R. James, Robert Chambers, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, etc, to straight-up horror (Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Lovecraft, Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman), to the mind-bending labyrinths of Borges, Cortázar, Quiroga, Sábato, Mark Z. Danielewsky, Ligotti, Angela Carter, Philip K. Dick, Calvino, Tim Powers, or Arthur Machen. I guess that if it's weird, original, unique, and manages to surprise me with something I haven't seen before, I'm game!

Right now, I'm busy with Oceano Mare by Alessandro Baricco (poetic, beautiful, entrancing) and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is the closest I've come to a so-called "bestseller" in recent years but I have to admit is a very compelling murder mystery, and a real page-turner at that! Once I'm done, I plan on snatching up Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, which from what I've heard is a wonderful read

I meant more there's an hyphen in your game dir, after a space character, I don't know if this may trigger something somewhere to think the directory may be a parameter. (Yes, I should escape characters as needed, but I am still writing the escaping code so for now it's not good :/)

My game dir was "ioawn4t - Android", so I changed it to "ioawn4tAndroid" and moved it to a path with no spaces or hyphens whatsoever, and I'm still getting the same error.

Anyhow, if you set the password for the keystore and the keystore location in the AGS Editor -> Preferences -> Advanced -> the things under Android, when setting the Android Keystore path the Editor do checks to see if it's really there. There's also a very weird thing that Android Studio asks now is that the keystore and the key passwords are the same. I haven't tried using different ones to see what kinda of error message it outputs. I am out of home now, will check when I get back.

Both passwords are the same, yes. And the .jks file is definitely there in the path that I entered (no spaces or anything there either).

btw, when I close the editor, the process OpenJDK Platform Binary keeps running hogging a ton of memory, and it keeps some files locked until I kill it from the Task Manager. Not sure if this is useful to know!

[@Laura Hunt]

@Laura Hunt, I will investigate, it may be something like special characters on path, spaces on a folder name or something else not related. I will try to reproduce here and see if I can figure it out.

There are no special characters or spaces in the path or anything of the sort, so it's likely that I've done something wrong at some point, given that it works for Mehrdad and Joseph. If you can figure it out or provide detailed instructions as to how to create a keystore that would be great, but if not, no worries. At least Mehrdad has confirmed that it works correctly, and I'm sure somebody else will step in to test it too

With the new build I'm not getting the reported errors anymore, but:

> Task :app:validateSigningRelease FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:validateSigningRelease'.
> Keystore file 'C:\Users\xxxxx\Documents\AGS Projects\ioawn4t - Android\Compiled\Android\mygame\app\Γ?¬C:\Users\xxxxx\keystore.jks' not found for signing config 'release'.

I guess this error is on my side, but I generated my key through Android Studio itself so I have no idea what might have gone wrong (Build->Generate APK->Create new->Filled everything out->Selected 'release' as build variant.)

I installed everything though Android Studio, the latest version 2021.1.1 Patch 1. The path is correct, C:\Program Files\Android\Android Studio\jre.

Unfortunately, this did not work for me. First I got the following error:



And then on subsequent tries, this one:



This is a short extract (it was much longer) of the error message that can't be seen in the screenshot (with my Windows username redacted):

symbol:   variable key_ctrlx
  location: class id
C:\Users\xxxxx\Documents\AGS Projects\ioawn4t - Android\Compiled\Android\library\runtime\src\main\java\uk\co\adventuregamestudio\runtime\AGSRuntimeActivity.java:238: error: cannot find symbol
        } else if(id == R.id.exitgame) {
                            ^
  symbol:   variable exitgame
  location: class id
C:\Users\xxxxx\Documents\AGS Projects\ioawn4t - Android\Compiled\Android\library\runtime\src\main\java\uk\co\adventuregamestudio\runtime\AGSRuntimeActivity.java:240: error: cannot find symbol
        } else if(id == R.id.toggle_keyboard) {
                            ^
  symbol:   variable toggle_keyboard
  location: class id
C:\Users\xxxxx\Documents\AGS Projects\ioawn4t - Android\Compiled\Android\library\runtime\src\main\java\uk\co\adventuregamestudio\runtime\AGSRuntimeActivity.java:251: error: cannot find symbol
        return R.menu.default_ingame;
                ^
  symbol:   variable menu
  location: class R
Note: Some input files use or override a deprecated API.
Note: Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.

I'm not sure if this is because I was using a game with script compatibility level set to 3.4.1, but right now I don't have a game compiled with 3.6.0 to test.

Also, an interesting side effect was that in the compiled Windows version, frame-linked sounds were not playing at all. I don't know what this has to do with the changes introduced for the Android build, but I can confirm that when I compiled and ran my game with the "vanilla" AGS 3.6.0.17 Alpha 18 build, those sounds played correctly.

Also, if I do a Say at the same time as a SayBackground is being displayed, it disappears...is there any way to avoid that?

Code: ags

game.bgspeech_stay_on_display = 1

I'll try to test this today and report my findings. I remember however that back when I tried out the Android wrapper for AGS 3.5.0, right clicks didn't work and I wasn't able to bring up the phone keyboard either for a section of the game in which you have to type some numbers, but I assume these issues have been dealt with in the meantime?

Updated to Alpha 17
(use download links in the first post)

- Added Character.IdleAnimationDelay property to let setup idle view's animation speed.
- Added Cursor.AnimationDelay property to let setup cursor's animation speed.
- Rooms created from a Blank template will now have default background of a game's resolution.
- Editor no longer prevents exporting string arguments from Get/SetTextProperty calls to TRS file.
- Fixed Custom properties' default values were not exported to translation.

Yesss I already said this on Discord, but thanks again for these fixes/additions!

I have a very tiny additional suggestion to make. In the header of the .tra file, there are some lines with instructions as to how to use the various parameters:

Code: ags

// The normal font to use - DEFAULT or font number
//#NormalFont=DEFAULT
// The speech font to use - DEFAULT or font number
//#SpeechFont=DEFAULT
// Text direction - DEFAULT, LEFT or RIGHT
//#TextDirection=DEFAULT
// Text encoding hint
//#Encoding=UTF-8

However, "Text encoding hint" doesn't have any instructions, so new users won't know which options can be used here (I myself sometimes forget if I should write ASCII or ANSI there). In order to make it more user friendly, could it be amended to something like this?

Code: ags

// Text encoding hint - UTF-8 or ASCII
//#Encoding=UTF-8

[EDIT:]

Maybe something like:

Code: ags

Character* birdscarers[20]; //or whatever the number of characters that can interact with birds ends up being

birdscarers[0] = cHector;
birdscarers[1] = cPedro;
birdscarers[2] = cMaria;
//etc etc etc

And then you would iterate over this array in your function, something like:

Code: ags

for (int i = 0; i<20; i++) {
    if (birdscarers[i].x >= cBird.x - 20 && birdscarers[i].x <= cBird.x + 20) { //HERE GOES THE ANIMATION CODE AND WHATNOT } 
}

I guess there could be issues if several characters start interfering with one another, but this could be a start. (Maybe create a state bool like "arebirdsflying" and prevent the function from triggering if it's true.)


EDIT:

Another way to do this could be with custom properties: simply create a custom boolean property for characters called "scaresbirds" for example, give it a default value of false, and set it to true only for the characters that you want to be able to interact with birds. Then the code would look like this:

Code: ags

for (int i = 0; i < Game.CharacterCount; i++) {
    if (character[i].x >= cBird.x - 20 && character[i].x <= cBird.x + 20 && character[i].GetProperty("scaresbirds") == true) { //HERE GOES THE ANIMATION CODE AND WHATNOT } 
}

[at all]

It also might be that the new "import ttf" dialog is also wrong, and should be designed differently. As an option it may be reversed to its old looks if it was more correct.

It could be an option, yes. So far, the "Import at font's point size" option hasn't done anything for me in most cases. How does AGS calculate the font's point size anyway, given that, as you said above, a true vector font doesn't really have a specific/default point size?

I think there may be a misunderstanding too. "Import at font's point size" also uses the number field, it tries to import the font at the typed size. But it uses "point" term incorrectly, as it seems. So the correct title would be "Import at this font's size".
The difference between two these options is that the first option imports at the size given by user, and the second searches for the font size that results in particular full font height (ascender + descender).
I may either remove the second option if it's not useful, or reorganize fields to make it more clear that both options use the number field.

Oh. Oh! Yeah, that wasn't clear to me at all, I thought only the second option used the number field.

But at least this confirms that AGS is calculating the total font height correctly as 14 (when the "resize ascender" option is active).

Erm, this particular option is a backward compatibility feature, and is meant mostly for fonts which made specifically for AGS in the past. Because ascender is resized to match the demanded font size, this option may result in font glyphs being drawn lower, adding vertical space above the letters.

The problem with 3.6.0 is that it still uses unmodified templates from 3.5.*, and therefore when you create your games all the properties are adjusted for importing these older projects.
We need to update the templates to have the recommended settings for 3.6.0, with "resize ascender" off, and other changes.

Yes, I had the impression that "resize ascender" was the new option and "do nothing" was the backwards-compatible one. All clear now.

[designed]

I'm not certain if I understand this. AFAIK the TTF is not supposed to have a fixed pixel size itself, its pixel size depends on the point size it's used at, as well as some characteristics.
In the description it sais "font is designed to be displayed at 11px and multiples thereof", but afaik that does not mean that "the font is 11px".

Right, but pixel fonts like this one are not "real" true type fonts; rather they are more like bitmap fonts saved as ttf for convenience and for wider compatibilty than a strict bitmap font format. But they are only meant to be rendered at very specific sizes (i.e., the "native" size the characters/glyphs were designed at, and integer multipliers of that, just like any pixel art in general).

Where may I see the information about point size 8 corresponding to 11px?

Here, for example: https://simplecss.eu/pxtoems.html

It also might be that the new "import ttf" dialog is also wrong, and should be designed differently. As an option it may be reversed to its old looks if it was more correct.

It could be an option, yes. So far, the "Import at font's point size" option hasn't done anything for me in most cases. How does AGS calculate the font's point size anyway, given that, as you said above, a true vector font doesn't really have a specific/default point size?

UPDATE 2: Running under debugger, i can see that when the font is imported with the size "11", its data sais "size 11x11". However the font rendering library calculates final size by summing "ascender + descender", which results in a higher height (13). AGS uses this reported number to show as "Font Height".
What puzzles me further is that under the same circumstances the actual size of letters on screen (tested by screenshot) could be 14px (capital letters).
Perhaps, 11x11 is some kind of a control size, not directly related to particular letter(s).

Yes, I found that confusing too. I'm assuming that 11x11 is simply saying that every character by itself fits in a 11x11 cell, but of course, this is not the same as the total font height when we take the tallest characters + descenders into account. But at least this confirms that AGS is calculating the total font height correctly as 14 (when the "resize ascender" option is active). This is making me think that maybe AGS is indeed doing things correctly, and it's the font designers who are failing to account for the real total height of their fonts by reporting only the "cell size".

Please check the value of "TTF font adjustment" property?

In my example above, it's set to "Resize ascender to the nominal font height". If I switch it to "Do nothing", the Font Height field changes to 13.

That's the only thing that changes; the point size field still displays "11 pt".