CrafterCMS (Online AGI tools)

[russdanner]

There is a ton of helpful information in the Help file that should show you how to do all the things you need to finish adding all your resources and getting things running. And you can also always contact me, either here in the forum, or by PM, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have - either about how to use WinAGI to do what you want, or generic AGI related questions.

So far I am only really running into one issue:
pic.ControlRoom and pic.OuterBay PICTURES are so large that I run out of memory with AGI.EXE in DOS BOX.  These work fine in AGILE.  Is there any way to tell DOSBOX/AGI.EXE to give me more memory? These are not any bigger than SpaceQuest 2 PICTURE files so I am kind of surprised -- but I would like to be able to run in DOSBOX for all this effort.  Any ideas? 

[Collector]

Remember that DOSBox already gives you all or at least nearly all of the 640KB base memory, more than any real machine. Any memory issue loading resources would be more likely internal to AGI, but I would imagine that Andrew could say better than I.

[russdanner]

Remember that DOSBox already gives you all or at least nearly all of the 640KB base memory, more than any real machine. Any memory issue loading resources would be more likely internal to AGI, but I would imagine that Andrew could say better than I.

I assumed the same. I tried loading that room right away without any other resources without much luck just to make sure it's not a slow leak. I'll go back and actually look at the asset in the vol file in a bit but for the moment I am have it on hold while I port the rest of the game.

[doomlazer]

You've got 30 Kb of 0x00s at the end of your pic.outerBay file for some reason. You can probably remove the empty data with a hex editor and the pics will work fine.

Edit: 30 KB, not Kb

[AGKorson]

Yeah, 30kb of extraneous data would probably be enough to overwhelm available memory in MSDOS AGI.

The memory model for AGI is very simplistic- a 64kByte block is allocated for the game (not counting the picture buffers- they are located in a separate segment), but the agidata.ovl file occupies the first ~8K, leaving only ~56K for actual game data. The room.0 portion will typically use another 7 - 10K depending on the size of your game. Each room also needs some memory to handle displaying objects on screen. So best case scenario is around 45K or so for resources in each room. The WinAGI help file includes a detailed discussion on memory management if you want to learn more.

There is no way to adjust available memory in AGI. You get what you get. (OK, there IS one way, by using the AGI Power Pack, but that's a hack, not a built-in capability of AGI. And it's an entirely separate topic.)

If you need to know how much space a resource takes up in your game, it's displayed on the property pane beneath the resource tree. Select the resource you are interested in and the 'Size' property will give you that info. Most of your pics have sizes that seemed too big to me given the displayed output - I checked, and every single one of them has the extra bloat. You may need to check your save function to see why your pics are getting extra data appended.

You have shown me a minor bugfix that I need to make sure gets added to the next version. WinAGI should detect cases where unused data exists in resources and provide a warning to the user. And also include a way to fix the problem. In the current version, you will need to export the picture resource to a file, use a hex editor to remove the extra data, then re-import them.

[russdanner]

Thanks guys!

That last part about exporting, fixing outside, and reimporting is what I needed! 

I'll start with the ones I MUST do and then worry about the others (given that I just got done porting a ton of rooms into the game, and I'm crunch'n.) I never noticed the issue when I built these binaries from the JSON commands -- and I only worried about problems that presented themselves. Bringing the game into the "real" world definitely shows where the compiler and engine I worked on differed from the spec.

[lance.ewing]

@russdanner, have you played through version 0.7 of LTEC, i.e. the one you sent me?

If you find any issues, let me know and I can upload a new version of the ZIP for you.

I did try just now and couldn't seem to get out of the first SQ scene. It looks like I've swept the whole deck, the message has appeared from my watch, I've read through that, but I don't seem to be able to walk out of that room to the right. I'll try again this evening but just wanted to check with you if everything is okay in that room.

[lance.ewing]

I think the issue is the following line:

Code: [Select]

if (posn(ego, 145, 135, 160, 160))

I can't seem to get any closer than X = 144. Oh... is it because I'm holding the broom?  

Yeah, that was it. I didn't need to do that in the other version, so didn't realise that that was part of the puzzle.

[lance.ewing]

I have just finished a full play through of Let Them Eat Cake running in AGILE, with 37/40 points.