Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - obscurenforeign

Pages: [1] 2
1
OK, thx.
I can tell from your video that WinAGI is able to open the WORDS.TOK file, because it shows the word and group counts in the properties window. I think there's a problem with the words editor form- maybe a control on it that is not compatible with Windows XP or a property being set incorrectly. But why it would do that in XP but not any other Windows versions, I don't know.

I might have access to a Windows XP machine. I'll try to do some testing to see if I can figure this out.

Windows XP actually did complain about the WinAGI installer making changes to my system for my... "security." It appeared the installer wasn't able to register ole controls. Although it seemed to work otherwise, what you said suggests to me this could be related?

After about a month of Windows 9x and emulation and other messing around... well I don't know if this will be any useful information to you but here goes.

I installed Windows 95 within Dosbox-X on a Raspberry Pi (ARM64) system. The emulation speed wasn't the most impressive, no dynamic recompiler it turns out, but it was nearly at the speed of a 486-66. I installed the Windows Installer service and the Visual Basic 6 runtime and... WinAGI 2.1.16 wouldn't install. In fact I tested multiple versions and 1.1.22 was the newest version that seems to install on any 9x system. Note that the latest version of Windows Installer available for 9x is 2.0... though, I don't know if you intend WinAGI to presently run on 9x anyway. 1.1.22 crashed when I ran it.

Since I had a real system set up with Windows Me (yes, Me) on it, I decided to play around with it a little. I installed VB6, (turns out Me already includes Windows Installer) and... it ran, (even the words.tok editor worked! :D) although it crashed upon exit. (From what I can tell, WinAGI also stays running after this and takes a few Windows components with it... this prevents from Windows from shutting down properly, and Scandisk will complain about erroneous FAT entries for temporary files.)

Since I had it (well, an old version) running on a real Windows Me system, next I wanted to know if the crashing was a flaw in Windows 95 or Dosbox. I installed Windows 95 in PCem (on my x64 desktop) and... WinAGI ran just the same way as on my real Windows Me system. So 1.1.22 at least runs on 9x, though with a crashing bug... and it's not as if using such an old version is ideal anyway. WinAGI not working in Dosbox-X must be a bug with its CPU interpreter. I also tried 2.1.16 with the files manually copied into the PCem Windows 95 install, but it just beeped at me when I tried to run it. Haven't tried that on ME yet... I'm not expecting improved results.

I'm not sure by what other means WinAGI would be usable, especially on an ARM system. More accurate emulators such as PCem will probably run even slower on such a system, much too slow to run Windows, and I still haven't gotten it to work in Wine. (Even tried installing IE6.) It appears that AGS will work but... well...

I hardly have to do things this way... but wouldn't it be cool if I did?

I did get Qt AGI Studio to run on Raspberry Pi... in Wine. Yes. Although Linux builds are available, they fail to run or compile due to missing Qt 3 and 4 libraries. The last update in 2012, (before being revived by cromer) it switched to being Qt4... with Qt3 compatibility modules. 10 years later, and now Qt4 is deprecated, and unavailable in Debian Bullseye's repos! (Might work in Buster?) That sure doesn't motivate me to write software against Qt! (But, Qt AGI Studio isn't what we're here for anyway...)

2
Sorry about disappearing for a few weeks.

  • Does it do this for all games, or just this one? Does it have this problem for existing games (i.e. a Sierra game that you import) or just games you create?
I just tried importing Leisure Suit Larry, same behaviour.

  • It looks like you created a sample game from the template. Did you do anything else to the game after creating it?
  • Did this behavior start immediately after creating the game, or did you close it, re-open it and then it started doing this?
  • Can you open the template game and edit the template's WORDS.TOK file?
In the video I made a new template game expressly to be able to show the bug. I did first encounter the bug in the sort-of game I was working on though.
  • If you close your game, and open the WORDS.TOK file individually (choose 'Resource|Open Resource|WORDS.TOK File' on main menu), does it open?
I think that was how I got WinAGI to properly crash before.
  • As a last ditch effort, have you tried uninstalling and then re-installing WinAGI?
  • To make sure I'm looking at the right code, can you confirm what version of WinAGI you are using (click Help-About to see the version.)
After initially finding the bug, (while on an older version) I downloaded and installed WinAGI 2.1.16 in order to make sure it wasn't a bug that's already been fixed. (Especially one related to my previous bug, which had been my first assumption.)
AGKorson, I'm not sure you noticed, but that looks a lot like it's running in WinXP! Maybe that's part of the problem?

Good catch. I think that might actually be Windows running on Linux- obscurenforeign has been the primary user/tester of WinAGI on Linux.

@obscurenforeign, is that the case here?
Yes, I gave up trying to get WinAGI to run in Wine and instead have been using it in Windows XP in VMWare. (I'll attach a screenshot of the full window for your pleasure.) Don't worry, I can do worse. I'm currently looking at installing Windows 98 in Dosbox so I can do development on a Raspberry Pi. Watch out, I'm crazy.

3
Sorry about the vagueness there. The problem is so weird I must've thought I was going nuts.

It isn't technically crashing... though I did get it to properly crash too, I think by trying to import a words.tok file. But trying to open the editor simply isn't doing anything... but with the strange caveat that it makes WinAGI unable to close the currently open game, otherwise still seeming to function normally. In this state I can't close WinAGI either, I have to terminate it in task manager.

I recorded a video of the bug if that helps:


Edit: It looks like Gold Rush isn't explicitly restricted from loading. You get the warning in the image below, but it does launch in ScummVM 2.0.0 which is still commonly found in the GOG releases of Sierra games. With WinAGI, I put ScummVM v2.0.0 next to the .wag, change the preference to point to it and then the run button works great for testing with scummVM.

That is very weird, at one point ScummVM would refuse to recognize that version of GR, so I wonder why they would *add* the functionality back in.

4
Is anyone else having problems with the words editor crashing WinAGI? No, probably not...

Threepwang, I speak French if you want any help from me. (Probably not.)

I remember a long time ago I tried to translate an AGI game into French, but I gave up really quickly. Well... I wasn't as good at French or programming back then, but it felt obvious to me how much AGI wasn't made with other languages in mind.

I don't have a lot of experience with SCUMMVM. I think it has some built in file checks that prevent it from running modified Sierra games, unless you get them registered somehow. Or something like that. Hopefully someone with more knowledge of SCUMMVM will weigh in.

I believe ScummVM will consider any AGI game it doesn't recognize as an unknown fanmade game. However there are certain game hashes ScummVM also blocks entirely. (For example, the cracked version of Gold Rush.)

5
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.10
« on: February 02, 2022, 11:25:33 PM »
Can you check which version you are using? If it's 2.1.10, I believe there was a bug with the 'New from Template' function.
2.1.12 here. I made sure to download a fresh copy of WinAGI from the wiki. (Not that I really had a choice, it wasn't installed on my PC anymore.)

What's happening is that the game file name and resource directory name aren't being properly renamed after they get copied from the template. The template game filename is 'AGIV2.wag', and the template resource directory is named 'Resources'. Which matches what you are describing. The wag file does have your new resource directory name (src), but since the copied directory didn't get renamed to 'src', when you re-open the game, it will create a directory named 'src', and then decompile the logics. Your solution is a good way to fix the problem.

This was actually what clued me in. I decided to screw around (because what else will I do with hosed barely-developed source code?) with the data files in the project directory when I realized that the wag file is actually just plaintext. I saw "ResDir = src" and I figured I may as well try copying the lgc files over. (Afterwards I deleted the files in the src directory to see if they were even being accessed... and I made a backup of the project files after finding my comments gone, at least...)

I'm glad to know that I am not the only person to have had this happen! I ran into this less than a week ago and thought I'd done something crazy because all my comments and formatting throughout all my logics had seemed to disappear. I wasn't even able to retrieve them by opening my backups. All my comments/editing had just disappeared. I even uninstalled my old version of WinAGI and reinstalled the most current version to see if it would fix it, without success. I just started to process of trying to re-add comments and rename variables yesterday so I could read my code again. But, thanks to your post, I have been able to find that my comments aren't really gone into oblivion. I'm sure it was something I did that caused the issue, but I don't know what it was, so wouldn't be able to reproduce it (on purpose anyway). Thanks a million!
-klownstein
It's a really terrible feeling to lose a significant amount of work like that. I'm glad my post helped you! (Fortunately for me I barely wrote half a function before I had to close WinAGI, so my mood was mild annoyance...)

I'm just a bit amused that every time I try picking this program up again, I seem to find a brand new bug... no offense.

6
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.10
« on: February 02, 2022, 05:18:30 PM »
I'm back to... report another bug I found. Or I think this is a bug. Sorry.

This makes no sense, but if you save a project in WinAGI and then open it again later, all comments will disappear from the source code editor... it looks more like decompiled code. (In fact, I think it is decompiling the logics instead of using the saved source.) The comments thankfully don't disappear from the file on disk, I can still see them in notepad or if I open the .lgc files directly in WinAGI. It also complains about not being able to find AGI.wag. (It seems the file's being named AGIV2.wag instead.)

Attached is some before and after screenshots of a newly created template game and the game after closing WinAGI and opening it again.

E: Ok! I think I have a partial understanding of what's going on here... I hope this makes things easier for somebody.

WinAGI appears to be looking for the source code in a src directory but is instead saving it in a Resources directory. I'm not sure why though... Copying the lgc files from Resources to src makes them appear in the editor mostly-normally, but it'll think every logic needs to be recompiled.

7
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.5
« on: May 13, 2020, 10:46:27 PM »
Definitely very strange. All other file operations use lowercase file extensions, so maybe that is the problem. I could try using "words.tok" (lower case) as the filename.

I can build a small test app that tries opening/closing a file with different versions of the file name and extension (upper, lower, title) - if you could run that, it would least confirm or reject the hypothesis that it's related to file extension case. Let me know if you're interested in testing.

I am!

8
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.5
« on: May 11, 2020, 07:44:24 PM »
Looks like the object editor works. I was able to add a new item into the OBJECT file and it didn't give any errors. Changes I made persist.

I've done a full recompile many times (habit) and it's always been successful. Heck, I've already done a bit of scripting using WinAGI in Linux. My changes are appearing when I load the game in ScummVM or copy it into Dosbox.

What a strange bug. The only remote thing I can think of is if the VB runtime is "helpfully" converting your code to lowercase somewhere... wouldn't be the first time Microsoft did that, I seem to recall Windows 9x converting all uppercase file names to title case by default, so you'd see Words.tok instead of WORDS.TOK. Can't remember if it was just visual or if it'd change the case when you modify the file.

9
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.5
« on: May 10, 2020, 07:46:54 PM »
The way I transcribed the error reflects how it appeared. I've attached a screenshot of it now. (Should've done that to begin with.)

The first time this occurred, I had admittedly been testing my game (to what extent it can be described as such) in ScummVM. However by the time I posted my previous message I had already tried saving the file again under every possible scenario, including completely rebooting the OS. Surely, its file handles can't persist across reboots.

Your description of how WinAGI handles WORDS.TOK got me thinking, Linux handles files slightly differently vs. Windows, and that can sometimes cause bugs. ...The most well-known phenomenon would be files of different cases being treated as different, I seem to recall ScummVM's readme warning that under Linux some games (such as later Humongous games) would need to be renamed to all upper or lowercase in order to work... they had been shipping games with filenames like Pajama.HE0, PAJAMA.(a), and pajama.HE4... and every other combination imaginable... sometimes all at once. This is fine on Windows, but since on Linux PAJAMA and pajama look different, it wouldn't be able to find the files... I think that's been resolved by now and you can use the files as they are, though I'm not sure how.

In the case of WinAGI, I enabled debug output, and within the... over 500MB of text that gave me, I found a few references to a .tok capitalization:
Code: [Select]
0009:Call oleaut32.VarBstrCmp(01a91a64 L".tok",6265a600 L".agw",00000000,00030001) ret=6601b0e8
0009:Call ucrtbase.memcmp(01a91a64,6265a600,00000008) ret=6a35c9a0
0009:Ret  ucrtbase.memcmp() retval=00000001 ret=6a35c9a0
0009:Ret  oleaut32.VarBstrCmp() retval=00000002 ret=6601b0e8
0009:Call oleaut32.SysFreeString(01a9887c L".TOK") ret=660e60df
0009:Call ntdll.RtlSizeHeap(00110000,00000000,01a98878) ret=65232200
0009:Ret  ntdll.RtlSizeHeap() retval=00000010 ret=65232200
0009:Ret  oleaut32.SysFreeString() retval=00000000 ret=660e60df
0009:Call oleaut32.SysFreeString(01a91a64 L".tok") ret=660e60df
However, I couldn't find any corresponding references in the WinAGI source code.

My other thought is in how Linux handles file handle exclusivity... with a file open in a program, I can rename it or even delete it... can't do that on Windows. The program it was open in will act as if you hadn't done these things until you close the file, when the program will return to reality... after it's closed, the program will no longer be able to find the file if you try to reopen it. (And in the case of deleted files, the space the file occupies on the partition won't freed until the deleted file's been closed...) However, I can't think of how this would affect WinAGI.

10
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.5
« on: May 09, 2020, 01:46:48 PM »
Another burst of productivity from me, another wine bug I find. This time in the WORDS.TOK editor (which I guess I never played with before...)

Trying to save a modified WORDS.TOK gives this error:

Error during WORDS.TOK compilation:

55: File already open

Existing WORDS.TOK has not been modified.

Trying to export one, it just fails silently. No file is written.

I couldn't find a topic specifically for 1.2.7 but it's affected.

edit: saving as .agw seems to work but it appears to be a completely different format. Not sure if this opens up a workaround yet.

11
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.3 Is Available!!!
« on: July 19, 2019, 04:22:00 PM »
That did the trick!! I guess this proves after all that Wine's debugger actually is useful for Windows devs, provided that they care anyway. (And how can I even blame someone for not wanting to figure out why Wine's broken.)
On the subject of Winetricks, it's just an extra utility for Wine that you can install, and run it, mostly to install bits of Windows like that to make things work. Just choose what you want from an alphabetical list. (Funnily enough, it appears to acquire the dll by downloading Windows 2000 SP4 from some random FTP server, the Windows Installer installer from the HP website, and uses that to extract the DLL from the service pack...) Maybe I should make a tutorial how to do this. WinAGI works perfectly now! (It's funny actually, I've used Notepad++ in Wine too, but this problem never occurred to me. I think it's crashed on me before but I didn't think about why.)

For what you just wrote about MSFLXGRD.OCX, so this isn't part of Windows?

Collector, since WinAGI appears to work perfectly on Wine after tweaking, it looks like for this case at least, that this will hardly be a problem at all. That's the cool thing about Wine I tried to get at before, it preserves backwards compatibility this way, because Wine won't try to break things in future versions, and if they do you can always go back to an older one, there's ways to give a prefix its own binary I think. (Now distributions breaking Wine, on the other hand... cough Ubuntu)

Oh, and I've tried an older version of AT AGI Studio before, I found the editors a bit incomplete, and the template was full of bugs. Maybe this has all been fixed now, but with the old one I figured trying to use WinAGI was more worth it, even if I have to use a PC old enough to run the original games to do it.

12
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.3 Is Available!!!
« on: July 16, 2019, 03:56:50 PM »
Hello, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, registering the OCX didn't seem to help, logics still crash WinAGI, even the preview.

Wine, for whatever it's worth, lets you run Windows software on a Linux system. It's not perfect of course, but a lot works these days. I've been able to use a lot of software in it that'll never be able to be ported natively, and sometimes it can even run stuff that doesn't work on current versions of Windows. (Trying out old games in Wine is a fun way to waste a day...) The main problem is that things using some of Microsoft's more esoteric technologies often break due to the ways Microsoft does things.

I isolated the relevant console output in Wine, though it's probably incomprehensible to you anyway. (I didn't see a way to insert it into the post without making it annoying, so I'll try as an attachment.)

The splash screen, I really just see as cosmetic, but I guess I felt like mentioning it anyway. No worries there. It's probably more notable that I had no MIDI output. (But that's not specific to WinAGI, and I think there's a way to make that work too.)

13
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 1.2.3 Is Available!!!
« on: July 09, 2019, 12:07:30 AM »
Good to see this is still going! It's been a while for me.

These days I'm primarily using Linux (Ubuntu, might change in the future) and I've been trying to make as much work this way as possible. So, I decided to try getting WinAGI to work in Wine. (Well, again I guess, but more seriously this time.)

First off, when you run it you'll get an error about missing MSFLXGRD.OCX. To fix it, you'll need to install msflxgrd with winetricks. The VB6 runtime might be needed too, I had it installed prior because I thought it was the culprit.
Picture, View, and Sound editors all appear to work from a cursory look, I was able to compile and build the template game, and it ran fine in ScummVM. However,
Minor problem: the splash screen displayed black.
Much more major: trying to open the code editor crashes WinAGI. I guess something about it disagrees with Wine. Of course, trying to make an AGI game without being able to edit the logic would be rather difficult!
(I also couldn't get MIDI playback of Sounds to work, but I think there might be a way to make MIDI playback work in Wine.)

(I know, this probably isn't even worth figuring out WHY it doesn't work, let alone fixing.)

14
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI 1.2.2 BETA
« on: January 18, 2018, 01:07:04 AM »
Nah, you might have actually made my life easier here, because now I don't have to deal with the Windows installer system! Yeah, welcome to my world.

15
AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI is Back
« on: January 17, 2018, 10:51:54 PM »
That's funny. I was under the impression the template game was unique to WinAGI. It's interesting though, it doesn't suffer from the volume bug! (It's in the QT AGI Studio template game...)

And I swear those warnings don't appear on Windows XP. Might have to check what settings I've got.

Pages: [1] 2

SMF 2.0.19 | SMF © 2021, Simple Machines
Simple Audio Video Embedder

Page created in 0.04 seconds with 20 queries.