Regular readers (bless you both) will know that the between-game code has been a huge headache over the past couple of years. For the past few days I’ve been getting feedback from the new games, and one issue has bothered me a lot: sometimes the between game code doesn’t always work for some people. It always works perfectly for me – I haven’t been able to duplicate any of the bug reports, and for most people the game works fine all the time.
The reported problems are erratic – e.g. the between game code will work perfectly ten times then break on the eleventh, or not work once then work perfectly forever. It might be something to do with how Windows accesses files and shortcuts? One thing is certain: it will take a long time to trace the problem.
I’m working almost blind here: I’m not a Windows expert, I can’t reproduce the bugs, and they involve RunAGSGame, a feature which has never been used in this way before. So it seems highly likely that problems like this will sometimes appear in the future. So I’m considering a radical solution: to cut the Gordian knot.
I’m looking at the possibility of combining all the games into one single giant file. Thus ending all between games problems forever.
This may not be possible. It would mean creating a game that, eventually, will be 5-10 gigabytes in size, saved games would be 10 megabytes each, and a lot of other stuff would need to be rethought. I’ll explore the possibilities tonight.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Caius // Jul 15, 2010 at 2:59 pm
From my perspective as an engineer, that sounds like a terrible idea. It will make releasing new games (that “plug in” to the existing game) nearly impossible in the future. It may also destroy your pricing model, and it will certainly make the game a lot slower to run. Lastly, remember that a 32-bit machine can never run a program that is more than 2-3 GB in size.
IMO, you’re much better off improving the “between-games engine” that you’ve built on top of AGS.
2 Goldenrod111 // Jul 15, 2010 at 3:02 pm
I’m not sure how it would work in AGS, but I’m doing some similar area addition with a different program. Admittedly, VERGE uses plain-text files instead of AGS’s customized method, but, if the file handling is similar, there should be some way to insert the new books into the game folder and have the program detect and add them to the database. I wouldn’t recommend switching Enter the Story to VERGE, though. The rest of the engine is focused on tile-based games (e.g. the 2d Legend of Zelda games).
3 Alice // Jul 16, 2010 at 3:38 am
Totally unrelated but LOL @ your ’2 regular readers’ – I’m sure you have more than that
4 Alex // Jul 16, 2010 at 8:04 am
Admittedly, I haven’t gotten a chance to try the newest between-game code, but I have to agree with Caius that this doesn’t seem like a good idea:
Imagine you have 20 stories released, and a new customer comes along. What if he just wants to buy three of the stories? Does he have to buy every story at once because it’s all one gigantic file?
And what about people who have already bought the game? When a new story is released, do they have to download another gigantic file that includes all the stories they already owned, instead of what they’d do now, which is to just download the newest story?
When I was testing Theogeny, I didn’t have any problems with the between game codes. So while I haven’t tested it yet since ATOTC was released, I’m of the opinion that it’s probably not worth changing the entire structure of the game.
5 Alex // Jul 16, 2010 at 8:09 am
Also, here’s an alternative: instead of literally walking between stories (thus making the computer switch what game it’s playing mid-play), you could have an option to return to the bookshelf with the click of a button (‘s’ for shelf or whatever) and choose a different story to play. Every time you do that, the computer automatically saves the progress you made in the story you were just playing, and picks up where you left off on whatever story you choose after. That would eliminate most of the between-game code that may or may not be buggy.
It would also be more convenient, because it would mean you don’t have to walk around for ages trying to find that one room that lets you go to a particular story. I seem to recall that your Fairy Tales story is accessed through Limbo in Dante – imagine if you wanted to go there from ATOTC: you’d have to switch to Les Mis somewhere in Paris, go to the forest, which would switch you over to the Dante game, and then you’d have to play Dante until you get into Limbo so that you can switch to Fairy Tales. Eek!
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