Black Gate intro.

[drcode]

Last night, I checked in code contributed by Eric Wasylishen that implements lip-syncing when the Guardian speaks. It will probably show up in tomorrow's snapshot.

[marzo]

It is looking very good. Nice work, Eric!

[artaxerxes]

excellent work... it works perfectly!
/me wonders if the SI intro could be synchronised too.


Artaxerxes

[SB-X]

That's excellent! Thanks for checking the patch tracker from time to time. (or however it was contributed)

[Sleepy Emp]

Did this update include the 127+ character fix? It still doesn't seem to work.

Nice lipsync, by the way.

[drcode]

Actually, Eric emailed his changes to me directly, and I said I'd try them that night. But that was almost two months ago...

[Alun Bestor]

Ahh, this is brilliant! And a long time in coming

I did notice the intro still has some sound issues (no sound for the Guardian emerging, no sound for the static), and rendering problems in resolutions greater than 320x200, with graphics rendering outside the original screen area after the Guardian's speech. Perhaps the whole thing should be letterboxed to the original dimensions regardless of screensize?

[gruck]

Is Exult still missing the very unimportant moongate zoom in the intro?

[Alun Bestor]

Yup. I was actually thinking that one way to improve that moongate zoom over the original would be to render a fullscreen swirl effect behind and the painted background over the top of it, with the moongate itself masked out so that the swirl shows through. Then when the shot was zoomed in, it would appear as if the swirl were expanding to fill the whole screen, rather than getting pixellated.

[Incarnadine]

The lip sync is great, but I seem to be getting a bunch of crash bugs, so I'll just have to stick to the standard 1.2 release for now

[Garrett]

Try bypassing the intro by editing the config file (this is explained in the documentation, naturally).

If that solves the crash then that is indeed where the problem is, if it doesn't then there's something else in the CVS code that disagrees with your system. Either way, finding out exactly what is causing your problem would probably be very useful to the team.

[Alun Bestor]

You don't even need to edit the config file to do this. Just click on "Setup" on the Exult start screen and switch "Play introduction" to "Off".

[Incarnadine]

You misunderstand me. The crash bugs don't seem to have anything to do with the intro itself.

[wjp]

Could you submit detailed bug reports about these crash bugs to our bug tracker?

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_i ... tid=102335

[Dominus]

yes, please, only bug reports do actually inform us that there are problems and what they are. Many thanks for reporting them!

[drcode]

Please, do submit them. We may actually want to release a new official version someday:-) Plus, the recent snapshots have loads of bug fixes in them, and I'd like to see them get solid enough so most people can use them.

[octopusfluff]

Do you have any particular milestones you're looking for, before the next release?
I'm just curious as to what criteria you're using for that, since /so much/ has happened since the last release.

[drcode]

A big criteria is that the game doesn't crash:-) I suspect this has something to do with audio, and it seems to be a problem on Windows.

Otherwise, I think we have enough bug fixes to justify a 1.4 release, plus we have the mods, multiple-maps, and the new opening screen.

[SB-X]

Why not impose a "feature freeze" on yourselves? Then you'd make sure not to introduce any new bugs, and be encouraged to release the long awaited 1.4.x as soon as possible. (whatever happened to the Linux-style branching versions anyway?)

[octopusfluff]

Not even Linux uses Linux-style branching versions anymore.

[wjp]

I'd also name the next release 1.5, and not 1.4, to avoid confusion.