Congrats on the update! I've been extremely happy with PyWright so far.

I feel bad about posting a bug report now; I've had only sporadic Internet access this week. Nonetheless, here are some "infelicities" (bugs/issues) I've found, with my ideas for workarounds:

Bug: * character doesn't work; the asterisk has a line of white alongside it!
Temporary fix: Don't use that character.
Better fix: Probably has something to do with the sheet of characters, or the way that sheet's read?

Bug: ani-judge-gavel foreground is too large, and thus leaves an unsightly border if it's displayed and then something else is shown.
Temporary fix: Make sure to give it a name (fg ani-judge-gavel name=tempgavel) then delete it (delete name=tempgavel).
Better fix: Resizing the entire animation to 256 x 192 seemed to work for me.

Bug: defense_nt variable is not consistent enough to be useful when it's most needed - that is, when the folder name doesn't match the nametag. Particularly painful is the effect of emo on nametags:



Temporary workaround: Make sure every character who appears in court is given the correct folder name.
Better workaround: emo should not reset a character's nametag, in my opinion.

Infelicity: Unclear precedence for how files are used, especially when player-created character has same name as an existing one!
Temporary workaround: Current release fixes this issue for the court macro, thank goodness. It's probably best just to be very careful about this; the user-created folders seem to almost universally have precedence, but there may be issues if you have normal(combined), normal(talk), and normal(blink) coming from different folders.
Better fix: Warn casewriters about this, and tell them to try testing their games with and without the art downloads installed.

Bug: First character is often slow to display in text with changed delay. Irregularity results.

Example: "{delay 5}Hmm..." is likely to put the H on the screen for a jarringly longer period of time.

Temporary workaround: {wait manual} probably would help, but I'm not going to do that for every textbox where it applies!
Better fix: Don't apply the first-character-pause multiplier, whatever it is, on top of the delay multiplier.

Bug: Rapidly clicking through dialogue leads to weird pauses/unexpected message skips. Usually these resolve well... but...
Fix: Painstakingly rapid-clicking through a case and seeing where this happens, then trying to work out the cause. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

Infelicity: Rules for looping of talking sprites a bit unclear. What causes the sprite to snap back to the first frame? How can this be altered? Which frames loop in a (combined) sprite?
Fix: Clear documentation/tutorial

Infelicity: Court macro system works, but is not very flexible when it comes to background/character changes.
Fix: Warn editors in advance to use stacking, name assignment, and other tricks to make sure they don't ruin the court scene.

Infelicity: Moving between scripts seems to require a court restart, among other things, and may lose various bits of info. At the very least, flashing a black screen disrupts immersion in the game.
Fix: Have an option to "link" scripts together so they're loaded as if they were a single, continuous script?

Infelicity: c900 red is near-unreadable on most backgrounds, and this is the most obvious choice for a 'red' color. This plagued Turnabout Substitution.
Workaround: Editors should seriously consider using c911 or the more orangish c922.

Infelicity/bug: 2x scaling is not kind to text at all, due to the way scaling is handled. Reading it is marginally painful.
Workaround: Have two fonts preinstalled, and have the display default to the bolder one.

Infelicity: Looping music well is an arduous process.
Workaround: Editors put their noses to the grindstone and make a shared bank of intros and loops. I've already made loops for some of the JfA court music, like the trial intro, the lobby theme, and the slow examination. Audacity is a great free tool for this.

Infelicity: Music downloads seem to be low-fi GBA versions, not DS versions.
Workaround: Buy the soundtracks legally?

(crickets chirp)

Okay, okay, use a third-party source.

Infelicity: No random number generation for choosing failure messages.
Fix: Suggested command: set {varname} randint low high

Infelicity: Adding new statements to a testimony in midplay is nontrivial.
Fix: Suggested command: statement (etc etc) onflag={flagname}
Would cause the statement to only appear if a flag is set.

Infelicity: It's a pain in the neck to get double-quotes in dialogue; it may be possible to use start/end-quote characters by copy-pasting from a word processor?
Workaround: Use apostrophes instead.
Fix: Use {"} to print a quote

Infelicity: This (’) is not recognized, displays as a Mask deMasque star, and is the default apostrophe of Microsoft Word. This (') is recognized.
Workaround: Use find-and-replace on all scripts to make sure the unrecognized apostrophe never appears.
Fix: Both characters should probably map to apostrophe.

Infelicity: The default frame speed for character animations is too fast, even if it's good for other animations.
Workaround: Lots and lots of framedelay statements.
Fix: variable _default_portrait_frame_delay and possibly _default_fg_frame_delay.

Whew!

Thanks to Saluk, Ping, Brawldud, and everybody else who's done such great work!

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FerdieLance:

Brilliant, brilliant list. Never feel bad about posting bugs, I really had no idea on most of those. Being an engine developer is tough, because you really need to USE your engine, in order to know how to make it better; but you never have enough time to use it because you spend so much time working on the engine itself.

The workarounds are great too, that way people can keep programming without having to sit and wait for the next release.

I'll go about moving those into pywright.dawnsoft.org/bugs...
Ok, here they are: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/bugs/issue ... 20-%20bugs

OMGZ lol.

Some responses:
{c900}: Perhaps I should make some default colors so you can do {cred} for the most obvious one.
Looping music: Having as many of these available would be helpful to pwlib users as well
Linked scripts: at one point there was a way to do this (actually I think it might have been default behavior), I thought this could still be done but I just checked and I was wrong. Good find. The next release isn't far, and this is a scarily easy thing to add, so look for it soon.
Sprites: You guys will definitely like the sprite system in beta 11 much more. While still compatible with beta10 sprites, it has much easier ways to define exactly how things work and which files the frames come from. I'm loath to put more work into the beta10 sprite system when I already have something great just waiting for the rest of the engine to catch up! Some tutorials are definitely in order though.
Rapid clicking: I noticed this a few versions back, so I know about it, but don't really know the cause or a way to fix it. Fix: take your time clicking through dialog :)

Good finds all around. Thanks for the help FerdieLance!

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How do I get evidence ?
I see there's none in the ev folder.

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While it is up you can download them from here: http://www.court-records.net/Evidence.htm

I may put up an ev pack at some point in the near future. It's a little different than the other graphics though, for a few reasons:

1. You almost never need most of the icons, only a few
2. It is a bit easier to make your own original evidence icon than other kinds of graphics

So I felt that a pack wasn't really necessary. If you want it, I'll make it :)

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Ok. How do i change ev and profile name to my preference? And description?
I tried adding sfx but it doesn't say anything.

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From docs:

-----EVIDENCE DATA-----

Evidence used to have a special set of commands, and a confusing initialization
script to set up the database, but now it just uses variables for all of the evidence
fields. When a piece of evidence is added to the player's court record, it will be
added by some id value. All the variables related to the fields for evidence
are named based on this id. No fields are required, they will default to something.
If the evidence icon name matches the id (such as an evidence with id paper, and
an existing file art/ev/paper.png is found), that will be used as the icon.

setvar [id]_name [name]
Gives the evidence [id] a more descriptive name.
setvar [id]_desc [description]
Gives the evidence [id] a description.
setvar [id]_pic [image]
Gives the evidence [id] an image from the art/ev folder
setvar [id]_check [scriptname]
Tells what script to run if the item is checked.
setvar [id]_presentable true/false
Default is true. Set to false if you dont want the player to be able to
present this item

If you like, these can all be placed in a single script that is included at the
begining of intro.txt. See games/test/the_test for an example.
------------------------
Note that profile ids always end with a "$"

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What about the sfx? I cant hear it. I'm on full volume now.

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The white line on the asterisk annoyed me too. What I did was I opened the "p" file (the file with the fonts) with Photoshop, where I found the asterisk was close to the side of the box it was in. So I moved it into the centre. Worked just fine.

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Good find Cardiovore.

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Did you extract the library.zip? You weren't supposed to.

NOTE: During your PyWright experience it may be best to turn OFF "Hide file extensions for known file types" because we will refer to files as "PyWright.exe" and "PyWright.exe.log" and "script1.script.txt" or "Oops.ogg"

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Hide file extensions is one of the dumbest things they ever did on windows. It only causes confusion. I'll have to add that tip to the tutorial too :)

You'll also have to be more specific about what you mean when you say "sfx dont work". Which sound effects? Sound effects you added? Or just all sound effects in general? If they are effects you added, how are you playing them in the script?

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Ok. I read the doc.txt file. I can't understand how to add cross examinations. yeah. what's a Macro?
EDIT: I know what a macro is now but i cant put it into words.

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Have you downloaded the game "test"?
Then you should read the cross.script.txt in the games/test/the_test folder.

Man ... I cann´t download the version for windows

P.D:Sorry for my poor English and my pathetic knowledge of computers

1. What windows version do you have? I think it only works on XP or above...
2. At exactly what point are you stuck?

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jaydrick0620: At it's most basic level, a macro is a single command that runs a set of instructions. It is like a recipe in code for how to do something you might have to do often. If intro.txt is like the recipe for how to make a burrito, the macro could be a recipe for how to make the salsa that goes in the burrito. The burrito recipe (intro.txt or another script) just says "add salsa" (calls the macro {salsa}), but the salsa had to be made somehow too. (I work for a food website, so now all of my references are for food lol)

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No man, The download link doesn´t work, I can´t download. This is the problem...

Maybe is a problem of my internet

Maybe you shoud try downloading it with the updater?

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Maybe the links in the first post were just bad...

Should be fixed now :)

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OK. In examining script, How do i gat the region of the items examinable?
And how do i get music? I tried the updater but it doesn't work.
EDIT: (so many questions!) I made scripts for the Examine, present, talk scripts and how do i use move? I'm trying but it wont work! And how do i get the "move" script to go back where it left off in the intro.txt script? AND *Huff**puff**huff* *Reserve for later questions* Thanks for answering my previous questions, saluk!

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OK. In examining script, How do i gat the region of the items examinable?
> Not sure I understand the question, but to know the x, y, width and height corresponding to the region you want to be examinable, you can open the background with gimp, for instance.

And how do i get music? I tried the updater but it doesn't work.
> Normally, it should... Is it that you don't get the files, or that you can't get the music to play during the game?

EDIT: (so many questions!) I made scripts for the Examine, present, talk scripts and how do i use move? I'm trying but it wont work!
> Here's an example of a "move" script from my game:


And how do i get the "move" script to go back where it left off in the intro.txt script? AND *Huff**puff**huff* *Reserve for later questions*
> Once again, not sure I understood... when exactly do you want to go back to intro.txt? Is it that one of the places you can go to is the one in intro.txt?

---

More bugs/infelicities. Thanks again to everyone involved with PyWright!

Bug: Evidence/profiles in the CR, in their downscaled versions, look really pixelated and unattractive.
Workaround/Fix: I'm not sure; I think they used to look better - perhaps it had to do with OpenGL.

Bug:Using the resume command during cross-examinations now eliminates the back arrow!
Workaround: Ignore it for now.
Fix: Distinguish between "starting a cross-exam" and "resuming one" when it comes to displaying arrows.

Bug:Resume can cause a nasty bug when a press contains a goto statement - it jumps back to the label the goto indicated, not the cross-exam.
Workaround: Don't use goto in press routines.
Fix: Have resume specifically apply to cross-examinations.

Bug: Some titles are slightly cut off on the sides now - see the title "Checkmate and Turnabout" for an example.
Workaround: Use shorter titles, for now.
Fix: Display titles differently.

Infelicity: It's a bit repetitive using {sound blipfemale.ogg} for text when a hidden character's speaking in court.
Workaround: Perhaps there's a trick for this I'm missing, but it seems the blipsound is attached to sprites, not character names.
Fix: Option for attaching a blipsound to a name? Maybe I'm missing that.

Infelicity: Unclear how to fade to black, if that's possible
Workaround: Specialized animation? A character that's really a black screen, and can fade in?
Fix: fade {color} command.

[s]Bug: Under certain difficult-to-reproduce circumstances, in a mountain of spaghetti code, examine routines will jump to "none" no matter what region was selected. These same routines will work perfectly if copy-pasted into a script of their own.
Workaround: DON'T WRITE BAD CODE. (Bangs head against wall.)
Fix: Figure out what would cause examine to skip labels.

Bug: In addition to the above case... even in more straightforward scripts, examine sometimes always fails to recognize the region on the first click, yet recognizes it on the second.
Workaround: Ask the player to click twice? Devote an entire script to examining one scene?
Fix: I don't know; I tried setting _currentlabel to none to emulate the effect of clicking once...

The last bug is causing me a bit of gray hair...[/s] RESOLVED. Had to do with stacked backgrounds.

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Last edited by FerdieLance on Sun Aug 23, 2009 3:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hi again, I just downloaded the mac exe (I got a new laptop (OSX 10.5.7) so I have to reinstall pywright) and I can't find the updater.
pywright works fine otherwise except that there is no sound. I tried pressing escape and going to sound settings but it says "sound not initialized".

Lastly, this is the message I get when I try to install pywright using the source. I'm not sure I installed everything correctly though. The updater works fine.



Eh, sorry for all of this.

I solved the examine bug! I solved the examine bug!

Bug: Examine does not work in court scenes when the view is currently scrolled over anybody other than the Defense. Example of failed code:



This examine will always turn up 'none,' because the background used is not the crime photo, but the court background! The obvious fix, of course, would be to set the background to the photo without stacking it, but this is bad news, because it ruins the court scene and requires an obtrusive court restart.

Workaround: Always make sure to move to the defense view before an examine command if you're going to stack the picture on top of the background.

Fix: Better documentation of the examine command? My impression was that it read coordinates clicked on, not coordinates on the background.

---

Bug: Clicking quickly on the final statement of a 'press' routine, before 'resume' takes you back to cross-examine... can cause the cross-examination arrows to vanish, leaving only a 'normal' forward button.

Workaround: Take your time.

Fix: Solve the general "why does fast clicking cause issues" problem.

---

Equilibrate Concerto: In the mac .app, there is no updater application (each .app file added many megabytes extra). Instead, there is a special option on the games menu at the top that will take you to the updater. The sound probably has something to do with my mac not having sound, so I haven't gotten to test it yet.

The source version needs some depandancies to run, most importantly pygame, and PIL.


FerdieLance: You are delaying the next release. I hope your happy.
(Lol, if some of the problems go away you should be happy)

You are correct, the scaled images look bad because opengl left us. I really hope I can solve that display bug by the next ver.

I'll rexamine resuming, that's pretty critical.

To fix title display, change line 2245 in core/core.py to this (make sure to copy the spaces on the left as well):

The fix will of course be in the next version.

blipsounds: they are based on character names, but there is no user accessible file to alter which names belong to which sound. For the time being, feel free to edit core/blipsounds.txt and add the name to the proper section. This file will be able to be overwritten in the games folder at some point.

Fade to black is simply:


Stacked backgrounds can be dealt with a bit by telling examine which backgrounds you are working with. If you set "_examine_use" to the name of a background (bg x name=), then examine will use only that background and ignore the other ones. This might help in this case, but there are admittedly crazy amount of complexities with stacking stuff. It also has a bit to do with how the court scrolls.

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Oh men...I finally download , Now it remains to prove ;)

Thanks a lot for all the help, Saluk! I've gotten a working pre-beta of the first trial segment finished now!

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Bug: {tboff} does not work very well in cross-examination; the testimony sign still flashes very briefly before each statement.

Workaround:

1) Make a backup of core.py. Please don't skip this step.

2) Using a good text editor - Notepad++ will do - go into core.py and find the class testimony_blink

3) See this if statement?



Change it to this, taking great care not to add or remove spaces before the line. Whitespace matters in Python.



4) In your script of choice, you can now turn the testimony_blinker on with:



... and turn it off for cross-examinations with:



Of course, on the next update, this'll get nixed unless Saluk implements it. But hey, it works for now!

Fix: Put the _testimony_blinker variable into the next release?

Thank goodness for Saluk's relatively clear coding; this would've been impossible otherwise.

I do hope this change doesn't somehow destabilize the entire program? I kind of tinkered a little blindly there.

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I can't understand:
How do i add macros?

I couldn't understand what it said in the doc.txt.

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Nice, thanks for the fix FerdieLance! It's exactly how I would have (and now have) implemented this feature. I think when I made the tbon/tboff before it was before there were even variables.



Jaydrick: You can add macros anywhere. Here is where pywright searches for them, and in this order:
Every file in PyWright/core/macros/ that ends in a ".mcro" extension.
Every file in PyWright/games/your_game that is called macros.txt or ends in a ".mcro" extension.
Every file in PyWright/games/your_game/current_case that is called macros.txt or ends in a ".mcro" extension.
Ever macro you define in the current running script.

You "define" a macro by writing "macro mymacro" to START defining it, and "endmacro" to STOP defining it.
Here's another example, hope it helps.
[code="intro.txt"]
macro fumshoe
char gumshoe nametag=fumshoe
endmacro

{fumshoe}
"Hi. My name is fumshoe"
char pearl
"Fumshoe? Are you by any chance related to gumshoe?"
{fumshoe}
"Who the heck is gumshoe? I"m FUMSHOE I say. FUMSHOE!!!!"
[/code]
In this example script, a macro named "fumshoe" is created at the top of the script. Any time you write {fumshoe}, that line is going to be replaced by the line "char gumshoe nametag=fumshoe". This is useful for 2 reasons - it saves you typing the long line every time you want to use the gumshoe sprite with a different name; and if you decide later to change his name to crumshoe, you only have to change it in one place.

The most important part of making the macro is adding the lines "macro whatyouwanttocallit", adding the lines underneath that that is the set of instructions you want to be able to easily insert somewhere, and then adding the line "endmacro" underneath that.

You can think of the whole thing like telling pywright to copy and paste. {fumshoe} means, "copy the code in macro fumshoe, and paste it here".

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I've started working on a tutorial, but it may take a while.

Guess what, everybody, it's that time again! It's... bug report time!

Here's one SilentBobX discovered:

Bug: Under at least some circumstances, pressing enter to skip text causes displayed evidence (evidence displayed using the ev command) to disappear! Weirdly, clicking the skip button doesn't do this.

Here's a sample script with the bug. Put Phoenix's phone in the ev directory - or, really, use any piece of evidence and give it that name - and watch the vanishing act.



In hindsight, I should've used Trucy or someone else who could pull a more convincing vanishing act, but I think the point stands.

Workaround: Skip test with clicks, not enter.

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Do i put the
{fumshoe} within the intro.txt?
And i'm still not clear with this:
How do i get my move script to get back to where it left off in my intro.txt?

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You put the {fumshoe} wherever you want to run that macro. In intro.txt or any any scripts you launch from intro.txt. Wherever you need it.

Once you make a menu, it doesn't go back to where you were. For starters, it doesn't really make sense to do a "move" and then be in the same room. Although you can do that. Maybe I'm not understanding what you are trying to do correctly.

In your move script, you show the list of places to go, and then make a script for it to go to:

startroom.move.txt


Then you might have this for the other rooms:

startroom.script.txt


nextroom.script.txt


To sum up, menus can only go forward, not back, so you have to structure it in a way to go forward where you need it to go. Remember, you can show any background from any line of any script, so even if you are in a different spot (and not in intro.txt where you left off) if you show the same background and use the same characters the player will never know it is a different file. (Except for the ugly loading sign that flashes in and out and may be going away...)

Hope it helps. If you are still confused, send me your files, explain in human terms (rather than computer terms) exactly what you want to happen and I'll try and show you how to code it.

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Oh. Ok.
I still can't move!

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Has anyone figured out a fix for music to work for the OSX version yet?

Thanks

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What code ARE you using?

This is a more simplified version of 'Pings move code, this one is used in my game



The way it is set up, if you've already moved to Maya's office and read the dialogue, it will send you to the menu. If you haven't, it sends you to the dialogue.

If you want to repeat intro.txt at any given point, you would use the command
to do so. The intro is the first script ran in a game, it is advised you have many other scripts around like "crscene1.script.txt" or "ending.script.txt"



I don't know as I use XP, but saluk will keep you notified.

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Hi, kwando, could you send me your logfile.txt? (pm or spoiler tag)

The problem is, I don't have a proper OSX to test on, just a hacked one to run on my windows laptop - and I never got sound to work period. So it's not easy from my end to find out what is going on.

Also which music files are you trying to play? And what's the code to play them? It might not be an OSX thing at all. First, it is doubtful that any mp3 file will work. You have to use .ogg files. You can use a free tool like oggdrop (http://www.nouturn.com/oggdrop/) to convert them.

Also, be aware of the path to the music file. If you are playing music from the aj1 pack, to play the intro you need to put this command:

Note the path to the apollo justice files (aj1_s1) and the .ogg extension on the end (for music the extension is required).

Hope it helps.

--------------------
jaydrick, I'm sorry but without more information of what you are doing and how it is going wrong, I can't do much to help you. Maybe brawldud's example will help.

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Sorry, I have no idea what you are talking about .
This is just more for playing fan games with music...

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Which fangame? I know some of them used mp3. Hence, the music just wont work in OSX in any case. Has to be .ogg. If this is what's going on there is no quick way to fix it without converting all of the music tracks and changing all the code to point to the converted tracks.

And also there should be a logfile.txt in your PyWright directory. Send it to me.

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