Well, anyone who has talked to me knows I *hate* v2k. Don't get me wrong - the advantages are great. But the resurgence of old bugs and the persistence of new ones turned me off immediately. Sounds played at half speed, read/write vars never worked, and the engine didn't seem as stable. So let me be the first to thank/congratulate speed bump on v2.6, because I think verge is finally heading to where it should be. Of course it needs a bit more tweaking but it's almost there. These are some points I wanted to bring up:

Read/Write Vars- not sure if it works exactly yet but at least it doesn't crash the program!

music_volume- trying to set this variable kept crashing verge, maybe because there was no music playing? Either way, the log just ended with no explanation.

crashing message- where did these go? with all the crashing and no explantion why, it makes things kind of hard to troubleshoot.

line reading bug- i know that this has to be the easiest bug to fix! Why do we need to start text/dat files with a blank line at the beginning just to get the pointer right? It is ridiculous that this bug lasted throughout all the versions of v2k.

speed- this plays *fast*. My textboxes scale in and out when people talk and in v2.6 I can't even see them scale at all! Everything seems to be moving way too fast and I was wondering if the timing was perfected yet. I hope it can work the same speed no matter what machine you have.

render flashing- whenever there is a render or change to the screen the entire screen seems to flash. this is in 256 color mode too. Not sure exactly what causes this yet.

serious crashing- quite a few times when v2.6 crashes i need to hard reset my computer, one time a soft reset worked. Is there a way for windows to not be as affected by the engine or not? I have win98.

key unpresses- probably has something to do with the super fast speed of the timer, but i can hit enter and 20 textboxes will fly by at one key press. If a char moves or something otherwise pauses the engine, then the key will unpress normally. Maybe I need to stick a tiny wait() at the end of my textbox function, but I don't think I should need to.

I don't quite have all the crashing hammered out yet, and still have yet to successfully save/load, but I'm very optimistic about this engine. Thanks for all the work put into it.

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Thanks man; it's cool to see you're already on top of most of the problems. As far as Read/WriteVars, in the log it saves/loads fine, but I can't get into my save/load menu without crashing so I don't know yet if the info being saved/loaded is useful or not. But it appears fine.

I was under the impression that the safemode thing was only for sound, and to be used if you were having trouble with sound. Is sound_device not to be used in windows at all, or only if I use safe_mode. Is this the only change to user.cfg?

I know it sounds like I'm making a mistake, but if I set music_volume=20; in my autoexec() without playing music first, the proggy crashes. It will run fine if I either playmusic() first or comment out the set to music_volume.

Keep up the good work man. It looks like Diver Down will be in windows with hicolor after all!

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Aside from sound_mode, and rewriting my delay, v2.6 has been nothing but gravy, to me.

I think fseekline() works, but now (properly imho) considers the first line to be line 0.

and even my non-beefy (not even tofu-y: 1 meg) vid card let's me run in a window (with glorious sound), even while online with IE5, Outlook Express, and PSP5 running. (screen shot: http://acmefiles.com/images/v26screen.gif)

And I never imagined how much music would effect the overall presentation...

And I think many of your crashes may be caused by long running functions without updatecontrols() in them. I had a few minor issues with jerky animations and the like, but with updatecontrols() in any function that runs for more than a tick or two, it runs smoother than any previous version. I'm actually able to time our intro to the music being played to within a few ticks.

Oh, and I believe we still need dos4gw at least for vcc and maped.

Hope you stomp all those bugs, v2.6 is better than cheesecake!

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-Pontifex
"How many rocks are there, in the whole world?"

...its made to compile v2k+j. Sorry, but IMHO thats better [mostly of course because my game compiles under v2k+j, and work with slight modifications for v2.6]

-FireMoth

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You say America is the home of the free. No man is free if he restricts others. You say America is the home of the brave. When was the last war we fought considered bravery? You say everything is free in America yet you let companies over-advertise till t