Scrolling Problems

I was putting together a cut scene today where the screen scrolls vertically downward to show an event, then returns up to the player character. For some reason, though, I couldn't get the scrolling back up part to work. I tried everything to no avail. However, when I sent the .ved to my co-designer, it worked perfectly for him.

I did some experimenting, and found out that when I unplugged my laptop (when I do so my system switches to a secondary, low performance gpu) the scroll happened no problem. I'm going to try this out on a different system or two, but it seems that certain things do not work properly on higher performance systems.

We've run into problems with system speed before. It affects the speed of which objects move when scripted to do so, as well as inventory scrolling speed.

Are these known problems? Anything I can do to fix this? Any kind of help would be much appreciated.

I assume that your game has a resolution of 1920 x 1080.
This screen such as a dimension of 1920 x 2160. Right?

Resolution is 1366x768. The room is roughly twice the width and twice the height.

Did some more experimenting.

Scrolling seems to lock whenever the screen reaches the edge of the room. When it locks, the screen can still be scrolled along the other axis, but cannot move along the one it had original moved. That is, if the screen scrolled horizontally and reached the right edge of the map, it then can only scroll vertically. If the screen scrolled vertically all the way to the bottom edge of a room, it then can only scroll horizontally. When the screen hits a corner (both horizontal and vertical edges of the room) it cannot be scrolled at all. I've tried all commands possible to free the camera from this locked state (scroll to position, scroll to object, center screen on character, scroll when mouse reaches the screen edge.) Nothing works.

All this seems to be tied to the currently running FPS, as observed using Fraps.

The frame rate (that is, the amount of frames pushed by the video card, not to be confused with a monitor's refresh rate) seems to be dictated by the v-sync settings on display adapter control panels.

When using the v-sync settings "default on," "default off," or "application controlled," Visionaire caps the framerate at 60. Scrolling works fine, and there are no additional problems.



When using the v-sync settings "force off" or "force on," the framerate seems to have no cap at all, apparently going as high as the display hardware allows.



This causes the scrolling lock as described above. In addition, it creates problems when running scripts. We had scripts to move objects, and one to control hover-over inventory scrolling. With the uncapped framerate, the objects moved noticeably faster than intended, and the inventory scrolling was so fast that it made selecting some items difficult or impossible. My codesigner was able to make a script to solve those last two problems, but the scrolling lock problem still remains unsolved.

I also noticed that ALT-TABing out of the game and back unlocks the camera.

I could simply tell players to change their v-sync settings if they experience scrolling problems, but many people detest v-sync and may be turned off by such a requirement. Also, v-sync creates a fairly noticeable amount of mouse lag.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas about this issue or knows of a workaround. I suppose I could always just remove scrolling from the game all together, but the parallax effect really does a lot to make the location feel alive and I'd rather not lose out on that.

Thanks in advance.

Sorry, messed up on the images. Here they are:

Workaround suggestion:
If the problem is definately "reaching the edge" of a scene couldn't you just ad a vertical and horizontal line of one pixel around your background with a new size of 1368x770? Then using the scroll to-action should allow you to prevent the camera from reaching the edge at any time.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, that might work in certain situations. Unfortunately, this won't work for centering the camera on the character. :\

I did discover a way to solve the problem yesterday, though. Setting the scroll speed to above 200 prevents the locking; it was at 150 before. No idea why 200 is the magic number, but setting the scroll for anything under that causes problems.