Snakes of Avalon - Inventory doesn't work

[Max833]

Game
Snakes of Avalon

Download
https://archive.org/details/snakes-of-avalon

Desktop
Windows 10 Pro, 22H2

AGS Version
AGS 3.20.1110 vs. AGS 3.6.3.1 (newest github build version)

Describe the bug

Place the mouse cursor at the bottom of the screen to open the inventory. You'll realize that you can't right-click on items (like the wallet) to look at them, nor can you link them to the mouse cursor and drag them with a left mouse click (see screenshot). It's working with the old version.

[ivan-mogilko]

This is broken by an old commit in v3.5.1 which fixed another bug: 68120e9
... although i cannot explain how is that related yet.

EDIT: actually, I'm unsure if that's the only change that affects this situation. This commit may be what caused it back in 3.5.1, but there's something else today.

[ivan-mogilko]

So, this is one of those frustrating cases where game authors have worked around a engine bug instead of requesting it to be fixed, and now the game relies on engine bug happening to work properly.

In the past Character.SayBackground was causing interface to get disabled, which was wrong, because this command was meant to display some speech lines on background while the player keeps playing the game. In this game there's a lot of background speech, therefore authors do not handle inventory clicks when the inventory is being clicked, but when the parent gui underneath receives a click. In short, inventory was constantly disabled by the SayBackground effect, and clicks went through onto the parent gui, triggering OnClick script.

After this bug was fixed, the clicks are now received by inventory window. But this game does not have proper script for that!

[Max833]

Yeah, I can understand that. Stuff like that is really annoying. Honestly, I don’t get why things like this don't get reported. It only takes a few minute, and at least it'd be visible as a ticket then. Reminds me of something I read in a forum a few months ago that AGS has never really liked alt-tabbing and that it can cause really weird bugs for years. I mean... that kind of issue can just be reported (even if it turns out to be an SDL bug in the end or something like that). I've never been able to reproduce that one myself, but I really don't get why people don't do this.

[ivan-mogilko]

I'm not sure how to simulate the old logic in the current engine, and whether it's even possible to do, because the original effect was a result of multiple factors, including the relative order of gui update which i probably cannot change now (i mentioned this in some other ticket a while ago).

For ScummVM this would be easier, since it's in their norm to add workarounds based on game's GUID. One could simply disable inventory window control in this particular game, and thus emulate the effect.
But I do not normally do that in this engine.

[Max833]

Okay, got it. Thanks for taking a look! I'll report this to ScummVM and open a ticket.
Edit: https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/16291

Should I close the ticket here than?

[ivan-mogilko]

Should I close the ticket here than?

No, I will keep this open for the time being.