Hi everyone! I purchased Adventure Maker back in 2012 and I had a lot of fun with it back then. I'm at a point now where I wanted to get into making things with it again. However, I've run into a huge issue that is halting any kind of progress. This is a pretty long post but I figured I should give you guys as much detail as possible.
When I first installed the software on my new machine a few days ago, everything seemed to wok fine. However, randomly a few hours into working with the software, all video suddenly was unable to play. In the fame editor, the hotspot where the video is supposed to be is just filled with solid black or white, while in the compiled project (installer .exe) the video will be "invisible". No sound plays either. Videos between frames ("when this is clicked play a video") don't work either. The video seemed to stop working around the time I got an error when testing it; I accidentally deleting the .ico for one of the inventory items, but the program didn't crash or anything so I can't imagine that had anything to do with it.
After being unable to play any movie of any kind, I decided to do a reinstall just in case something got corrupted. It still didn't work and hasn't worked since. Occasionally (in regards to the looping hotspot video) it will work in the frame editor once I've run "test frame" once and quit, but it will never work in the "test frame", "run project", or the compiled project.
I've tried the compiled project on a few other machines (both windows 10) and the video works. While this means that I can just use a different machine to use AM, I would like to A) figure out why this is happening since I don't want players to run into this problem, and B) this is my workstation PC where I do all the rendering, editing, etc. so I would prefer to do it on this machine. Also, the video didn't stop working on my machine until after hours of work, so I can't say for sure that those other computers would have still worked if I had just kept clicking the video again and again for hours on end.
It is a complete mystery to me what's going on. It's obviously something related to my PC, but I can't figure out what - here are my "findings" after a few days of researching and testing.
1. As I said, I've tried all different kinds of formats (avi, mpeg, wmv, and mp4 with the help of the windows media player plugin on this forum) as well as different resolutions and codecs (including mpeg2 and cinepak) and none work. I've also tried exporting it from different editing/exporting programs (pinnacle, da vinci resolve, any video converter) in case something weird was happening and it also didn't do anything.
2. I installed the Windows Media Player plugin and for a few minutes after install that worked, but suddenly it stopped working and acted just like the default video player did.
3. I read a post on here about some of the newer nVida garphics cards having issues with AM and videos (I have a 1080ti on this machine) and thought that might be it, but one of the other machines I tested it on (not one of my machines) had a 1060 and the videos seemed to work fine. I haven't disabled my driver like the poster on here did because I've had driver issues before on this machine and I don't want to risk messing something up, but since the 1060 plays it fine I don't think its that anyway.
4. AM/the finished project isn't freezing, as the program keeps acting like the video is playing normally (ex. if I have it set so that when I click a hotspot a 3 second video plays and then it jumps to a new frame, then after 3 seconds of nothing happening it will jump to the next frame).
5. I thought file size might have something to do with it, but I've tried extremely small video files and it doesn't help either.
After days of messing with this I have come up with nothing. Due to the nature of my project it is going to require a lot of video playback so if I can't fix this I'll have to figure out a different program, which would be disappointing since I really love Adventure Maker and it makes everything else so easy. I don't know what to do next, so I had a couple of questions for you guys:
1. Have you heard of/experienced anything like this? If so, how did you fix it?
2. Does anyone with a coding background know how AM handles its video playback? I'm thinking maybe whatever program/code it uses could just be different or corrupt on my machine (I use a lot of different media production programs so maybe a file type association is wrong or something). If I knew more about how it works maybe I could pinpoint the problem (although I doubt it as the WMPlayer plugin also doesn't work and it seems to handle things differently).
3. Are there any files left over after uninstalling AM that could be left over from the initial install? If so, maybe that is causing it, so is it possible to remove those files as well?
4. If Adventure maker ends up not working for me in the long run, does anyone know of any other similar programs? I've messed with Wintermute and Adventure Game Studio but they seem tailored to 3rd person adventure games and I'm not sure how easy it would be to do a 1st person game in one of those programs.
Thanks for reading all of this! If anyone can answer any of my questions that would be a big help! I love AM and really want to use it but I don't want to make a big project in it if I A) can't see what I'm doing and B) don't know what is causing it (thereby being unable to ensure it won't happen to players).