Putting a game to CD-ROM

[xenogia]

Is it possible to put an AGS developed game on to a CD-ROM.  Also is it possible to put the game onto several CD's with an option of like inserting Disk 2. :

[Scavenger]

Yes, yes. It is possible to put in on CD-ROM. You just need a CD burner or something. Examples of CD-AGS:
Adventures of Fatman

Which I would buy if it weren't for my lack of money and credit card details .

But, at the moment, it is extremely hard to do something like you said. I think, you'd have to make two different AGS games, make one not able to run w/o the save file at the right place, or maybe partition the game into:
AGSGame.001
AGSGame.002
And put them on different CDs. But that would mean you'd have to know where each bit ends and begins, and an AGS game over 640mb? Whoaa... no way. No game has been over 30mb insofar. Are you using 800x600 16bit with AVI files all over the place or something? ._. I doubt you'd need all that stuff

[Vel]

Drgon, KQ2VGA was about 140MB with all the music and speech.

[edmundito]

Well, fatman actually installs the whole game in your hard drive. however, I think that in a recent version of AGS Chris added a way to add something to the setup file to make it run the game from the CD... I'm not too sure how it worked nor remember details about it, though.

[Scavenger]

Vel: Oh, sorry. I was forgetting the speech. But the game has to be really long to have a CD's worth of speech and music. Sam and Max was 170mb, as was FOTAQ. But, hey. What do I know?

[Pumaman]

You can run the game from CD, but you can't span multiple CD's.

Really, the best way is simply to install the whole game to the player's hard drive.

In order to run the game off a CD, you have to install the EXE file to the hard drive along with the Setup program, and add a line to acsetup.cfg:

[misc]
datadir=d:\game

where "d:\game" is the CD-ROM folder with the game files in it.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Ok, I may be wrong here, but isn't the biggest disadvantage simply that you can't actually save? Unless a "change save game directory" thing has been implemented. Wouldn't be a bad idea, that way I could burn games into CDs and quit worrying about how my obsession of having every single AGS game is rapidly eating up my drivespace.

[Alex Lowes]

could we add it to the request list chris?
Request name:Multiple CD-SPAN/ :

[Gilbert]

hmmm actually I doubt if anyone would really make AGS games that take up more than one CD, and if the spaces are just wasted by AVIs, it just doesn't worth that IMO.

You can, however, maybe put different AGS games on different discs and mess with the RunAGSGame() function I think, I'm not sure of it though.

[Pumaman]

Ok, I may be wrong here, but isn't the biggest disadvantage simply that you can't actually save?

You can save, so long as you install the EXE to the hard drive as I explained. The save games are put wherever the exe file is.

could we add it to the request list chris?
Request name:Multiple CD-SPAN  

As Gilbert says, I'm very dubious about anyone needing this feature. Perhaps if somebody really does create a 750 MB game I'll give it some thought, but it's not worth it to implement now.

[Vel]

HA! Someone else has played Fate of the amazon queen!

[TheYak]

I don't know about the technicalities of placing a game on CD and having the bulk of it there.

However, spanning multiples shouldn't be too hard.  In essense, just make two separate games..  The first will end with Insert Disc  2 or To be Continued, insert next disc or whatever.  The second disc's game would simply intro with a transition to the second part.  Again, I can't see needing this feature as no AGS game has come close so far; unless you wanted to do an FMV game in AGS which it really isn't totally equipped for anyway.

[xenogia]

I'm doing a Gabriel Knights 2 style adventure game.  I work for a company called Trinfinity and we have an array of equipment to develop this game.  Digital camera, props, video capture card, etc.  We are not releasing it commercially though.  I will probably upload it to the net or for the people who do not have broadband I can send it if they send me a money order for the posting fee.  But that is when the game is finished, at the moment I am so busy developing visual software for Raves that I don't get a lot of time.  But it will be released as quickly as I can produce it. 8)

[LOGAN]

First of all, why are you all whining about no worth having or needing this feature...

I vote Put it in for the genious that wants to use it.. I am not going to make a 2CD game if the program does not support the feature anyway, that would be bogus, haha.

Oh comon,

it would not harm..
Else give us the use uf high compressed jpg as backgrounds.
And animate Flash backgrounds.

Oh I got carried away...

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

High compressed jpeg backgrounds? You any idea how bad that would look? Flash animations, well that's been talked about in a different thread. As for "it will not harm", well how about all the features that people would actually find useful but which CJ will never get time to implement because he's too busy working on multiple cd spanning and a flash renderer?

And the fact is, nobody is EVER going to make a 750mb game. It just ain't gonna happen.

edit: haha, beat you to it, cj

[Pumaman]

First of all, why are you all whining about no worth having or needing this feature...

I vote Put it in for the genious that wants to use it..

I wish I had so much spare time that I can just chuck in features willy-nilly. But I have to prioritise what features are more important to add than others, and spending a day or two implementing this feature which nobody will use, rather than implementing something more useful, would be completely silly.

[InCreator]

Anyway, is playing AVI-s from CD-ROM possible by defining video file path in PlayVideo command?
I think so, although I haven't time to check this out.

It'll be even nicer when AGS could be able to locate speech.vox and music.vox files from somewhere else.

Maybe making a "SetSpeechFilesDirectory()" command would help... or something else like this? And this thing can be also set from game setup?

Actually...
I don't think that AGS has gone so far yet. BIG game companies such as LucasArts use their own engines, which are more advanced. If you're so good at adventure game making that you can do a game with full avis and everything, you'd work in one of these giant corporations already, or even own one. And you probably won't need AGS then.

[Pumaman]

Anyway, is playing AVI-s from CD-ROM possible by defining video file path in PlayVideo command?
I think so, although I haven't time to check this out.

Yes, but there's no way to know the drive letter of the user's CD-ROM drive, so that wouldn't be very helpful.

It'll be even nicer when AGS could be able to locate speech.vox and music.vox files from somewhere else.

Read my post earlier about the datadir config variable.

[Jimi]

could you not use a BAT file?

[LOGAN]

Ok, I understand.

With Highly compressed jpg's I mean compressed at 95%. Compared to an Bitmap this already gives a huge saving.

I can at least make an adventure game (using div-x) with enough to keep me occupied.

But a CD-ROM feature would also mean an installation I guess. Or at least some shortcuts that difine the drive used.

So if I would put an adventure on CD-ROM (Or DVD-ROM, who needs multiple discs anyway I only have problems with save game?

Hmm and a shortcut to the drive (motas.exe f:) of just looking at the available removable drives (or all) would not be handy?



PS: http://www.openswf.org/ (It's free to show flash

pps: my online adventure MOTAS: http://www.albartus.com/motas/