Messages

#14: The car was invented by Carl benz, the internal combustion engine by Nikolaus Otto, the Diesel engine by Rudolf Diesel (all Germans)

But none of them figured out how to make any of those things cheaply enough for the less than fabulously rich to afford them.  That was a purely American achievement.

#12: Most other countries have similar festivities

Maybe you didn't read closely enough: "Thanksgiving celebrates prosperity, which most nations have only at fleeting moments."

Many countries may have similar festivals, but few of them have consistently had something to celebrate throughout their entire lifespan.  In all our 200 years as a nation and the colonial years before that, we've only had one decade lacking in prosperity.  How many nations can say that?

#13: That's the reason why you have so many overweight people
#9: Might be another reason for the overweight people problem (ever wondered, how many calories there are even in Diet Coke?)

No, that's the old dieting myth: "If you eat less, you'll lose weight." The reason we have so many overweight people is that our idea of "work" is sitting on our asses staring at computers all day.  Farmers can eat all the hamburgers and drink all the coke they want and still stay fit and trim.

#10: What culture?

Again, you apparently weren't paying attention.  We have all the good parts of most everyone's culture grafted onto our own.  And don't mind the fact that it was our culture that pretty much invented civil rights and modern democracy.  Yeah, we got a bit of help on that from the Brits, but they've still got kings and nobles, and we don't.

#7: One Word: Guantanamo. So much for respecting other peoples' freedom.

We hold those people at Gtmo because they were trying to take freedom away from others.  If we didn't respect other people's freedom, we wouldn't bother to capture and hold prisoners, we'd just nuke anyone who disagreed with us.  And there's no country in the world that could stop us from doing so.

Do you think we pay ludicrously high gas prices because we don't have the power to conquer the entire OPEC block and pump the oil ourselves?  Guess again.

Do you think we call for peace and disarmament talks with North Korea because our military isn't strong enough to just waltz in and overthrow their government?  Not at all.

Do you think we spent all that time pleading with France and Russia to let us invade Iraq because we weren't capable of doing it by ourselves?  Heck, we *did* it by ourselves, we don't need no stinking NATO!

On the same subject, why do you think we tolerate the current situation in Iraq?  We have enough firepower to blow the terrorists to hell a hundred times over.  We don't use it because we'd hurt a lot of innocent people in the process, and overwhelming force like that simply offends our sensibilities.

Twenty years ago, we couldn't launch nuclear missiles because we had a Mutually Assured Destruction situation with the Soviet Union.  But the USSR is gone now, its nuclear power is all but kaput.  So what's stopping us from launching nukes now?  Simple: we believe it would be wrong to do so!

According to some scientists who claim to have worked at a certain military base that apparently doesn't exist even though you can clearly see it from the nearby mountains, we even have operational alien spacecraft at our command.  Okay, even I am skeptical about that one, but what if it's true?

If you think our government abuses its power now, just think what it would be like if Osama bin Laden were running things!

#6: ever wondered why you have so many murders in your country?

The first murder in history was committed without the use of any weapon whatsoever, and few of the murders in America are committed with weapons legally purchased under the gun control laws we do have (indeed, many are committed without any gun at all -- knives and automobiles seem much more popular).  Banning alchohol didn't stop people from drinking, banning drugs hasn't stopped anyone from getting them, and I daresay banning guns wouldn't stop people from killing with them.  It would however prevent honest and law-abiding citizens from defending themselves when attacked by a murderer with an illegal weapon.

Criminals prefer unarmed victims; politicians prefer unarmed peasants.  Besides the right to defend ourselves from criminals, the right to bear arms is the right to overthrow our own government if it ever gets entirely out of our control.  The root of any government's power is its ability to kill, therefore to maintain a democratic state of affairs the government must be equally threatened on behalf of the people.  All of you who live in countries without the right to bear arms: the only thing keeping your government from imposing martial law and becoming a dictatorship is the threat of more powerful countries intervening to restore your freedom.  You'd be naive to think otherwise.  If a country with no such fear, like America, were to take away its citizens right to bear arms, thing would quickly go downhill for everyone.  I'd rather have the right to defend myself and accept that some will abuse that right than to be at the mercy of a government-controlled military.

And if you count abortion, government oppression, and the various other kinds of legalized murder present in many countries, not to mention all the murders that go unreported due to other countries' poor law enforcement, America's relative murder rate would probably take a significant nosedive.

-America still has the death penalty and an execution rate comparable to China

So we don't want to keep serial killers around to drain our resources and possibly escape from prison and kill even more people.  Is there something wrong with that?

A cold-blooded murderer cannot be reformed.  A person capable of killing another person without remorse simply has no conscience left to them.  Anyone who says otherwise is either naive or has an agenda.  Imprisoning such people for life is not economically feasable at this time (what with all the resources being devoted to preserving useless wildlife and providing professional couch potatoes with unearned salaries -- and of course giving loans to other countries who never pay us back so they can subsidize their lifelong prisoners), plus there's the possibility of escape, even the attempt of which would doubtless result in more killings.

Maybe it's more "civilized" to abolish the death penalty.  Maybe it's more "civilized" to keep it.  Just who decides what "civilized" means, anyway?  The only entity I can think of with the authority to make that determination is God, and nearly all gods seems to approve of or even demand the death penalty for murder at least.  Any claim made by a human, or even a group of humans however large, would be as hypocritical and self-important as you accuse Americans of being.

But that's exactly what I do not like in oh so many Americans: That hypocrisy, that damned feeling of being better than anyone else!

Excuse us for having some national pride.  But you know, I don't see it saying anywhere on that page "14 Reasons Why America Is Better Than Any Other Country In the World"; it simply says "14 Reasons Why America Is Great".  I don't imagine that America being Great precludes any other country from being Great as well, perhaps even for some of the same reasons.  It's really not that specific or objective of a word.  Maybe you think it was claiming that we're better than anyone else because that's what you would have said yourself?

You do know that most verbs in languages that use conjugation are regular: in other words as simple as English in that respect, the only difference is whether the modification has a space involved or not.

Not quite as simple, not nearly as flexible.  Even regular verb conjugation usually involves a whole new set of suffixes different from the standalone words with the same meanings, and those suffixes often change slightly depending what you combine them with.  In English, verbs are modified by common, everyday words that are not exclusive to verb phrases.  Also, having separate words provides more options than being locked into a fixed set of suffixes; if you need to express something different from the usual forms, you don't need a different syntax to do it.  Indeed in some languages it is impossible to express anything beyond the standard conjugations.

Not to mention the single msot difficult thing for non-native speakers to learn: PRONUNCIATION. In Spanish, a letter always sounds the same, so even if you don't know what you are saying, its very easy to read written Spanish out loud if you knwo the pronunciation rules.

That's what I mean by our spelling rules being ridiculous.  It's not that our pronunciation is difficult (in fact it's very simple), it's that our spelling doesn't match up with it.  Again this is a consequence of our vocabulary being derived from several different languages, all of them using an alphabet that wasn't designed for any of them.  We've got some words spelled according to Spanish rules, some according to French, some according to German, all mixed in with several regional spelling systems from medieval Britain.  If you separate the words by language of origin, they're pretty consistent within each group.  Not that that makes it any easier to figure out.

The other major cause of the spelling issue is that some pronunciations have been simplified over the years, but the spellings didn't change with them.  Thus we end up with a lot of vestigial letters that once made a sound, but are now silent.  The fact that we've outgrown some of our own spellings is more evidence of the language's level of evolution.

If you learn English verbally, without trying to become literate at the same time, it's actually much easier than most languages.  All our phonemes are fairly simple to reproduce, we don't worry about trivial sound differences like whether you make "sh" against your teeth or in your throat, we don't inflect words without reason, pitch and cadence don't matter, and our grammar is very loose and flexible.

The mind boggles: I guess you're referring to homosexuals and artifical vaginas.

Sarcasm aside, I'm referring to torches (something you set on fire), and flashlights (something with an electric light bulb).  I'll grant that "flashlight" doesn't sound nearly as refined as "torch", but we Americans like to differentiate between flammable objects and non-flammables ones (as knowing the difference can be terribly important for personal safety), besides which we just don't like to use words that already have meanings for new inventions that their meanings don't apply to.

We also aren't on the whole terribly concerned with appearing sophisticated and elegant if it gets in the way of more important things, which can't usually be said of the British.

I might have also mentioned that "elevator" is a noun while "lift" is a verb...

You mean you don't undertsand the concept of dipthongs... "o" is a different sound from "ou"

Yes, "ou" makes the sound "ow", but that's not the sound found in "colour" or "humour", at least not in modern pronunciation.  And for that matter, dipthongs on the whole are another artifact of using an alphabet that wasn't designed for the language we're trying to apply it to.

Having said this, then, are you a nudist or a hypocrite?

...I didn't want my post to become overlong, and it wasn't entirely relevant to the thread's topic, so I didn't really explain my meaning accurately.

When humans invented clothing, God's reaction was, so far as I can tell from the Bible, "Well this wasn't my idea, but if you really want to, at least let me teach you how to make them out of better materials than leaves."  So clothing certainly isn't forbidden if you personally want to wear it.

Think of it this way: There might be good reason to remove a great work of art from public display from time to time, but it would be wrong to keep it locked up in a storage room *all* the time.  The artist created it to be seen, it does no one any good when kept from view.  The obligation to the artist can be fulfilled without displaying the work to everyone every second, but it is not fulfilled by displaying it only to a privileged few for a high fee.

And of course, clothing can also be beautiful, can even enhance natural beauty.  Since the capacity to create beauty ultimately comes from God, clothing too has a demand to be displayed.

The term "nudist", however, implies some other ideologies besides just going about naked.  I've not yet discovered exactly what said ideologies are, but the vague indications of them that I have encountered suggest I would not find them so Biblically-compatible.  Obviously that's not enough for me to form a prejudice on, but it's enough for me to withhold endorsement.

I think that "nothing to do with" is obviously false. Just see how many car adverts have pictures of ladies in burqahs...

A woman who exudes sexuality is provacative whether she's dressed in a bikini or a frock.  Conversely, most people don't find the nude photographs at domai.com at all provocative.  And if "sexiness" were proportional to the quantity of skin showing, why do Catholic school uniforms turn so many people on?

Not to mention that there are large numbers of 100% heterosexual women who like looking at naked women just as much as men do, and a currently somewhat smaller number of straight men who appreciate the aesthetic quality of the male body.

It's obvious, at least to anyone who doesn't think with his dick, that nudity and sex are completely unrelated.  Any small relation that does exist currently is created artificially by the taboo itself.  We're not born thinking there's anything particularly unusual or interesting about nudity, we're conditioned to think that way by being banned from seeing people naked except in sexual situations.  Those of us who've overcome that conditioning lead much more relaxed and enjoyable lives, not having to worry that we're breaking some moral rule every time our God-given appreciation for beauty tells us to stop and admire a pretty girl or handsome man.

He reveals his ignorance...

A Mexican friend of mine who speaks both Spanish and Portugese told me that Portugese is basically Spanish with a wierd accent, which seems to be backed up by a multilingual dictionary I have.  This leads me to believe that, not being fluent in either language myself and observing the wide variety of accents found in Latin America, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a random TV broadcast or music video.  Just because *you* know what language is spoken in Brasil doesn't mean that information has ever been available to me from a reliable source before now.

That said, I do know some fragments of Spanish and a few Spanish grammar rules, and I find most of the latter to be unnecessary complications with no effect on the meaning of the sentence.  As an anime fan, I've also studied Japanese and Chinese a bit, and being a medieval folklore buff I've studied some German as well.  I've found that as much as I enjoy learning *about* other languages, actually learning to speak them is beyond my abilities.  So I'm far from ignorant of other languages, I'm just not fluent in any of them.

And of course, the only true ignorance is believing one knows everything.  Such a one asks no questions, because he believes he has all the answers already.  I know enough to know that I know very little of all there is to know, so I ask questions in a continual attempt to fill in the dreadful gaps, and dispense freely of the knowledge I already have to help others do the same.  You learn something every time you objectively consider another's point of view with an open mind, even if you ultimately determine it to be foolish.

About the 14th reasons why America is so great... they seem more a joke for me.

It's a bad sign when it's so hard to tell irony from seriousness...

For the record, that article is found in the "Serious" column in the Politics sections of John VanSickle's webpage.  If you want to see him joking, try New Mental Disorders.  Another of John's articles which seems relevant to this discussion at this point is Utterances of Pride.

Incidentally, if Mr. VanSickle ever runs for president, I will do everything I can to see that he gets elected.  If he could get half of his ideas through, America would be considerably better off, though certain whiny bed-wetters would be rather unhappy.

Hmm.  This list has and will continue to change at any time without notice, but for the moment I'd probably say (in no particular order):

Fey - Se Lo Que Vendra
Into the Sky (Xenogears)
Paulina Rubio - Si Tu Te Vas
Solid Desire (opening theme from Shadow Skill OVA)
Fey - Vertigo
Paulina Rubio - Libre
Magus' Theme (Chrono Trigger)
The Underground Castle (first dungeon) BGM from Soul Blazer
Fey - Romeo y Juliet
The Man with the Machine Gun (FF8)

I'll start off with a hyperlink:

14 Reasons Why America is Great

I totally agree with all fourteen, even though I'm not particularly fond of sports myself.  I'll even go so far as to add a 15th: We speak English.

I know those of you who speak French, Spanish, and German will disagree with me, but English is really the simplest and most evolved language in use today, so far as I know.  Here's some of the reasons why:

- We only have 4 forms for each verb, not 20 or 30 like most other languages.  Instead of creating a zillion conjugations to be individually memorized, we just take four basic forms and modify them with simple general-purpose words until we get the precise meaning we need.  Less to memorize and more range of expression.

- The only words that have a particular gender in English are the words that imply a gender within their own meaning.  Compare this with German, English's ancestor language, in which every noun has a gender assigned apparently at random with no regard for the word's meaning.  Furthermore, in English the only place you need gender agreement is between nouns and pronouns, all other words can be used with any gender without modification.

- We've dropped nearly all inflections from the language.  Whereas many other languages, German not the least, still make you memorize 4 to 8 different forms for every noun and adjective, in English there's only one.  Since no meaning is lost this way, we may conclude that inflecting nouns and adjective is a pointless obfuscation.

- Our grammar is very simple and has few rules, which makes it easy to learn and very flexible.  In many languages, if you mess up the grammar even slightly the sentence turns into utter gibberish; in English, you can completely mangle the grammar and people can still understand you, though they might snicker a bit.

- Because English is cross-pollenated with French, Welsh, Latin, Finnish, Norweigan, German, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, and a few other languages, we've got the biggest and most precise vocabularly.  Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that English has a bunch of words that mean the exact same thing: this is not true.  While the sorry state of the US public school system has failed to impress this on several generations of students, there are in fact subtle differences between all of these words; no two words mean quite exactly the same thing.  Metaphorically, in English we can paint our verbal pictures with 16 million colors, while most other languages are still limited to a standard 256 color palette.

Granted, there's room for improvement.  Our spelling rules are utterly ridiculous (a consequence of the cross-pollenization), pronouns are a little messed up, and there's still some useless vestigial grammar rules, but by and large we're farther ahead than most languages.

Now of course there are many countries besides the USA that speak English, but we've got a few things over many of them even.  For one, we know the difference between something you dip in tar and set on fire and something you insert batteries into and push a button to turn on.  We also know the difference between an 's' and a 'z' (most of the time, anyway); and we don't stuff unneeded 'u's in next to our 'o's nearly as often as some other countries.



Moving on, there's a lot of talk in this thread about girl's fashions, but I wonder just what is meant by "dressed like a whore."  Being a conservative Christian, you might think I'd be all for high collars and low hemlines, but you'd be wrong.  I've never seen anything in the Bible against girls (or boys for that matter) displaying their bodies: in fact by my reasoning it's sinful not to.  God's best work should be admired, not shunned.  It was humans who invented clothing, not God.  Being "sexually provocative" has nothing to do with how much skin is showing and everything to do with attitude and body language.

By the same token, I hate unecessary plastic surgery.  I'm so sick of ugly, bulging balloon-breasts.  They're not attractive, girls!  Stick with what God gave you!  Even a flat chest is prettier than a fake one.

On the other hand, if you're going to wear clothes at all, I'd prefer to see nice clothes, regardless of how much skin they cover.  That to me is what "dressing like whore" means: wearing ugly, gaudy, unflattering clothes with too much makeup in all the wrong colors.  Which unfortunately a lot of young girls do.

I also heard that in one od the episodes of The Simpsons, when they come to Brazil (I think it's called "Blame it on Lisa") they make fun of us (brazilians) and make some monkey-related jokes... but I can't say anything about this since I haven't seen it...

I've seen that episode.   At one point they have angry monkeys harrassing orphans.  They also have the staff at a hotel playing football (soccer) with the guest's luggage, claim that "you can get anywhere you need to go by joining a conga line", and one of the major plot devices is a childrens' show starring strippers.  Then there's a bit where they joke about the government painting the slums bright colors so as not to offend tourists -- even the rats are painted red, green, and yellow.  But like most Simpsons jokes, it's all so playful that you can't really take offense at it if you have any sense of humor whatsoever.

BTW, in that episode they said that language spoken in Brasil is Portugese, not Spanish.  Is that true?  Every Brasillian I've ever seen on TV has appeared to be speaking Spanish, though I can't swear I'd be able to tell the difference.

I'd say we have the best soap-operas in the world (and they are NOT like those "Mexican soaps" with a poor girl that loses her son when he's just born, then she falls in love with someone she shouldn't -that's commited- and years later her son reapears bla bla bla...)

Hmm... throw in some vampires, a witch or two, an evil twin, someone in a coma, and a bit of corporate espionage, and you've got an American soap.

But you know, a telenovela isn't really the same thing as a soap.  The themes are similar, but from what I've seen telenovelas usually develop to some kind of resolution that ends the story; soaps just go on and on forever, becoming ever more ridiculous and farfetched as the writers scramble desperately to continue the storyline.  In the USA, when a show has its ending planned from the start we call it a "miniseries"; only the shows that are intended to never end at all are called "soaps".

Er... to any Americans reading this, are most of y'all anti-Canadian in your country?

We're all jealous because you have mounties.  Our police officers are often more thuggish and ill-bred than the criminals.

Maybe an easier solution would be this: if AGS runs in windowed mode with a 320x200 screen, instead the interpreter could create a 420x300 screen and center the actual graphics in there. So you'll have all the edge you want.

Yes, adding a margin around the game window, and then translating clicks in the margin to the nearest actual screen coordinate, seems like a better idea than restricting the mouse.  Probably more complicated to implement, but I for one would be really freaking annoyed, and I mean tear-the-cd-out-of-the-drive-and-throw-it-against-the-wall annoyed, if I encountered a program that confined the system mouse to it's own window, even it was just a default setting that could be turned off.

I presume it should be fairly easy to convert a .it file to one of the other tracker formats - they're all pretty similar.

That's not really true.  Superficially, all the module formats may be similar, but each has it's own set of features that are totally incompatible with the others.  Yes, you could theoretically convert to another format, but you'd drop notes and effects in the process.  I'm not an expert on module music, but I've heard that IT is the most sophisticated and feature-rich of all formats (IT is to S3M as PNG is to GIF), so converting it to another format, even the second-best XM, would be like converting a 10,000 color photograph to a GIF.  You'd also have to find a converter.  IT is newer and more advanced than XM, S3M, and MOD, and the very few converters I have seen don't support it, or support it only as an output format, not an input format.  Unlike other music formats, in module music a single dropped effect controller can turn the most beautiful song in the world into blaring off-key noise pollution.

POV-Ray Raytracer
If you can handle creating scenes using a programming language instead of a wireframe modeler, this program provides the most realistic 3D renderings you'll ever see. Period.  This is because it uses real scientifically-correct mathematical physics modeling, instead of faking it like polygon renderers do.  There's a shareware frontend available that provides wireframe preview and editing, but using it tends to degrade the quality of the scene somewhat, since it's not as precise or versatile as the underlying scripting language.  Using the frontend also make it difficult or impossible to take advantage of the large collection of utilities and include files that users have created.  The native scripting language is no harder to learn than any of the scripting languages used by game engines, and it's better-documented than most of them.  Personally I find povray's script language easier to use than the GUI interfaces sported by most of the polygon modelers I've tried.

I would find a "duplicate GUI " feature handy, and a "duplicate button", too. In fact a general GUI cut/paste feature...

I as well.  I think most people make custom save/load guis once they're advanced enough, and those usually differ only by one or two controls.  And the custom command gui I've been working on for my project involved nearly a dozen completely identical buttons.  I think I have also occassionally wished for the ability to copy controls from one gui onto another.  So a full copy & paste would be excellent, but "duplicate GUI" and "duplicate button" at least would be useful.

Initializing arrays would also be useful to me.  I've never requested it before because
A) It's not absolutely necessary;
B) Arrays aren't an official feature anyway, so I figure there's not much chance of getting them enhanced; and
C) I'm not working with AGS very seriously just yet, so I don't really have much business making suggestions.

Hydrogen Peroxide is good.. But why don't they call it Hydrogen Dioxide? It's forumla is just H202, right??

RIGHT??

Hydrogen Dioxide would be HO2, a very improbable combination.  You might call H2O2 Dihydrogen Dioxide, but the convention is to not put a prefix on the first element unless you have to, so they call it Hydrogen Peroxide, meaning one oxygen for each hydrogen.

Aww.. What's the matter.. Does itty bitty Ryukage not want to admit that some cartoons can be watched and enjoyed by males? Awwwwww.. How sweet.. He's trying to be all grown up and manly.

As Esseb pointed out (thank you, Esseb), I'm a huge fan of good animation.  I watch more anime than live-action, and I also quite liked Titan A.E. and a number of other Don Bluth films.  I just can't stand Disney.

How can you say every animated Disney movie is dumb? Have you watched them all?

Most of them.  Saw every one of their fairy-tale movies from Snow White on through to Beauty and the Beast, and quite a lot of their live-action productions as well.  I may have enjoyed them as a kid, or I may have just thought I was supposed to enjoy them, but at this point in time I find them trite, predictable, and rather stupid.

Do you have any idea how much work went into each film (Except for the latest, crappy-ass ones) Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Black Cauldron, Aladdin.. All of em' well done animated films.

Putting a lot of work into a dumb idea doesn't make it any less dumb.  I might make an exception for Black Cauldron -- I only remember that I've seen it, not anything about it (I thought it was Don Bluth).  The rest of the movies on your list: stupid.

And how dare you say Pixar's films are dumb.. Again.. Have you WATCHED any of them? IMO.. The only dumb Pixar movie was Bugs Life.. But Finding Nemo.. and Monsters Inc.. Wow.. If you can't like those films you must be one very depressing individual..

Saw Toy Story.  Dumb.  A movie about fish?  Dumb.  Movie about a human lost in monster world? Been done a zillion times, dumb every time.  Shrek?  Maybe I just hate Mike Myers.

BTW.. What does your signature mean? Were you born in 1996? Cause your profile says you're 23...

Well I wasn't born performing ninjutsu.  The Ninja Warrior Ryukage
(I'm almost embarassed to link to that, it's so dated.  I've been meaning to write a totally new and much-revised version, but have never gotten around to doing so.  At least you can read an in-progress story featuring the newer version of the character here.  Don't worry about popups, it's a Gold ezBoard.)

My signature (and the text under my avatar as well) are obvious references to the REAL ULTIMATE POWER homepage.  Because I'm a ninja.  (OK, not really, but this is the internet.  Here CJ can be an anthropomorphic superhero puma, Andail can be an elf, and I can be a ninja. Because that's what makes the internet great.)



As a general reply on the subject of anime:

From the titles that have been cited, I'm wondering how many of the people here have even seen enough anime to have an informed opinion.  Mononoke?  Sprited Away?  Probably great films (haven't seen them -- not my cup of tea), but there's more to anime than Miyazaki.  Pokemon?  Sailor Moon?  Aimed at kids and teenage girls.

Someone said anime has lots of guys that look like girls.  First of all, how is this any different from the zillions of movies staring Ben Afleck, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, or Johnny Depp?  Not that I'd recommend any of their movies, but the point is that an abundance of bishounen (pretty boys) is not a strictly Japanese phenomenon.  Second, ever seen Golgo 13?  Yotoden?  M.D. Geist?  Roujin Z?  The Peacock King?  If you watch shoujou (anime aimed at teenage girls) you'll see a lot a bishounen.  Watch anime aimed at a more mature audience, and this perception vanishes.

Someone also complained about frenetic non-stop hyper-action.  This is a trait of shounen (teenage boys) anime, and sometimes of shoujou (shoujou tends to depend more on elaborate, dance-like attack motions that in real life would allow an enemy to go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, read a newspaper, and still have time to punch the heroine in the face before she finished making her attack).  Personally, I like action-packed anime like Yu Yu Hakusho, Project A-ko, Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, and Shadow Skill.  But there's no more of that in anime than in any other country's films.  No one in their right mind would accuse Witch Hunter Robin, Galaxy Express 999, or Darkside Blues of being "action-packed."

More than one person has said they don't like anime because of it's conventions.  I ask: what conventions?  As has already been pointed out, anime is a medium, not a genre.  There are shoujou conventions, shounen conventions, hentai conventions (mmm, tentacles), mecha conventions, and other genre conventions.  Akira Toriyama is a genre unto himself, with unique conventions of his own.  But there is no such thing as anime conventions.  There's even an entire wing of art films with the express intent of breaking conventions.  Anime runs the whole gamut from kids shows like Hamtaro and Tama and Friends to hardcore porn like Urotsudokuji (I may have mangled that title) and Rei-Rei, and most of the conventions are the same as any other country's shows aimed at the same demographic.  I think there's even a few anime sitcoms.

In my experience, anyone who says they don't like anime has simply been watching the wrong anime.

Though they don't make good counterexamples to the above compaints, lemme list a few more good ones for those with open minds: Excel Saga, Lupin III, Demon City Shinjuku, Ronin Warriors (aka Yoroiden Samurai Troopers), Patlabor, The Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, Plastic Little, Ariel, Detonator Orgun, Gunsmith Cats, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tenchi Muyo (the original OAVs are good, the TV series maybe not so good, and Tenchi in Tokyo is downright atrocious), and Devil Hunter Yohko.  Watch all the movies and TV shows I've mentioned in this post, and then you'll have an informed opinion on anime.  Don't worry too much that my list is biased, I've mentioned some anime in here that I dislike right along with the ones I like.  I've even mentioned a few that I haven't even seen myself.

But wasn't this the bash dumb movies thread?

Ninja Scroll.  90 minutes of demons randomly attacking this guy (who's not even a ninja) for no apparent reason, and then just when it looks like the story is finally going to start, the movie's over.  Also, a needless number of disturbing rape scenes.  Contrast this with Yotoden (aka Wrath of the Ninja): same exact plot, except Yotoden actually makes sense, and there's actually a reason the demons show up when and where they do.  Also, no rape scenes.

Akira. Only one thing to say about this one: WTF?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  It had nothing to do with the games whatsoever, and wasn't even halfway-decent as generic sci-fi.  (On a related note, Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals was terrible as well.  In fact, the only videogame-to-movie conversion that actually resulted in a decent movie was Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer.)

Austin Powers.  Ugh.  This one was so bad I didn't even give the sequels a chance.  The few parts that were actually funny were just minor bits that were over in a couple seconds, while they spent 10 or 20 tedious minutes at time on stupid, vulgar toilet humor.  And there wasn't even a discernable plot to tie the stupidity together.

Everything animated ever made by Disney and/or Pixar, and quite a few of their live-action films as well.  Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  Maybe everyone's blocked it out to protect their sanity.  It was so bad even trekkies hate it.  (For that matter, all of the odd-numbered Trek movies seem to be lousy.)

I think that after the awsome trilligy of Lord of the Rings, there should obveously be another sequel. However, like Star Wars Episoid 1 it would rather be a prequel......and if you arn't familiar with Tolkien the book that started the whole LotR  series was a magnificent book called The Hobbit. The book stars Bilbo, Frodo's uncle on a quest where he first discovers the ring. .....on second thought, it would be a shame if it didn't live up to the glory of LotR, so it is rather a risk.

And after that, they should make the Silmarillion and Akallabeth.  Of course, that would probably require a running time of about 30 hours, but as long as they included some intermissions, I'd go see it. 

--I hate puzzles which you can't solve if you happen to lack some innate talent.  The piano puzzle in Myst, for example: the solution is obvious (like most of Myst's puzzles), but utterly impossible to perform if you happen to be tone-deaf, like I am.

--I hate mazes, but for a different reason than everyone else: mazes are too easy in graphical games, and are consequently boring and pointless.  Mazes in text adventures are another matter, those are actually a challenge.

--Action sequences.  It's not a fricking arcade game, dammit!  If I wanted to do finger aerobics, I'd play Street Fighter 2!

--Total disregard for logic.  I don't require real-world logic, but any story, interactive or otherwise, must be consistently logical within the terms of the world presented therein.  This is more than just puzzle-logic; it means stroy and characterization logic as well.  My favorite fantasy worlds are those that do not conform to real-world logic, but have their own carefully planned laws of nature to which they consistently conform.  The fantasy worlds I most hate are those that pretend to conform to real-world logic, but are totally inconsistent even to their own rules.

--The objective reality of the story changing inexplicably as a result of player action or inaction.  Someone recently mentioned this in another thread, as a common problem with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories: if you ignore the sound behind you, it turns out to be a fearsome tiger that eats you; while if you turn to investigate, it turns out to be a harmless bunny rabbit.  This is corollary to the logic issue above.  Note that I do consider it OK for reality to change if molding the plot is part of the game and all variations are clearly observable as results of player decisions and thus somewhat predictable, it's just not OK for things to change totally at random for no observable reason.

--Interaction modes reduced to the point where the game basically plays itself if you just keep clicking whenever the cursor lights up.

Do any of you ever have ideas for games that for one reason or another you aren't interested in pursuing?

From time to time I'm hit by what I think is a good idea, but one that I know I wouldn't enjoy working on because It wouldn't suit my style.

If the same thing happens to other people, I thought it would be useful to collect unwanted ideas, so that they could be picked up by people who could make a better go of them.

Anyone else have any unwanted ideas? Maybe better ones than mine?

I once considered making a Scooby-Doo game with AGS, but decided it wasn't my style; I'd love to play one, however.  The games that have come out alongside the recent movies both look like the usual dumb cookie-cutter platformers, and I can't remember there ever being any other Scooby games; but it would make a fantastic adventure game.  Something like Maniac Mansion, where you change among the five members of Mystery, Inc. as they search for clues and set up Freddie's inane ghost traps.  Of course, as everyone knows, the classic Scooby is the best, none of this Scrappy Doo, celebrity guest stars, or real monsters crap.

Heh, this and the maze part are those that I like most. They lengthen the game too.

My only complaint about the maze was that it was too easy.  Having conquered far more insidious mazes in Infocom games, it hardly even registered that the fireberry cavern was a maze at all.  For that matter, none of the mazes I've encountered in graphical games have seemed very challenging after Infocom mazes (except for the railcar maze in Myst, which like most Myst puzzles was more annoying than challenging).

Hmm... I didn't care much for Kyrandia.  While it certainly has a number of things in its favor, there was one big thing that turned me off: most of the time, the challenge was not figuring out how to solve the puzzle, but figuring out what the hell the puzzle was.  All too often you're just left hanging without the faintest clue what you're supposed to do.

Like the part where...

Spoiler

The part where you're left at the witches house with the boiling cauldron.  By reading a hint book I discovered that I was supposed to make various potions by putting three objects of matching color in the cauldron; however there was nothing at all in the game to prompt me to do this.  Just the opposite in fact: I got the impression I was supposed to wait for the witch to come back and make the potion for me, or tell me what she needed, or *something*.  That's just one of a hundred places where I got stuck simply because the game utterly failed to properly indicate the nature or presence of a puzzle.  The puzzles were easy to solve once I knew what the hell they *were*.

[close]

And if the sprites were stored in pcx (or other) format. Would this afect too much the performance?

I'm not sure, I haven't really tried. But it's not something that I see as a big problem, so it's not planned to be changed any time soon.

If you do ever feel like changing it, take a look at the existing support for run-length encoded sprites in Allegro.  RLE provides only minimal compression, but can be written directly to the screen without decompressing, so it if anything it will improve performance -- uses less memory and writes whole runs of pixels at once instead of one pixel at a time.  And even as minimal as RLE is, it tends to work very well on game sprites because of all the large blocks of solid color.

Ok I am using a certain midi in my game, the midi itself works fine, and is stopped using a StopMusic() command... however after that all my other midi's sound... strange.... almost as if the first midi had a certain controller event that didn't get fully released when StopMusic is called, messing up all of the following midi's.

From your description, I think that's exactly what's happening - the midi controllers aren't getting reset.  RPGMaker 2000/2003 and Winamp 5 both have similar problems.  I think the real culprit is probably DirectMusic, because Winamp didn't have the problem until they started playing through DM.  I haven't bothered to try changing Winamp back to regular output to test my theory, however.

However, if I maximize the window at 1280x960 or do the same at 1600x1200, the middle table does stretch too much, to the point where the site no longer has that "neat" look about it. So, here are a couple of options -- either use a fixed width such as at http://www.2advanced.com (fixed for 1024x768 maximized) or live with the fact that it looks good maximized up to 1024x768 and hope that most people browse in windows at resolutions higher than that.

As I'm still unsure about this, for now I think I'll leave it as is, and hope that people don't full-screen it at 1600x1200. Personally, I run at 800x600 so I'm not really going to design the site for a fixed res any larger than that

CSS level 2 provides a max-width property for dealing with this sort of thing.  I would expect standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera to support it, although I don't know for sure.  However, I can pretty much guarantee that Internet Explorer won't support it, IE doesn't support CSS2 at all.  Still, it's better than nothing.

Oh, and as for resolution detection, it is possible but not very reliable.

Yeah, I thought as much. It's a shame that this wasn't though of when HTTP was designed

Actually it was thought of, and rejected.  HTML is for marking the grammatical function of each chunk of text; it's not supposed to carry any size, layout, or formatting information at all.  Stylesheets hold the formatting and layout information separately from the data structures, allowing display devices with different capabilities to apply different layouts to the same data.  HTML isn't just for graphical browsers running on Windows and MacOS; it's for cell phones, PDAs, text-only terminal shells, printers, braille displays, and audio screen readers, too.  Depending on the display device, "screen resolution" may not even be a defined concept, so it has no place in HTML.

First of all masks have nothing to do with alpha channels whatsoever, except that masking a layer creates layer transparency, which PSP can then convert to an alpha channel.  But masks do a lot more than just add alpha transparency, they also affect drawing and blending.

Second, the Load/Save alpha channel feature in PSP has nothing to do with real alpha channels.  It's just a means of storing a mask or selection in the PSP file itself instead of on a disk.  Saved alpha channels are lost when you save as anything other than a PSP file, and the alpha channel stored in a PNG files does not count for the Load Mask/Selection From Alpha channel function.

What everybody else calls an alpha channel, PSP calls "Layer transparency."

So, if you're seeing the checkerboard background, and you select the PNG exporter, and set it to use existing image transparency, then you ought to get an alpha channel.  You won't be able to "load selection from alpha channel" or anything like that, because as I explained PNG alpha is unrelated to PSP alpha.  However, re-opening the image in PSP, you should still see transparent areas, since PSP equates PNG alpha to layer transparency.

The only thing I can think of is that you might trying to export a 256-color image with an alpha channel.  PSP8 prohibits this because it's an invalid combination, but older versions might have allowed it and just dropped the alpha.

In the PNG optimizer dialog, check the preview picture (the one on the right) and make sure the checkerboard pattern shows there.  If it does, then PSP ought to be exporting an alpha channel for you.  Also don't click buttons too fast, PSP needs a second or two to save a temporary version of the converted image each time you change a setting.

I'd like to change my vote from Darth A to Darth New.

Also I agree with remixor, klaus's design is too sterilized, which I said before.  I hadn't realized it used iframes, that's another strike against it.  Not only are frames of any sort a minus-100 on both the usability and compatibility scorecards, the W3C has begun the process of removing them from the HTML specs entirely.  The specs already consider them nothing but a legacy feature retained only for backwards-compatibility; in a few more years browsers should follow in that thinking and they'll disappear completely (from the specs, at least).