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Right. Anyway, a few days ago I came back from Spain and, among other things, we visited Port Aventura. They have tons and tons of great stuff there, the entire place is beautiful, but I won't bore you with all that crap and will skip straight to the point.

So, I had my first roller coaster ride there. It was the Dragon Khan roller coaster (they say it's one of the best in the world). Prior to that, I had no experience with thrill rides, so I was only vaguely aware of what was coming. The thing started climbing really slow and reached a peak (from which you can see miles and miles of beautiful Catalonian landscape all around you, which adds to the fear factor). Then of course it decided to dive down reeeeeaaaaly fast. That was a real bitch. It felt like I was falling really fast - though I was perfectly aware that I'm sitting and have a safety belt, I couldn't FEEL any of that. It was just like a feeling of freefall. That was too scary for me, I was just waiting for the vagon to part with the rails and crash somewhere in the beautiful Catalonian landscape, so I closed my eyes for the rest of the ride. I felt lots and lots of falling and turning around and it was scary as hell. Of course, now I feel extremely sorry for being a coward and missing an extremely important part of the ride - the view.

Fortunately, I made it up later with another mad scary thing - a freefall simulation called Huracan Condor. For those who haven't tried it, it looks like this: They put you in the chair, lift you and then throw you down. In more detail, your "chair" (I don't know what else to call it) is climbing slowly to the height of 80 meters (it should be around 250 feet if I'm not very much mistaken). You stay there for a few seconds, then they rotate the chair just a bit so that your head goes a bit forward and then you fall. The first 60 meters is free fall, and the rest is slowing down and finally stopping. Though the main attraction here is of course the fall itself (which causes your stomach to go up to your mouth, just like the roller coaster) for me the scariest part was the climbing and those few seconds at the top. There are simply no words to describe that feeling - you are 80 meters above the ground, have nothing under your legs, and that Catalonian landscape is spreading miles and miles around you. Such mixture of beauty and fear is rarely seen. Of course, from the second I stepped on that darn thing, in my mind I was calling for my mom, wanting to get the hell away. Fortunately, I didn't close my eyes this time. So, that Huracan Condor minute is the absolute highlight of my short visit to Spain, beating the Salvador Dali museum in Figueres, Magic Fountain in Barcelona and even Nou Camp (!)

What I wanted to ask everyone is to describe your experience with thrill rides of this (or other type). Were you thrilled? Scared? Terrified? Having the best time of your life? Judging from my first (and hopefully not last) experience, if you can overcome the fear, the thrill rides are quite possibly the most exciting thing EVER. Better than having a threesome with Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway. Or foursome with Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Marilyn Monroe in their prime.

Have you noticed that in (almost) EVERY SINGLE adventure game you can pick up only those objects that are necessary to finish the game? (Okay, not in ALL games, but certainly the vast majority, including the most famous ones). So, you're stuck and you keep walking around with a key, a rope, a bucket and a credit card, thinking "Now, just where am I supposed to use this bucket? Or, where's the door that this key unlocks?" Basically, your gaming philosophy is changed from "How can I solve the problem I face right now?" to "Where can I find a problem to solve with my objects?". And that's something that makes a... how should I say... "gap" between adventure games and real life (well, not REAL life literally, otherwise it would appear I'm against fantasy games or something, but you get my meaning). Like, in real life you probably wouldn't visit every single location and try your key on every single door you see. And you would definitely not carry any buckets with you.
Now, here's where Ečstatica kicks in. I got stuck in it numerous times not knowing what to do (and the fact that you could carry only two objects at a time didn't help). For example, one of the first locations in the game contained this key. I spent hours and hours trying to find the door that the key unlocks and guess what happened? I had absolutely NO NEED for the bloody key! The same goes for an armor on a wall, a broom and lots of similar stuff. Actually, I had some ideas about what to do, but I was thinking "This can't work, the game can't be over this quickly, I haven't even used half of the items!". Naturally, one day when I decided to carefully explore the surroundings, I finished the game pretty quickly.
It's pretty similar in Dreamweb. Your inventory is limited (fortunately, not only to two items) and, just like in real life, you can pick up almost everything that isn't nailed down. You can take empty soda cans, trash, pieces of clothing, useless papers, CDs and various other junk. There are even some items that appear useful (like some wires on the floor) but actually they are not. So inventory management gets a very important role. Not to mention that it absolutely kills the notorious get-everything-that-isn't-nailed-down-and-try-using-everything-on-everything method that works so well in Sierra games.
Well, just thought to mention this. Of course, I'm not bashing the classic adventure games or something, just thinking that this "freedom" to pick useless objects kinda increases the quality of the gameplay and forces you to think the way you would think in real life. Bah, I'm boring...

Greetings, people! I'm sure some people on this forum still remember me   Anyway, I was on a loooong vacation and now I'm back in full force. I've been working on a game, it was going pretty slow, but I'm going to increase the efforts.
Anyway, did anything interesting happen here in the last 2-3 months? If so, point me to the appropriate thread. Long live AGS!  

OK, I wrote this to help everyone who has the lack-of-water problem. This article will feature on my site (which I'm working on at the moment and should be up in around ten years), but I thought you guys should read it first and tell me what you think  
---------------------------------------------------------------------

HOW TO GET WATER OUT OF OIL

It has probably happened to you that you have guests in your house, but no water. Of course, your guests like to drink water, so you're in a bit of a trouble. It is scientifically proved that the lack of regular water supply (i.e. at least once in two hours) leads human individues to nervous and potentially dangerous behaviour. We will also assume that you don't have time to go to the nearest store to buy some water. So, what can you do to save your house from the furious guests?

Luckily, almost every kitchen has large quantities of oil. So, naturally, you will use oil to get water. This requires some knowledge of chemistry, biology and mathematics, but I doubt you will have problems understanding it.

First of all, it is important to know that around 30% of any oil is actually water. The other 70% are minerals, carbon-monoxide and similar things. So, roughly, five liters of oil will translate into one liter of water. One liter of water should be enough for two hours (presuming that you have only one guest, if there are more you will have to have more oil). Apart from oil, you also need to have some sugar, salt, carrot, cucumber and some sulphuric acid.

First you put one liter of oil in the freezer. The other four liters you should pour in a cauldron or something. Put it on the strong fire and wait for five minutes.

You will notice that due to the heat the large percentage of minerals has expired. Some harder minerals are not likely to disappear without a fight, so you will have to use salt and sugar. Mix three coffee spoons of sugar with one spoon of salt, and add a drop of sulphuric acid. This creates a material known as Carbon-Dioxide. Carbon-Dioxide interacts with hard minerals, connects with them and gives us - WATER! Yes, that's right! It is probably one of the coolest things in chemistry to create the water this way.

Now we need to get rid of the carbon-monoxide and other materials from the oil. How are we going to do that? Easily: First of all, those "other materials" are things like fluor, methane and other elements from group 5 of the Periodic system. Since they all belong in the same group as carbon-monoxide, it is natural that they will act similarly to it. A neat way to "extract" those materials is to combine them with natrium peroxide. When combined with natrium peroxide, these materials are simply going to transform to pure oxygen, which will elevate from the substance! And how are we going to get the natrum peroxide? Easily! We need to get some natrium and some peroxide.

As we know from our chemistry lessons, carrot contains lots and lots of natrium, while cucumber contains some peroxide. We will cut the carrot and cucumber into small pieces and put them into one bowl. Add some salt (as a catalist) and mix with a spoon. Natrium from the carrot will interact with peroxide from the cucumber and create the mighty natrium peroxide. Natrium peroxide is a solid brown material, so you won't have trouble extracting it from the carrot-cucumber mixture.

Now, all you have to do is add some natrium peroxide to the oil. It will combine with those materials we want to extract. We will get some pure oxygen, which is going to float away. However, not all of natrium peroxide is going to interact. What happens to the rest of it? Well, since natrium peroxide is pretty unstable, it will interact with hydrogen from the air and transform into ozone, O-3. Ozone will naturally elevate from the surface.

Keep in mind that during this whole time the cauldron was on fire (to provide the heat, a catalist). Naturally, large part of oil has boiled away, and what we're left with is a pure and simple ONE LITER OF WATER (give or take a few drops). Neat, eh?
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It's finally there! My first game! Actually, not first, it's third, but I don't count the previous two.
Anyway, it's about a Scotland Yard inspector who has to find a beautiful ring lost by a girl. Don't let the lame idea put you off. The lack of quality should put you off, mwahahahaah!!!
The game is pretty short, about as an average RON game. The style of graphics is similar, too. Only the puzzles are a bit weirder.

http://archaicsoftware.tripod.com/ISN.zip

Beware, the link is case sensitive.

 How can I make a non-player character repeatedly move all the way to the right and then to the left side of the screen? This should be happening in the background so the main character can interact with that NPC.
When I try to use something like
while (1)
{
MoveCharacterPath(NPC, 0, y);
MoveCharacterPath(NPC, 319, y);
}
the game crashes with an error message saying something like "path too complex, cannot add any more paths".

I have a scripting problem (wow, unbelieveable!), either because of a bug in the engine or because of my stupidity, probably the latter.
Anyway, let's say that my character has two inventory items, numbered 1 and 2. When player uses inventory item 1 on inventory item 2, a message should appear.
I used the following code for inventory item 2 (when inventory item is used on it):

if (character[GetPlayerCharacter()].activeinv == 1)
{
Display("Testing.");
}

Of course, this doesn't work. But when I select the action "conditional - if inventory item was used", use inventory item 1 and add another action - Display("Testing.") - it works. Although the equivalent code is exactly the same as the one above. What's the problem?

Btw, if it's important, I'm using an older version of AGS.

OK, this is only the first chapter, but some day it will be finished. "enjoy!"

http://a-janjic.freewebspace.com/sside.htm

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the beginner's technical forum, so feel free to move it, I won't kill anyone (though the name of my name is Kill, ha!).

Anyway, here's the deal:

The character appears on the left side of a hallway. He can't go through the hallway before he gets rid of a nasty enemy that stands there. So, I made a hotspot between the player character and the enemy and when the character gets on that part of the floor, he returns and says something like "I'm not gonna get near that thing" or something. It works fine when I try simply to MOVE character to the other side of the room.
But, there is a door on the other side of the room (he shouldn't be able to reach it before he gets rid of the Enemy). However, when I interact with the door, he simply moves there, passes over the hotspot and ignores it. I tried removing walk-to point and putting a simple MoveCharacter(coordinates of the door here), since that should be a non-blocing function, but still the same thing happens. I guess I can simply "avoid" this problem by putting something like
if (character[ENEMY].room == <number of the room>)
{
Display("I can't go there now.");
}
but I'd like to have more elegant solution. Is there a command I can put in the piece of script dealing with interacting with the door that will make the player character do what he's supposed to do when he stands on the hotspot?

[Save Target As...]

As you can see, I've finally moved my lazy ass and started working on a game. This is supposed to be the first game in a looooooong (yeah, right) franchise featuring an old Scotland Yard inspector solving various weird cases including vampires, werewolves, murderistic shaving foams and similar stuff. This first game (it's titled "Kill!", I'm thinking about changing the name because it completely sucks) is of introductory character (kinda like Rob Blanc 1), it will be pretty short and help to introduce the main character and the type of puzzles and humor I'm going to use in these games. Yeah, this all sounds great on paper, we'll see how much of this I'm actually going to do.

Anyway, what I have done so far is not much - a few backgrounds (will post some of them later, but they're nothing special, I don't consider graphics a very important part of the game), almost all characters and some objects.

Right now, you can check this small non-playable demo. It contains the intro to the game (which is actually just a looooong dialogue). It's not much, but it will give you an idea what the game will look like. I will occasionally post screenshots and other promotional stuff here.

Download the demo - Save Target As...:
http://archaicsoftware.tripod.com/isn.zip

I wrote a loooooooong post about this yesterday, but forgot to login before sending then everything got lost somehow. So I'll cut it short this time.
Anyway, last Monday my brother Vladimir, cousins Zarko and Milena and me went to Belgrade to see Sonic Youth. The concert was great. It ended around 3 AM and we decided to go home right after that (and the Nobel prize for stupidity this year goes to...). My brother was driving (we borrowed my mother's car) and he assured us that he didn't need any sleep, that we can go right away. So got to our car (it took us more than an hour because we had to wait for the bus to get us there) and started the journey. The three of us fell asleep right away. Milena was sitting in the front seat (she didn't use her seat belt), Zarko and me in the back (I was on the right side). Everything was going well till we got to a place about two hours from home. We stopped to drink some fresh mountain water, then I fell asleep again, and when I awoke it was like an apocalypse. The ground was hitting our car from all sides, I heard the sound of glass breaking and then it went through my head that we might be in trouble. Just for a second a silly thought went through my mind ("The car is going to be ruined!") and the next thing I remember is seeing my brother and some other people trying to push the car back on the wheels (it turned on its right side) so I can get out. I was the alone in the car and I was almost crying. Partly from the pain but mostly from the fear probably. I also noticed Zarko for a brief moment, he said "Your knee is hurt" and then he went to see what happened to Milena. Then I looked at my right knee and saw that my pants were completely torn on that place. I didn't feel any pain in that part, though, only in my left leg and right arm. When I got out of the car I noticed Milena all bloody. Her head was bleeding, her shirt was all red and she was crying from the fear. Fortunately, Zarko and some other people were saying that she was OK. After that, I looked at my right knee again and blood was flowing from it like a stream.
To cut the story short, what happened is that my brother fell asleep at the wheel (it's never a good thing), we crossed to the other side of the street (fortunately, no one was coming from the opposite direction, otherwise we would all be dead now), then we hit some big rock at the left side of the street and crashed, ending up on the street again. Nobody knows exactly what the crash looked like. None of the four of us remembers much and the police can't tell from the car's position what happened (both sides of the car are severely damaged, but the roof doesn't have a single scratch on it). As for the people in the car, Zarko was completely OK, he didn't suffer a single blow somehow, my brother had a small brain concussion and hurt his elbow, Milena had some nasty cuts on her head and ear and bruises everywhere and I ended up with a destroyed right knee, hurt right elbow and shoulder and undefined pain in my left leg which I still feel (the accident happened on Tuesday morning). Only Milena ended up in hospital (my brother and should have, too, but our mother is the doctor so she could take care of us better) and I had to go to a surgeon to take the small pieces of glass from my knee. It was the greatest pain I have ever experience and probably the greatest pain possible, if we don't count when someone cuts your head off. That damn glass got deep in the open wound and the surgeon felt free to dig in there with all means possible, completely ignoring my moans (I wasn't moaning with pleasure, you perverts!). Yuck. Now, a few days after that, my knee is itching (meaning that it's pretty much OK), the elbow and shoulder still hurt a bit and my left leg hurts equally as before. The doctors didn't find anything wrong with it but I'll probably have to have it examined again. My brother is OK, Milena is OK too, so you see one big cheesy happyend here. Except that the car is ruined. But in real life, unlike in movies,  cheesy happyends are a good thing.
So, here's a few pieces of advice for everyone out there, so that you can avoid what happened to us (after the accident we received some brilliant advice from oour parents, they said that we should have had a rest before driving):

1) Don't drive tired. EVER. Driving tired is ten times more dangerous than driving drunk. Don't think "I won't fall asleep" because you will.

2) If there are more people in the car, don't fall asleep at the same time, leaving the driver alone. At least one person should stay awake, that's increasing the chances that driver himself will stay awake.

3) Don't drink pills, they won't help. Have a nice sleep before going.

4) If you feel even remotely tired during the driving, park the car by the side of the road and have some sleep before you continue.

and finally, the most important:

5) Don't crash your car.

I know this sounds obvious and stupid, but unfortunately we had to learn it the hard way (actually, semi-hard way, the HARD way would be the death of one or more people). Sorry if this post was too long, but I thought I should share this with you guys. Best of luck to everyone.

Harvester

I am currently playing The Longest Journey. Everything was going well till the seventh damn chapter. There's this stupid puzzle with four damn crystals. I spend almost a week trying to find the way to arrange them and solve the damn puzzle, but no luck. Today I finally got pissed off and I checked the solution. Well, problem solved, but another problem appeared - the guilt. Yeah. Now I feel I'm not gonna enjoy the rest of the game and that I'll simply try to finish it as soon as possible and move to another one. Crap! And that game rules!
Anyway, to make me feel better, I'd like you to tell me about great games that you ruined by not being able to solve yourself. My other examples include Phantasmagoria 2 and Larry 7 (ok, Larry 7 wasn't exactly a GREAT game, but it was interesting enough).

It's called The Perfect Murder. It's only one page long, and this is the unedited version. Well, read it or die!

http://a-janjic.freewebspace.com/murder.htm

Oh, yeah... Gonzo read the story and corrected some of the mistakes, but I'm too lazy to upload the new version yet.