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Thanks a lot!

Does it contain all branches from SVN and such? Did the conversion from SVN to Git cause some kind of lost data?

Does someone have a backup of the Subversion repo?

Thanks in advance

Dear Adventure Game Studio Forum Members,

I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to you today as a passionate fan of adventure games and an advocate for digital preservation. I am currently on a mission to preserve the earliest versions of Adventure Game Studio (AGS), and I am in need of your assistance.

I am trying to track down the earliest code release of AGS. I have looked at the earliest commit on AGS GitHub repository, but I am uncertain if this is the same as the original forum zip release. If anyone has a cached copy of the original forum zip release, it would be incredibly helpful for future reference.

I found the following forum thread, but the svn server is offline. I wonder if there's some backup somewhere: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/engine-development/initial-ags-engine-source-code-release/

The reason for this request is that it may be beneficial if I or someone else decides to disassemble an earlier game to have the earliest known sources handy for reference. This would greatly aid in our understanding of the software's evolution and contribute to our efforts in digital preservation.

I understand that this is a significant ask, but I believe in the importance of this endeavor. Any assistance or guidance you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to any possibility of working together to preserve a piece of our shared digital heritage.

With utmost respect,
Timofonic.

Does anyone have other versions not there? I'm mostly interested in the oldest ones, from AC to AGS pre 2.5.

Alphas, betas and whatever!

Thanks in advance!

Do you mean like these?
https://archive.org/details/adventuregamestudio?tab=collection&query=chris+jones

I downloaded them all!

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/f71q9flens95i/engines

One file more. Not much difference. Any more out there? I'm quite interested in collecting ALL possible AGS versions, with special interest in old ones.

Sorry for necroposting!


I downloaded agsarchives.torrent and uploaded the engines to mediafire.

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/je8ik6nheyexl/engines


Does anyone have other versions not there? I'm mostly interested in the oldest ones, from AC to AGS pre 2.5.

Alphas, betas and whatever!

Thanks in advance!

Are there plans to merging both AGS Archives and this AGS Games list? As this site is going to the AGS Archives hosting too

Hello.

I did look at the AGS irc, but it got disconnected. I tried to login with the following possible IRC servers and no luck:

irc.dasjoe.de
irc.adventuregamestudio.co.uk
irc.adventuregamestudio.co.uk


Also, the AGS site document about the chat room still points to irc.adventuregamestudio.co.uk and Dasjoe said about that subdomain is no longer used for the IRC server.

Is this a common problem? Is going to be solved and the official AGS site updates because of this? There are lots of outdated information in the AGS[url/] site too.

Regards.

I'll ask CJ to drop by and give his ideas of how this might go forward.  I wouldn't expect anything definitive though.

Oh, you are asking to God!

Anyway, what about converting the SVN server to Git? Or even using github instead.

And please ask him *again* about the vss repository dump...

Thanks AGA, I think if we knew what his goals and desires are for this, we could proceed more peacefully in mind.

Amen!

But, who are we kidding. Lets face it guys... We all really need CJ to just make a stop by and write a post of how he would want things to go on. Without his approval and his statements, I think we may just keep repeating the same idea's over and over again. Honestly, AGS is his baby and he has the right to tell us what to do with it officially and thats what we probably should be waiting for.

Don't you remember my reply about God?

God abandoned us, he's too busy with other "real life" important stuff. He donated his baby to their community, the community must organize themselves and learn the Open Source way.

Please open your eyes, stop your dogmatism to him and become pragmatic...

The community should also say thanks to "the creator", but that's not the most important thing. The community must organize themselves without any kind of bottleneck due to waiting replies from a busy person (CJ or whatever) or not accepting popular decisions in the project because of dictatoship.

No more prophets, no more leaders. Just make a meritocratic organization

It's certainly an option.

Would CJ agree on converting the SVN repository to Git? After all, most active devs are using it so merging/forking would be easier and such.

(a dump of the original visual source safe repository would be appreciated to integrate it and save the code progress, for historical and retrocompatibility research reasons...)

Running a local Git server is an option.

What about running one in adventuregamestudio.co.uk subdomain? Like git.adventuregamestudio.co.uk

What about accepting different scripting systems providing different computer programming approachs? This way, game developers would choose one of them based on their experience or personal preferences.

Here is some examples about what scripting languages would be good to include...

- One for non-programmers but poweful enough for complex games too, being scalable with additional features for more advanced users. This would be the default one
- A Python/C#/Java alike for people used to to Object-Oriented Programming.
- A JavaScript/ECMAScript alike for people used to web programming. This is currently done by the Wintermute engine, for different reasons.

If the scripting system can be hooked up to produce an AGS bytecode compilation, then there would be no problem at all to give it as an option.

After all, those scripts are going to be converted to bytecode by the AGS compiler. You can't include big external dependencies like a full blown JVM but provide a common infrauestructure to execute the game logic, the "AGS VM". This way it can be ported easily to all kind of devices because of portability and lightweight design in mind. If you require an external interpreter or embedding a script interpreter, you ruin all the portability and/or lightweight advantages

As two possible negative points, maybe this would make code maintaining of both the AGS compiler and editor more complex in certain way.

Am I right?

I'm interested in helping port AGS to iOS and MacOS because Wadjet Eye (I'm Dave's wife and work with him) really needs portability at the moment for commercial reasons. I'm a C++ programmer primarily but I can turn my hand to anything. I can dedicate a lot of time to this.

That's very good! You and your husband are getting profit and enjoying AGS, it's good you want to contribute back to the project. Also, both of you can know better what the project needs in a more professional way

I agree about AGS community should start coding ASAP and form a proper team, merging efforts and organizing tasks. But your proposals are a bit monolithic, as you don't count on the personal motivations on this project runned by unpaid volunteer people. AGS is nor a Foundation or a Corporation, but a loosely community driven project (in the sense of not clear direction or strong management on it) with deep origins on a lone programmer that did a quite big effort.

To make the infraestructure, the team needs to be formed in a progressively organical way first. If a Foundation were done, things would get easier and ask for donations and some commercial activities (a cheap licensing for propietary usage, advanced support and paying to have special features done quickly and having a limited exclusivity to them, teaching development of adventure games, etc.) to get funds and paying the most skilled developers to work FULLTIME on the project.

Why that obsesion about Allegro? What's so special and cool about it? Are you a programmer? If yes, what are your facts about it? Despite SDL having some issues too (and still not usable on certain platforms) it's actively more developed and available on lots more platforms than Allegro. OpenGL is another good candidate for certain platforms, too.

You did put JJS as "code refactoring", but his goals are more related to portability. Instead, Crimson Wizard is doing a GREAT refactoring work and he's not listed as "code refactoring".

I agree about not being in SCUMM Team, because that Team focuses on the SCUMM engine only.

I'm not sure if you are using the correct terminology or got some concepts right, really. What's your background in this? Are you making a poll or wants others to totally accept your words because are blessed by God?

God? God is dead, as Nietzsche said

SMF has a mobile version (WAP2 link at the bottom of every page).  What are the benefits of tapatalk?

http://www.tapatalk.com/activate_tapatalk.php?plugin=smf

Wiki is a bad idea because there will always be clueless people about who think they know more than everyone when in fact they know very little. 

I was a wiki editor and even Mediawiki is quite powerful in permissions stuff. You can create groups, assign certain permissions to those groups and even make certain pages be edited only by certain groups.

For example: You could create the "documentation team" group and only those people could edit certain flagged wiki sections.

The comment about stagnation was due to the idea of code rewieving, something that isn't happening and isn't possible at this stage due to a lack of developers and a management adapted to the Open Source model. Sorry if it sounded offtopic and not related to the main discussion.

I understand written English quite well, despite I'm not a native English speaker

timofonic : Coding Project Management :: iceyfresh : RPG Development

It's funny, the GCC uses SVN. Amazing how quickly that project died from not being run by some ScummVM fanboy that knows nothing about programming or project management.

You are funny, you should be the AGS project leader

By the way, there's an unknown project called Linux. It was the main reason of making Git, named after the creator of the project himself (that he likes to say "fsck you!" these days too). There's tons of other of bad examples of unknown projects here.

JJS, Tobihan and Ivan are doing the most interesting work. Most of that work isn't in the official repository. Now JJS's fork becomes an inofficial repository of AGS in GitHub but it seems the SVN repository still coexists.

Can anyone explain about this?

[Changes to the standard AGS Manual ought to go through the save review process and receive the same scrutiny as changes to the editor and engine code.]

Why do you want to split between standard and user created? That means the standard one gets less updated and users will start something new instead. And there will be overlaps. Why not one good documentation where everyone can contribute?

I am not advocating that the standard help file be split.   What I am suggesting is that there are other materials beyond the scope of the AGS Manual and that it would be useful if those materials could be made available in the same form as and from the same menu as the standard help file.   You concede the point about modules but how about such things as templates, tutorials, programming conventions?  For group projects there could also be project specific guidelines, storyboard, instructions and policy on archiving and repository submissions, etc.   

I don't see how any of that would fragment the AGS Manual.  A wiki on the other hand would do exactly that; over time the AGS manual would become fragmented, self inconsistent, less concise and less understandable.   Changes to the standard AGS Manual ought to go through the save review process and receive the same scrutiny as changes to the editor and engine code.       

Stagnation?

Are you being ironical? The only thing that saved AGS are the unofficial forks, that are revitalizing the project a lot. Where's the strong hierarchy there?

Also, I see many people in the community are too centered in Microsoft platforms and that's why don't think about the lmits of using formats like CHM. Open Sourcing not just the game engine but the editor would mean to port this last one to other platforms by using Mono, or new editors for other platforms too (Mac, iOS, Linux...).

We can't offer support for every weird little used browser or platform, I'm afraid.  If you're not using a mainstream browser or system, we're not going to spend the time to make it compatible.  Sorry!

That's quite funny, coming from a site non-mainstream game engine for a non-mainstream game genre

WAP isn't so weird, anyway it's a quite ancient standard. And the only issue are the colours, the site is usable it seems

Saludos desde Spain!

Hello.

I see the AGS website has been greatly improved. Congratulations!

I have some ideas I would like to share with others and discuss them. While the website design has been improved dramatically, I think it usability could be improved a bit. Here are some ideas...


About the main site...

* Put news about AGS project in a blog-like way, this is something that improves visibility and it's done by other Open Source projects: OpenWrt, Battle for Wesnoth, KDE, Blender etc. You could put a main new section related to the software announcements, and others for different topics (released games, awards, contests, etc).
* A Planet-like thing would be interesting to have. You could use a Planet, a sindication on the main site or something between all that. This way, it could be easier to look at other AGS-related blogs and get informed. Please don't forget to use tags appropiately to sort different information into proper sections if necessary.
* Some cool slideshow or random screenshot of the more interesting games would make AGS more interesting too. There are available solutions for it in php, you could use them.
* Project developers should have their own blogs to post about stuff they are working on, so users and other developers could watch what's coming in AGS.


About the wiki...

* Please include a section to the Wiki in the up part, just like the other sections.
* I think the wiki should be the central information repository of the project to both developers and game makers. Offline documentation could be generated easily, permissions to make certain pages by a special group (like "documentation team") could be done and offline documentation can be generated in many ways.
* The wiki currently needs a main page design overhaul.
* I think wiki.adventuregamestudio.co.uk should be considered as a prettier subdomain to access the wiki.

@Crimson Wizard

It seems you are doing a GREAT refactoring work, would you like to set up a development blog? So your effort would gain more visibility in the community.