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I managed to fix the problem--I'm typing this from my own computer as we speak.  It had to do with the DNS, I just had to add the appropriate IPs to my hosts file.

If anyone else ever has this problem, PM me and I'll tell you how I fixed it.

I have this problem only with this website.  I'll try the browser cache thing but I am not sure that will work, as I have tried to reach the site with both Firefox (my usual browser), and Internet Explorer (which i almost never use, so there should be very little in the cache at all).

One thing did occur to me--I didn't have this problem until I installed Windows Media Center as my OS.  Could that be the problem?

Has anyone else here ever had a problem where they try to go to this website and get the message about not being able to reach the server--i.e., the message you get when you type in a non-existant address?

For some reason, that has started happening on my home computer (I'm using a different computer now), and it is ALWAYS like that.  I can't get to anything that uses the bigbluecup server--I can't get on www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk, I can't download games from other links if bigbluecup is part of the address--it's as if, for my computer only, the website just doesn't exist.

I use a wireless DSL connection.  My room-mates use it too, and they can get to this site just fine.  I can always bring it up fine if it's on some other computer, just not my own.  I have double-checked the address many many many times and I am certain it is correct.

Can anyone tell me what the problem is?

Actually I think I figured out a couple of ways to still do time travel.  Nothing conventional--no time machines or wormholes or magical rifts or anything like that--but something a little more believable.  Although technically, you know, just living is time travel--every moment I'm moving from the past to the future .  But don't worry, my travel method isn't quite THAT mundane .

We'll see.  I'll get started and if I manage to finish within a month, I'll enter the finished product.

Quick question from someone brand new to MAGS: when you say that someone CAN have multiple characters in different times do things that affect each other, do you mean we can do that in place of having someone actually travel through time?

I've been toying with the idea of making a game where the basic theme is exactly that, but haven't started it yet--thought it might fit this...let me know...

Ok I'm definitely going to give the text-parsing thing a shot, if I have any difficulties I'll post them here.

Meanwhile, another question before I begin--do you guys anticipate that a well-written text-parsing code based on the premise of Garage's code up there would go faster than the textbox-typing, or slower?  As I stated before, my comp appears to be having some trouble with the textbox thing

...oh...

*feels very small* 

You can?

Darn it, I was just trying to figure out how to do that last night, browsing through the help file.  How do you do those things?  Is there some kind of plugin I need to download or am I just missing the documentation somewhere?

If I can read the header and detect the file size, I think that would be good enough for me.  The idea is that if someone just tries to replace an MP3 file on a whim, the chances are good that the game will give them an error message and crash--I think that would be discouraging enough that most people would probably not look into it further.

Oooo, both of these last two suggestions are making me reconsider my 6-labels-and-a-textbox-input-screen idea.  I'll have to fool around some more with this stuff, and I'll definitely have a look at that module.

Thanks guys for helping me out so much with this!  The journal looks great, btw--hopefully I'll have some screenshots up soon in the My-Game's-Not-Done-Yet-But-Hopefully-Soon forum, whatever it's called.

I would advise you to change the limit of 999 pages. If the player would click repeatedly on the "new page" button and then on the "delete page" button, you'd end up having 999 empty text files in the game directoy. And really, who writes 999 pages in the game? Make it 25 or 15 depending on how much information fits on one page.

Or you take it a step further and make the journal system dynamic, which means that the game automatically analyses which files are empty and then when the user creates a new page it will first take an empty file and refill it instead of creating a new one. But that's not easy to do.

I'm one step ahead of you .  The journal is "intelligent"--before you can create a new page, it checks to see if the current one is blank and if it is, the journal tells you to put something on that page before you can make a new one.  If you delete a page, all the pages after the deleted one get moved "one page up" to fill the gap.

So, the only downside is that if you delete, say, 15 pages, then there will be 15 empty files at the very end of the page list.  When you hit the first "blank page" of the journal, though, it lets you go no further, and if you do create a new page (after putting something on the current blank one), it uses the first empty file rather than creating a whole new one.

So the suggestions you make are actually alreayd implemented .  And it is surprisingly easy to write the code for it, though it still took me a good 4 or 5 hours to do so.  I'm kind of a newbie; I'd be willing to bet most of you answering all my annoying questions could do it in less than an hour if you wanted to .

Okay, I guess I'll do that.  It'd be nice if I could delete the file entirely but if it's not possible, it's not possible.

BTW you and GarageGoth are both getting mentioned in the Special Thanks, for all your help with this...looks like after all my false starts I'm finally going to publish a game after all

Wow thanks for the fast response Gilbot!  That's what I love about these forums...

If it's just my machine that's causing the slowdown, then that's ok.  Most people's computers are twice as fast as mine anyway, so that's no big deal.  I'll probably include a disable-the-music-while-writing-in-the-journal option for people with slow comps.

Hmmm, no built-in way to do user-inputted word-wrap, eh?  That sounds like something they ought to add.  I wonder if there's a module or plug-in that would do it.  I'll have to look around.  Otherwise, I'll have to figure out how to do it myself.  Maybe change the gui to have 6 labels that get replaced with textboxes each time you hit enter from the last one, or something like that.  It would be easier for a newbie like me than the on_key_press parsing idea.  I guess the textbox could send its text to one of the labels, then change its location, until the sixth time when the program bundles all 6 strings together and sends the whole thing to the appropriate function...I'll have to think about this some more.

Anyway, thanks for your help!

[mods: You can mark this as solved now...]

Thanks for your help Garage!  I'm almost done, just bumped into one or two little obstacles.

In the end, I decided to do it this way: The journal is a gui with 5 labels and corresponding buttons to delete or add to a label.  The buttons are a "toggle" deal--if there's text in the label you can delete it, if there's not then you can enter text into a new pop-up gui with a textbox, and the game enters that text into the appropriate label.  File input-output is handled any time a label changes.

I've run into a couple of problems with the textbox, though, and one minor inconvenience relating to the file.  I posted 'em as separate issues since...well, that's what they are

Anyway, I wanted to just say thank you and let you know how I decided to do it in case you were curious.  If you want to try to figure out the obstacles, links are HERE and HERE.

Thanks again Garage!

mods: You can mark this as solved now...

This is not essential for my game but it would be nice to be able to do...

Right now my game is set up so that it can create up to 999 external files for use as pages in a journal system.  Since it is possible for a player to "rip out" pages via a special button, it would be nice to be able to delete files created with the File.WriteString command.  However I can find no way to do this.

Is it possible to delete game-created files from inside the game, or is this functionality unavailable for security?

I'm noticing two problems with the textbox I created for my game.

(1) I want the player to be able to enter up to 90 characters, which means that I'd like to have the words wrap around.  Unfortunately it appears that textboxes will not allow you to do this.  Is there some other way to either get the textbox to word-wrap, or to provide another means for the player to enter text that DOES word-wrap?

(2) I've never used textboxes in AGS before, but I'm noticing that the typing rate is incredibly slow.  In the time it takes me to type 6 letters, AGS has only displayed the first one.  It takes 5 or six seconds before a full line of text shows up on the screen.  Maybe this is just my coputer?  Is there some way to make this work faster?  Here's all of what I assume the relevant information would be:

game resolution & color: 800 x 600, 32 color debth
GUIs visible: 2. The first has 14 items, the second (with the textbox) has 2.
music playing: NONE!
repeatedly_execute: Just one if/then statement to check if a specific bool variable is true, and declare it false if it is.

I'm running a 1.0 Ghz machine so maybe that's the problem right there.  Considering I have no music playing at all, I can't imagine how slow the text will enter once the music is actually playing!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Yeah, I thought about that too--I know there's a plugin or module that lets you encrypt/decrypt files somehow--but I don't really want to mess around with that unless I have to.

I don't care so much if people can listen to the MP3's outside the program, what I don't want them to do is REPLACE the mp3's with other ones.  Is there a way for AGS to detect things like the length or the header or file-size of an MP3?  If I could do that, then I could at least make it not worth the effort for someone to find an MP3 they could replace the game's with.

If there's no way to do that, then I'll probably go with Scorpius' file-renaming idea.  I actually didn't know you could change an MP3's extensions and still have AGS recognize it.

Yeah--like strazer indicated, though, that would sort of defeat my purpose.  Actually, however, I realized upon further reflection that it's not the idea of people playing the mp3's separately that bugs me so much as it is the idea of people replacing the game's mp3's with different ones.

I thought about this further, however, and I think I've come up with a few ideas of my own on how to ensure that doesn't happen (or at least, to make it much more difficult).

The only issue that remains is, of course, compression--but actually if I recall correctly, music.vox doesn't compress the files very much anyway.  I could be remembering wrong.  :shrug:

All the music is MP3s.  I don't think I'm using speech.vox at all.

What exactly does your module do?  Would it make it possible to use RunAGSGame for games in different directories?  If I could do that, the rest of the problem would be solved, I think.

Yeah, me neither--especially now, since the only explanation I could come up with was blown out of the water by the fact that Garage's solution worked.  It's a very strange bug, isn't it?  Probably something that ought to be brought to the attention of Chris Jones, if he's still the one who programs this thing, or whoever has taken his place if he's not.

LOL.  GarageGoth, based on my previous logic for why Gilbot's code wasn't working, I totally expected yours to not work either.  After all, if whatever buffer or block of memory that stores the key input is not cleared upon releasing it (as I thought the problem was), then your code would not have worked since it relies on the assumption that that block of memory or whatever IS cleared if the key is no longer pressed.  So I tested it out, believing I'd be posting here that it didn't work and explaining why it didn't work.

It worked.

So I'm still not sure what the problem is, but whatever it was, you solved it.  Thanks again, and thanks to Gilbot for the original code!