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Looks like me and Becky will just be going direct to Alicante and back... I'd love to visit Barcelona of course, but if people are car-hiring it'll be a bit of a logistical nightmare for us to not travel down with you but to try and arrange to hitch a lift back up.

Hi, sorry I didn't respond to your PM, I've been snowed under with work recently!

In regards to Byzantine, it's current status is 'on hold', and I'm not entirely sure it will see the light of day as a 2d adventure game. The vision I have, the scope of the game and the way I want to tell the story might not translate as well as it could to a traditional point-and-click medium, especially so with the current lack of resources I have. I've been thinking of either going down the Interactive Fiction route which would probably work the best with the material I have, or if I get my way in the future hopefully a 3D Adventure game.

Either way, I have more manageable projects to tackle before I think of getting Byzantine off the ground again. It will be done one day as I don't want to abandon the concept and everything I've planned for it, but that day will come later than sooner.

It's a PC game, no idea how difficult it is to get hold of these days though.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/planescape-torment

Try not to read too many reviews and especially not the Wikipedia article, which completely gives away the story.

If we're going to talk about story-driven RPGs then we're going to talk about Planescape: Torment, which is pretty much is completely unbeatable in terms of depth, breadth and quality of writing (and has a pretty great main character too).

Unfortunatly it's 2 am and I'm generally lazy, so I'll expand upon this in the morning!

Did they have to trade-in their brains for their chests?

Shall we start with Katie Price and work our way down the list?

I think the main character being a nurse with ridiculously oversized teenage fantasy boobs practically bursting out of her tiny little top says more about the creators of the game than anything else, and you shouldn't be surprised that people find this kind of caracature offensive. I personally don't find it offensive, just... very silly, especially so if it's supposed to signify how attractive the main character is (unless you're using it as a satirical metaphor in your game and not for the HAWT BUSTY PLAYBOY BABE factor).

Sometimes if you move the mouse in a certain way the trail will shoot underneath it quickly, which will obscure anything interactable for a split second. As I said, it's only a niggle and it happens rarely, but I was just backing up Petteri as I feared his comment would get brushed aside as 'user error'.

Besides that, it's a pretty good game taking into account the time in which it was made! It could definatly benefit from some tweaking here and there but I'm sure you're aware yourself what areas could be improved upon

I look forward to seeing a new original project from you!

I got the same problem as Petteri too, I think it's down to the cursor trails being characters and not having their 'clickable' property unchecked so they occasionally obscure the hotspots when they move around. Just a little niggle though, nothing game destroying

Well, I'm using the latest version of the encoder and I've just tried a couple of tests without any glitches, so I'm still not convinced it's a problem with AGS I'll see if CJ is able to look into it anyhow, there might be something unusual going on under the bonnet.

I've been using just plain old oggdrop for my recent project, working in AGS 2.71, and both PlayAmbientSound and PlayMusic are seamless in regards to looping. I've never had a problem with OGGs looping at all, not in the Byzantine demo (looping music, some spot effects here and there) and more recently in Ben Jordan Case 4, and I used Soundforge in both those occasions to encode. I haven't used any specific bitrate either, BJ4 uses a multitude of different encoding settings.

Very weird indeed.

Edit: Just some numbers and stastics, BJ4 was made in AGS 2.62, and Byzantine demo was made all the way back with a 2.4 version... I think.

I think Tierra taking the early Kings Quest games and attempting to make them better was perhaps a valid thing to do, as the originals were so flawed and they injected a lot of originality into their 'updates'. In the case of the Monkey Island remake however, there is nothing that can be done to make that game better - no matter how large you draw the sprites and how many colours you re-draw the backgrounds with you will ultimatly end up with something that pales in comparison to the original, or at best have a direct clone of it with a few extra pixels. Energy wasted that could be spent doing something fresh and great.

People need to start using their imaginations and coming up with their own ideas instead of re-doing games that have already been done. Draw inspiration from your favourite games, but please please stop trying to make your own inferior version of them.

I'm getting my names mixed up, Final Scratch is what I meant, not the Apple DVD authoring software

I haven't tried this: http://www.mspinky.com/WreckedSystem_RecordSignal.html but i've been reliably informed it's more robust than Final Scratch.

Ableton live is a very awesome piece of software, although I haven't completely gotten to grips with it yet. I much prefer using Traktor for pure mixing though, mainly for spontenuity reasons, although using a laptop for DJing feels so stangant to me no matter what control surfaces I've tried (even Final Cut seems a bit creepy). The physical connection between hand and vinyl feels much more fluid to me, and much quicker to beatmatch than jibbling the usually incorrectly determined tempo with Traktor

Although the creative possibilities that digital DJing opens up much outweights the negative points, which is why I sold my decks years ago.

Edit: Nice mixes by the way. The music veers slightly too close to DJ Tiesto terratory for my liking, but they're technically solid Did I spot a John Tejada track in there somewhere?

I'm using OGGs for music and ambient loops, and they're completely seamless. There is an inherent flaw with the MP3 format that causes bad looping due to encoding/decoding inconsistencies or something, so make sure you don't accidently have everything secretly encoded as MP3s

I agree, it should be advertised better. I don't check every thread, or every forum. I think there needs to be something quite noticable on the forums' main page, and it needs to be there for at least a week before the ceremony.

I stayed up til 3:30am last year for them :/ (I fell asleep so I missed it in the end, but I tried!) I'm sorry I missed it again this year.

Better advertised? There was a great big sign at the top of every page with a countdown to the awards and voting information and everything for ages! How did you miss it?

Would you like CJ to personally come and staple a reminder to your forehead next year?

Disabling Alt+X or running in a window is a lot different to disabling a gimmicky device that distorts the visuals (especially when they only work in 32 bit colour games where there'll more than likely be art used that resampling filters only mess up).

I agree, but there are some cases where options are going to have a detremental effect on the visual experience and I feel this is true with the game I'm working on.
If they make the game look like someone's run riot with the smudge tool in photoshop and things look noticeably worse then surely it's not such a big deal to be able to disable the two hq filters, right? Especially if it's not a permanent disablement.

These hq2x/3x filters open up a whole new headache for developers, especially if you enable them to be as screwuppable as possible by the end user who delights in diddling with every setting then emailing the game creator because the graphics suck. The less options there are for people to mess up with the filters the better, you can't trust the general public these days

The plain nearest neighbour filters are going to be wonderful for a multitude of reasons, but I can't get over worrying about releasing my game with the beautiful artwork scotch is putting so much effort into only for folks to put on the 'make my game look better' gee-whiz option and blurring things up to hell (and then emailing me saying the game is broken).

So yes, I second the notion to be able to disable the hq filters... if only in the cfg file, so those that are desperate to get eye-strain can enable them.

The VGA version of Monkey Island is damn near perfect... and we can play it with ScummVM... so why on earth does it need to be remade? All the energy that's going into this could surely be diverted into original projects instead of going to a lot of effort cloning the wheel so to speak

The theme was really great... that french version triggers some strange forgotten nostalga, but I'd love to get my hands on the UK version too.