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i was thinking of taking advantage of the shortage this christmas and selling mine for like £400 (hey, it includes 4 remotes, 2 nunchuks and 4 games! plus those spiffy remote jackets nintendo are bundling now and therefore are offering for free through their website) to some desperate parents
but i'm not that mean 
plus i live in hope that way one i will own some games that are actually fun to play  :

remove the head OR destroy the brain

my sister's baby girl, who is 3 weeks old today, spends most of the time sleeping and hardly ever cries (although i suspect that will change a few months down the line), she's been here during the day for the last few days and it's wonderful to have her around, i just wish she'd spend a bit more time with her eye's open 

i kinda like the slow way he gets up, i get the impression from his balding head that he's not young and therefore might get up out of a chair a little slower. if that is the case and is going to be a running theme through the game i'd say keep it (and possibly give the character a bit of grey in his hair).
to reduce the amount of frames you could have him place the chair under the desk while at the side of it, i seldom often walk round to the back of my chair to push it, and if i do it doesn't take as many steps as it takes that guy 
one thing that does bother me though is the height of the desks, or rather the lack of it, with chairs that height it looks as if you'd need very thin legs to get them under it and would constantly be bumping your knees.

it is possible through the use of certain ripping software to extract sounds, midi and tracker modules from a compiled game, the software i have has no support for mp3/ogg, but if it did it would probably be able to extract those too.
and although i think it does have support for a lot of graphics formats i've never extracted any graphics, just always the sound and non-mp3/ogg music.

i suggest you read the wikipedia article on the MX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX440#GeForce4_MX

and the idea behind the 3dfx card being more compatible is that any pc that came with one is probably so old that any 3D game that can run on it will be supported by the card.
and i stand by my accusation that the MX440 has terrible compatibility with older games, you see a lot of games now listing what cards they're not compatible with and the MX440 is always on that list along with the GeForce2 and older ATi cards.

i'm no scripting expert so i'm not entirely sure if there is a way to randomly, although as is usually the case with AGS it probably is entirely possible.
but one way to script it without doing too much work would be to use the Character Control module here http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=28821.0 that way you can give multiple characters a simple set of destinations and have them repeat it endlessly (although the only thing i've ever used it for is trying to give the impression of a scrolling background through a window).

i have mine in an Athlon 800 with 512mb ram (480 if you don't count all the ram that seems to have escaped somehow), i've managed to play UT2004 at an acceptable framerate with all graphics setting set to low, Halo ran okayish too, and i even managed to get Sims 2 running, and then i tried to run Doom 3 and got less than 1fps just standing still looking at the floor.
i can't run Sim City 4 without lots of texture corruption though. i suppose it's not a terribly bad card, it's just a very misleading one, i only bought mine because there was a GeForce4 pricing error at the time and people were getting cheap cards, i only found out after i bought it that the pricing mixup was with the Ti and the site i bought from had already fixed the pricing problem 

eww, MX440, such a horrible card (i have one in an old pc), don't let that GeForce4 badge fool you, it's basically a GeForce2.
but, if my memory serves me right you can get older drivers off of the nvidia site, and there are plenty of driver sites with downloads for older hardware.
personally i would have kept the 3DFX card as it's probably more compatible with games you can run on your system than the mx440 (or i would have went for a TNT2).

RTFM or STFU

with these newer graphics cards i think it's good practice to either install more fans inside the pc, or do as i do and get yourself a nice big desktop fan aiming directly inside your pc (you do ofcourse need to keep a side panel off for this). i don't really need to do this anymore as my 7900GS stays quite cool (although it does have a fan), i started doing it when i used to have a Radeon 9800XT that was very fond of overheating, like 65°c idle going up to and beyond 80°c when playing games.
also, is that temperature reading the actual graphics card, cpu or motherboard? you should be able to get the temperature of your graphics card from the display settings.
if you're concerned that it is the graphics card you could knock it down a few slots and get yourself an exhaust vent fan to put above it to draw the heat directly out of the pc.

i've had that happen before, and not just with AGS games. the firewall would report that the exe was attempting to send ICMP type 11 information or something like that.
actually, i have screenshot i took of it from when it first happened, i think i posted about it at the time but can't really remember.

if it is actually just black and white (as in not greyscale) you could give your character a white outline (if it's black) and draw all your room's lines on the walkbehind layer (this would prevent the white outline obscuring lines you don't want it to) then when you walk onto a black area that is actually on the background the white outline would be visible.

i'm always playing around with designing GUIs and i've found it's usually much easier and feels better to create my own lettering for smaller buttons, usually keeping each letter the same overall width and height (usually 5x9) as that way everything looks nice if all buttons are the same width.
although that font in the example is okay not every word is the same width despite all three having 4 letters, 'SAVE' looks far too wide for that button.
try experimenting with creating your own uniquely designed letters before deciding on using an existing font.

fart on it!

my sister is currently pregnant and she walks nothing like that, you might want to do a bit more research into how pregnant women walk, which is not very quickly (all that bouncing about wouldn't be that good for the baby) and kinda leaning back.
The Sims 2 has a pretty good example of how pregnant women walk.
also, she looks more fat than pregnant as there's no over hang on the belly, although i think that is mostly down to the shortness of the character.

really great job Dave, i've enjoyed playing it and am now going through it again with the commentary, and will probably play through a few more times (or atleast create more saves than i usually do) so i get to hear all the dialogue options 
the musician has done a really great job, i especially love Lauren's apartment music, when she's standing on the balcony it totally reminds me of the blade runner game 

weeee! downloading my pre-order now
i have been looking forward to this.

i'm no law expert or anything, but if it were illegal wouldn't the responsibility fall upon CJ and not the people creating games with AGS (or those who just have it sitting on their hard drives)?
i seem to remember a case wherein it was found that both Microsoft and Sony had violated some copyright law over the force feedback motors in their control pads or something. the lawsuit was only against the two companies and not those who had bought their products, and the products that are still in use before the lawsuit aren't regarded as illegal, therefore there is no reason to worry.

but having said that, you might not want to use roger in your game either as you know, he's copied from space quest and everything.

there are more people than yufster who start seemingly pointless threads here instead of just using google or making their own decisions. i think this is a pot calling kettle black type situation we've got here.