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Yeah, and I consider the deep sea much more interesting than space. There are a lot of bizarre creatures down there while in space there's only.. dust. I don't want to sound like I find space boring (with its unimaginable size, giant planets with rings, nebulae, black holes and all that crazy stuff), but I would really like to see more from down the oceans.

To quote Karl Pilkiington:

"Space? Well there's nowt there is there?"

the ints are signed so it would happily go into negative numbers.. Just check to see if it is less than 1 instead of zero.

or clamp the int when he loses the health in the first place.

Yeah like lufia says.

just bind the object's x and y to the mouse. To make it even more appealing to the eye have an offset value equal to the position of the mouse on the object when the mouse is first held down. so the object doesn't 'snap' to the mouse.

Store the original value too so that if the mouse is released somewhere it shouldnt be you can snap the object back to its original location.

Who's Larry Vales?

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meh, we've done worse.

I actually do completely understand what you mean. The idea of extraterrestrial life has always tantalised me. I feel it would legitimise our place in the universe and we arent just a freak accident waiting to annhilate ourselves.

With regards to europa I am DESPERATE for them to send a lander there. Europa could support life as we understand it on earth. We now know that life does not depend on sunlight and there is absolutly no reason why there could not be small aquatic animals on the sea bed of europa fuelled by undersea vents.

If they dont do it soon i'm going myself. I'm going to build a damn rocket and go to europa.

It occurs to me that i never got around to address the points made by ascovel, so here goes.

I finally found some time to finish McCarthy. Overall, I have a bit different impressions than the majority. "Different" not meaning negative, just different.

But first, something I agree with everyone - the quality of the audio presentation alone is worth playing this first episode through. As for the visuals, the combo of the (maybe a little too) bare locations and snazzy visual effects in B&W gives a very striking, attractive effect.

The locations are *far* too bare. This was mainly due to my inescapable lack of artistic talent... The major upshot of this is that i can't change the style or makeup of the locations for episode 2 since that would result in some pretty awful continuity issues.

Also, I must strongly compliment Calin for the cliffhanger at the end. Especially the choice of that rising musical piece and the way you put it in sync with the shown events is great. In general, there are little things in the game that make me think of cinematic movie editing. Even if the scenes usually are from only one angle.

The ending is probably the part of which I am most proud. I nearly killed Tabitha's actress getting her to redo that line repeatedly. I think she nailed it in the end though.

Now, there's one thing about the game I can't understand... Why do so many people (the author included) describe this game as film-noir inspired? It has a chain-smoking PI for the lead and we hear his internal monologues, but otherwise nothing of the story, characters, or dialogs is any bit like film noir. The game is very much a perfect pastiche of 19th century Gothic fiction, with its larger-than-life characters, their melodramatic lives, depressions, poetic flowery language, search for enlightenment, falling in love on first sight etc. The only major difference is that the story is set in modern times.

This is true. I do plan to write a post-mortem of mccarthy in the future since its development was very very badly done. Essentially alot of the design decisions were arbitrary or done for terrible reasons. The game is possibly the most cliched piece of rubbish ever commited to fiction Originally I thought the purple-prose and melodrama would be interesting and beautiful in a kind of dreamlike way. Unfortunately this fell very flat in my opinion in the same way that a Barbara Cartland novel would.

I didn't find the game too short or puzzle-less as some, but I have a different serious complaint - the huge amounts of walking inside and around the house. Partially, this is caused by several events being just randomly triggered in different locations, which requires the player to search the entire building again and again to progress within the story. I started using the solution later on, just because I was tired of wandering aimlessly. This would be easily fixed with giving the player an optional map of the house, so he can get around faster.

The puzzles on their own are not particularly interesting and the hints just spell out what to do sometimes which is annoying. The one that I liked was how McCarthy used the coathanger. It was used for a believable problem and in a believable way. However, the coathanger was too well-hidden and the player didn't even know he needed one. I would much prefer if it just hanged in an open closet in McCarthy's room. The puzzle that gets McCarthy in the house for the first time was also nice, except there was too much trouble with finding the item needed for a certain easy to guess action.

The puzzles have been mentioned before but my official excuse is that I didnt really fully understand the mechanisms of adventure games. I was trying to avoid wedging in puzzles that made little realistic sense. The irony is that I ended up doing exactly that only the puzzles I wedged in were boring.

As someone already said, the verbcoin was a bit underused because the mouth icon didn't seem to be used to anything else than talking. However, it's always nice to have more action choices than just the "it chooses the right action by itself" button.

Hmm after developing a game with Ben304 and reading Vince12's excellent article, I'm of the opinion that the left click/use right click/look is the only way to go with regards to adventure game interfaces

It's too early to say much about the story (it was getting interesting when the game ended). It does seem a bit style over substance, but that's appropriate for the fiction genres McCarthy is the most close to. I also suggest thinking about adding an atmospheric title for each individual episode. To be honest if I was an AGS newbie I wouldn't be able to tell which games are called Blackwell, which Blackstone, which McCarthy, which Murran... There are a couple more of this sort which I can't remember now. Those names don't strike any sort of associations, they are nothing beyond common names.

The game is too short and one of my downfalls was thinking "oh i'll explain it in the next episode". The problem with that is it makes *this* episode boring and unfulfilling.

Thanks for your comments thought, insight is always helpful.

In other news, there have been (unconfirmed) reports of possible life on Australia.

No word about whether they're intelligent or not.

I remain skeptical 

The weather conditions in australia are too extreme for life.

Well there's life 11km under water, there's life at the edge of an acidic lake, there's life on the edge of a volcano...does that make a difference to your everyday life?

No, but many people believe that the earth is divinely unique and that life was created here.

Doesnt make a difference to me.. i still think its awesome though.

The things i want to know:

A) how does it reproduce.
B) How is genetic information stored.
C) Does it have DNA/RNA.
D) Are we related or is this an entirely new tree of life.

Also the existence of self sustaining methane clouds on mars suggest strongly that life is currently active on mars.. There are little green microbes living there right now.

So it's beginning to look increasingly likely that there has been/still is life on mars and the proof is likely to come within a year.

I was just curious what that means to the people here. Do you care if there was life on mars? Would you be interested if there was still active life on mars? Or dont you care in the slightest?

If there was life how would that affect your view of the universe and mankind's place in it?

that is exactly how the AGS command works

Code: ags

if (condition) {
   DoStuff();
}
else if (condition) {
   DoShit();
}
else {
   DoTheBartMan();
}

although i love the idea of an "Or else!" function,

Code: ags

Make_My_Game_Awesome() or else!;

Well then how come the snowrain plugin has exactly the same problem?

Well, i've done this before and the particle system manager module uses it extensively.

It certainly supported.

hmm ok.

It will draw sprites without an alpha channel at any transparancy and it will draw sprites will alpha channels at 0 transparency.. but it wont draw alpha channeled sprites at anything other than 0 transparency.

Yes that sounds exactly like my problem. Does anyone know of a way to fix this WITHOUT nuking my game?

Dear God(CJ), is there anyway of fixing this?

but alpha channels work just fine in objects.

alpha channels behave as normal in objects and animations.. just not in drawimage or in the rain plugin.

What annoys me most is that ive only just noticed the problem.. i dont feel like importing more than 500 sprites again..

32-bit, and its a 32-bit game.

ok kids.. this is a weird one.

Using 3.1.2:

For some reason alpha chanels will not work with any raw draw function. I know the drawing surface doesnt support alphas but this is on the background.. and its still not working.

Also the rain plugin just sends down white blocks and isnt using the alpha channel but alpha channels work just fine in objects.

Any ideas? Im thinking my project file might be corrupt.. anywhere particular i should look?

I dunno what youre calling 'hits'. Is that unique visitors or page hits?

My blog gets around 80 unique visitors a day, peaking at around 300-400 if I post something new or get plugged somewhere.

My advice is 2 fold:

A) comment on other peoples blogs, the through traffic you get that way is quite surprising.

and B) Do something interesting & often. Its vital that you get people to come back more than once, otherwise they might as well have not come at all. For example my blog has had about 1300 unique visitors in the last month or so but only about half of those have been back a second time (my blog is pretty boring).