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Seems to have broken (getChannel failed), and now disappeared due to inactivity.

I agree with Indie, Stickam is good for AGS but new links need to be posted.  It's usually the same people going on Stickam each time so if you move to Popular Threads not many people will miss out.

Started playing this from April last year until about January/February, and it will take a lot of your time up.  It's a good game, but there are 3 major drawbacks:

1) If you want to win the game or join a half-decent alliance you may find yourself up very late or very early (ie setting alarm in middle of night) to send out coordinated attacks for when a sitter can't do it for you.

2) Not sure how many servers are using it now, but there's a currency called Gold which allows you to basically pay to win - you can buy bonuses to attack and defence, NPC trading and vast interface improvements such as build queueing.  In my opinion this makes the game very unfair.

3) The server will eventually reset, which may be a good or bad thing.

That said, it is great fun and diplomacy is key, so you will make a lot of friends - nothing like joining your alliance razing an evil player

Rui:

Spoiler

Run into another room.

[close]

I agree with Mr Flibble.

I don't pay for music downloads because I don't like the idea of paying to download something which has exactly the same end result as downloading it illegally, so you have little to show for your purchase.  In fact, buying online involves going through the paying system and possibly having a less flexible music format.  When commercial products are more cumbersome than their pirated counterparts (copy protection in games is another example) I will opt for the pirated version.

In fact I don't pirate music anymore, at least through p2p.  I like to have a physical product sitting on my shelf and to act as a kind of receipt to show that I like the artist enough to pay.  If it's too expensive I'll just take the mp3s from friends.

I know not paying for music is wrong and it feels bad, but seeing millions of others amass large collections while I'm throwing my money away feels worse.

[Google Images is an artist's friend]

Google Images is an artist's friend
If you're not experienced in drawing something, such as trees or rocks, find a few reference photos on Google Images and have them in a seperate window or next to the picture you're drawing.  You art skills will improve faster like this too.

Don't stop working on a project for more than a few days
If you do this too often you will not finish your project.  When you have spare time, open up all the programs you need to work on the next part of your game and find where you left off.  If you're lacking motivation then at least revise what you're done to keep it fresh and leave the windows open in case you want to come back to it, but having everything ready in front of you can sway you away from gaming or the Internet.

Don't drown in coding problems
Sometimes you will hit a brick wall in your coding- either something you're not sure how best to implement or a difficult bug.  If you're out of ideas then get up and walk around with a hot drink, or something else to stimulate your senses, and work through your program from the top.  Don't go watch TV or you'll just come back to your computer after and play Unreal Tournament instead.

Think about which tasks to do when
If you've broken your game just before you go to sleep or done all the really easy fun tasks, there won't be much motivation left to continue with all the hard parts.  Try and tackle hard tasks whenever you can and leave the easy tasks for when you're lacking motivation.

really really fast, into a brick wall.

I wish I could be strong

I think everyone wants another OROW really.  They stopped at the height of their success, like a powercut at a disco.  What killed off the previous OROW discussion topic?  I seem to remember it being a lack of willing hosts, but it sounds like there might be more enthusiasm this time.  Will certainly give a game a crack as long as I'm not desperately busy.

I've never been bothered by the opportunity for spending longer than a week on an OROW game, which is quite possible since the rule is usually 'the only rule is that there are no rules'.  It's not so much in the spirit of OROW, but it's still fun just having a whole bunch of creative games, and comparing how people spent their week.

Another topic derailed thanks to OROW 

Nice attitude.  Actually Tuomas is right: he was saying that the MAGS, which is only a month, might not be enough time.

I'm still not so sure though, I think 2 months is just too much planning for a beginner.  The graphics and design will start to go stale and people will lose interest.  Since beginners improve rapidly, you want to give a short timescale to get to grips with everything without too much future planning.  A new game is always motivation, and starting from an experienced foundation will keep that motivation going much longer.

Don't forget that people have made games in under an hour before (although terrible), and the OROWs (one room, one week) had a great turnout, and some of those were very highly polished.  A one room game is a great MAGS format for unconfident people.

If you're set on making a beginner's competition you can just not allow the same person to win too frequently.

The competitions board isn't so much somewhere to prove your worth as just to have fun.  People won't care if you draw terrible sprites, write horrible music or make bad MAGS games.  The idea is to motivate you to do things you wouldn't normally do, put a little effort in and learn a bit, as well as just have a laugh.

I think a month is more than enough for a MAGS.  Short enough to wait for a new topic, long enough to get the work done.  If it were any longer people would lose focus and chances are something would come up in real life.  In fact even if you can't finish a MAGS game, at least you've tried.  One of the most valuable lessons it teaches beginners and experts is to think small.  If you struggle on every aspect of making a game you will have at least something complete as long as you aren't too ambitious.

If you haven't released a game before I thoroughly recommend entering a MAGS, whatever the quality of your finished game, as long as it is your best effort.

Wow, that's pretty awesome!  Nice work flicking the pad too, mine always used to stop or skip frames

When I was a pupil in secondary school (age 12-16) the head teacher was told by two pupils around age 14 in our year that a teacher had asked to take indecent pictures of them.  Shortly after being suspended while investigation was underway the teacher committed suicide.

Most pupils talked about how he was a dirty paedophile, and his name would come up in insults and jokes.  I don't know if there was any evidence apart from the pupils' words against him, but as I've matured I can't help feeling unsure about what had really happened.  There's always a possibility that these pupils were being malicious but regardless the teacher's career and life was ruined, driving him to suicide.  I hope he was guilty, but it's one of those things we will never know.

Anyway, good work handling such a sensitive issue Andail.  Your pupils must be proud to have you.

The Wii controller vibrates when the cursor is hovering over certain buttons I think.  But anyway, this is impossible with a normal mouse.  You'd have to do a load of soldering and writing drivers and whatnot.  Perhaps you can buy a special shocking mouse, but honestly, unless you are really enthusiastic and know what you're doing there are probably better things you can spend your time and money on.

Alright, I went to Geek Squad at Best Buy and they told me my only option is a fresh OS install.

I'm not so sure, but it does happen to be the most lucrative option.  I wouldn't pay $200 unless you're certain it's a virus going round wrecking your files and you are unable to salvage them or know anyone that can help.  I'm sure a lot of people here have helped their friends for no more than some cups of coffee and a favour or two.  Here are some cheaper ways:

• You have either spyware, an elusive virus (if AVG isn't catching it) or just an annoying Internet Explorer bug.  If you haven't already, download Spybot and Ad-Aware from the links above, click update and then do a full scan, it's simple enough.  Same goes with all other scanners, AVG too - update them first or you're wasting your time.
  If that still doesn't fix you, do what KhrisMUC said with HijackThis (it takes seconds to scan).


• If you can't stand trying to fix the problem them buy some CDs/DVDs or even another harddisk (which you can keep after) out of that $200, copy everything worth keeping onto it and reformat.  Then copy your files back over.  Spyware tends to stay in your system folders, so personal files are usually safe.  If it's a virus, it might come back and infect your computer, in which case you might have to reformat again and try or even buy other scanners.  I don't think it's the most likely result though.
  
  To reformat your harddisk just put your Windows CD in and reboot.

Of course it's your money, but unless your time is really precious or you really don't like playing with scanners then it isn't worth $200 and being parted from your PC.

The original UFO was great indeed, although I haven't played the others (I have a UFO trilogy budget release sitting on my desk still shrinkwrapped).  Complex and unforgiving, I didn't get far, mostly because I was young and didn't own my own copy.  Will have to get back to that game.

My main staples were Dune 2, C&C and Red Alert, not a big fan of Generals or RA2.  Total Annihilation was real cocaine and I had many nights stuck in deadlocked LAN games, at least when the stupidly long range cannons (and those that followed in CC) were rightfully disabled.

I've moved away from RTS's since because a large portion of the game seems to be remembering to catch up on old jobs that have finished, like building more units once resources come in or telling your harvester not to be a tard.  I haven't played much of the genre but I'd like something more programmable, like the gambit system in FFXII - "while <resource> > 1000 build <unit>" or "build 20 <structure> around this area".  If someone shows me a game focused more on strategy than micromanagement I'd be interested.

I guess I can live with it, but someone tell me something, I need this answered as I've mentioned like three times but no one has answered it. Will it effect my PC if I keep having to end the task when I turn off my PC every time?

Nope, if you don't mind:

• All the sites you visit being monitored and screenshots of your activity being sent to strangers.
• Having this malware opening a backdoor at any time and have a virus destroy your files before you get a chance to back them up.
• Having your passwords (eg. online banking) compromised.
• Infecting your friends with malware and viruses.
• Spamming people's mailboxes with porno.
• Joining in a denial of service attack organised by criminals.

Or it could do nothing at all.

This combination has kept my PC safe for many years, and many of those years I spent without any service packs or Windows updates.  They're also all free:

1) AVG
2) Spybot
3) Ad-Aware
4) Downloading only things that look like they're safe.  If in doubt, Google for forum topics on the thing in question.

There are plenty of other free things too.  If you know the name of the malware/virus you have then just Google it and you'll usually find instructions for removing it.  The majority of occurences of a virus filename on the Internet is in discussions or guides on removing it.

If you don't know the virus name, check all of your processes in the Task Manager and msconfig > startup against something like the startup list at http://www.sysinfo.org/.

Some people just use their hand.

Nice idea for a game, and the graphics are very good.  I look forward to playing.