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The last game I had to stop playing because I just got so angry and I was pretty much screaming fuckasscuntbitch and other nice words like that all of the time was Quake Live. It's crazy fast and sooo twitchy.

Nice game in theory, just that in practice I suck at it. One match I lost so badly I became bored and killed myself like a 100 times by jumping into the lava. I had -100 frags. I felt better. It did hurt the statistics of my player account though ... I don't remember Quake 3 or other shooters being so out of my reach. I did manage to get first place in a few rounds (7 out of ~40 to be precise) and that was really exciting. I mean getting the last winning frag in the last second basically. These games were hectic to say the least.

I often get words or phrases (could also be a bit from a song) looping in my head, especially before falling asleep. The more I try not to think about it, to break the cycle, the longer it goes on. After a while the words make no sense and I don't even know where they're from. It's really annoying, the feeling you can't control your own thoughts. I mean, I'm thinking (or at least trying to think) about a totally different thing, but this thing keeps going in the background. Concurrent thoughts. Really bizarre.

These rules are weird for a reason.

Would you like to play a first-person shooter, where you have to pee every 3-4 hours, eat at least twice a day, drink water, wash your hands and sleep. If you don't crap for a week, you die of constipation.

When you get hit once, you either die or are in so much pain you wish you were dead. When you find a med-kit, you have to take it somewhere where you can rest and use it. Also making sure you clean the wounds not to get them infected, otherwise you die. Also, without pain medications you most likely die.

When carrying a rocket-launcher you can only run very slowly for about a hundred meters. Then you are exhausted. When you are near an explosion, you either go temporarily blind from the flash or deaf from the sound-wave. Without visual or audible aids you most likely die in battle. Grenade shrapnel kills you. Instantly.

You can't climb a ladder while dual-wielding handguns.

The enemy has you outnumbered, you cannot win. You die.

When landing a high jump and hearing a crunch, that means you broke your legs and are unable to move any further. You die.

When climbing in air-vents, you most likely suffocate and die.

After murdering two hundred enemies, you most likely will not be able to function as a social person and eventually go insane. You die.

You are not a handsome looking guy. You die.

If you ever want to implement anything other than a flat isometric ground, then take a look at this rather old article (the example code is messed up but it's not really needed anyway)

What you should be interested in is this .. for the basic flat ground at least:


Basically when you click on the map, you find the first tile thats bounding box (box should be as large as this image is compared to the white part) contains the mouse coordinates, there may be many but any will do. Let's say you clicked a tile in 7-th column and 3-rd row (7,3).

Then imagine you draw this image on the map, over the tile, so that the white area is exactly where the graphical tile is. (You don't need to draw it)

Then you translate the mouse coordinates to bounding box, so that the top-left corner would be (0,0) and so on. Then you check the color of the pixel at that coordinate. Eg. if it's yellow, then in your case you subtract one from column and you get (6,3), which is the actual tile you clicked. If the color is pink, then you add one row and you get (7,4) which is the actual tile you clicked. If it's white, you do nothing because you already clicked the right tile.

Does it make sense? I'm not really good at explaining things.

edit: Oh, okay. I totally mis-read the topic. Nevermind then. Hopefully someone finds it useful nonetheless.

I've seen that "seized by FBI" image before on a few tv-series/movies link hosting (hosting links to other sites, not the infringing content itself) sites a few years back, so it's not anything new, but the timing on this one is just bad.

[criticise]

He did criticise something, though I'm not quite sure what.

In addition to adding a shadow under the bed, I'd also lower the viewing point, to show less ceiling and more of the floor. Something like this perhaps:

That looks like a chair with a tumor.

I want it!

[pressed]

Bath tubes are small, no? You'd be hard-pressed to fit anyone in there, unless it's a lego man, because I lost a lego man down the tubes of the bath when I was a kid. Seriously.

When drawing, make the rapist a white guy - less pixels needed.

Once you realize what I did there you will most likely not chuckle.

May I ask, how are these lists useful to you? I mean .. every display supports 800 x 600 and other common resolutions like that. The only useful piece of data, at least that I see, is the native resolution of different computers. Knowing that 848 x 480 is available .. how does that help you?

My screen is 1280 x 800. In full-screen, when possible, I use that. When playing in windowed mode, I prefer 800 x 600 because that fits the screen best vertically. I hate it when games run in 1024 x 768 in windowed mode and no way to change it. It just doesn't fit. But it's very common. And so, for my game (not AGS related) I'm going for 800 x 600, because it seemed okay to have 800 as the minimum height. It should fit most of the laptops .. I'm not worrying about desktops.

edit: Also, with today's widescreens, it's the aspect ratio you should be worried about. If you make an 1024 x 768 (4:3) background image and display it full-screen on an 1280 x 800 (16:10) device then you're going to have troubles.

366 % 360 = 6
950 % 360 = 230

It's modulus operator you want.

[artist]

Hello AGSers!

I'm posting this here even though the project I'm seeking help for isn't AGS-related at all, but I just know there are many talented people around. So no better place to start my quest of epicness. First of all, I'm looking for an artist so if that's not your speciality read no further (or do, I'm not to tell).

So, I'm working on this game called something or the other and it's kind of like old-school management and tycoon games, think Pizza Tycoon or Theme Hospital. It's about running your chain of restaurants in a fictional city during a one-year competition. There's slightly more story to that but that's not important right now. So far I've been chuckling along quite nicely doing all game-design, programming, music and art myself but lately I haven't had as much time as before (job and whatnot). And recently I came to realize my art sucks. I'll show a few screenshots below. I think I can draw but I feel it's not good enough for the final product and I want it to be as good as possible, because I do hope to sell a few copies. Plus I recently decided having black outlines (or any strong outline at all) is not the style I want and I don't have the energy in me to redo the graphics already done. It's not a massive game but there will be around 15 backgrounds and quite a lot of UI elements + other misc pieces of graphics.

Result? I want to hire an artist to really take this game to another level visually. I'm looking for someone to do similar style, that is, cartoony and cheerful, fun and funny (you could put little funny details in the backgrounds) but not childish.

If you think you want to and could do that, contact me, show me some of your previous works and maybe do a quick sketch of the direction you'd take it artistically and if I like it we'll discuss it further and agree on the fee. I'm not the richest person alive so I might not be able to give you a million up front but I'm sure we can figure out some deal (a royalty deal maybe?)

(Click for full sized image)



Take care,
Eigen

I've been working as an iOS developer for about 8 months or so but I've also done a few cross-platform projects. For that we used Appcelerator's Titanium It gets the job done on smaller/average-sized projects but gets limiting and buggy once you start needing certain specific things. I used it a few major versions ago and I'm sure its gotten better.

Another solution I found and even installed but never got around to trying is PhoneGap, that's pure HTML5 so if it's a web-app you want to make that should work fine. But could you be a little more specific on what's your app about, then maybe I can give better advice.

istaag ama waan ku tooganayaa!

How to talk like a pirate

They should be shot in the face with a double barreled shotgun. Just saying'.

Talking about different movies, I watched David Lynch's Eraserhead the other day and it was great. I didn't understand a part of it! Might have to watch it again after some time, perhaps it makes more sense then. All I know is it made me value silence and quietness around me (which I can still find even in the city) a lot more.

Another movie I recently watched was Death Race 2000. A classic I had heard so much about but hadn't really seen. Watched it and I can say it's a bad movie, no doubt about it, but the kind of bad you have to see for yourself.

Game gurlz

I've touched C#, not in any inappropriate place, I assure you, but I got to say I don't like it much. I guess it comes down to personal preference as to why I like C and especially C++ more. To me, in addition to obvious perks already stated here (multiplatform support, etc.), it feels more robust and closer to the hardware. Yes, you could write stuff in Assembly .. but rather not. C, when compiled, is the closest to what you might do in Assembly. You can even use Assembly in C language itself. All good stuff in my mind.

Another C-like language I've recently became to like very much (thanks to my job) is Objective-C. Its syntax is based on Smalltalk, so nothing like C, but it's based on it, so you can write C in that as well. Basically you write stuff like [Player getObject:APPLE] or [Player give:APPLE to:AnotherPlayer]. Once you get the hang of it, rapid programming ensues .. it's just so easy to write. There are other really good things about it as well .. like dynamic-typing and the ability to change what method to call on an object at run-time.

Bottom line. Use the language that best suits the needs of your project and that you're most efficient in.

The only way I run my Windows XP box is that my main account is a regular user account, not the admin one. If I want to install anything I either use "run as" on the .exe or log in as an admin. Having your main account as an administrative one is pretty much the worst thing one could do on Windows. I mean, it has all the permissions and even for stuff that goes on in the background. This advice was given to me by the network sysadmin in my university. I'm glad I took it because I haven't had any problems since. Obviously, if you go crazy and browse a dozen pr0n sites a day you're bound to run into trouble no matter what. So, drop the administrative account and start using a regular one (if you aren't already)