Messages

It's Z-code, yes. You can run it using WinFrotz, for example.

I think we'd need to know more about that particular case before we can decide how angry to be about it. Mostly this: how was it paid by the taxpayers? My impression has always been that politicians who hold offices or parliamentary mandates get paid for it (ignore this post if they don't in Australia). If the money for the holiday came out of that, I don't really see much of a problem.

Zool.



This one may or may not be a little harder.

Tough? No, sorry. Crystal Caves.

Cosmo, of Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure.



But what is this?

bury the hatchet, long live the cruise missile

A bit cheap/kitschy/repetitive/bleh, but it was fun to make. I used sounds made by closing a cupboard (a creak and a click), closing my wardrobe, biting an item of snackage, and tapping a mug with my finger. (plus a bunch of synth stuff, naturally)

Not really, auhsor - rar isn't free/open. If you want something superior in that direction that's relatively widely used, use Bzip2. It's a command line tool, though, which I assume will have contributed to its low popularity outside OSS circles. Many proprietary tools can decompress it, though - I know Winrar does, for example.

I have never ever seen a big difference.
What sort of data gets that good compression?
Not AGS games...

Wrong. You can easily try it out yourself - typically the zip is at least 5% larger, not at most. (disclaimer: I only tried a few games, and didn't perform any significance tests etc.)

If you use rar you've probably saved 1GB because 10% of your audience has ignored it! Huzzah!

The question is, is that a good thing? Is it good that most people are using something inferior? I'm not saying that everybody should use specifically (format X) or (format Y) instead of zip, but it's a very bad idea to cling to zip and dismiss all attempts at progress.

It works well for most of the artwork AGS sees.
And I think it's what AGS uses for backgrounds, which is why I mentioned it in the first place.

As I said, I'm not sure what, if any, compression AGS uses, but think: if RLE of all things works well for something, then more effective algorithms (e.g. DEFLATE, which is used for PKZIP and Gzip archives) will work even better. You may well be throwing away the opportunity to make the final product much more compact.

I hear Dev-C++ is good.

The size difference is maybe 5% at most anyway.

Uh, no. It can be quite substantial (more than 50% occasionally!), depending on the data. And 5% of a big file can be quite a lot, especially if you're going to distribute it to a lot of people over the net. Say stuh's game will compress down to 100 MB when it is finished (since it's already that large uncompressed and he hasn't gone far yet, that's reasonable) - 5% larger would be 105. If 100 people download the game, which is not terribly unlikely, that's a 500 MB difference already.

Not that I like to advocate the use of proprietary archive formats and compression algorithms. The PKZIP format has the advantage of being widely supported, as has been pointed out. There are, however, other superior algorithms that will hopefully see wider adoption eventually, such as the Burrows-Wheeler transform based bzip2. The problem with such things, of course, is that everybody doesn't use them because everybody else doesn't either.

As for having an 100Mb game, that does seem a little excessive, but then stuh's backgrounds are 800x600 with little hope for run-length encoding savings.

RLE on its own is a pretty crappy method of compression. I don't actually remember if AGS compresses its resources at all, but it doesn't seem so to me - this should be obvious, considering how well finished AGS games compress. Any clarification on that, CJ? (and information on whether you plan to ever start doing so? I think it's been discussed before, but I don't remember exactly)

The monkey sequence at the start of '2001: a Space Odyssey' was filmed in London using one-way mirrors.

HAL's name was intended as a clever joke based on IBM.

Can you work out which is which?

Must be the former, since the latter is almost certainly incorrect. (though many people do believe it to be true, mistakenly)

include and require do basically the same thing, but behave differently on failure. include produces a warning, require a fatal error.

No, what you want is: (not colour coded because I'm lazy and it really serves no purpose anyway if you don't already understand what's going on)

Code: ags

<?
import_request_variables('gP','r_'); // imports request variables - you may or may not have to do this
$f=fopen('feedback.txt','a'); // opens feedback.txt for appending
fwrite($f,"$r_name\n$r_email\n\n$r_content\n=======================\n"); // adds stuff to the file, assuming the fields are called "name", "email" and "content"
fclose($f);
?>

Esseb needs to learn how to post faster than shbaz.

Leks' site isn't finished yet, but he has an entry in the tune competition that you can listen to. It is good.

DS will eventually finish an EP that will appear on aud.stim, I hope.

Some of my music is here, though for the most part it is old stuff that sucks. I'm currently working on this. There's also Bread Machine, a ten minute song project thing. Two of them are from leks, the others are mine.

Skeptopotamus is the name DS and I use for the music we've made together.

Ghormak, who is also awesome, does not have a reliable central repository for his music, to the best of my knowledge.

Hehe, since we're all listing each other I'll add Loop Theorist, Skeptopotamus and Wrexsoul to my list as well.

I seem to not have posted in this thread before, so here are a few bands/artists I think are probably underrated: (some of them are popular in certain circles, but most people have never heard of them)

Bogdan Raczynski
Renaldo and the Loaf
Venetian Snares
Tim Hecker
The Braindead Monkeys
Peter Licht
Oxygenfad
Fidel and the Castronauts
Melt Banana.

These are Japanese giant hornets though...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/1025_021025_GiantHornets.html

Their venom is much more powerful/painful than that of European hornets, but it's still very rarely lethal except to people with a wasp venom allergy.

Some myth counterage: hornets in general are in fact much less aggressive than smaller wasps (unless you provoke them, of course). Also, their sting is almost certainly not fatal unless you're allergic.