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My vast army of mole people has ordered one copy.

I'd actually like to buy it - but of course I'd have to know what shipping [to Germany] would cost before paying. Judging from previous experiences, I imagine it's more than $1.80.

It's rare that I read anything as though somebody was saying it, which means I generally don't "hear" anything in my mind. I tend to treat certain common abbreviations as symbols of their own, though of course with the usual meanings, connotations and undertones attached to them as with any real word. [And the H is, and always has been, "humble".]

The "face" is nothing special. It's just a perfectly normal hill that happened to look a lot like a face on the first picture taken of the region because the shadows happened to fall that way at the time.

Here's something about the face. It's aimed at a particular idiot's claims of it being artificial, but it'll do.

Over!

Did you have this discussion when you first played SpaceQuest too?
"Hmmm... It's not likely that the Orat lives in a empty cave when he actually
is so civilized that he both can speak and play basketball?

My post (and the Captain's posts, presumably) was based on the assumption that your game was going to be mostly serious - Space Quest is a very different matter because it's 100% humorous. Nobody would expect it to make sense when taken entirely seriously. Honestly, if you're going to make a serious "hard" science fiction game, you have to think these things through or your game will end up looking silly.

Why, then, wouldn't they simply use humans? I gather from your first post that the idea is for the cyborgs to take care of the humans until there's an atmosphere and all that, meaning that actually using humans wouldn't work, but if the cyborgs are educated well enough to be able to keep the humans alive under all circumstances, wouldn't they very quickly notice that they're surviving conditions that humans couldn't?
You might say that, thanks to the awesome technological advances in the far future, it is possible to program them not to notice - but if that's so easy, then why couldn't they also be programmed to give the humans' lives absolute priority?

I really do think you might be better off discussing the development of the cyborgs' society, how they reevaluate their duties when they learn that what they have on their hands is all that's left of humanity - no longer important? More important than ever? And so on. What Mostly suggested, basically.
That's not to say you can't have your murder mystery. If you're not afraid of the whole Evil Conspiracy cliché, you might keep the destruction of Earth secret from the player character and most of the cyborgs for a while and see where you can go from there, for example.

Also, you never did say what your intended way of notifying the cyborgs of Earth's destruction was. Detected remotely? A magical faster-than-light message sent shortly before the end? And if this is far enough in the future for that, interstellar travel and highly developed artificial intelligence, it's likely that Mars would have been colonised by then - I think you should find some way to deal with that.

I recommend fixed point numbers - the newest betas of AGS finally have bitshift operators, so there should be no problems. They're basically the same thing RickJ recommends, except they use a power of 2 instead of 10, and are a bit faster and more accurate if done right - though they're also a bit harder to understand if you have little experience with such things.

If you absolutely have to use floats, I made a floating-point plugin a while back. It works by storing 32-bit (single precision) floating point numbers in AGS' integer variables. Because of the way these work, however, you can't use normal operators and functions with these variables without converting. It adds the following functions:

int float_to_int(int);
Interprets the argument as a float, rounds it and returns the normal int value.

int int_to_float(int);
Interprets the argument as a normal integer and returns a float of the same value (only as close as possible with single-precision floats, of course).

int fcomp(int,int);
Interprets the arguments as floats and returns 0 if they're equal, -1 if the first is smaller than the second, and 1 if the first is larger than the second.

int fadd(int,int);
int fmul(int,int);
int fdiv(int,int);
Floating point addition, multiplication and division.

int fabs(int);
Floating point absolute value.

int sin(int);
int cos(int);
Floating point sine and cosine.

int sqrt(int);
Floating point square root.

int exp(int);
int log(int);
Floating point exponential and natural logarithm.

int pow(int,int);
First argument to the "second argumentth" power. As with all the others, both have to be floats.

EDIT: Fixed some bugs I only just now found out about, added fabs because what I said in an earlier thread about normal abs working fine is nonsense.

Use the SetCharacterIdle function - it allows you to change the delay. AFAIK, there's no other way to change it.

Cooperation between Al Qaeda and the ETA seems unlikely to me. I'm no expert on either organization, but I don't think their ideologies are compatible, and they do seem to be quite devoted to their causes.
From what I hear, experts are arguing back and forth on this, of course. We'll probably know more soon, though.

(Thanks for clearing that up, Darth, and sorry for all the yelling - it's a point that's important to me, that's all.)

I wasn't really trying to argue against the death penalty - I was mainly stating my own reasons for disagreeing with those who call for it, or in the case of e.g. the US wish to retain it. A real discussion of all this would lead this thread far off-topic, and it would be of no benefit to anybody.

But we can't do these things because we certainly wouldn't want to inconvenience the nice terrorists.

(If I misinterpreted that part of your post, tell me so but otherwise disregard the following)

Now that's just unfair. I resent your implication that I'm somehow in favour of terrorists - is it so hard to accept that some people don't believe in the whole revenge thing? Is everybody either on the terrorists' side or in favour of throwing nuclear bombs filled with machine guns and ninjas and poisoned sausages at everyone who might be a terrorist?
I really don't like discussing in detail how action X is worse than action Y by Z number of EvilPoints(tm), but in general I obviously do think that a terrorist attack that kills dozens of people is "more evil" than executing or otherwise mistreating those responsible and the setback for the abolition of such practices this entails. (But if they are not yet legal, then the action of changing the law to make it so is quite a different matter to me.)

Hmm, so now after looking at some more detailed coverage of the attacks I'd say it looks more like the ETA now, but of course it's still all speculation.

About the whole death penalty thing... well, I can understand if many people want to give way to the voice that tells them to destroy them all, especially when the crime is as... not nice as this. I have to admit, even I can see the appeal.
But it's no good.
One, it's definitely not going to deter anybody who's serious about the whole terrorism thing.
Two, it will add to the group's ability to pretend it's fighting against oppression.
Three, it contributes to turning the judicial branch into institutionalized vengeance, which in my opinion is very much the wrong way to go.
Four, you're killing somebody. In my view, that's wrong under any imaginable set of circumstances and excusable only if you really, really can't avoid it. In such cases as this, it brings no added security to the remaining population, and it doesn't bring the dead back to life.
There's no point other than spite.

Apparently, Batasuna says they don't think it was the ETA, and there also seem to be other signs that are unusual for ETA attacks - apart from the scale, I hear the ETA usually send out warnings/threats before their attacks, but as I'm not very familiar with the Basque conflict I'm not sure that that isn't complete bunk.

I'm no good at warm words, but... I suppose I'd pretty much try to say the same thing Las said if he hadn't already. Everything else I might say belongs in the other thread, I guess.

In order of preference: loominous, Darth new, Darth A.

I think the optimal  solution is to  incorporate Darth's and/orLoomis' graphics in to Klaus' navigational system.  Maybe scrap the iframes in favor of a "more.." link at the bottom of the box.

I think without the iframes my concept wouldn't work that well. The tabs will turn to simple links. Of course this is also possible but not the intention of this layout. So it must be changed completely if no iframes are used: The navigation icons at the bottom could disappear with long contents and need to be put to the top. In the end we have a completely different thing. Perhaps it would look like one of the other versions with an additional sub menu line... Okay, not for real but who knows?

That would make your design (which I like, visually) better, IMO. Iframes are the devil. There are very few ways of organizing a site that annoy me more.

I think the first part (001 etc.) is a good idea, but I agree with a-v-o about the second. That part of Windows' default behaviour is absolutely horrible and serves no purpose, and everything should be done to encourage people to disable it.

Sounds like some piece of spyware or other did that for you. If AdAware, Spybot etc. can't find anything, look for something else... such as a modified hosts file. If you're running NT (NT 4, 2000, XP et al.), look for (windows dir)\system32\drivers\etc\hosts; if you're on 9x/ME, (windows dir)\hosts. If it's that, there'll be an entry for Google there. If so, remove it. (does this happen with other browsers too, though? If it's in the hosts file, not only IE should be affected)

If you can't reach Google any other way, try http://216.239.37.99/. That should work.

Well, I didn't really want to say this, but since you ask... well, I can believe that you were sick when you made that. It's definitely not up to your usual standard. Consider it a compliment to your normal, non-sick self.

Time for judging!

Some neat entries this time; I had a hard time deciding whether to hand next week to Peter Thomas or to Ghormak. My final choice fell on the latter.

Some inane thoughts on the individual entries:

Arch: I quite like your entry, but I have to say it doesn't sound wrathful/angry/irate/whatever to me at all. I'm not sure where you went wrong (maybe I did, not you), but the mood is entirely different. Sorry.

Peter Thomas: Very neat work! This was the sort of thing I was hoping for, compositionally. It really was a close decision. I enjoyed the Dvorak ripoff reference at about 40 seconds in.

Ghormak paid me the most, and I simply love piano-mashing too much.

I still have it as it was when I got it, but I'm sure somebody after me must have kept a copy. Arch? Femme/Sasha? Eggie? Anybody?