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I don't feel particularly good about a thread set up specifically to criticize one particular game, especially one that is a very earnest commercial effort, so hopefully some of those reviewers and other players who think the ending is amazing will show up to defend it.

I agree, and I'm sorry if I put you off buying the game. I didn't mean to do any such thing. I've added a further disclaimer to my original post and some links to less vitriolic reviews. I also hope that other players, or Alkis himself, will step in and hopefully put the ending into proper context.

This bit is borrowed, with a twist, from...

I realize, and actually it's quite nicely implemented:

Spoiler

The fact that she's been poisoned is indicated very subtly in a well written piece of narration at the very very end. A great exit note for an otherwise problematic end sequence.

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Ugh! That writing is... not good. It's not even good English. That weird Len Green dude has been going around arguing with people who complain that the writing is sometimes awkward, demanding examples. Well, here's one for you, right here, Len!

Yeah, I agree its not the finest piece of writing, but adventure games in general could use a lot of script doctoring. Except for the Blackwell games and, on the non-AGS side, the Sam & Max series, snappy dialogue is rare in the adventure genre. Everybody takes forever to convey the simplest of messages in the most unnatural phrasings thinkable (like so). I don't think Diamonds in the Rough is any worse than most current games.

I forgot to mention another thing, which in my opinion could have improved the ending:

Spoiler

With only one other gameplay task to perform before the talkative end sequence rolls, you cannot proceed before picking up the vial of poison. At this point of the story, you don't know the master plan yet and have no use for the poison. But you cannot trigger the final event without picking it up. Obviously you need to get it at some point, because the game is told in flashback, after Jason took the poison. But it certainly could be done in a less artifical manner. The player is bound NOT to want to pick it up knowing the outcome. Also, the game centers around choice, and how Jason has always chosen what others wanted him to chose, even though it may not be - as he says - the universally right choice. Ultimately he DOES make his own choice, what he feels is the right one, to tell his story to the outside world and to end his life. However, at this point the choice is out of the player's hands. We're watching a cutscene robbing us of the essential choice that is interactivity. Wouldn't it have been a much more powerful moment if you found yourself controlling a griefstricken Jason, nervously pacing his apartment with his proverbial back against the wall - and realizing that the only choice possible was to take the poison?

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I chose not to post this in the finished games thread for Diamonds in the Rough, to prevent spoilers by people forgetting to use the hide tag. If the mods think otherwise, please do move it.

A few months ago, I wrote a review of Diamonds in the Rough for a Danish PC maganzine. I gave it 6,5/10, which I think is its lowest grade yet (the weeks after release were pretty damn impressive when the average on gamerankings.com was 98% or something, but it's still at a solid 83%). I named multiple reasons, including the inconsistent implementation of the thought interface, the static visuals and a lot of running back and forth. But I could never explain my main grievance, as I didn't want to spoil the ending.
Now it's been several months since the game's release, so I think it's safe to discuss the ending without anyone peeking out of curiousity while waiting for their own game to arrive. I should say that this post has nothing to do with Alkis' questions about the panel's ranking of his game in the games database. I've been meaning to write this for some time, his post just reminded me.

I did not mean this thread to put anybody off buying the game. I add this after Snarky's post, because it was never my intention for someone who didn't play the game but considered buying it to read the spoilers. Here are some some more positive reviews of the game. Some of them mention the ending, but always in a positive tone (though in a secretive manner), so maybe it's just me being grumpy:

Just Adventure review - A
Adventure Gamers - 3/5
GameBoomers - B
Four Fat Chicks - 5/5


The rest of the post is pure *SPOILERS* for the ending of the game:

Spoiler

Ok, so the organisation that you work for turns out to be a bunch of racists, fighting for a racially pure America. The inspiration to this being an incident where the founder and current leader's sister was stabbed by a gang of black punks and lost her ability to bear children.

Jason, the player character's, amazing talent turns out to be... telling black and white women apart! Not by seeing them with a bag over their head or looking at pictures of their clothed booties, but by picking random numbers from a list through paranormal means. I don't know, but this seems overly complicated. Assumably the people who put together the list would easily be able to verify the ethnicity of the members of the sample group? The logical fallacy is that Jason is picking what they already know - how is this helping anyone? (see more on this below)

They then tell the chosen numbers to this girl who has the psychic ability to make the women sterile (I'm really not making this shit up) as a sort of poetic justice. Their plan is to make 100 women sterile in a year. They will then send psychic projections to all the news media in the country to tell them this (I guess it's more impressive than using UPS). They make the demands that all negroes must leave the country within a month, or they'll continue their efforts at a daily basis (what, 3-400 more sterile black women a year? I doubt that will even make a mark in the statistics). Once the blacks are gone, they will continue with all other non-white races. They'll really have to upscale their psychic gynecology department for this scheme to work out. Jeez, even sending out a group of crackheads on the street to stab random black women would have more effect than this.

They see Jason's special ability - the fact that he chose the black women on the list - as proof that they are doing the right thing, not realizing that he just choses what others want him to select. Ok, so this is why they need him to point out what they already know. But really, if they could convince the rest of America that Jason's list selection skills means that God or whoever wants an Aryan nation, then Uri Geller would be ruling the world.

Anyhow, Jason asks for some time to think, goes home, connects to the internet through a stolen wireless modem and his boss' password (poor internet security that doesn't check MAC adresses in a town where contact to the outside world is forbidden) and tells his story in a webcast (bloody emo). He's taken a deadly poison, because he can't live with what he's done: "17... 17 women will never bear children... because of me! Because of me!". Nikolas' excellent score plays during all of this, and brings the melodrama up another notch. "Can you hear me! Can you see me!" he says, before losing consciousness...
At the very same moment, there's a knock at the door. It's the psychic infertility girl who was the love interest before betraying you. She leans over him, saying "Don't die!" and Jason, as his last act, kisses the girl, thereby also poisoning her. At this point I couldn't help laughing, it was just all too much. There is certainly a dark comedic element in the writing, but I think my grin was a bit too wide. THIS was the monumental surprise ending that a letter in the game box begged us not to reveal???

All this is followed by an Afterword written by Alkis, where he details his research of racist groups during development. This is very fascinating, but I'm just still sitting there thinking: "That was it? That's the most stupid Evil Plan(tm) I've ever heard. It wouldn't even sound credible in a James Bond movie!" Even from a logistical point of view it just wouldn't work. Are you going to have that poor girl sitting around performing paranormal uterectomies all day? Aren't somebody going to locate you sooner or later? Even if the organisation is placed in the middle of nowhere, you can't build a whole town without leaving a paper trail - which any investigator looking into well-funded racist groups would pick up.

At the end of the afterword, Alkis mentions that some people didn't like the ending. As I read it, some of the beta testers were unhappy that Jason died at the end. I totally agree with you, Alkis, if someone tells you within the first 5 minutes of a game that he is incurably poisoned, then he'd better be dead when the credits roll - no magical antidotes to the rescue. No, the darkness of the ending is not what I disliked. I didn't like the ending because it was plain stupid and all immersion in the melodrama just trickled out during those ten minutes of dialogue with each line more ridiculous than the previous. I'm sorry, but this somehow made M. Night Shyamalan's movies seem almost clever. Can anyone please to explain the conspiracy plot to me in any way that makes sense? Alkis? Anyone?

Edit: Oh, I forget to mention Jason's nicely self ironic line during the bad guy's plot exposition: "When we first entered this room, I thought you guys were going to shoot me. I no longer think so.  You see, my fear of being shot eventually took second place to the dread that you are going to bore me to death with a droning account of your ludicrous propaganda." - and then it goes on for another five minutes. Spare some poison?

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Don't get me wrong, the game does have some nice gameplay features, and the writing is mostly good, which my grade also reflected. But in this post I chose to focus on the ending, because I really want to know what others think of it. Or whether they have different ways of interpreting it.

And we've had, what, four commercial games throughout the history of AGS?

Quite a bit more than that, actually:
Adventures of Fatman
Force Majeure 2: The Zone
Hauntings of Mystery Manor
Yahtzee special editions (5 games)
The Shivah
Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman Mine
Intrigue at Oakhaven Plantation
Blackwell Legacy
Super Jazzman
Banana Man
Blackwell Unbound
Diamonds in the Rough

That makes 16. Did I forget any? I think they're more or less listed in order of release. And there's both Resonance and Blackwell Convergence coming up (what's next, Blackwell Synergy?). I think the amount of commercial AGS games is quite considerable. And that's also why there's an "exclude commercial games" checkbox in the games database. So, seeing as a user can choose not to see commercial games listed, it means that they should be treated like any other game in the list for those who choose to include them. But it would be good if the developer could link to any external reviews in the game desciption (or to press clippings on own website), since it's difficult to decide to buy a game based just on a cup-rating.

Ok, I haven't checked out your script, so I don't know how it handles the timing for updating the frames. But obviously the clones would have to be stored in a struct, their animations updated and then drawn to the DrawingSurface every loop in baseline order every loop.

Overall, I really think dummy characters would be a better solution than either the buttons or RawDrawing. Characters naturally supports baseline, scaling, lighting, walkbehinds and anything else you can't do easily with the GUI method..

Because the function is in the global script and the hotspot is in the room script. You need to "import function do_dance();" in the global header  to be able access it from room scripts (you can also import it in the room script if you only use it in that one room, but then you may as well move the whole funciton to the room script).

I would say that if a game is listed anywhere else than in the demo section (where the review is obviously of the demo), the rating should definitely be for the full game. I surely expected the scores for the Blackwell games to represent the games and not just the demos since they were listed under medium length.

I don't think commercial AGS games need to be compared directly to mainstream commercial titles, but the price must be taken into consideration. I review a lot of indie games, and it's really not that difficult to evaluate the quality/price ratio. At least to me it comes quite natural to think stuff like "This is a great game, but I would never pay 30 bucks for it. At $15 it would have gotten a full score."

It would definitely be useful. But perhaps a cleaner way would be if you could link a GUI to a module, so you can access its scripts without importing them in the module header first (GUI scipts rarely need to be accessed from anywhere else than the referring GUI item)? If you just want to test out a couple of custom GUIs for your game it could be a pain to find and remove all the scripts in the global script once you remove it. I'm myself modulizing pretty much all my code now, because the global script was getting to be a mess.

For instance, if my lightmap module has two debug GUIs, I could link them both to the LightMap module script (by specifying its name in the GUI properties). The GUI events would then refer to functions in the module script instead of the global script. In case a developer exports a GUI containing references to the global script, these could then be automatically compiled to a module with the same name as the GUI and distributed alongside it.

I'm just sticking with this story until I hear Steve Bovis' explanation. Judging by his lame excuse for the multiple-identity postings at GameBoomers and Just Adventure when the game came out, it's going to be pretty pathic - but probably also quite entertaining.

Edit: Oh, now the folks over at NeoGaf discovered that even the abandoned version of LoL on the Amiga used ripped graphics. At least back then they made the effort of a paintover, but the similarity between the lines in the brickwork can't be a coincidence:

This is an addictive game so be warned. If you were about to grab a smoke [...] do not click!!!!!

Maybe The Suitor should pick up this game...

Not an entry:



TwinMoon: Aw, there goes any chance for a ku-klux-klan-costumed n-word-in-the-well entry.

At least from a purely visual perspective, this is one of the coolest things I've seen - in fact it just became my desktop background:


(click image for hi-res version)

No, it's not the eye of Sauron. It's a lightning storm caused by a volcano erupting in Chile. Read more about it here and here.

Yeah, I was pretty sure it saved the scripts too - otherwise what would be the point? But I just tried it out, and skuttleman is right, the linked scripts are not imported. Could this be a bug in the new AGS versions?

I'd recommend instead setting the GUI apart from the background by enhancing the shading it already has (a bit confusing by the way, from the shadows where the lines cross I can't tell if the light comes from the left or right), so that the edge facing the lightsource would be highlit and the opposite one shadowed. Does the game use 32-bit color? If so you should definitely consider using alpha channel for the sprite.

(btw, any chance for a RemoveAmbientTint() function?)

From the help file:

To turn it off, call this command again but pass the saturation as 0.

[Object.Scaling]

Assuming this will be become a 3.03 wishlist: I already mentioned the usefulness of Object.Scaling and Object.ManualScaling properties.  Now I also find myself missing an Object.IgnoreLighting property. I'm working on a couple of different modules, one that replaces the built-in region lighting with lightmaps and another that replicase the lighting of an object on a DynamicSprite. But since I can't check if the objects are set to ignore lighting or not, I cannot know which to modify and which to leave unlit/at manual settings.

This is by design -- valid values for bool are "true" and "false". Although the script will let you set a bool to 0, it's not something I want to encourage by letting people do it in the GUI editor.

I'm not sure why you'd want to discourage something that's been done by programmers for years and years and is in no way harmful.  A boolean is a true or false, on or off, 1 or 0 condition by design.  But it's your call .

Perhaps the editor could automatically correct 0 to false and 1 to true so that the stored values will be in the correct format, but still letting the developer save a little time?

You still didn't answer if it's a USB mouse, but if it's newly purchased  I would guess so. Try downloading one of the mouse drivers  from here, save it to your Settlers folder and add the name of the .exe file to the top of the Settlers .bat file.

If it's a serial or PS/2, try CuteMouse instead (just put ctmouse.exe in the game folder).

Edit: You did unplug your tablet while running the game, right?

I didn't even realise it was Friday the 13th and haven't been out of the house at all today. Well, only 15 more minutes for something bad to happen. Hmm, maybe I should backup some of my stuff.

Edit (at midnight): Ok, I officially made it through - didn't even spill the coffee which happens most other days.

I think it's a good idea. Perhaps an overhaul of the translation code could be part of the next AGS version, along with the scheduled reworking of the dialog system? I remember there were requests for separate speech files such as german.vox, french.vox and so on.

Also, I recall reading in an old thread that:

if a translation is in use the speech won't play

Is this still true? I didn't see it mentioned in the changelist, so I assume so. If so, that's quite a pity. I'm sure a lot of non-english speakers would enjoy, and could even learn from, playing a game with English audio and localized subtitles.

(Perhaps lipsync for LucasArts style speech could be implemented in the process? *hint hint*)

Yeah, AGS doesn't re-initialize the settings when you use RunAGSGame. That also killed my ambition of being able to change resolution and toggle windowed mode from in-game. Seeing as RestartGame in effect just restores savegame file 999 it shouldn't make any difference.