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Messages - GarageGothic

#181
Quote from: Sslaxx on Wed 27/04/2011 16:25:52Allegro 5 is plenty modern enough. I suggest the first thing to do is get the code working with that maybe?

Ah, that could be very true. When I researched code libraries last year Allegro 5  didn't yet have a stable release so I didn't even look into. But as far as I understand it's a vast improvement so indeed, Allegro 5 should be fine. Kind of a shame it doesn't have unified cross-platform 3D functionality though, but I know that's not a concern to most people.
#182
For those of you who have trouble waking from lucid nightmares (killing yourself is never a good ending, even if it's just a dream) and Calin's tip of opening your eyes wide doesn't work, try either 1) closing your eyes in the dream, then opening them, your real eyes will do the same, or 2) lie down on the ground as if you're trying to sleep inside the dream, then sit up - again, your body should follow this impulse. Sometimes these can lead to a false awakening, i.e. dreaming that you're waking up in your bed, but if so just repeat the routine.

Edit:

QuoteOh and also, while probably a bit OT. I VERY often feel I am in a deja vu situation in real life. Where I see things happening that I am sure I've seen before. Would be interesting to know if any of you know what that type of stuff is called (just deja vu?) and what causes it? :)

Didn't you ask this question before?  :P

No, but seriously, I also get this sometimes and I really cannot explain it without invoking parapsychology. Not just strict deja vu (which happens after the event, and as you say mostly you're not sure why it seems familiar), but also dreams of stuff that later happens or facts that turn out to be true in real life, although I had no awareness of it. The "most credible" but not terribly satisfying rationalization I could give for some of my more "psychic" dreams is a combination of cryptamnesia (having seen something without consciously noticing it, and later on recalling it in a dream) and self-fulfilling prophecy. But from a less skeptical point of view, precognition would explain it a lot better. To paraphrase the bard: There's more between your ears than is dreamt of in our psychology.

Also, there's seems to be a strong link between "precognitive" dreams and general feelings of synchronicity in the waking state. Generally I experience these when I'm either head-over-heels in love or deeply immersed in creative work for weeks at a time.
#183
Most of my Sierra floppy games were bought back in the day, but I've been lucky to find the odd LSL2 or SQ2 at flea markets, charity shops and bargain bins. One thing you may want to consider is that the floppies most likely are corrupted by now, so if you're mainly interested in the boxes and manuals anyway you might as well look for Mac, Amiga and Atari ST versions of the games instead of just targeting the PC version. My copy of Indy3 is a Mac version, but the box contents are the same and any abandonware site has it if I ever want to play it (not like I even have a 3.5 drive in any of my current computers :)).

Also, contact other collectors and see if they want to trade. I got my beautiful copy of KQ5 from GhostLady as thanks for helping her out with some scripting. A lot of serious collectors have multiple copies of each game, and while they may not be flogging their extra copies on eBay they may be willing to let go of them in exchange for a title they don't have.




Edit: The following games were found at flea markets and car boot sales: KQ2, LSL2, Heart of China, Torin's Passage, PQ SWAT, Indy 3, Full Throttle, X-Files, Blackout (very cool Danish cd-rom game), Titanic, and The Riddle of Master Lu. A few of the games like SQ2, Sanitarium, and Indy and the Infernal Machine were bought new, still in shrinkwrap after more than a decade, and found in various bargain bins.
#184
Quote from: kingstone on Tue 26/04/2011 17:10:20You just have to contribute the bits that you require yourself because the magic happens when we all fit our pieces together ;D

I'm gonna use that as a pick-up line sometime!  :=

Edit: Have you looked into any solutions yet? As far as I understand, one of the main issues with making AGS cross-platform is its dependence on Allegro. Perhaps it's time for a more modern and platform-agnostic graphics library? I remember checking SFML out, but I can't recall if I came across any negative points to it - but I have a list somewhere with the observations I made about each of the 2D and 3D renderers I researched.
#185
Quote from: Darth Mandarb on Tue 26/04/2011 15:24:57It doesn't look too appealing to me (resembles road-kill a bit)

I say print it out, put it in a frame and title it "Roadkill with penis and vomit #1". It'll sell for a fortune at the Saatchi Gallery!  ;D
That being said, I've eaten weirder looking stuff in the UK.
#186
I think Calin's module is the only way to get properly lipsynced LucasArts speech at the moment. Normal Lucas-style speech doesn't use PAM files.

As for background speech, just use a GUI label to display the text instead. I've been doing this for lucas-style animation but subtitle style text and it works fine. Make the GUI visible, run the invisible-font Say command, then make GUI invisible (since Say is a blocking function you don't need to implement a timer or anything). Of course to fake lucas-style display your custom speech function would also have to position the GUI above the head of the character, taking screen edges and GUI width into consideration, and set the label text color to the character speech color.
#187
I realize it could be a problem for pixel-artists (though could perhaps be solved with a non-blurry scaler), but as I see it the only thing that would really make sense would be to let the developer choose an aspect ratio and develop the game using a virtual resolution for screen coordinates. Then let the end-user choose the resolution based on whatever his hardware supports and have the game render the graphics scaling them whichever way and adding black bars if the aspect ratio is unsupported.

I'm also willing to put a huge effort into improving AGS since I plan to use it for a whole bunch of games in the future. Though my coding skills are kinda rusty I've been looking into replacing AGS' renderer for a while now, so the moment the source is opened up I'll be testing out my ideas. (Original plan was a plugin, but when I realized there was no way to override the viewport initialization it didn't seem worth the while).
#188
Quote from: EHCB on Mon 25/04/2011 12:57:19it's also given me some of my least favourite films. Namely anything by the previously mentioned Seltzer and Friedberg and the Trey Parker abomination Orgasmo.

Gotta speak up behalf of Orgazmo and Trey Parker. Just watched it last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. Great stoner/hangover movie for a day on the couch. Add Parker and Stone's Cannibal! The Musical for a nice double feature.
#189
If you like film noir, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is hilarious. (Even the trailer is great).
#190
Oh, stephurhan, you just made me remember Murder by Death. I love that movie!

So many great actors: Peter Sellers, David Niven, Alec Guinnes, Peter Falk, and great dialog by Neil Simon.

Edit: And even though it's not a parody (strictly speaking), I'll use any opportunity to pimp the hilarity that is Clue, even just for the sake of Tim Curry's amazing performance (the whole thing is up on youtube - not the best image quality though, but I'm still gonna rewatch it now :))
#191
Guilty pleasure, I admit, but I have a soft spot for Kung Pow! - it's utterly retarded yet some scenes makes me almost choke from laughing. But my favorite spoof film is Top Secret! as also suggested by tzachs.
#192
You could try smiley's wonderful LipSync Manager editor plugin. It works wonderfully, and as you say, Pamela hates its user.

Edit: Sorry, the plugin link is dead, it turns out. I've found what I think is the latest released version (the file date matches the date of the plugin thread) and uploaded it here.
#193
Similar to Darth, I've been toying with a similar idea for years, but unlike him I haven't given up on the idea entirely.

Yet, I don't think an adventure game would necessarily be the best medium. I'm thinking more along the lines of an immersive sim like Deus Ex or the Hitman series (I think it was my obsessive trial-and-error replays of Hitman missions that gave me the idea in the first place). I hadn't thought about skills like Darth mentions, but saw the whole thing more as a matter of pattern recognition, memorizing NPC behaviour and finding optimal solutions to each situation.

I think it's a good idea as long as the time limit isn't too strict, and Darth's suggestion of time blocks sounds sensible. Depends on the completion time for the day of course, but if it takes much longer than 30 minutes for a perfect playthrough there should definitely be some kind of skip-finished-tasks function.
#194
General Discussion / Re: Belief Quiz
Tue 12/04/2011 09:05:58
Used to be a strong atheist, but these days I consider myself a "rational mystic" as Sam Harris calls it. Really missed the option "It's probably all in your mind, but that doesn't mean it isn't important" :).

1.    Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2.    Neo-Pagan (98%)
3.    Theravada Buddhism (97%)
4.    Liberal Quakers (93%)
5.    Mahayana Buddhism (89%)
6.    Taoism (83%)
7.    New Age (82%)
8.    Secular Humanism (82%)
9.    Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (71%)
10.    Hinduism (66%)
11.    Jainism (66%)
12.    Nontheist (59%)
13.    Orthodox Quaker (56%)
14.    Sikhism (52%)
15.    Scientology (50%)
16.    Reform Judaism (46%)
17.    New Thought (43%)
18.    Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (41%)
19.    Baha'i Faith (36%)
20.    Seventh Day Adventist (34%)
21.    Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (26%)
22.    Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (20%)
23.    Orthodox Judaism (19%)
24.    Islam (17%)
25.    Jehovah's Witness (14%)
26.    Eastern Orthodox (11%)
27.    Roman Catholic (11%)
#195
Had totally forgotten about this thread. Great to see another Dreamweb fan, Ascovel. That game has been hugely influential on me, along with a couple of other underrated games like Zak McKracken and Gold Rush!. I even ripped off a couple of passages from the "Diary of a (Mad?)Man" for a film I made in high school (not that the rest of the film was in any way original, it was a glorious adolescent homage to Twin Peaks, Gabriel Knight and Alan Parker's Angel Heart).

Quote from: magintz on Sun 10/04/2011 10:07:43Dreamweb... I think I had that game on an old Amiga. I remember being in a mental institution and escaping via an elevator or something. Driving around in a car to a police road block also sounds familiar but it's gotta be at least 15 years since I played it and I must have been only 8 or 9. I think there was some giant purple monster... am I right, was that game Dreamweb?

No, but that sounds like one hell of a game. Let me know if you ever find out the title :)

(for a moment I thought you were talking about Countdown, then I got to the purple monster :o - I really have no idea what game this is)

Quote from: Mati256 on Fri 01/04/2011 17:58:34You might know this already but there are 8 references to games and movies in that room.  :o

Argh, now I have to know what I'm missing. There's:

Maniac Mansion (purple slime meteor)
Zak McKracken (crystal)
Indy and the Temple of Doom (two amber stones)
Sam & Max (totem pole)
Star Wars ("millennia old falcon" comment)
The Maltese Falcon (the bird statue itself)

Is one of the stone tablets from the ark of the convenant? I can't figure out what remains - unless there's a Howard the Duck comment attached to that bird-like object on the right-most shelf :)
#196
General Discussion / Re: I can't decide?
Sun 10/04/2011 11:17:28
Quote from: Studio3 on Sat 09/04/2011 23:49:10I just can't really choose one. the left will take a bit longer to make however it's cooler then the one on the right. The one on the right is easier to make however it is rather plainer then the one on the left.

You have decided already, you prefer the one on the left. All you're asking from us is to give you an alibi for choosing the easy way out. Stand by your decision, instead of providing an alternative that isn't really what you want anyway, why don't you work on the left-hand guy and see if you can simplify the artwork to make it less time consuming to animate?
#197
For some weird reason I really like how nodespace looks different in every game. I mean, it would, wouldn't it? :)

Really looking forward to this, Dave! Keep up the good work.
#198
The default fade-in is a blocking function unfortunately. So you'll need to create your own non-blocking fade function. A solution that's worked well for me is to use a fullscreen GUI with black background color and fading it gradually in rep_exec_always. You can see my code here:

Code: ags
// Main script for module 'FadeNonBlocking'

int fadeintimer;
int fadeouttimer;
float fadetransparency;
float fademodifier;

function FadeInNonBlocking(int time) {
  fadetransparency = 0.0;
  fadeintimer = time;
  fademodifier = IntToFloat(100)/IntToFloat(time);
	}

function FadeOutNonBlocking(int time) {
  fadetransparency = 100.0;
  fadeouttimer = time;
	fademodifier = IntToFloat(100)/IntToFloat(time);
	}


function repeatedly_execute_always() {
 if (fadeintimer > 0) {
    fadetransparency = fadetransparency + fademodifier;
		if (fadetransparency <= 100.0) gFadetoblack.Transparency = FloatToInt(fadetransparency);
		else gFadetoblack.Transparency = 100;
    fadeintimer--;
    }
  else if (fadeouttimer > 0) {
    fadetransparency = fadetransparency - fademodifier;
		if (fadetransparency >= 0.0) gFadetoblack.Transparency = FloatToInt(fadetransparency);
		else gFadetoblack.Transparency = 0;
    fadeouttimer--;
    }
}
#199
Hehe, great topic.

One of my own favorites is the voodoo museum in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers:


and of course Dr. Jones' office in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:


Here's one so obscure I had to boot the game up in DOSBox to get a screenshot - the flat of the player character's friend Louis in Dreamweb. While your friend's in the bathroom, you can snoop around his place to find (and pick up, even though its all useless junk!) such treasures as half-eaten food trays, guitar plectrums, individual cigarette butts, and dirty coffee cups. If you're in a mischievous mood you can also log onto the computer and read his emails and check his bank account balance, or if you're plain evil, steal your friend's only roll of toilet paper while he's on the can  :=

#200
You're very welcome, guys. I'm happy to see that other people are also getting something out of these. I've been away for a few days, so I only got to watch the Gilbert and Chahi lectures so far, but Def's mention of Prince of Persia whets my appetite to hear the Jordan Mechner talk next.

@anian: I think we shouldn't read to much into Brathwaite's comparison between games and movies - to me it seemed she was mainly using the parallel to point out how our obsession with games being fun - whatever that means - is limiting the themes we address in games. Personally I'd much rather aim for games being "meaningful" than stick to some vague definition of "fun" - not only would such a shift allow us to treat themes currently outside the normal scope of games and make it easier to transition from mere entertainment to actually emotionally and intellectually challenging and rewarding endeavors.
(I don't want to get into the games vs. art debate, so I refrain from saying "artistic" - but in any case I think the idea of meaning and personal impact is much more important than whether something can be defined as art). But speaking in terms of meaningfulness could perhaps also be one way of getting over our self-delusion that what we spend most of the time doing in games is really all that "fun" in the first place (i.e. MMORPG grinding, shooting generic Nazi soldier no. 439, or your average adventure game item-combination puzzle).

Chris Hecker touched some of the same topics in his GDC 2011 rant "Potential Unreached" (ca. 10 minutes long). In case you haven't seen it already, you might also find Jonathan Blow's lecture "Video Games and the Human Condition" interesting. The first hour is a bit long-winded, but it's still well worth watching - and if you get fed up with hearing about Farmville, just skip to the 60 minute mark :). (Weird coincidence - I've been going around telling people that Alan Moore quote for ages, hearing Blow use it makes me really curious about The Witness despite its inspiration from Myst).
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