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Listen, I couldn't give a shit about political correctness BUT the whole point is that the scene might detract from the game. Yes SteveMcCrea, it was more exciting than the final showdown, but that's a flaw of the original game's ending - not a praise of the hijacking scene. You're in the middle of a criminal investigation focusing on your arch nemesis Jessie Bains and his revenge scheme against those who witnessed against him - and as you casually take the plane to another city, you suddenly get involved in a hijacking? What kind of storytelling is this?
Imagine that you were watching Silence of the Lambs, and as Clarice walks down the street on her way to Buffalo Bill's house she passes a bank where five banrobbers are holding the customers and staff hostage, so let's put the entire serial killer story on hold while she takes care of the hostage situation in the bank? Jeez.

You'd be much better off fixing the ending of the original, giving Sonny more stuff to do in Steelton before going down the sewers (what's with arresting the punk in the park?). And the sewers themselves could be so much more exciting. Multiple encounters with Bains, traps, and for the love of god, a more interesting final puzzle than standing on the right spot. (Did we even get an explanation of why he was down there in the first place? Surely there must be better places to hide). The whole point of remaking a game should be to make it better - otherwise what would be the reason?

The fact that some people might be uncomfortable with the hijacking scene - not to mention fail to see the logic of being able to bring weapons and bombs aboard the plane - is just ANOTHER reason for avoiding this sequence. To me it felt like just a preview of Codename: Iceman, and I find Jim Walls' stereotypical representation of Arabs as terrorists to be even more disturbing than the actual hijacking itself. Add to it that killing the terrorists was a possible dead end if you hadn't adjusted your sights before leaving Lytton.

I actually watch Kim Possible sometimes just for the art, because I love the Clerks cartoon and Kim Possible shares a lot of its style as well as most of its directors.

While I agree that we shouldn't limit ourselves just because of some real life event, I do think that it would be a wise decision to cut that scene from PQ2. It didn't have anything to do with the plot, and actually seemed a bit out of place in the middle of the Bains investigation. Actually it was more dramatic than the final showdown!

Also it doesn't seem very realistic that you would be able to bring a gun aboard a plane just by flashing your badge these days.

I think you'd be better off if you turned the bomb puzzle into a trap set up by Bains (like the shotgun at the motel). Perhaps you arrive at Colby's house too late to save him, and Bains has rigged the entire house to blow.

Seeing as Radiohead took their name from a song on Talking Heads' True Stories, you could do the same.

Complete track listing:

1. Love For Sale
2. Puzzlin' Evidence
3. Hey Now
4. Papa Legba
5. Wild Wild Life
6. Radio Head
7. Dream Operator
8. People Like Us
9. City Of Dreams
10. Wild Wild Life (Extended Mix)

1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 would make good band names I think.

Edit: Or you could always go with 'Sonic Death Monkey'

Yes, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. They're craftsmen rather than artists, but no matter what you think of their work (they made crap like Small Soldiers and Godzilla as well as the two great films Mats mentioned) , they certainly put more thought into the process of screenwriting than most others.

I disagree with esper that Hollywood doesn't want descriptive passages in screenplays. As long as it's short and to the point, descriptions of how locations and characters look, how they perform the action, all these things are just as important as the dialog. What you should never do though, is do the blocking in the script, that is breaking the action into single shots and camera angles. The same thing goes for titles, unless you have something very special in mind (the scrolling text in Star Wars should probably be mentioned in the screenplay).

And if Drew Carey can't tell the difference between action and dialog, either you've used the wrong format for the screenplay, or he's just a moron

I've referred to Ted & Terry's website many times before, but I still think their columns are some of the best advice you'll ever get on screenwriting, even when you disagree with their ideas:
http://wordplayer.com/columns/welcome.html

I don't know why you would want to repeatedly_execute. Just SetLabelText after randomizing the result.

Wow, this was even more painful to read than Chris Columbus'Ã,  Indiana Jones screenplay. I don't mean to be harsh, because it's a valiant effort that could turn into something really interesting. ButÃ,  I think most of the criticism here (of screenplay format, choice of words etc.) is missing the point. Even those saying that an adaptation shouldn't copy the original word for word fail to mention that GOOD GAMEPLAY DOESN'T MEAN GOOD MOVIE SCENES! Please allow me to quote:

BERNARD
Hey, look! There's a can of paint remover and a paintbrush here.

He picked them up from the floor. Wendy noticed the bowl of waxfruits.

WENDY
Dave, do you think that we should take this bowl of wax fruits?

DAVE
I think we should. Maybe we can get some use for them.

Wendy took it and then they went out the door.

Interior: Piano Room

JEFF
They have some pretty cool stuff in here.

RAZOR
Yeah, especially that old record player.

MICHAEL
Not so much interesting to stuff to pick up.

JEFF
How about watching some TV?

A game isn't a movie. Instead of trying to recreate the gameplay scene for scene, you should rather look at the things that really attracted you to the game. What scenes from the game are really vital for the story, which visuals must be in there? Keep in mind that Maniac Mansion has a pretty horrible story to start with - it's supposed to be like a bad teen flick, so you must add something to it besides the dialog to make it enjoyable. The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Little Shop of Horrors turned trite horror clichés into musical comedies. What can you do to make Maniac Mansion really take off? Perhaps put more of a focus on some basic actions that have to be performed. You can't have the characters stumbling about, not knowing what to do next until they find the correct inventory item. Give them a real mission, and then set up obstacles that must be overcome. Some movies that could possible inspire you are Back to the Future, Fright Night, The Goonies and the Lost Boys.

Good luck!

Just a quick question for CJ: Will any kind of sprite cropping (other than the current rotate crop) be implemented for 2.71? If not, I won't wait anymore to release my shadowbox-script.

Do you need to click on the actual window to close it, isn't anyclick while it's displayed enough?

In any case, if you want the gui to disappear when you click it, just put code for GUIGetAt or whatever that command is called in the on_mouse_click event (if IsGamePaused and gText.Visible == true).

Edit: The easiest thing would be to make gText non-clickable and just check gOther, as that covers the whole area.

Edit 2: BTW, you can choose font on normal text window - SetNormalFont I believe the command is called.

Since you're writing your own function anyway, why stick to using Display()?

Just make your own GUI with a label to show text on, and set the size based on GetTextWidth and GetTextHeight commands (1) Get width, if it's wider than max width then  2) GetTextHeight using max widt and 3) Set the label to this height/width + a few pixels of slack space). That way you could would know the exact dimension of gText and could set gOther to the same (+ margins).

True, you could do that too of course

But the main problem with using RawDraw is that the snow will always be behind the character. If you use that, you should add perhaps 5-10 characters/objects for foreground snow flakes.

The legs are much better now. Good work. But I can't really tell about the animation before I see it moving. His eyes disturb me a bit now that you've put white around the pupils.

At least in theory you could split the screen into a grid of sprites and then rawdraw the visible ones every game cycle while the screen scrolls. That would allow for an almost infininetely large screen. I'm not sure of a good way to handle the character movement code/collisions though other than resizing invisible objects sprites  to cover non-walkable areas.

Of course it's Dick van Dyke, in Diagnosis Murder if I'm not mistaken. Very good likeness. The only thing that bothers me a bit is the part of the coat seen through between his legs. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at. Perhaps the color is too similar to his shirt, or I just have a dirty mind focusing on what's between people's legs.

Edit: Or show a few pixels of his pants at the endge of the coat. Right now it seems as if his hip/crotch area is a square instead of an upside down triangle.

I loved Indy 3 (FOA as well, but not as much) so I'm really looking forward to this one. But what's up with the travel from Marshall (?) College to San Francisco?

Edit: I just realised that it WAS Marshall College in Raiders. Strange.

i dont think any1 should sell there games unless:

1. they are really long so you its possible to play it for weeks

2. its all really pro made

3. awsome to play

In other words, Still Life should have been a freebie . Seriously though, it's difficult to demand weeks of gameplay when most commercial games these day rarely offer more that 8-10 hours.

Well, it's almost as simple. Use the parallax plugin

http://www.lumpcity.co.uk/~skimbleshanks/plugins/AGS_Parallex_Scrolling.zip

Edit: Oh, Rui beat me to it

I have a current feature request that would allow something like this, but as it's just for one screen, let's make it easy. First draw the unlit background. Then draw the highlighted screen and cut it into a number of sprites (not square shapes but irregular ones). Place them as objects over their corresponding piece of the background. Make them 100 % transparent. Then as the cursor passes over them, gradually decrease the transparency in a relation to how far the object is from the cursor. The object directly beneath it should have no transparency at all.

I did something similar for another effect, and it looked great.