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Encryption is only part of the issue (and in any case, AGS' own file obfuscation is lousy - most if not all Strings are searchable cleartext in the executable file). To me the main concern was the ability to bundle files of various formats in a single resource file. I'm probably just gonna add the functionality to my plugin, but it's kinda getting to the point where I'm rewriting so much base functionality that I might as well do a full AGS port.

Use ogg vorbis instead of .avi - no issues with external codecs that the end user may or may not have installed, and they can already be included in the compiled file.

Edit: This was in response to icey/Scavenger's post on the previous page, btw. That said, as I've suggested in an earlier post, I *do* think it would be excellent to have a custom resource file format to "hide" custom data files that could be accessed through File functions or by a module. For instance .xml vector data, text resource files, or the .pam files used by the script Calin posted (though I still think AGS should support lipsync for any style of animation internally - I can't see any technical arguments for restricting it to Sierra style overlays).

Snarky and Darth made the point I was trying to get across, except much better. It was kinda late, and stuff like this piss me off so much it's hard to be eloquent

The problem isn't the soldiers who *are* gay, it's the straight soldiers who can't even hear the word "gay" without fantasizing about sweaty man-on-man butseks. I really don't get why we can't get over this obsession with who's fucking who and how. Yes, people fuck, get over it. I don't like the mental image of wrinkly-ass John McCain sucking his wife's sagging tits either, but for some odd reason that's not the first thing that springs to mind when I watch an interview with him.

America must get over its sexual hangups, and its not gonna happen as long as they pretend that suppression is working. It reminds me of the situation in schools where Conservatives want books about same-sex parents banned, then claim that gays shouldn't be allowed to adopt because their kids will be bullied in school. WTF!?!? Teach your brats not to bully others then, before pointing fingers at other people's parenting abilities.

Of course there will be a few incidents at first, if they end "don't ask don't tell", but after a while whole platoons of soldiers will know at least one or two gay people, and see that they're not so bad and won't come to rape them in their sleep, in fact they may be people they respect at would entrust their lives to. Nothing cures fear and prejudice faster than actually meeting "the other" and discovering you're not all that different after all. The army used to have racial segregation, and I'm pretty sure nobody would dare argue that we should bring it back because black people make them uncomfortable. Even without statistical evidence to back it, I'd even hazard a guess that fighting alongside people of other ethnicities cured a lot of white folks of their racial bias. Just stop dicking around, so we can get on with making the world a better place.

"Yahtzee makes games which titles start with a number. His reasons for doing this remain shrouded in mystery."

"Addendum: Urban legend has it that two men, Ben and Vince as some sources call them, unknowingly came close to discover Yahtzee's secret by coincidentally starting their game titles with symbols rather than characters or numbers. According to more gruesome variants of the tale, these men are now on the hit list of the (almost certainly) mythical "6 Day Assassin"."

Edit:

Regarding AGS facts.... "The AGS forums are 93% more likely to go down when CJ isn't around to fix them."

"This usually happens during CJ's attendance of Mittens where, through strange synchronicity, 93% of the forumites are likely to go down on him!" 

"Chris Jones' middle name is... [connection terminated]"

Holy shit! Peter Fonda is using AGS!!! :o Loved you in Easy Rider, man!

If you intend to sell your game, there are several proprietary DRM wrappers that can protect your game moderately (though *any* software will be cracked if its popular enough to make the effort), but they're quite expensive. Also, some of the online distribution portals like Big Fish Games add their own copy protection if they choose to publish your game. Implementing your own security measures through AGS is pointless at best, as Dualnames said, but more likely just a pain in the ass for paying customers.

A little bird just told me (actually it was Emily Morganti in the official press release ) that the second episode is now available for download. For obtuse reason you still have to register on the site however, and I've conveniently forgotten my login. But it's there to get now if you want it hard enough.

I am using the latest version of AGS, so I can't find the lightning bolt... maybe that was in the old version, as I remember the "events" tab. The new version doesn't have it.

A wild guess - you didn't actually put the script line inside a function, did you? You need to create a room event by clicking the "Events" icon (lightning bolt) in the room editor, then select the "First time enters room" event and click the "..." icon to open up the script editor. There you can then put your script line inside the newly created  room_FirstLoad() function.

[Dialog.RunOption(int option)]

I'd love to see something like Dialog.RunOption(int option), preferably without having to call Dialog.Start() first.

A lot of otherwise enjoyable paranormal mystery stories suffer from this problem. The denouement in Ripper revealed that the impossible crimes were... [...] ...which cheats the audience. The delight in a mystery comes from finding the solution to the impossible problem. If the problem is solved with an impossible explanation it's unsatisfactory.

While I agree with your point, I find the example unfounded - the Ripper "twist" is pretty much established fact from the get-go (either that or I'm psychic since I never managed to get past the ridiculous astrology puzzle).

My best piece of advice would be to read Raymond Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder. Finest piece of writing on the whodunit genre I ever read.

Also, for some alternative inspiration for futuristic noir, check out Penny Arcade's Automata comics (part  two here, click "next" for following pages, sequel story here and following pages).

Overall, if you go for noir, please do research the origins and elements of the style. I've yet to see a "noir" indie game that got anywhere close to the real thing (sorry Calin, as much as I love McCarthy, grayscale and internal monologue does not noir make). Try to think beyond the hardboiled detective trope, not only is it a cliche, but keeping your protagonist on the right side of the law may even limit the drama - some of the best noir plots come from morally ambiguous characters getting in way over their heads in an attempt to make a quick buck or get laid by the femme fatale.

Well, my point wasn't to trigger the rating dialog when you exit the game, but only after playing it to completion (or upon uninstall, in which case the player has made his mind up not to finish it). Of course this differs between game genres too, but it should be within everybody's interest that games aren't rated after two minutes of play - you could also leave it up to the author to decide when to prompt for a rating (though it should always be possible to rate the game unprompted of course), so the maker of a platform game could trigger it for 15+ minutes of play, while someone releasing a mystery game may not want to encourage players to rate it until after the mid-game plot twist.

Sorry for rambling, I just think it would be a cool idea to encourage people to vote but also don't want a rating dialog to pop up every time I close the game. Haven't necessarily thought the idea through

How will you tell that they've finished the game, though? It might be weird for longer games if they open it, play half of it, save, quit, and be prompted to give it a score.

if we could agree on a standard system where games write to a specific file upon finishing it, that could be used to trigger a rating pop-up after exiting.

Would be as simple as a script module imported in the editor and called from the game's ending screen. Nexus would presumably already have full access to the game's save/config folder for the sake of uninstall, so checking for the existence of a specific "proof of completion" file should be trivial.

I must admit I'm loving my Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch to bits, despite it being the smallest (comparable to A6, though in 16:10 format) and one of their cheapest models. During half a year of owning it, the tablet's boosted my creativity immensely - I find that good tools in and by themselves beckon to be used, same thing with the digital recorder I bought leading to me playing the guitar again.

My previous tablet was a clunky, inaccurate piece of shit with batteries in the pen. Not entirely useless, I did draw this CD cover with it, but so awkward to work with that it felt like a chore. What that tablet taught me, however, was that A4 was much too large for me. Possibly my drawing technique is simply wrong from childhood, but I've never used big arm movements when drawing - except for charcoal or ink-and-brush drawings/paintings. A6 on the other hand - perfect, absolutely right size to hold in the lap, great format for comic book panels, handwritten notes and sprites. And as for game backgrounds I've always done anything but basic composition in a zoomed view anyway, so size isn't an issue.

Overall, it really depends on your technique and what you want to use it for. Better to start out with the smallest size you're comfortable with, and then decide what your next tablet will be depending on your experience. Would suck to invest in expensive model only to find out that it's impractical to work with, or that you only use a small part of the surface anyway.

Great article! Thanks for more excellent advice, theo. The parts about scaling and depth were particularly interesting for me, as part of what I'm trying at the moment is to break away from the traditional "theater stage" approach towards a more cinematic style of composition and editing (e.g. use close-up shots for dialogs or interacting with items/characters in the foreground).

One thing I'm still curious about: How do you approach the animated light effects? Do you use dodge/burn tools on the grayscale layer, or do you redraw parts of it? I suppose you must also change the color layer if the light has a different hue? I'm so impressed how you manage those smooth transitions without losing the painterly look to the shadows.

How about this? Ask people to rate a game after playing it in Nexus. Then use that.

Perhaps it would be a bit cheeky, but a big "rate this" pop-up (which can of course be declined) as a default part of the uninstall procedure would certainly make me a lot more likely to rate a game that I normally wouldn't bother to give my opinion on. Other than that, if we could agree on a standard system where games write to a specific file upon finishing it, that could be used to trigger a rating pop-up after exiting. I don't like the idea of being asked every time I played it for a few minutes (unless it was totally unobtrusive), that'd be as much of a pain in the ass as Skype's call quality survey.

Also, no need to encourage rating a game until the user has either finished the game or given up on it

Some kind of review score aggregating feature would be interesting (if not too much of a hassle to implement). Otherwise at least a separate field for review links/quotes so authors won't have to put them in the description text.

I think restricting distribution would subvert at least what I see as the main attraction of Nexus - namely an efficient way to try out all those smaller games that I currently can't be bothered with because I know I'll just have a ton of awkwardly named .zip files and temporary folders in my download folder that I never get around to deleting.

Nexus is perfect for something like MAGS, OROW or hour games, where you know that you're most likely not going to keep the games. The larger games, which are often the ones getting high cup ratings, I don't mind installing in my games folder to return to later, but the real benefit of Nexus to me would be a fast and clutter-free way to try out all those "lesser" games, that often prove very inspiring despite their flaws but at the moment doesn't seem worth the trouble.

I'm guessing Nexus would have the same, if not more, sorting methods as the current DB, so if you wish just leave the "Don't show games with less than two cups" filter on by default.

Now, in theory, I could rip all the AGS games from the gamesdb and add them into the nexus database. Would this be unethical? or even illegal?

Illegal? Depends on the license of each game. Unethical? Perhaps too strong a word, not to mention highly subjective, but from the point of view that the right to publish and to choose where to do so belongs to the author, it would be an infringement on their artistic if not legal rights.

Personally I think "impractical" would be a better argument. Unless Nexus becomes a direct overlay to the AGS database and any links are automatically mirrored when updated, it will make version control much more difficult. Also, there's the issue of tracking download count, and as others have pointed out, missing out on ad revenue that you relied on for partial funding.

The best solution as far as I'm concerned would be to get CJs approval to make Nexus an official AGS distribution platform and hook it up to the games db - providing game authors a checkbox when uploading their game to select if they want to make it available on Nexus. If that's not possible, make it an opt-in not opt-out process, anything else would be, not necessarily unethical, but a pain in the ass for all involved.