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I'm not a tea guru, but we Cantonese are into it. It's just commonplace to have a pot of tea (yeah, leaves, not T-Bac tea bags or powder) when we go to Yum-Cha (which literally translates to "Drink Tea") for lunch (even though the restaurants use cheap and crappy tea leaves in general).

[Edit on 14-12-2010:]

Developed and published by: Square Penik
Original game by: ...isn't it a bit too obvious?  :
Platform: Nintendo Family Computer

4x

In-game screenshot:


I have taken some liberty and I possibly didn't follow all the design choices the developer would take, but I swear that the graphics follow the specs of the target system and I have PROOF!111!one!11! (Whether the composition is practical though, is not gauranteed.)

Edit on 14-12-2010: Proof updated to fix some roughness. Old proof is here.

Q1) By 'Standard Sierra' or 'Verb Coin' GUI, do you mean AGI/SCI and SCUMM GUIs are available out-of-the-box? If so, does AGS feature a command parser similar to SCI0 and early SCI1.0 games? Also, it is mentioned that a LucasArts-styled conversation system is available by default; is the same true for Sierra-styled conversations, with zoomed-in talking portraits and what-not?

There are only basic functions provided for these GUIs. To get them really going, you'll need to use scripting and nearly every kind of GUIs you can think of can be done with scripting. People have made script modules for some of the more popular GUIs though, so you don't always need to do everything yourself. For SCI0 parsers you need scripting also, but it is definitely possible (Cornjob had already done that before). For the Sierra conversation portrait thing, there is actually an option to enable that in the editor.

Q2) AGS now is a WIN86x-based application, but its games & byproducts (I've seen platformers and simulators done with AGS which are nothing short of amazing) run on an engine that's been ported to Linux and OSX; how well and what features will not work with each ported engine? The WIN86x engine works on top of DirectX; Linux and OSX engines are running on software mode, then? Should we expect future support for a 64-bits architecture?

I've never tried the engines for any of the other platforms (for obvious reasons) but I think they're mostly complete so most things work, but games that use plugins definitely won't work. The problem is that they're not quite actively worked on, so their versions aren't in par with the newest Windows one. Other solutions such as using WINE or virtualisation to run the native Windows engine directly may work too.

Q3) In the 'features' page it's mentioned a range of color palettes or no palette at all with support for 32-bits Alpha; out of curiosity, if I chose to emulate an enhanced graphics adapter (EGA) palette of 16 simultaneous colors out of 64, does AGS come with the appropriate 64 color spectre? If not, can I import a new palette?

The AGS engine does not support 16 colour modes but you definitely can just use the EGA colours in your games. For 8-bit games you can of course change the colours of the slots to match the EGA palette (if it isn't obvious enough that the first 16+ colours of the default AGS palette are already the basic EGA colours ). For 16 or 32 bit game there is no point in importing a new palette as these are not indiced modes, so you can use every available colour at any time you want.

Q4) Again in the 'features' page there's mention to proprietary file extensions such as the MP3 format and AVI. Shouldn't these be avoided? I don't mean to insult the Americans, but how come people haven't been sued for sharing or selling games that make use of these formats without paying royalties and such? Take this in good humour, please. Oh, the question itself is serious.

Seriously, if you don't feel comfortable with these formats, just don't use them. I don't know much about their licenses, but I think MP3 licensing is required only if you sell your games beyond a certain number of copies or something like that and it doesn't matter much if the games are free. I'm not quite sure about M$ AVI though. Anyway, if you really want to include sound files and movies, just use a safe and free (and better) substitute, OGG, and AGS DOES support it.

Hmmm. That's odd. Have you tried rebooting the system? maybe the system becomes unstable or has a memory leak or something like that?

I cannot think of one atm, but one problem is that AGS uses bitmapped graphics (as opposed to vector graphics of Flash) and so physics games may not look as good (there're usually effects such as sprite scaling, rotating and stretching, etc. that in general look better in a polycrapal or a vector setup).

Hmmm, will the game crash if you comment those lines out? The engine may report the incorrect lines sometimes.

I like the edits!

One problem I see is that, the highlighted look icon is not that much different in contrast with the non-highlighted one. I'll suggest adding something inside the looking glass (for example a letter 'A') to make it more interesting.

This is a quick paint-over to show what I mean:

Just a quick check and may not be of help. Would it be possible that the objects' views containing frames that point to non-existing sprites?

I think apart from 'use', the functions of the other icons aren't obvious enough, mainly because they match the style of the characters in-game.

Whereas the design of the character is nice, when you extract individual facial components and display them separately, they're not very recognisable. It's really hard (for me at least) to tell the eye and the mouth, in both the highlighted and not highlighted versions. I even mistakenly thought the curve representing the nose as the mouth. I'll say a speech bubble works better in this case (with '...' added inside it for the highlighted version). For the eye... Well I cannot think of a way to make it more obvious, so I'll leave it to other people.

The highlighted version of the telekinesis icon is okay IMO, but the one that's not highlighted is not understandable as it's just a head. I think you can add one of those "sound wave" lines like in the highlighted to each side of the head (so when it's highlighted there are two lines on each side).

It depends on your preference though, as I think it's also okay to have the not highlighted icons difficult to comprehend, but the highlighted ones should be obvious, so one way of fixing it is to keep all these icons, but add a doted line to the highlighted eye and a small speech bubble to the highlighted mouth to make them more obvious.

Remember next time though, that the two Technical forums aren't for discussing such kind of matters. A more appropriate place is this thread.

The game files were actually platform independent, in fact the editor created an ac2game.ags (or ac2game.dat in even older versions) file in the game's folder, which contained the game files for the whole game. You can just put it in a folder with the engine agswin.exe etc., and then double click the engine to play the game. The game executable in the Compiled folder is just the engine combined with this file. And this is how we can say, use the engine of a different version or a different platform to launch a game (exactly how it worked back in the days when there were both an official DOS engine and an official Windows engine). Even for the combined executable, we can rename it to ac2game.ags and place it with another engine to have it run.

This was how AGS worked before V3. Unfortunately since V3 we don't have the barebone .ags file any more, so that the created game must have the engine attached to it, but that rename trick still works.

There's a not longer maintained port for version 2.71 of the engine from a few years back.

And its thread is a sticky too.

It would be cool if there was a way to split the game files (sprites, backgrounds, duologue, etc.) and the engine.

You don't need to do that, as engines for any platform (when the required version is available) will just see the Windows executable as the data file.

Grafx2 is another free and modern DP clone that's worth checking. I mainly do stuff with Edge though.

Not many reasons, but I think that there're still a few rough ends that people have reported recently which aren't fixed yet. Also, it seems that CJ is quite busy ATM to work on it.

If you check the first post, V3.2 is not considered "officially officially" released yet, and so the non-installer RAR version is still absent.

No, but as M.U.G.E.N. is open sourced (I think) it is theoretically possible to use these codes as a base to make a plug-in for AGS. However, it wouldn't be an easy task, and it may not be easy to make tighter integration as formats for resources may be different for the two engines (it would be a little bit easier if you don't need resource sharing and each engine use its own resources though).

Hmmm. Twins. Suspicious...

Hmmm. Interesting.

I've never heard of these "toys", probably since real baking ovens are a rarity here (unlike the west, only about 1% of people here would ever have a baking oven at home, unless it's a microwave, which is extremely popular, or those weak ones that could only make toasts and reheat stuff and the like) and kids won't care about playing with them. It would be fun that they really work, despite they look more like toys than many real toy cooking apparatus.

[Description]

Alright. After some checking, I've found the problem.

Seems that this module is not as "automatic" as it is claimed. In fact, these are hidden in the first post:

...but the drawback is that you have to put an object in every room where
you want shadows to make the module work.

...

The module scans for an object called "ModShadows" when you enter a room.
If he finds it, he creates the sprite and draws the shadows. If he doesn't,
nothing is done.

So, what you have to do is to add a new object to every room that shadows under characters are needed (you can skip those rooms like close up portraits, etc. as you don't need this effect) and change its Description field to ModShadows and things should work.

I don't quite understand what you want.

Are there any other places where Hunger would be modified that you have not posted here? Otherwise both sets of codes won't work for obvious reasons.

Note that Hunger is only continuously decreased in game (and in a VERY fast rate too, given its initial value of 100 it will reach 0 in 2 frames since the count-down starts, which would be only 1/20 second under default settings) and in your initial set of codes you check whether it will be larger than 150 at some point of the game, which would never happen as its initial value (100) is already smaller than 150 and it's just being decreased over time.

The next set of codes won't work either, as the variable is always smaller than 150 during the whole game, so the animation will only be played over, over and over again.

Hmmm. I see that there is no character shadow in the game, but as I mentioned, we need the source files of the game to see what happened, otherwise we're just as clueless.

Just make a copy of your game's folder, delete all the subfolders inside it (we don't need stuff in the _Debug, Compiled, etc. folders) and you may also delete most of the .crm files until only the one for the first room is left, so that your game's idea won't be leaked to us and to reduce the filesize. Pack the remaining stuff and upload it.