Messages

[pre-determined quantity]

I don't know much about the culture of your company or your country, but I don't see any problem with the VP having donated "too much" money.

As with charity shows on TV (as least those large ones made annually here) it is just normal for rich/superior/whatever people to donate large sum of money, whether they do this for showing off (or so they're not embarrassed) or done so the grand sum at the very end would reach some pre-determined quantity, it's a kind of encouragement to other people to donate money. In fact this does help making more people donate, but not necessarily making most people donate more, unless for the people whose wealthy/social status are comparable to those big ones, which in such case they're under some kind of pressure or competition so that they may need to donate more money than they personally wish, and this is not a bad thing after all.

This can be easily seen by the fact that while "big" people would donate multi-million dollars, an average person would donate as little as 100 dollars or even less (NOTE: I'm talking about HKD here), as shown in the scrolling text on the bottom of the screen during such shows.

Of course, in a company the difference may not be that apparent (millions vs 100 bucks for rich vs normal people) but it's still there. Your VP, having donated $1000, did put some pressure and set a standard to people of comparative (and higher) rank to hers (which, as I mentioned, is not a bad thing) but this should not affect most of the other people, except:

There’s a lot of yes-men within our corporate culture that try to impress VPs by jumping on the bandwagon...

I'm not sure how many does "a lot of" actually means, but I think there'll still be plenty  "normal" people who won't donate unusually large sum of money. As some people already pointed out, $63 is a quite generous donation and I don't see how the 1/16 inch part could be funny. Instead, I personally find this to be rather rude as it 1. mocks the generous "big" people for donating too much and 2. mocks all the "poor" norms who donate around $10-20. I think it's actually a better idea to not let that joke in your post to pass to the mass. Maybe that admin. assistant is really smart after all.

[is quite annoying]

(Don't get me wrong, but with ambitious projects like yours, how come you have to ask stuff that easy? This is very close to RTFM.)

Also, your signature is quite annoying.

Stick to topic. What was asked here fit this section fine. Take your critics elsewhere.

The problem is, adventuregamestudio.co.uk is supposed to be the official address for the site. It is supposed to be permanent, in case the registered adventuregamestudio.co.uk has changed to some other thing (this actually happened, though we're at the current one for years now).

I agree, let's ban Dualnames.. wait whut?

No no no. Maybe we can just make suggestions on titles and demand him to have watched all the mentioned films, and then make him write a short summary on each, so we can read that and make our choice on whether said films are worthy for us to check.

[eEventEnterRoomBeforeFadein]

I don't know what your "changing room in a more realistic way function" is about, but can you work around this by using on_event() with the event eEventEnterRoomBeforeFadein? Is this absolute necessary to have the dimension of another room known before changing to it?

[for]

A for loop for use in scripts, so that for loops can be used where the number of iterations are known, (e.g. traversing an array, generating numbers from intA to intB in steps of intC), and while loop can be used for the more general case of unknown number of iterations. Also, using a for loop ensures that the loop variables are initialized, there will less cases where initialization, increment/decrement of the loop variable was forgotten.

Well, I think this has very low priority, as signified by the fact that there were 'for' loops before the overhaul of the text script system in AGS AC V1.14. So, this feature has been absent for more than 10 years now.

Unrelated question: is there any way to toggle between full screen and window mode during the game? I could only find the Windowed property in relation to this, which is read-only.

No.

[Edited:]

Does that mean that I do not have the 'real' original version?

That's still possible, so build dates aren't concrete proofs (but other stuff are, as settled in the above discussions and I'm sure you're aware of them), unless you can confirm that the files are indeed the first version.

One problem was that the Wikipedia article even lists LQ to have been released in as early as late '99. I don't know who added that (but at least the page in our own Wiki doesn't have this claim), and I couldn't confirm it as it's been a long, long time, but if that's true then it at least shows that you cannot judge this by build dates (not to mention that dates can be inaccurate and it's those favourite "millenium-bug" years).

Edited:
I'm quite sure that the Euro learning game and LQ predated DG's games. That's possibly an indication that your files weren't the original versions/build dates couldn't be taken seriously.

But how can you then explain that Lassi Quest uses the character from Alles Euro. That guy that I "open sourced" after my release.

Heh, maybe you're correct, as I remember both games appeared at approximately the same time, but I couldn't tell which was first, though I think one point people did argue at the time was that LQ was a "full game" or something like that. I couldn't judge as I never played your game for obvious reasons (it wasn't even in English, right?) and I didn't even know they share graphics.

I've tried this. Just copy the file with that name from the AGS folder (the default sprite set) to replace the corrupted file and the editor could open the game for me. However, this is not guaranteed as it may depends on how many things has linkage to sprites. Either way, you'll have the troubles of re-importing the sprites and fixing references to sprites (Views, Characters. Items, Scripts, etc.).

[acsprset.spr]

The acsprset.spr file contains all the sprites. If it has a size of 0 kb, that means it is corrupted and all its contents are gone. If there is still a file called backup_acsprset.spr you may try renaming it to acsprset.spr to see whether you can recover most of the works (though you mentioned you didn't see a backup file), otherwise you can only revert to a backup of your game files (provided you backup your files regularly) or re-import the sprites to rebuild them.

There're some factual errors about these facts though. It's common knowledge that Lassi Quest was the 1st ever made game (I couldn't remember whether it was still in AC era or AGS, but if it was AGS, then there was no single game compiled with AC) but none of the 'first xxx game' categories here listed it.

Yes. The problem is, under some Windows systems it is not easy to make a universal batch file that works under any folders you extract the game to (making a shortcut is better, but that would still rely on Installers or the End-users' work to get the path correct). Winsetup.exe provides an easier means for Windows users to set up a game. The problem is, when you compile a Windows game the name of the game executable is concatenated to the setup executable (so clicking it would launch gamename --setup), so if you rename the game's executable file winsetup.exe breaks.

[AC]

Supposed to be from V2.00, where the original editor Roommake was rewritten to Roomedit (don't listen to Dual as Roommake was for the AC 1.XX era) which was improved also to become ready for a Windows version of the engine (note: Roomedit was still DOS based at that time). The real version which contained a beta version of the Windows engine was V2.03.

In fact, you can just check CHANGES.TXT in Docs folder of AGS for all such records.

Edit:

So AGS 1.0 creates games with the winsetup.exe insteat of setup.bat?

There was never an AGS 1.0. AGS started from V2.00. It was called AC before that. Also, the DOS engine was dropped just in recent years, since the V2.7 branch came out. Before that, you could choose between outputting a DOS or a Windows executables. So, both setup methods using winsetup.exe and setup.bat co-existed by that time.

Prog's roger is no match for CJ's talent.

[RMB]

I'm not left-handed, but this reminds me that in the PC-Engine, the I button is to the right of the II button in a joypad (just like how A is to the right of B in a Famicom joypad, unlike Sega consoles where the ordering of the buttons are all reversed). When the PCE mouse was released the button placements followed its joypad counterpart and so I was to the right of II. This caused some stupidity, as you have to click the RMB for confirmation while playing some of the games that supported the mouse (there are only a handful of them). Some of the games did get it correct though, that they switched the buttons' functions. You could redefine the buttons in only a few games.

Troublesome titles included the PCE version of Lemmings. I was tempted to call it left-handed Lemmings. Luckily it wasn't hard to get use to, at least not as hard as playing a platform game with the button functions reversed (i.e. not following the "SMB configuration"; this applies to may early Sega console titles and some other console games mainly produced in the west).

Wow! Looks great! Definitely looking forward to it.

Alright. One simple way of finding this out should be to research the game's thread (just look for the threads by checking Ionias' posts).

From this announcement, Ionias closed down his company and announced that the game was abandonware, near the end of 2003. The game's own page had this too, on page 6. So we just need to read from there onwards. I didn't have the time to read all of this, but what I gathered was that immediately a number of places (including The Under Dogs, but they have removed the full game now, possibly since a commercial re-mastered version was released) offered the game for download, though without voice. If you look hard enough, soon afterwards, people shared the fill talkie CD version though emule, and eventually some people even uploaded it to net space (that's how I got a copy).

So, the full talkie was not unavailable. At least it was available freely for some time and it was perfectly okay to grab it. I'm not sure whether there're still legal ways to get the CD version nowadays. It all depends on Ionias' decision, on whether he still allows us to get it, as the game has been re-released commercially not long ago.

Maybe. The problem is, I never download demos, so I'm not sure about it.

As far as I remember, due to financial problems (or lack of interest) Ionias closed his company and declared the game freeware and so the complete CD version with speech could be downloaded for free with his permission (and that's how I got the game; I will appologise if that's not the case ). However, he re-opened his company somewhat recently and that's where the re-mastered version came in place (from his site, you see that the re-mastered version is being sold, so it's safe to assume any older versions apart from this new one are now free).

The game's Wikipedia page also has some info.