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In case you missed it, there's the word people in my post, which, last I checked, is a plural form meaning an abstract amount of persons.

Which talks for itself: Thou shalt not make sharp comments on undefined person(s). Why irritate many if there's only some you have message to?
Talk directly, man. It's an internet forum, no real punches. Behind-corner-talk is really irritating. Imagine that someone says that one of us (no name) is child rapist. How would everyone feel?

Everyone's an individual, no one considers himself/herself an abstract person or a member of abstract group. And making comments on specified groups, divided by some variable, such as race, sex, lifestyle, etc is usually viewed as bad thing nowadays and named with nice names such as antisemitism, racism, homophobia, etc. If you want to give names to a rabbit, don't say "someone with long ears" or donkeys get hurt.

also all you moderators out there Great job of keeping the fourms clean and stuff with out you guys AGS would have fourms filled with Junk and other stuff id like to thank All of AGS for helping me learn how to do stuff around here also Admin Your doin the Best job they should award you with Admin of the year you do a great job here at AGS

No Christmas for you, moderators.
And no Christmas for anyone who helped mr. ShadowBeast19 to learn how to "do stuff around here", you heartless digiterrorists.

Stretched over large geometry, this isn't that huge at all.
But simple textures, with no specular or bumpmaps this size sounds a bit like a waste.

I hope you're not referring to me with this post, because if so, you're wrong.

RickJ asked for my old roger-mod avatars for DemoQuest virtual member so I dug them up and decided to continue this wacky tradition of mine.

This happened before this thread.

Anyway, this reminds me one older thread...
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=18617.0

They look lousy.

1. Take a long look at your images
2. Google for space images
3. Take another look at your images
4. Compare real photos to yours
5. Draw conclusions
6. Redraw your images

Simple.
For example, stars are never this big. They are never same size. There should be hundreds of more stars.
Seas do not glow.
Earth-like planets are covered with clouds.
Neither satellites nor space stations/ships/whateveryoutriedtodrawthere are NOT lazily drawn rectangles with 4 lines coming from them.
etc, I think you get the point.

What did you try to draw aside from planet on picture #2, I have no idea. But it looks like something my 4-years old nephew sometimes draws. Very much like it.

Acquire 2 free hours and spend WHOLE of this time on ONE image.
Then post image here and we'll see again.
Good luck.

Heh, I'd rather not explain my current avatar image...
(linked for future reference)

Wow, what wonders could lathe modifier do. A whole chess sets! Now why didn't I think of it...

Few points though:

The detail and realism level varies a bit too much.
While most of the things look superb,

* Slots machines geometry feels weak and robust
* Pool table and billiard table #2 have really... er... sucky table legs. Can't explain how, maybe it's even so in real life, but they look downright ugly.
* Pooltable needs definetly higher-res and higher-detailed material. Preferably better shading too to make it really look like thick-cloth-covered.
* You have way too much sharp edges. To name some: Glasses, Chess clock button, Slot machines, tables.
Extrude every side a bit and then bevel a microscopic bit. Almost all things in world are worn a little - do same, and it makes shading look much better also. Glasses hit eye especially much, it looks like you could cut your lips with these glasses.

I totally love craps table. I think it's the prettiest piece of those all. Just try to fix texture wrapping on light wood a bit, and it's perfect... maybe tile few times more?

BTW... Are you selling these models? If yes, does it pay well?

My suggestions for independent games:

Just Another Point'n'Click Adventure Maybe funniest AGS game ever.
Larry Vales series True classics!
Prodigal Best AGS game ever, with only Pleurghburg as considerable rival. MUST be in top three!
Quest for Glory 4 1/2 Another historic giant
Emily Enough: Imprisoned No description needed
Permanent Daylight The game that brought probably many people to AGS
The Shivah Gilbert's a master... it's commercial now though.

It's quite hard to call yourself an AGSer without knowing those games.

Want to stay up?
Battery.

Only - and I mean ONLY drink that really works. I've tried all kinds of energy drinks and most of them are simply piss with a drop of lemon acid in it. This one works. I've been up 20 hours, then drank 3 of those and went to work for 8 hours.
Until effect lasts, you're more conscious and concentrated than ever. When it's gone, you're a zombie. During the effect, you have to take a leak very often, it kind of boosts kidney work. I usually consume one before driving school and 1,5 hours drive will be really tough near the end 
It's quite expensive too, with 0,3L can costing more than 2L of coca-cola.

I'm not sure if it's available on the other side of earth, though.

Coffee won't really work, because you have to consume atleast 4 or 5 cups for effect and this gives heavy work for your digestion system, which actually tires you quicker. So carbonized taurine drink will be a bit quicker to work and easier to digest.

Want to sleep?

Take a warm, relaxing bath. It works quite well. Immediately after bath, go to bed. Don't stay on feet for anything, just bed.

Are you sure that your will to sleep or not to is correct?
I know that my awake period lasts 21 hours exact. After which I need 8 hours of sleep. Which makes my day 29, not 24 hours long. It has been like this since childhood, and during school, having day cycle like this really worn me out.

So all is fine if I don't have to wake up every day at specified time.

This makes my sleeping time shift every day a bit and I will never ever have one constant time when I go to bed.
Maybe it's same for you?

Obi, don't hold the tune contest forever.

Heh, we have all kind of crap threads in "popular threads" subsection, but I really didn't find anything like this.

Either people don't read nowadays or no-one came to that thought.
Anyway, clue on a good book is always handy. So, what's that book or two that you pick up again and again and have skipped a night's sleep over it? And what is it about?

I have three:

1. Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (Egri csillagok) by Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi.

I can't count how many times I've read it. IMO, it's most interesting, breathtaking historical novel ever written by humankind. Every nation should have a book like this about it's people and past. I recommend it to anyone who's even a bit into history, especially (late) medieval era.
(English version available on Amazon, reviews say it all.)

2. Skies of War by three-time Soviet Hero Aleksandr Pokryshkin.

The author was one of the best fighter pilots during WWII and book describes his life during war from being an ambitious plane mechanic to becoming one of most feared aces over Europe and after war, Marshal of Soviet Air Force.
He invented many airborne battle tactics, maneuvers, and his experience helped to improve fighter planes alot.

Unfortunately, book was never translated into English, but it's a really good reading. Even despite Soviet censorship appearing in almost every paragraph.

3. Death is the very last option (might be incorrect translation) by Bulgarian writer Bogomil Rajnov

I don't even know why I like this book so much. It's a short spy novel about Bulgarian intelligence operative infiltrating crime syndicate in Soho, London. Which later turns out CIA cover to smear Soviet Union via drug trafficking. But the way it's written, desperate situation of protagonist and extremely well executed atmosphere makes it better than any Bond movies or other spy stories. Protagonist isn't superhuman suit-guy with technical gadgets. All he has is sharp mind and special training. He gets beaten to almost death many times, survives many murder attempts and makes desperate decisions in more than desperate situations. A how-to-book for anyone trying hand at interesting crime novel.

The book seems to be really rare, and Google doesn't know a thing about it. Neither does Amazon.

* in 1280x1024 resolution, everything is aligned to left, leaving wide empty area on right.
I suggest aligning everything to center, so it would look nice on all resolutions.

* Menu buttons look weird. They're separated and won't match overall style. I would suggest something simpler. A menu bar or just some horizontal bar graphics under whole button row would probably make it clearer that it's the button-bar and there's stuff you could click on.

* I quite like the overall theme, it's simple and nice. But main photo-banner and and everything else won't go together very well. Photos are way too crazy and colorful compared to everything else.

I don't understand Serbian (or whatever Slavic language that is), but It's quite clear that this should be a web for a night club? This requires some style, dude. It's also quite similar to Russian, which I do speak, so I'll take a guess what means what. Anyway,

- the photo image on "reservations" looks quite good
- the photo image on "prices" (?) looks stylish. But kind of empty. Especially compared to other images.
- the photo image on "music" looks extremely cheap. Like some 90's clip art thrown together in MSPaint. It doesn't fit with other images at all!
- the photo image on "about club" is what made me write this here. There's many colorful images together, and your website uses only soft, blurry, eye-pleasing colors. So this image there is like a needle in the eye compared to everything else.
- I like the image on index page. Photo styles differ here a bit too much also, but it still looks great IMO.

Also! photobanner size changes on different pages. This is bad. Keep same size of the banner on all pages.

What would help? First, lose the GIF compression. Images, especially in reservation bit, look too grainy. Photos work much better as JPG if you save using high quality or since the images aren't that large, save them as PNG for no color loss at all.
Second, how many images do you have to make that banner? Maybe choosing images that have similar color would work better. I mean, where light is similar. Maybe you don't have to slap together one photo of mostly green light, other red and third one purple.

If your resources are limited, try to tone these photos into one color. I would work harder and make them go into color when mouse pointer is over them, but considering how simple the page is, you probably wouldn't want to go this far.

Anyway, my point is that you need to keep one style throughout the site, not mix up a spaghetti of different fonts and styles and buttons and logos.

* I'm not too sure about the font. For a night club, it looks kind of... for old people. Like for a library or book shop webpage, not trendy club. But it's well readable, so... I don't know. I'd try some other fonts before deciding.

* Make the "Copyright © 2007" thing much smaller! The page is about club, not you or whoever made it.
This simply doesn't look good if it's same size as the content of the page.

* If possible, make pegasus image tiny bit lighter (brighter) so it wouldn't mess with the text on it. Near it's head area, where is much dark colors, text is difficult to read. And even though my monitor brightness is at maximum!

* I tried to make a tiny edit about image toning and menu bar area, but this is just a quick one, I'm sure you can work this out much better.



I don't suggest to tone photoimage as hard as I did - this is getting a bit too boring for a club page. But try something similar or find photos with more similar coloring and you'll get the idea. I made this to show how things should match in color and tone. Or even better, make several versions and see what works better in this problem. Using better compression on photos would do the half of the job, for sure.

And I repeat again, do something with these buttons. Text on them feels too large and weird. Maybe using slightly smaller font would do the trick?

Anyway, good luck with this website, I hope atleast something I said helped a bit.

P.S. 55 Euros for entry?! Omg. For that money, I could visit 4 clubs in Estonia. Or one and buy 2-4 good coktails too. Or go to any worldwide popstar concert, like DJ Tiesto etc.

Huh, well.

If someone can deny reality as we know it, and believe in something (s)he cannot see, hear or prove, it takes a special kind of person I guess. And mentality. I cannot imagine comparing insulting biological mother to a church I attend, but from atheist viewpoint it should make some sense: If you take a fairy tale seriously enough to live by it, why not have so strong feelings about arguments against it. This much I understand, at least I think I do.

To not offend anyone, I'll try to repeat text above in my simple, immature, atheistic way. Religious people know how to fight temptation to hightlight it, so don't look...

Spoiler

If you're f**ked up enought to believe, you're probably f**ked up enough to burst in tears if someone takes a step against you religion.

[close]

That's how I see it now.

I deny religion because much things in its structure don't make sense to me. Like preachers/priests/pope/etc. How can a  sinful, unworthy human being decide that he has right to be an ambassador of the almighty? To speak in Lord's name, to rise above the masses and act as God's secretary? To actually imagine that creator of world needs HIM to spread his word, orders or love? That's a blasphemy! 

These lashes for teacher and islamic-countries' laws are somewhat similar. People shouldn't decide that they need to protect someone or something that made them and owns them and their life from soul to cells. It's like saying that God is weak and can't handle a single miserable teacher? And what, Prophet will be happy about that woman getting some beating from his followers? Is that how they think?

I don't judge any religion, but I do judge people.
Using God as a shield and excuse from humanly evil and/or stupidity is wrong.
That's what I think.

I could go on like this, but this is way offtopic already.

I presume you're not a religious person, because if you were you'd be more likely to understand what it means when somebody insults or makes fun of the very thing that you've built your life around.

I actually don't know. Maybe it's just my thick skin of scandinavians. As I said, I don't understand it a bit and my logic doesn't explain this. If you're believing in something so much that you're "building your life around it", our modern, scientific and free-thinking world is battling you every day. I mean, REALITY. In a situation like this, a single group of individuals saying simple words should be least of your concern, and nowhere near serious offense.

But about my own religion, I think that I want to believe. Something. Great. Up. There.
Maybe a bit I even do. I believe that Christ existed and maybe other prophets too, like Allah.

But angry always-punishing bearded jew on a cloud top, sorry, no.

I find this disturbing because basically, doing this will offend innocent Muslims who happen to be reading this thread.

Still!... WTF is that "offended" thing?!
Are they made of glass? Can our discussion break their faith? Or are they hurt because everybody doesn't love Allah?
Or because not everyone admires their beliefs? This is SO selfish! Oh, you don't like the things I like, now I hate you.

I'm quite sick of this 'offended' issue in every topic. If someone says that my drawings are bad, well, I try to get better at it. If the criticism has no other reason than mean act, I ignore it. Preachers like this is probably the most dangerous thing for the teacher: justifying the lashes by abstract "offended" word.
But offended? I can't even imagine this. Should I cry myself to sleep because someone dropped a bad word at me?

Jeesh.

Thinking about that teacher again, a public excuse to muslims is the most she should do to get out of this. Anything more is way too harsh and ignites public hate.

Well, "force" is a strong word indeed. It works more via manipulation, propaganda, aid, etc.

But to answer direct question:

Where does the catholic church force people to follow it today?

Violent areas in Africa.

As far as Islam goes, I think that world works quite correctly right now. Peaceful muslims are allowed to believe if they want in mostly catholic or free-religion countries, and radicals (terrorists, etc) are shot on sight. I don't really see problem in this, theoretically. If specific followers of specific religion declare war on others, it should play by the rules of war.

However, in reality, innocents tend to get shot. And stupid teachers get lashes.

All would be fair if teacher would respect them...  BUT they would respect free thinking teacher might had and caused this incident. Anyway, as world is right now, these lashes would probably reconfigure that teacher. Or if it won't happen, give more crazy people reason to strap bombs on themselves. Either way, it's bad and should change for us to survive peacefully.

I swear my cat gets high, she licks the sticky side of tape and also used to lick off old peeling varnish from one of my old chairs - she does it frantically like she's addicted to it. I always have to keep an eye open for that cat, she scares me...

Huh? My cat licks plastic shopping bags. Like crazy! I something wake up because of the noise. And I can't pull her away.
I wonder if there's scientific explanation to this.

What's an offense? People tend to cower behind this word way too often these days.

So I say that you suck. Do you sue me? Probably not, you simply retaliate, throw a punch or ignore. Even if I tell it to other people.
But if I say that your skin color or god/sexual preference/faith sucks? What happens is a social hurricane.
Why are these two statements so different?

What I tend to think in those situations is:
On individual level, you should protect your identity much more than a racial group or religion of someone's. Did God ask for your f***king help?! He's almighty, he will punish me by himself, shut the hell up. Or did all those billion people of same color/sex preference? There's way more of them than one me. You don't have to play hero and saviour.

And why are all people in the world playing along with this sick, pointless game?
Especially in religion issues: if you're a true believer, no infidel should bend your faith with wrong word.
Why invent harsh punishments, require strict clothing, force all this? Is this faith so fragile and thin?

There's two similarities in Islam and Catholic Christianity: Both are oppressive (in their history). Both forced and even today force people to follow. Religious freedom in wide area of the world has somewhat cut down their reach and power a bit, but there's still large masses of people who are forced to follow.
Lot's of pacifist love-spreading believers would argue me on this, but all it takes is a history textbook to prove. Also, they isolate themselves from aggressive believers, claiming that those interpret Holy Bible (or Qur'an) in wrong way (murder is sin, etc), but if so huge percent of believers of something are like this, well, they can't be called exceptions.

I believe that one born in Islam country would risk his health and life even in early childhood when rebelling against the religion.

And even free democratic governments are still bound to faith. Military has its own preachers, people are buried in ground in catholic areas, president's call for God in their speech.  I'm not against this, in fact, I would like to be buried too and I celebrate Christmas. But I didn't really choose to do this, it's tradition of almost every single human around me. In few weeks, whole city will be full of Christmas adverts and shopping campaigns, a Christmas tree will be erected in city square, and so on. I can't really escape this even if I wanted to. Or be accepted in community, If I still choose to evade this. I would be called a nut case. That's what I call pressure. Not direct, but still social. And it works, too.

Still, political correctness is a word that makes me want to throw up whenever it comes up. It's a disease of 21th century.
People act and talk like total idiots because of this. And even generate whole court cases that would fit better into a comedy show.

Can we do a thread with gramatical mistakes? Pleeeeeeeese! ^_^ I would be the protagonist! 

I'm quite sure that thread like this would cause exploding brains here and there.
Internet society nowadays have taken grammatical mistakes to a whole new level.

Let's copy-paste something I wrote long ago...

Hypnotized... well, kind of. I did it myself.
Try not to sleep for 52 hours!

Seeing a dream while being awake - just with some weird dream crossfaded onto what eyes really see?
And the dream is totally controllable, I could be superman with just at will?

Sitting down for 5 minutes, (I could swear it felt no more than 5 minutes!!!) and realizing that you've been sitting like this for 3 hours without moving?
Other similar time warps, a sort of bullet time?
Total sound slowdown! I can't explain or describe this. My ears just heard everything slowed down...
Instant amnesia periods, where you have no idea what happened few hours ago?

Etc...

Cool, but dangerous and painful. Don't try at home!

Well, about breathing, some of my friends tried it at 9th grade, breathing heavily so they'd pass out for short period of time.
I'd say this was quite idiotic. You can aswell punch yourself into nose and do it until blood loss is enough to faint. I've had nose problems due accident in childhood and lost over a litre of blood once. It just ran and didn't stop. Whole bathroom was red. Overbreathing effect is more or less the same - you feel weak and dizzy, everything feels surreal.

Stupid...