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Wohoo, a place ta say a word.
Right now, I'm on a Pentium 75MHz, with 32MB RAM and 1 MB S3 Video. 640x480 AGS games *run* but are not *playable*...

But the oldest thing I've ever got was - well, you guys would pay a lot to see a thing like that...

"Elektronika 4201", RUSSIAN machine, It even had 1,8MHz of speed and two 5inch floppy drives. It was built into two large boxes, each  weighted about 30kg.
One box was just a heavy box, other one had floppy drives.
Monitor was especially small, about 6-8" and black and white only. PC-speaker was very bassy, and each boxes had HUGE fans, so "computer" made more noise than a Harley Davidson bike without a muffler...
There was even a mouse! With IRON ball and two buttons, also a cord which was heavier than the one, which is attached to my monitor right now. We used to call it a "rat".
Well, thing was fully IBM-compatible. And I remember myself playing Mach3 and Tapper on this... popular games were also Alley Cat and Shamus...

I'm sorry that my dad threw it away after I opened the boxes once and my fingernails started to come apart(!) (there was strong radiation of something inside, probably because the materials used inside, even my granny who was sitting in the other side of the room, said she felt something), as an unique piece of Soviet technology, I could made a lottsa bucks when selling it.

c:\windows\winexec.exe
Well, somehow, I managed to get something named like this into my computer. Now,  suspect that It's the reason behind making my Internet explorer ultra slow.
All other internet-based programs, such as kazaa and msn messenger download things normally (which is 8-10 kb/sec for me), but Internet explorer kinda' times out and speed will be no more than 0,2-0,3 kb/sec.

I tracked down this thing after a little confusion and deleted it. but all i found out about this, was EvilBot written into exe file info.

What is that thing?
Anyone seen this thing?
Is it the evil thing behind breaking my IE?
How to get *really* rid of this thing? (IE is STILL slow)
What else does this thing do?

Thanks in advance. Any help would be appreciated.

Tough deleting sprites will result warning message, I found another way AGS crashes.

I tried to logically do right, but that resulted a crash.
This is what I did:

I drew some of my sprites over and made duplicate ones. When replacing the old ones in a view with newer ones, I removed all the old sprites from a loop.
Then I deleted them from Sprite Manager, thinking that as they're not assigned to a view anymore, It's safe.
Well, it wasn't.
When trying to put new sprites into same loop, AGS usually goes to a folder in Sprite Manager where old, just deleted one was and tries to select the old sprite. And that caused the error, because old sprite was no more there. I got an error message and pressing ok caused same error message to appear again and again, which left me no other option than press Ctrl-Alt-Del and force AGS to close.

Once again, long story about a little bug.

Question:
These AVI/FLI/FLC videos. They're not packed into any VOX or EXE file, right? (since AGS started to have a new version weekly, I've kinda lost the track what's implemented and what's not). Anyway, if videos are not packed-

Suggestion:
They could be packed into something. To ease video/ (-less) game distribution and other thing is that in a game where some cutscenes play as AVI video, it could spoil the fun, because players could check out all the cutscenes to get a hint what to do next. And for adventure games, which usually have low replay value, It's not very great thing.

Anym - this cigarette thing was FOR EXAMPLE. I have lots of things I could do with money - we all have. Just with adventure game developing as a hobby - It doesn't bring in anything. I'm looking at the ways to make my time&work worth something, get myself more motivation to advance at this, and hundred other things related to that. Maybe to get public attention? Or getting famous? Or get a job offer from some low-profit less-known software company? Who knows?
Or maybe just wash off the fact that I'm speaking along with many topics in this forum, yet no-one has played any of my games because all my ideas are unfinished yet and when I'm hitting the Games page, I want to give my best. After all, even if I don't manage to produce something sell-able, I haven't still lost anything.

Free copy? Indeed. And maybe some credits, too. This may be especially tempting if game is really good and gets some positive reaction from public.

Spelling mistakes? That's why i am a member of this super-user-friendly community here. I'm sure you guys even help to translate my game into spanish, if needed. But then again - If I'm making any money with that game - would be you as helpful then?

I really don't think that ANYONE could get rich just by making a computer game, especially when doing all the stuff alone. As I said, I'm just trying to find a way to make all thing worth something. To cover up all the damage that insomniac lifestyle, these incredible amounts of caffeine and those "cylindrical slavedrivers" (some vocabulary, eh), and monitor does to my eyes and health. And time. Anyway, I'd like to have some reasonable price to be set and then see if I'm able to produce something worth it.

I have a sickness called perfectionism. Really painful one. I'm never statisfied with yesterday because I was in experienced/less smart/not so good/etc. then. So I feel like my games will be never complete. Like this post in this thread. It's 6th time I edit it! Yufster already posted something and I'm still trying to finish my line of thoughts... So I never managed to give any of my creations a deadline- simply because when I make a game with 15 rooms, after thing is complete, I ovelook room 1 and notice how much it differs from room 15. Because there's 13 rooms of learning and getting better at rooms, between.

With other trade articles, handmade things cost a lot more than ones made in factory. Like clothes and accessories and so. Can we pull similar line between computer games? Pleurghburg got lots of attention but I'm sure that Chrille saw a lot more hell while doing this than any Lucasarts/Sierra/Whatever development team could even imagine. Doesn't it make his game better then a some way?

You can buy a game where's room that was made by 4 proffesional guys, but you want a room that was made by one, amateur guy, for free? A bit unfair, isn't it? And I'm talking about public opinion here. Of course, often this amateur guy doesn't give a heck and is happy to spread his room without any charge, even happy that so - it finds more audience.

Maybe fact that freeware developers get nothing but emotional statisfaction, is one of the reasons why we have so many greatly-started-but-stopped-at-some-point game projects.
Of course, If I'd have a life (heh) I'd make games freeware only.
Yet, I haven't sold a piece of of my own creations and I'd like to give a try. Even if It gives me just one penny. It's more like an ambition or something. I could look up and say: "Here! My fantasy and drawing/programming/whatever skill IS worth something!" Fantasy nor skill isn't something we could see or touch. A penny is.



As we talk about reasonable price - It's pretty clear already that biggest winners here are potential buyers/players.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not up for riches. I started this thread because I really don't imagine myself releasing a demo and then asking "um - how much would you offer for that game?"

Other possible bug: I'm running Win 2k on work's computer, a P500 w/ a Riva 128 8M.  Any AGS game or demo will not display anything in fullscreen mode.  In windowed mode, no mouse interaction is possible.  

It's probably your company's conspiracy against AGS or a secret project to make employees work instead making adventure games... a nice software idea, actually. Imagine "MS-NoPlay XP"...

actually - no. Problem is that my computer is out of action at the moment and new one is somewhere between U.S. and Estonia two weeks for now! I really cannot do 3D on Pentium 75Mhz... Damn this postal system...  But I'm currently working on the homepage and results will be up as soon as I get my machine.

wwweird... I think I wouldn't play it, because even looking at the pic makes me losing sense of reality and making me feel that I'm having a dream or something... real cyberpunk, man.
But It's original and looks really good. I wish you luck!

hehe - and as there's superpopular game "Dragon Lore", you could name yours to "Drugger Lore"....  

Well, it depends much of style, too. Just when we get over these MSPaint backgrounds, things are going to get better. Just too many games look excactly the same right now. And this is kinda boring.
But saying that gfx doesn't matter in adventure games... i don't believe it. Making games is supposed to be difficult. Now, If I don't have to draw - I'd make 10 games per day. Nothing difficult in converting ideas into a story.

AGS gives possibility to do that easily and if we'd ask: dear AGSers - you're currently doing a game - what's missing yet? 90% people says: Graphics, animations, GUI/cursor design. So gfx is the "work" here, everything else is more like things WE CAN do, except maybe some (crazy?) ideas that require advanced scripting.

Well, getting right perspective isn't that difficult. By the looks of the cafe I assume It's done in MSPaint. But when you use a painting program that supports layers like PhotoShop or Artgem(see my tutorial on resources page), you can use my technique - draw some kind of grid matrix and use it as a reference to keep track of right perspective. Like this:

I drew it fast so It isn't 100% correct, but such thing helps a lot if you know how to use it.
With such helper, room edges, table edges and everything else can be done much more accurately.
Now look at the closest table to the image bottom and imagine its leftmost edge aligned with grid. Get my point?

Hope you're not insulted or something. Game was pretty fun and I felt that it ended just at the moment things started to get really exiting. An idea worth a sequel. Or declare whole thing as "demo" and make it four times longer! I think you'll find loads of fans to this one.

btw, I saw your background and gave a little tip to help you at drawing in perspective. Perspective was and will be the biggest problem for amateurs, but there's lots of tricks to come around it.

Don't underestimate yourself - your background was pretty fine.

Have you ever played Uplink? There's some ideas you could rip off.

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Hm. I'm making an adventure game (doh!) and I was just wondering (as I usually do hundred seven times a day) that whole thing sucks and why the hell am I doing this. And then I felt (as I also feel millions of times a day) that I want to work my arse off this time and make something REALLY good.

Just... just that I don't have enough motivation and what's the point when all I get is mom telling me that my 32-hour day cycle (22h cpu, 10h sleep) isn't normal and dad steps occasionally to my room to ask when the hell am I going to find a job and stop making telephone/electrical bills.

So... I... (You can skip next part)

Want to do a game. And sell it.
Want to do a game that doesn't make me guilty charging money for it. Not in front of this community or my concience (did i write this right? whatever, you'll get it.). As I have no job and nobody believes in me, making all my relatives see that this endeless ass-warming at the front of a computer is really able to produce money of any kind, would be big thing for me.

So. Here I wonder. How much money could I ask for a game? I want price to be fair enough not to rip people off and make them burning pirate cd-s. I live in Estonia and we haven't changed our currency to euro yet, so what looks a little to other people, is pretty good price for us - and vice versa. Relation to euro/dollar is 15:1.
and with a dollar, I can already supply myself with nicotine for one day. Or two empty recordable CD-s. Even three. For example, 15 bucks already supply me with cigarettes for half a month! And If I get 15$ or 15â,¬ for every copy and manage to sell at least few every week... well, nice dream it would be.

So - 15$. Is it too much for a full game, with s3m self-tracked music, 3ds max rendered-backgrounds, and 2D sprites?

NEXT: Sequel to this game!

Paths. Some games have npcs wandering around (Lure of temptress, shadow of the comet,etc).
Is it possible to have pre-defined paths for npcs?
So they  move on specified route through - let's say 5-or 6 rooms?

And I notice that there's "Player walks out n edge" room interaction. Haven't tried but I assume it won't work on non-player characters.

"NPC walks out n edge" could be useful then, too.

Totoro - i like the game and i hope that next game you make is done totally by yourself. and don't complain about non-existing drawing skills - there's bunch of nice tutorials around and well - how are you supposed to know how to swim if you haven't been in water? Nothing comes naturally - it's all about little things to discover and lots of experience. Maybe you haven't found yours? Can't draw? Try 3D-modelling for example. Maybe it comes so easily for you that you will make everything 3d?

The thing about characters walking speed and animation speed is very bad. I really think you should work on this, start by increasing walking speed and lowering animation speed.
Put up an update or something - and I'm sure you'll do this because -

Spoiler

Never leave debug mode ON when releasing anything!

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Aw god. Just enter some middle-eastern chatroom, make some powerful friends and give them idea that whole evil is planted into Microsoft headquarters. You'll become a hero, world admires you and we can all sit and wait until something better comes out... from someone less non-caring. Or - XP, for instance, suggests you to send an error report, whatever you mess up. So find a million friends or so, and let them send a report every time somethings goes wrong... attaching mailbombs to reports will surely help to make your voice even louder... hehe