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I'm sure he just borrowed it.

[EDIT] I should point out that only the last panel is from III Spy. I do not take responsibility for the rest of the strip.

The first Intel powered macs are scheduled for June of 2006 or thereabouts.
But the idea is that all apps will have a "fat binary" that includes both PPC and x86 code.
I'm not sure if it's going to be possible to compile an app so it only runs on x86.

It's like with Keen 6. iD owns the rights, doesn't want to release it, Apogee would love to, but can't.

iD occasionally bundles the Keen games with "iD anthologies". If it was already free, there would be less incentive to buy one of the anthologies. Plus, they may decide to make Keen for cellphones or fridges or toilet seats or whatever new platforms are out there. If you've already played it for free that's a lost sale.

The fact that I can't legally purchase a lot of the golden oldies anymore - and no, paying 30 USD for a second-hand 2-floppy game + 10 USD shipping to where I live isn't interesting enough - pisses me off greatly.

"interesting enough"? That's a poor argument. However, second-hand games don't provide any revenue to the game makers - if that's the only way the game is likely to ever be available, then sure, why not abandonware?

I too am frustrated that I can't buy old games "new" and get royalties to the creators. I think it would be pretty neat to have a standard way to, say, paypal the developers of old games. After playing some games downloaded from the underdogs I felt I'd cheated them. For example, "Superhero League of Hoboken" - I felt a real glow finishing that, and really wanted to reward Steve Meretzky and his team. (Then I remembered the Space Bar. Did I really pay full price for that? Wah!)

Abandonware serves a purpose. However slight it is - it's about bringing the games back to the fans.

I fully agree with this. If the authors and publishers agree too, everyone wins.

Each %d you use corresponds to a number you want to display - so 4 is the WEIRDO's room number and 4477254 is some random junk from the stack.
To fix, remove the second %d.

Cheers.
The fire plugin has been updated to v2.7 only.

New version of the plugin released.

* Only works with AGS 2.7 because of the differences in the way 2.7 deals with dynamic sprites when loading and saving.

* Now works properly when loading and saving.

* There's a new function to PreHeat an object so when you enter a room it looks like it's been on fire for a while, rather than starting to burn every time.

There may be some bugs lurking, so please report any problems you have!

Thanks CJ.
That explains my confusion.
I guess that means upgrading my own game to 2.7!

[EDIT] What about engine shutdown? Do I need to free the sprites? Do they get freed before or after the AGS_EngineShutdown call to the plugin?

No, that's called after the rest of the restore has happened - the room has already changed, etc.
I want to clean up the old room before I leave it.

I guess what I really want to know is what happens to dynamically created sprites when the game is saved and restored.

Option one is that the save game includes those, and that on restore all dynamic sprites are first destroyed.
Option two is that dynamic sprites are global across the game and across saves and restores.
Or there's some third option that I don't understand yet.

My limited testing indicates option one. I'd like to be sure I'm doing the right thing before I release my plugin.

At the very least I want to be able to reset the object graphic to a non-dynamic sprite whilst the room is not around so that next time it's loaded the object isn't referencing a dynamic sprite that doesn't exist.

Hi,
I'm updating the fire plugin to fix some reported and unreported problems.

The plugin creates dynamic sprites when an object is set on fire, and deletes them when the player leaves the room.
It keeps a list of burning objects which is also cleared at that point.

When the game is restored though, I don't see any way to clear the dynamic sprites before the restore, without forcing the game author to call a dll function directly.

[EDIT] There's not even a guaranteed way to call a dll function - on_event eEventRestoreGame is presumably called after the restore, and RestoreGameDialog doesn't necessarily restore a game. (Oh, and Restarting the game should also clear the fire list.)

Does anyone have any advice?

Cheers!

How do I found out which color in this system is the equal of, say, 123,132,312 (just made that up) in regular 255 RGB?

rawcolor = (2048*R) + (64*G) + B

Well, he asked for a conversion that would go from "255 RGB" to rawcolour.

This should work better.

// first convert from 0-255 to 0-31
int r32 = R/8;
int g32 = G/8;
int b32 = B/8;
// then
rawcolour = (2048*r32) + (64*g32) + b32

I liked hearing Vader say Padme's name.

Boy, you're easily pleased

Personally, I thought the plot was just as pathetic, ridiculous and unbelievable as the first two.
I liked the action, and the atmosphere of the last half hour was good.

Meh.

Thinking about it, this seems highly unlikely.
Why would Ubisoft sell the rights to TellTale? They're probably making money from the current games, and they're not exactly hurting for money.
Where would TellTale get the money to buy the rights? I doubt that poker game has filled their coffers to brimming.

More likely they've just come to some agreement, with TellTale developing and Ubi publishing.

The books just aren't bringing home the bacon...

Once I decompressed it (it had been compressed using Duck Truemotion) it had decidedly higher quality.

That's an insane claim.
The reason it looks better after you decompressed it must be that your DUK player wasn't playing it properly.

It might be difficult to make the filesize lower with DivX because the DUK compression will have left artifacts that DivX doesn't know are artifacts and will try to reproduce at the expense of original movie details. It's unfortunate that you don't have the original uncompressed movie.

Jeez, when I suggested they were working on CSI-like projects (here), I didn't mean CSI exactly. What a waste!

It's a pretty good idea I think.
(And by the way, that background is bloody good - you keep getting better!)

The lighting layer wouldn't have to be black and white - you could for example have a red light bulb and red highlights on the character. It could act like a multiply layer in photoshop.
For game size, this would not compress very well with the current background compression scheme (RLE). So yeah, it could bloat up.
Should work fine in 16 bit.

There are some layouts where it wouldn't make a lot of sense though, eg shadow behind the character that the character is clearly not standing in...

Do not buy an XBox 360.
The PS3 is going to wipe the floor with the XBox 360.

As for backwards compatibility, "your favourite" (Joe Public's favourite) XBox titles will be ported, and you'll have to download an executable.

Gamecube games being downloadable is pretty unlikely, since it's about 2Gb per game. That would take days at 100k/s. Plus where would it be stored? On the 512Mb flash memory?

Yeah, floats are pretty much essential unless you want to get into the pain of using fixed point maths. I don't recommend that.

Good luck!

I recommend doing some back face culling (you can see there isn't any by looking at the top of the cubes in the wireframe + solid mode).
You'll need to set up the triangles so that the vertices are always in a particular order (clockwise or anticlockwise) looking at the front side.
The triangle should be drawn if the camera is "in front of" the triangle.

Find the triangle normal by taking the Cross Product of two edges. This defines the direction a point should be to be in front of the triangle.

Then find a line from the triangle to the camera, by subtracting any triangle vertex from the camera position.

The triangle should be drawn if the line to the camera is in the same direction as the triangle normal, or specifically, if the Dot Product of the line and the normal is positive.

Triangle = V1, V2, V3
Camera position = PC
Edge 1 = E1 = V2 - V1
Edge 2 = E2 = V3 - V1
Normal = N = CrossProduct(E1, E2) // may need to switch E1 and E2, depending on whether vertices are clockwise or anticlockwise
Line to Camera = LC = PC - V1
Draw if DotProduct(LC, N) > 0

You can also use these types of calculation to get the lighting of the polygons.

Imagine a light at PL
Line to Light = LL = PL - V1
Brightness of triangle is given by Br = DotProduct(LL, N)
You can use this to calculate an RGB value - if it was R, G, B, it's now Br*R, Br*G, Br*B

Although in this case you'll need to "normalize" the normal by dividing each component by the length of the normal.
The normal length NL = sqrt(Nx*Nx + Ny*Ny + Nz*Nz)
If the normal is Nx, Ny, Nz, then the "normalized" normal is Nx/NL, Ny/NL, Nz/NL

Cheers,
Steve


PS

function DotProduct(float x1, float y1, float z1, float x2, float y2, float z2)
{
   return x1*x2 + y1*y2 + z1*z2;
}

function CrossProductX(float x1, float y1, float z1, float x2, float y2, float z2)
{
   return y1*z2 - y2*z1;
}

function CrossProductY(float x1, float y1, float z1, float x2, float y2, float z2)
{
   return x2*z1 - x1*z2;
}

function CrossProductZ(float x1, float y1, float z1, float x2, float y2, float z2)
{
   return x1*y2 - x2*y1;
}

That isn't the coolest thing in the universe.
Keep looking and you'll find Van Gogh's "Night Stars" too!