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[Edit: Position filled]

Edit: Position filled

I've got a game that has been in the works for a long time and is now approaching completion. My deadline is May 12th, but I'm still missing music for most of the game. The game is set in the Oceanspirit Dennis universe so the overall tone is spoofy and comedic, though I'm going for a slightly more sensible tone than some of the other OSD games. If you've never played an Oceanspirit Dennis game, think an adventure game version of an old school Japanese RPG.



I need at least three tracks:
1) Battle music for an old school RPG-style battle sequence. As epic and over the top as possible.
2) General 'wandering around a sleepy village' background music.
3) End credits.

If someone was really keen it would be cool to get some more individualised music for some or all of the different locations in the village, but I realise I'm not allowing a lot of time.

If you are interested in writing some or all of the above, or want any more details, send me a personal message or reply in this thread. Again, the deadline is May 12th, and I'd really want to get the music implemented a few days before that.

I don't know Norton very well, but it sounds like it's automatically quarantining the files. If that's the case there should be an option somewhere in Norton to view quarantined files and decide what to do with them (usually restore, clean or delete them). Norton will probably have encrypted the files to stop them being launched, so you won't be able to just copy them out of the folder.

Not sure how to stop it quarantining every file, your best bet is to go through all the settings and see if you can spot anything. You *could* turn off heuristic scanning (which is where the antivirus looks at files and -supposedly intelligently- guesses whether they are viruses based on their attributes). That's one possible culprit, but if you disable that the computer will only be protected from viruses that Norton already knows about. You'd be putting it at risk from brand new viruses or variants of existing ones that Norton hasn't put out a definition update for yet.

Personally, if it's a home computer I'd never pay for antivirus. There's plenty of free ones out there that work well.

There was a pretty good freddiew video advertising this too. It's cool that they work on iPad as well, just a shame I'm no good at the games...

I've found free software to cover almost everything I want to do with my PC, but I can't find a decent free video editor. There seems to be a few programs for Linux and Mac but not many for Windows. Those that do run on Windows are either unfinished, unstable, low on features or don't support many file formats.

I'd like to be able to have multiple video and audio streams, mask video, speed up/slow down video and audio, and obviously cut video and audio up and move it around. All while being able to preview in realtime. So, you know, not much.

Does anyone know any free software that runs on Windows that would do all that? Or failing that, anything out there that's cheap that people would recommend?

Happy birthday IndieBoy! Hope it was a good one!

It was a good theme, and I've been working on a game idea I had for Submerged (02/2011). Problem is it never got further than an idea, I didn't even write any code, so I've pretty much had to start from scratch. I had too much on this month though so there's no way I'm going to finish. I don't really want an extension, there's so much to do I might not make that deadline and I'd rather work at a slower pace for a bit.

I can't reproduce the problem. If I save it creates a new file (C:\Users\<my username>\Saved Games\<my game name>\agssave.001). If I save again it overwrites fine. If I change the file permissions on the agssave.001 file so that I don't have rights to edit the file, AGS crashes out when I try and save.

Are you using the built in save game dialogue

Code: AGS

SaveGameDialog();

and does it make a difference if you do?

Two more things that comes to mind at the moment:
1) Do you have anything entered in the "Save game file extension" in the general settings (even a space?)
2) If you right-click and choose properties on the game's .exe file is there anything ticked on the Compatibility tab?

Check you've got a "Save games folder name" set in the General Settings? I think this is set by default to the name of your game in AGS 3.2, but if you've updated your game from an older version it might be missing?

In Windows Vista and 7 applications aren't allowed to write to the Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders unless they are started with the 'run as administrator' option. Older versions of AGS (2.x and maybe early 3.x?) used to just put save files in whatever folder you ran the game from, but when Windows introduced this feature this became a problem. AGS changed to create a folder in the user's profile (C:\Users\<username>\Saved Games) with subfolders for each game. I'm guessing if you don't specify a folder name, AGS just tries to put the files in the same folder as the .exe, which as you say causes problem when you're running it from Program Files or another protected location.

It's one of the only Sierra adventure games I've actually enjoyed playing. I agree with a lot of the negatives that have been said, and I never got the good ending myself (watched a let's play instead), but I thought it was unique and fun.

My main complaint was that there were a lot of things that were easy to miss. The clock/act system implies that the game won't advance without you witnessing certain scenes, but often something will be going on and you WILL miss it unless you're in that exact location at that exact time. Otherwise I thought the act system gave a nice sense of progression (and also told you that someone else had probably been murdered when it advanced). Without the time advancing you'd have to trek through the entire house everytime you did/saw something just to see if any characters had moved. Also for some reason I really like time as a gameplay device*.

I liked the lists of things you'd found/missed and advice it gave you at the end so that you could look out for things on a further playthrough. On the whole I thought the puzzles were logical and there weren't *that* many walking deads/stupid deaths (for a Sierra game). I didn't mind that the characters were one dimensional and clichéd, it's framed as a murder mystery play so I was kind of expecting that. Lillian did feel like a bit of a cheep shot though.

I dunno, I guess I liked it because I like detective/murder mysteries and the game was different to anything I'd played before. I probably love the idea and potential of Laura Bow more than the actual game. If I had more talent and time I'd make a game using some of the Laura Bow ideas/themes, but my writing is worse than Roberta Williams'.

*This is your cue to tell me I should play The Last Express.

One Dollar: Thanks for pointing out the broken links. I wonder how long they've been like that?!    Also, weren't you working on an OSD game about Ray searching for Dennis? Come on and finish it, dude. I just provided one jillion megabytes (approximate) of OSD goodness for you. The least you can do is finish your Ray game. 

Hah, you keep bringing that up... if I ever do finish it it'll never live up to the hype

Here is the links though (I wanted my Download points )

Thanks Icey, collection complete!

Great website Ponch and I now have 784MB of Oceanspirit goodness to play through. One thing I noticed though, the numbering for games 10 and 11 is reversed on the site compared to the .zip files and both site links link to 11's zip. Also the link to Last Boss by Mr. Mog has expired, does anyone have a copy?

Gonna go play some OSD now...

I would use a loop to check each pixel from the sprite's origin point (his feet) upwards for the height of the sprite, checking to see if there is a wall there (either because its a region or because it's not a walkable area). If you don't find one, the sprite is fine where it is. If you do find one you take the number of pixels you've searched, subtract it from the sprite's height and move the sprite that number down the screen.

For example if your sprite is 100 pixels tall and starts overlapping a wall 80 pixels above its feet, the top 20 pixels (100 - 80) are going through the wall. You would then move the spite down 20 pixels. Of course this assumes all the corridors are at least the sprite's height, otherwise his feet will overlap a wall instead.

You could search every pixel for an overlap, but that might be slow. Instead you could search a column going upwards from the middle of the sprite, and/or each side of the spite. You could also only check every x number of pixels going up, as long as your walls are less than x pixels wide.

There's a vicar who's given a parrot as a present. It's a talking bird, but the problem is every other word it says is a swearword. This is a big source of embarrassment for the vicar and he tries everything to get the parrot to stop swearing, but nothing works. One Sunday lunch time he finally loses it. He grabs the bird cage, opens up the freezer and shoves the parrot inside. He slams the door shut and there's a muffled stream of the most obscene words you can imagine. After a few minutes everything goes quiet. The vicar's calmed down a bit by now, and he doesn't want to harm the parrot, so he opens the freezer up and puts the bird back in its cage. The parrot looks at him in silence for a few moments, then it says "I believe I may have offended you with my language, and I am truly sorry". The vicar is amazed, and is about to question the bird's sudden change when the parrot continues "Can I just ask, what on earth did the chicken do?".

[Edit:]

Not sure what's going on with the credits for http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/Newsite/Games.aspx/Detail/1303/Eternally_Us... Calin seems to be listed twice and it says he's worked on 16 games, listing each twice.

I was also wondering if it would be nicer to have the screenshots under screenshots and features on the AGS page open in an overlay instead opening in new tabs. Might fit better when things like the feature list expands out onto the same page?

Other than that I really like the new site, great work.

Edit: Also sorry if I missed this, but were game lengths, resolutions and websites intentionally removed from the database entries?

Along with your entry, you must also provide some form of 'evidence' your legend/story/cryptid of choice is pre-existential.

So do we have to base the game on an existing legend, or are we allowed to create our own accompanying documentation?

Being a curious individual, I would see in this challenge an opportunity to learn something, so hooray!

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking though for everything I've looked at it seems like there's a big pile of basics I need to learn before I get anywhere near graphics programming, file IO and launching external programs. I was wondering what language people would choose to do this in, to save me learning a bunch of syntax then discovering I'm blocked from launching things outside of specific directories etc.

Actually, thanks to the ags shell plugin, it's possible to run cli commands from within AGS.

Ah, thanks, I didn't know about that. I'm going to try doing it in another language for learning purposes, but it's useful to know I can fall back on AGS if it doesn't work out.

I'm building an arcade cabinet with some people from work (Windows XP PC, CRT monitor, wooden cabinet shell, joysticks, buttons and a card that converts them to keyboard inputs).

What I want to do is create a program that acts as a graphical frontend to let you choose which game you want to play. This has to be controlled entirely with the keyboard (no mouse) and when a game is chosen it will need to load the correct key mapping file to the card (done through a command line program with arguments) then launch the game. Ideally it'll also have fancy graphical effects (the vision I have in my head is of the song select menu in DDR games - cycling through screenshots of games with arrow keys and loading more info about them when one is selected). Also once the launcher is built it will need to be easy to add/change games, so probably storing info about the games in XML or something and loading that when it starts.

Anyway, my actual question: what should I build this in? AGS is out because it won't launch external programs. I've looked at Flash which is a possibility, but that also has some restrictions on loading programs. I've done lots of scripting but very little real programming, so what would you recommend?

Been following this, but finally got around to pledging today. I would probably have bought the game anyway (now that it's certain to be made) but access to the documentaries swayed me.

One thing I wonder about is that when they proposed the idea it was obviously supposed to be a pretty small game. They've got a lot more money available than they were planning, but are they still planning to finish it for October? I'd rather see them make the most of the opportunity to make something like DotT rather than rush through an 'episode' length game that I can play on 20 different platforms.

I think the rules could benefit from being re-worked to make them clearer. To be honest I thought you were allowed to use any free materials (which is why I made my comments in the January thread to that effect) but I see it is actually limited to sounds, music, modules and templates. Looking back to the days when Klaus ran MAGS it seems even modules and templates weren't allowed. I think I got confused because I know (in the days before OSD :o) people have submitted RON games to MAGS. I tried to find out if those were special months like the recent OSD theme or if people had genuinely remade the characters during that month, but the MAGS site doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment.

Anyway, I'll probably comment more when you put up your rules. I was thinking something like the below, but feel free to ignore them.

1) The game must be made in AGS.
2) Your game must not contain anything created before the theme was given, with the following two exceptions:
- Your game may use pre-existing sounds and music, but they must be freely available to the public.
- Your game may use pre-existing modules and templates as long they are freely available and the vast majority of the game is new.
3) You may work in teams or on your own.
4) Do not enter with a game you made at the last minute or one that does not work. Put a reasonable amount of effort into your game.
5) To enter you must provide a working download link in this thread before the deadline is reached.

I'm quite tired, so I don't know how much sense they make.

It's fine

I'm too attached to my blood to write you a letter, but I don't agree. The spirit of MAGS has always been that games should be new and created solely for the current month's competition. The exception to this is using materials that are freely available, for example music, graphics and modules. This covers the Oceanspirit Dennis games Icey is talking about because they are new games based on assets that are free for everyone to use.

So I would have said that Bogdan's entry wouldn't be covered, unless he released everything he made before the month started to give all the MAGS entrants the same start. Even then I still think it goes against the spirit of the rules as you are supposed to be *making* a game, not adapting or finishing a game. Otherwise I could fix up one of my old MAGS entries and release a much better version this month because it has a pub in it.

Still, you're in charge of MAGS so I guess it's your call.