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In all honesty a simple world poll like "would you like your country to be detached from the rest of the world, without loosing any comfort?" would wield a huge YES from Switcherland, Japan...

But where would our PS3s and Wiis come from? Microsoft would dominate the console market like they do the computer one...

I've never been to Switzerland, but my house mate went on a skiing trip there and said the Swiss came across as a bunch of miserable tourist-haters. I kind of respect the neutrality in any war thing, but they do have a stereotype of being somewhat xenophobic and shut off.

The third oddest video clip I've seen this week:
http://www.lernert.nl/haas.html

Reminds me of that bit in Raiders...

You can get the demo off Steam (and probably several other places); that shows a fair bit of the gameplay. Yahtzee's review was pretty accurate, its got glitches and a lot of collecting items in it, but its a very funny and original game.

Thanks, I'll try those out tomorrow. *Her* left arm, or the arm on the left (like you did with your paintover)?

Thanks for the feedback. Yup, she does look rather manly now that I've come back after taking a break. Here's my second version, complete with (slightly) improved posture, more hair, no ears and higher contrast.

   

I might have another go tomorrow, in the mean time any more suggestions are welcome. I might increase the size too.

I spent far too much time this afternoon making my (effectively) second sprite ever from scratch and I'm not entirely happy with it. It started at 60 pixels high and is now 45, so the proportions are a bit out, and I don't like the legs much. I was trying for attractive but not Lara Croft, though its hard to tell at this resolution. In the sprite she is wearing her hair tied back.

The character holds a fairly high position in a large interplanetary power company sometime in the future. She is sent out as a kind of representative/engineer to check on gas extraction plants and their crews, making sure everything is running smoothly and suggesting solutions to her superiors for any problems she encounters.

Anyway here she is:

1x and 5x

All (or at least most) C&C welcomed, paintovers and the like are also appreciated.

Any resemblance to Trinity from the Matrix is purely unintentional.

The RAD video tools work well, if you can get around their rather complicated interface.
http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm

If they take their £28 from your account, that'll mean another overdraft and another charge.

Interestingly I caught the BBC's Money Program yesterday, and these standard charges for unauthorised overdrafts were the subject. As far as I understand it there is a law that says banks are allowed to cover their expenses for extending you an overdraft, but they're not allowed to charge an amount that's inproportionate to the amount you were overdrawn by (obviously this applies in Great Britain). Lots have people have been hit by the same thing and are campaigning against it.

The standard practise seems to have been threatening the bank with legal action, going to court, waiting while the bank refuses to show up and then being granted all your charges back from the last six years. It got to the point where so many people were doing it that the courts have agreed with the banking ascociation to run a test case where they decide something like whether the banks can charge for overdrafts (but not the amounts). Until that case happens sometime early next year, you can only take the issue to court if you are in financial hardship, however the banks are still being allowed to charge you.

That's as much as I remember, but I was half asleep. I'm not suggesting you take your case of £28 to court, but you're not the only one unhappy with the system and something is starting to get done about it.

There seems to be a line continuing up from the right hand side of the door - did someone go a bit overboard when cutting the door frame out of the wall?

(Insert critical red pen here)


Otherwise it's looking really good

There's a glitch in the front cycle. The character wobbles slightly around when his left foot (right hand side to us) touches down. I think it must be due to the entire image having been displaced by one pixel within one of the frames. Maybe it's just me.

I see that too, but only after you pointed it out

I just found two very small issues with creating a new game:

1) When you create a game using the blank template the first thing you are presented with is a compilation error because there is no room 1 and no character 0. This is right, but only because I haven't had chance to add them yet. Prehaps you could skip the compile check when a new game is made? It's not a big problem but could be a little off-putting for someone who's not quite sure what's going on, and the compile error comes before the warning about using a blank template.

2) If you create a new game but don't save it, the AGS folder is created and all the files made but the game title you entered is not saved. The game appears in the game list but with the default title of 'New Game'. Should the game name entered during the creation be saved when the folder is created?

They're both very small issues in an otherwise fantastic program

**Oh hi there, I don't think we've met before. You're the moving thread right? No... no its on your topic name...**

I'm sitting here in the dark lit only by my computer monitor because I don't want trick or treaters calling and my room's at the front of the house. I'm also putting off going back to work on my four week lab project on barcode scanners, no less. Slightly unsure of whether barcode is one or two words, but the real issue is having to track down sources I can use as references to back up knowledge I already have. I occasionally wonder why I'm doing a physics degree rather than a computing one. Well actually its 'Physics With Computing' but that's just a big con - there's no difference to straight physics until the last year when we have to do about two extra modules, don't do a couple of others and get about three more options (and about three we can't pick from).

We had enchiladas for tea which were pretty nice. One of my housemates wanted them but another wanted to buy fajitas instead so the deciding vote was mine. It was made purely because "you can eat enchiladas with a knife and fork" was the best argument either of them could come up with.

Heroes season 1 episode something is on TV in about 50 minutes (me being a poor Brit who doesn't want to download them) so I'd better get on with the report. I only have the experimental method, experiments, discussion and conclusion to finish...

I'm sure we'll meet again,
OneDollar


Both Google and Open Office spellcheckers say its 'bar code'

Looks like a bit of work to do. Thanks CJ!

Your backgrounds look fantastic and I am in no way an expert or anyway near as good as you but...

The glow around your lights seem to be fixed ovals. Should they have a different angle when they hit other walls and the floor? I'd also get rid of the glow that's hitting the notice board (presumably from the lightbulb) in your latest picture - the clear cut glow works local to the light but the notice board would more or less be lit equally at that distance, especially as nothing is blocking the light from reaching it.

While I'm thinking about clear cut glows, maybe the elevator light shouldn't be faded on the floor when the lightbulb isn't? I agree that the elevator light looks a little bright - if you're going for atmosphere it looks like the elevator leads to a safer place while being so bright. The problem might be that it appears to be a light source itself - you could try it with just a small light somewhere on the elevator roof casting a glow. If the player can open the mesh door you're adding you'll probably want to have a shaddow cast that changes, but I guess you might do that with objects or something.

Hope some of that helps

When I try to play my FLIC animation using the run command in the editor under DirectDraw 5 I just get flickering bands of the animation. When I try it under Direct3D 9 I get the following error...

An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00000000 ; program pointer is +1101, ACI version 3.00.953, gtags (0,5)

AGS cannot continue, this exception was fatal. Please note down the numbers above, remember what you were doing at the time and notify CJ on the Tech forum.

in "room5.asc", line 9

Line 9 is:

Code: ags

PlayFlic(0, 1);

When I was using AGS 2.72 it all worked fine.

<<EDIT>>
Oh, and I am using Beta 13

<EDIT 2>>
And another issue - when running under Direct3D 9 and using the 'disolve' for room transitions I get a mismatched colour depths error, though it works under DirectDraw 5. My game is 16-bit

Agreed. Even if it was over complicated and becoming more and more redundant it was pretty useful as a reference for the odd bit of code. Anyone want to email it me for temporary hosting on my googlepages site?

I'll do that if I ever get around to finishing it. For the moment I've renamed the .exe back again

OneDollar:  You renamed your exe after you compiled it.  I had to rename it back to MAGS0907.exe in order to run winsetup.

Sorry about that, in the 20 seconds or so that I had left I couldn't find where to change the .exe name in AGS. I'll see if I can get a fixed version up at some point, but it'll be difficult

There's no way I'm gonna finish the entry I started within the time limit and I'll probably be without Internet access from sometime tomorrow for some length of time so I probably couldn't post it anyway. Still, I might have a quick look around the Internet for some atmospheric music and put a demo up (what I've done so far) if anyone's interested?

<<EDIT>>

Tacked on a text-y intro of sorts, a few sound clips and an end screen. There's supposed to be music but my computer won't play it so it may be there or may not be. Very rough cut I'm afraid, it's just that the idea was one I'm fairly pleased with and I'd like to get it out there. I may continue this, I may not.

The game is called 'Recollection' and can be downloaded from here...

Download

...and here's a screenshot of sorts...

In case you don't quite get the plot from the minimal content here... DEFINITELY DON'T READ BEFORE PLAYING AND DON'T READ IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN SEEING A FULL VERSION

Spoiler

you play as a guy who finds himself in a coma and has to traverse an imaginary version of his head to try and remember what happened and wake up

[close]

Hope you enjoy...

<<FURTHER EDIT>>

Renamed the game .exe file so that you can run the setup properly. Whoops. Anyone actually interested in me finishing it?

So you could in fact have someone who was 'trying to get' (as in obtain, capture or stop) a pirate?