Messages

I don't know yet when I'll be available over the summer, but Southern Europe is always nice to visit. Just plan something and I hope to be able to attend (it's been awhile for me, as well) but I can't promise anything right now.

Winsetup should be deprecated and the relevant functions moved into the script domain, imo.

That would be even better, yes, but in the meantime an easy fix to is move all those rarely-used and hard-to-understand functions into the "advanced options". Because they are.

Regarding our earlier discussions about the winsetup program, one of the reasons for releasing Heroine's Quest without one was to find out which options people commonly use in winsetup. Based on feedback thereon, there are three options that players are primarily interested in, and those are (a) fullscreen, (b) magnification factor, i.e. the filter pulldown, and (c) language selection. I'm afraid that common players (as opposed to AGS regulars) simply don't understand most of the other options, like the difference between DX5 and DX9, or "alternate" letterbox resolution.

But then it struck me that the winsetup program already has an "advanced" submenu! This currently contains the options for replay and memory limit. I think a very good approach would be to move all those rarely-used extra options into advanced, that's precisely what it's for! That way, normal users can have their easy winsetup, and AGS regulars can click advanced to see all the other options. Plus it'd take all of five minutes to rearrange controls on a standard Windows GUI like that. (alternatively, add a boolean to the game settings that lets the designer swap between "original" winsetup and "simplified" winsetup).

I stongly believe that clarity is the best approach in installation and setup tools, and this way everybody can have what they need.

> Hire Robina and order her to map the land outside our town, one day(turn) for each cardinal direction. If she finds treasure to be plundered from evil foes (monsters) then she is to attack and return to the castle.

+1

It seems to me that Primordia isn't the focus of the discussion any more,

Indeed it's not, since Dual posted earlier that he'd withdrawn the game.

Ahem, let me intervene, but I've kind of withdrawn the game, since Andail pointed out it may end up having heated discussions. So why are we discussing this?

So perhaps we can focus on the more complicated topic of commercial vs free games? I think it would help the discussion if we had some concrete data from earlier years to show how much either group is being eclipsed by the others? Has it been the case in previous years that a commercial game got all the votes and the free games had no chance, or vice versa?

You guys are freakin crazy?

We're The Internet, we love arguing. Plus we're going to make an adventure game about arguing about adventure game arguments. Yeah!

(I didn't remember the bit about the Bake Sale games having been exempt from the restriction. Which just seems like a needless complication, and changes the rule from a technical requirement to something like a subjective judgment on whether games have a good excuse for not being in the database.)

That's not subjective though, that means that for these games (as with Space Quest IIv), the eligibility criterion used was its release date (and, as per the poll above, a clear supermajority of the community supports this).

Indeed, it strikes me that in the past, whenever going by database date has been problematic, the issue was resolved by using release date instead! So based on that, I would say it's a good plan to use release date as the official criterion in the first place.

I don't mean this as sophistry, but is the release date a plain and simple fact? I know at least one well-known AGS game (No-Action Jackson) that was never officially released: the version everyone plays was labeled a beta.

Sorry, but NAJ was posted in the Completed Game Announcements forum by its author, so there's a clear timestamp from that. I don't see how a post in CGA wouldn't count as a release. I'm sure there might be an exception or two, but generally speaking a game's release date is an easily provable fact. We're not looking for big granularity here, we just want to know the year; the question is not whether this system is perfect, but whether it's preferable to going by database date.

(Or for another example, what if you had released Heroine's Quest without voices in 2013, and then added a voice pack later on in 2014?

There is actually precedent for this: the game would be eligible for most awards in 2013, and for "best voice acting" in 2014. That doesn't strike me as problematic as long as we're going by release date (in this case it's not even possible to go by database date, since the db doesn't keep dates for voice packs).

I think that if games that missed the database in 2012 were explicitly told that they could compete in 2013, then community should change the rules starting from next year. This is fair and reasonable.

Could Bicilotti and Dualnames please confirm this is the case, because their earlier remarks in this thread don't mention this? As far as I'm aware no public statements have been made about this a year ago.

See, the issue I have with the database entry date is that people have been known to make mistakes with that in the past, whereas the release date is a plain and simple fact. If anything, we sometimes adjust the database date to match the release date; clearly it's not possible to change a game's release date afterwards. So the release date is the most straightforward approach; everything else is bookkeeping. And bookkeeping is important, mind you, but bookkeeping keeps track of the facts, not the other way around.

> ACCEPT her offer.

Reason: They are trackers. The are a compliment to the melee fighters we already have, they are affordable, and the must know how to map the land. Maybe they already have.

+1, and I would love to see Robina compliment Lancelot

More to the point,
> ACCEPT her offer, and as their first task request that they SCOUT our immediate SURROUNDINGS, starting with east and west

ORLY? Looks like (atm) 8 people want the same awards for commercial and freeware games while (atm) 33 people want seperate awards for commercial and freeware games. The tendency seems very clear to me,

Yes, there is a clear answer to the question of "should the awards make a distinction between free and commercial games". There is (as far as I can tell) no consensus yet on how exactly to do that, hence my suggestion that it needs more discussion.

Then I suggest to work from that. I'm curious how many people urgently need a custom resolution build, anyway.

I think the simple solution is to give a 3.4.0 beta version that allows for custom resolutions, or alternatively put custom resolutions in 3.4.0 and rename the 'limits removing' to 3.5.0. I agree that these are major changes that don't belong in a 3.3.1 build. However, I should also point out that although removing limits is a good development, few designers urgently need it because the limits are pretty high already. $.02

edit: after a brief chat on IRC, I am questioning whether a community vote is the appropriate way of settling this (or any other matter, for what it is worth); of the online communities I am member of, the most thriving ones operate mostly by do-ocracy and consensus.

That's a good point. Well, we're not voting to "ratify" a new "award policy"; we're polling to see what the relative support of various options are, and it strikes me that the poll gives a clearer outline of that than the earlier discussion. And luckily, some issues that may come up in theory have in this particular case not turned out in practice. Based on the poll and thread, I believe there's a strong consensus on the third question (release date vs addition date), and that the consensual outcome for the second question (amount of categories) may well be to keep the current categories but discuss dropping/combining a few individual categories, i.e. a gradual change instead of a sweeping one. The main issue that apparently has no consensus is the first (commercial game categorization), so that would need further debate. Let's give it a few more days, of course, and then have further discussion on the issues that aren't settled yet.

    Best Demo
    Best Player Character
    Best Non-Player Character
    Best Tutorial or Documentation

Personally I really like the "best character" awards, and I think the "best tutorial" is good to encourage more people to have their games come with clear intructions (and reward those who have done so). I can certainly get behind dropping "best demo", though.

So here's my idea of a list:

I'm not seeing any issues with the current list of categories; we traditionally get sufficient and diverse votes for each. So I don't really see the point in reducing it. Perhaps we need to scrap one or two categories, but I think a proposal of "scrapping most of them" goes much too far.

No, because nobody told me anything had changed.  (edit) but it works now.

May I make a feature request for the big picture to "slideshow" between the other three?

Bumpity. Can someone tell me how that page works please?

@Radiant, I don't think there's anything specifically needed by AGS, but it will make life a lot easier for developers, thus you'll get more productivity. Linq alone could probably have been used to reduce the amount of code by one fifth (wild and unsupported claim).

I'm sorry, but with a large change as this, I would really want to hear more concrete examples of what and how it makes easier for developers. For multi-person projects, I'm not a fan in general of migrating to a newer version of anything without a solid concrete reason. $.02

Given how many people still use XP, I'm not in favor of migrating to a .NET version that doesn't work in XP any more. I'm not seeing any big advantages to the migration, either; what new capabilities specifically are needed for AGS?

+1 to speaking to Robina next.