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My old and new list:

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14. A Tale of Two Kingdoms

You are, I hope, aware that we completed and released that game several months ago?

I think it's been mentioned before that some people asked for permission to use existing songs, and succeeded.

Yes, I've done that succesfully in the past. Many musicians don't mind, as long as you're not making money off your project.

Aside from that, there are numerous musics (mostly MIDIs) on the internet that are in the public domain, which means you can use them at will (note that BOTH the original music AND the performance must be PD for this to work).

And, you can ask people to help. If you have a good game, you can find people to help you with music.

Using things without asking for them is just poor form.

By the way, scotch messed up the price calculation. It's actually 117 Eur per person. If you already sent money don't worry about the difference, but everyone else it's 2 Eur more

Does that mean it'll be 119 euro tomorrow?

Hm. CJ, does the MP3 decoder run in a different thread?

C64 ftw!

If someone is able to post a sample that demonstrates the music stuttering, I'd be interested to investigate it.

I PM'ed you with that.

Food for thought.

Many of those reasons don't stand up to closer scrutiny.

Ok, you say that graphic resolution is not important, ok, but we had a lot of problems to center the images in the rooms in AGS because the resolutions higher than 320x240 are virtuals

This really isn't such a big deal, you can center anything as long as it's an even size.

More things, Wintermute let you to modify the native methods of the engine, AGS no.

Why on earth would you ever want to do that?

Wintermute let you to add scripts in each frame of animation, AGS no.

False - repeatedly_execute (_always) does exactly that.

Wintermute have a native video format and it means that the player don't need to have any codec installed in their system to see the videos, AGS no.

You don't want a native video format because other applications won't support that (for the same reason you want to use BMP/PNG/JPG rather than inventing your own graphics format). There's plenty of standard video codexes that are found on all contemporary computers.

Wintermute let you divide the game files in packages,

Completely irrelevant with contemporary hard drive sizes. The "easier to distribute patches" idea would be nice for AGS, but (1) most games don't patch a lot, and (2) it can easily be done with any kind of DIFF tool.

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

People have the right to their opinion, of course, but backing your opinion with "facts" that are in fact misconceptions or made up entirely is very bad form.

Congratulations, CJ!

Three words: avoid feature creep.

You should have a clear list of things you want in your game, and stick to it. Keep the list short if it's your first game. Don't add other things to it because "it'd be cool" - it's way cooler to complete a short game, than to work on a game that gets longer all the time and never seems to end.

I haven't moved so far, either.

Radiant, meet Tuomas.

I can't do that unless he comes to Mittens, now can I?

Anyway I'd be happy to mail you the money, preferably over paypal. Kindly PM me with your account and so forth.

I was going to give up on this dream due to civil service, but it appears I have some kind of epilepsy which means I won't have to do it in the next 3 years and probably not after. So now I'm taking part in the local porn industry to get some cash, and I'll try to save it,

Er, you sure you want things like that potentially leak onto the internet?

Simply put, don't try to leave, try something different.

Spoiler

like defend yourself?

[close]

Needs more Cuppit

Okay. So AGS2.7 is Dx5, and AGS3.0 is D3d, is that correct? Thanks for your advice. By the way, would you agree that OGG playing is roughly as fast as MP3 playing, or are there significant differences between the libraries?

Yes, easily. Use the repeatedly_execute function to switch the GUI on and off, and use the Random function to give it coordinates.

These operations are quite slow (particularly the D3D one), so no matter which method you use, my advice is still to try and avoid rawdraw completely in repeatedly_execute.

So in essence, it would then be faster to have a series of objects and/or characters on-screen (with Z ordering) that fill the entire screen, than to use rawdraw? Okay, that'd be good to know, and I can work with that. Does it matter whether I use objects or characters or GUIs or overlays? Assuming that each individual one does not animate much?

Dont i get special thanks or an award for digging this?

We can give you a free copy of our next game, if you want

One other thing is that nothing is set in stone - plot elements, characters and even whole rooms come and go, depending on what works best for the game.

I think that's the important part - flexibility.

A frame rate of 30-40 fps should be enough to keep the music playing, unless your track is a particularly high bit rate. Can you post a sample of the problem?

Good point, it may be the bit rate. I can PM you with the AGS executable if you think that helps?

Which is faster - RawClearScreen(), or RawRestoreScreen() to a screen that happens to be pre-cleared, or RawDrawRectangle()?

The best way to determine this is, of course, testing it yourself(if I remember right, ags has an fps display). 

Yes, obviously I'm aware of that. I was hoping that either somebody had already done so (such as OUXX, who was doing performance tests earlier) or that CJ could tell me that one of those is much faster (or not) because of the way the code is written.