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Relying on the presence of a mouse wheel or middle mouse button is not great for those who play on laptops with their track pads, something I often do when I travel.

Sure. But if your argument against it is that it's awkward to control for a sizeable group of people, well, that's what numerous people have also been pointing out about verbcoins. That means that if you want a smooth and intuitive interface for look/use/special, you should use neither of the two.

Hm? How do you do three interactions with just left and right click, without holding down any of the buttons? I'm not being facetious, just curious what you meant.

You use the mousewheel or the middle mouse button. Any mouse made in the past decade has at least one of those.

It seems that a lot of users never read manual until they are really stuck (and in that case they'd rather ask on forums) .

Indeed. An important rule of interface design is that you should not assume anyone reads manuals.

there's a special action for both our main characters, so we have three main possible interactions (look, use/pick up, special action)

All of the GUIs mentioned in this thread would easily allow a special action per character; that's no reason to favor any one of them in particular.

That's not an excuse to use a two button system over a one button system. I just wanted to point out that the look command can and has been used for more than just useless descriptions.

Indeed. As pointed out before, it's not the amount of verbs that has a "huge impact on gameplay", but the amount of meaningful interactions.

But honestly I think this is a mistake. If your game is going to be published in different platforms, you should give each the best UI controls they can have, instead of going for a lower common denominator.
That is, take advantage of keyboard shortcuts and mouses with two (three) buttons (and a wheel) in the platforms you have them.

Precisely. For example, on any platform that has a keyboard, there is no excuse for omitting keyboard shortcuts (and it's not like they're hard to implement or anything). It keeps surprising me how many developers overlook that.

What does that message mean? It appears in Linux in the startup logs

Failed to init one of the drivers; Error: Insufficient digital voices available

And then sound/music does not play.

Great, that info allowed me to fix it.

I've logged a few other bugs related to game switch, but they didn't cause a crash like this one, so they're less of a big deal. But yeah, this is not a function that's commonly used. I'm happy it exists though

PS. Translation errors are written to the log, they are not displayed as a message box, unless game decides to quit because of them.

I haven't seen any logs. Yes, I did the prefix trick.

The above files cause the game to fail to load, with the error message:

ERROR: ld.so: object '/export/disk1/home/username/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.

Script link failed: Runtime error: unresolved import 'AGSteam::SetAchievementAchieved^1'

[Download for Linux: (64-bit), (32-bit)]

Download for Linux: (64-bit), (32-bit)

Hello! I'm in the progress of releasing a Linux version of Heroine's Quest, and I'm having some trouble getting achievements to work. I've just downloaded the 64-bit plugin from the link above since that's a newer version, but it turns out the 32-bit link above is a 404. Can someone help please?

(edit) ok, I've found the file.

Ok, thank you!

Playtesting reveals that under Linux, Steam achievements don't work. It may be the case that I'm using the wrong (or outdated) version of libagsteam.so and libsteam_api.so; can someone tell me where to find the correct ones please?

Any news on this one?

I've got a few people testing Heroine's Quest in the latest master branch build of AGS. So far they don't report anything regarding goto-dialog.

That sounds good. Could you arrange a download of these pathced allegro binaries, then I've got a group of testers on standby.

Some players report having issues with the mouse under Linux. It's been suggested that applying the following patch to allegro would resolve the matter.

https://sourceforge.net/p/alleg/bugs/396/

I'm not well-versed in building Allegro from scratch; could one of the developers here confirm this? If it works, maybe the package on teamcity can be updated? I'm currently using the master branch from Linux on teamcity.

I actually find my self cursing slightly, to not be able to select the noun before I go find the verb in the 9 verb LA UI...

A number of Lucasarts games allow you to do precisely that, supporting both word orders.

One government that tried for a long time to classify people based on race was the Apartheid government of South Africa.

Predictably this classification ran into immediate problems as soon as people of "mixed race" had to be taken into account. If one parent is "white" and the other is "black", what should the child be called? More confusingly, if one parent is "3/8 white, 2/8 black, 3/8 mixed" and other other is "1/8 white, 4/8 black, 3/8 mixed", how on earth do you classify the children?

And then, South Africa became an interesting target for Asian investors. It took the government some time to figure this out, but eventually they put up the law that all Japanese people count as "white" whereas all Chinese count as "black". How utterly ridiculous is that?

Right, I should have said the criticism up until now, in this thread. Those are objective, but "it feels bad" or "I don't like it" isn't.

Bear in mind that this goes both ways. Most of the praise of verb coins doesn't go any further than "I like it" or "It looks pretty", neither of which is objective.

(conversely, there have been numerous objective objections as early as the first page. But you don't like them )

The gui is a tool and has to be there to serve the player who does not have to notice about it.

Precisely. And that's the most important law of GUI design.

Oh, here's another interesting angle. The way the English language works is that the verb comes before the object (noun). So to players, it feels more natural to construct a command by clicking "look" and then "tree" (to have their character look at the tree), instead of the inverse ("tree" then "look"). Most players won't consciously note this, but will feel that the former is intuitive and the latter is not.

Note how the Sierra GUI enforces the natural sentence, how the LucasArts GUI allows both the natural sentence and its inverse, and how the verbcoin forces the inverse and does not allow the natural.