Messages

Well done, IA.

Bunch of bugs:
With the installer, I cannot specify a directory to install in other than the default.
In the manual, the queen's name shouljd be Val*A*nice. Also, the gnome has a name (Ifnkov) as does the dog (Kenny).
Why does the game include the TCP/IP plugin?
Manannan isn't supposed to kill you when you go down the pathway.
The cat should be called Schrodinger, since it teleports.
Disallowing the player to pick up obvious items if the character doesn't know he needs them, is poor game design.
Non-skippable cut scenes are also poor game design.
The wizard's bookcase is a pixel hunt, which is annoying.
I found several issues with scaling, walkbehinds, walkables and hotspots; I didn't bother to write those down.
The clocks in the game don't work.
The game desperately needs a "fast forward" button. If you know what you're doing, you simply have to stand around for nearly fifteen minutes waiting for the wizard to come back.

I want that annoying talking blue cup from Radiant's game (But with speech voiced by Joe pasquale) to appear onscreen everytime you make an error.

Yay for Cuppit!


Personally, I'd like support for that Wii thingii.

In the 'conversation dialog topics' menu, the control that lists all the names of the dialogs is too narrow. If you have more than 40 or so, 20% of its size is taken up by a vertical scrollbar and this makes reading the names somewhat awkward.

Also, if you click on any name in this control, the entire screen flashes for a second. Not sure why.

At first thought there would be something wrong earlier in My_Function(), either a 'return' statement or some kind of 'if' that causes the Display to be skipped. Try putting a Display at the top of My_Function() and see if that works.

[Pirates]

Pirates, definitely, as suggested above.
Cyberpunk is also a good genre, but I'm unfamiliar with any AGS cyberpunk games.
Gothic could also work if we have vampyre games out there (kind of close to horror, though)
Non-adventure goes here, I'd say. It's better than among 'short' and 'long' because this way you can identify a short n-a game.
Cartoon, probably (or maybe Slapstick). It just feels different than plain comedy. DOTT != MI.
Remake should go here as well, for (well duh) remakes of old games. Actually, it's probably best to categorize all games as 'remake' (straight remake a la Larry 2 P&C or MM deluxe), 'fanfic' (better title please? for MMMania and all MI fangames) and 'original' (anything else)
Maybe something like "almost all story and no puzzles" or "almost all puzzles and no story"
"factual" should probably be "contemporary" (e.g. No Action Jackson is not really factual but doesn't quite fit any other genre, unless you want it to be just 'comedy')

Isn't 'childrens' roughly the same as 'educational'? At least for purposes of categorizing AGS games. I'm also tempted to combine 'mystery' and 'crime', not sure about that though.

And finally, Unique, because there are just two or three games out there that defy description.

Of course, some forum oldbies will (probably) have to volunteer to 'tag' all existing games. Based on that, if any categories are too broad or too narrow we can get more or less cats.

Oh and yes, two cats per game sounds about right. One is too few, and too many cats make them rather pointless by default.

In my experience, #ags is the best place to get help in any aspect of a game

Ooh, neat. I didn't know we had that. Which server is it on?

A: No, my method is simpler.
B: No, MY method is simpler.
A: Mine.
B: Mine!
A: MINE!
B: Slacker.
A: Loser.
B: Ruffian.
A: Fop.

(insert rest of Fettucini quote here )

The best place to ask is probably an IF newsgroup or forum; they have way more experience with text parsing than we do.

Stuff like a popularity rating for users, and if someone posts and ad but just leaves it be after recruiting a few people, the people recruited could give some negative feedback, and if a user gets enough negative feedback

The problem with such ratings (as compared to, say, those on eBay) is that making an AGS game can easily take several months or over a year, and thus it is not really possible to get meaningful feedback before the game progresses quite a bit.

(for instance, think of any of those 'big' Sierra/Lucasesque projects; can you remember or figure out from its site (1) whether it's still active, (2) who is currently on the team roster, and (3) who actually did a lot of work on it? For nearly all games the answer is no. Thus you cannot meaningfully rate anyone involved in any of those)


I think we need a /dev/null type thread for all the n00bs who have a good idea and want someone else to do all the work (because they'll clutter the forum if there isn't any). I believe most known and respected forum members can get people on their team if/when they want, but they use other (more personal) means than OCR.

The easiest thing to do is invoke the system timer... the amount of milliseconds since midnight is, for all practical purposes, random.

For true 3-d games such as an FPS, I would recommend using e.g. OpenGL rather than AGS.

Can anyone offer some success stories about games they made with random people from forums that they never spoke to before?

Actually, that's a good point. Over the course of A Tale of Two Kingdoms, I contacted everybody in the OYS thread offering music, graphics, portraits or animation, over a period of at least three months. About 90% of them (1) didn't respond at all, (2) declined in direct contradiction of their OYS post, (3) joined up and withdrew later without actually having done anything, or (4) joined up and stopped responding to e-mail later without having done anything.

So no, it doesn't work, and I assume that neither do the little icons that go with your profile, and neither does the 'Help wanted' thread (if I state that ATOTK is more attractive than most projects in that thread, and it got two or three reactions toal, then most projects there will get zilch).

Tough luck, eh? I believe that nearly every AGS game is made by two or three people that do everything themselves; something like one coder/artist, one supplemental artist, and one musician. There doesn't appear to be any room for people who cannot do art but only want to do the programming and scripting (or worse, only have a l33t ide4).

I think it's quite possible in the forum to get a musician for your already-mostly-finished game, but other than that I am very sceptical about the entire procedure. It's just wishful thinking. Yes, game design using people met over the internet can work just fine. And no, neither a forum thread nor a special script page is going to be of much use for finding those people.

I think this is a good idea. People offering services should have the option of uploading a sample graphic/music so that others can estimate what style and quality they're working on. Or a link to their website.

Similarly, recruiters should link to some existing material. However, I've noticed that there are far more people with a kewl idea who want team members, than actual artists looking for a job; so the recruitment portion of the site may be pretty much pointless.

The list should probably be ordered by whomever edited it last, that way people will drift to the bottom eventually if they don't update their stuff. People are encouraged to 'touch' their profile regularly to keep it current.


Scratch that, thinking further I don't actually believe this will work. See post below.

Gee, and I thought the third part was Laura Bow and the Eye of the Beholder...

You should give 201 another try; it's the best in the series imho. 301 was good as well (but extremely difficult) only the plot twist for the last chapter is about as bad as the ending of Monkey Island II.

The magic system is in fact the same as with Enchanter (except that you don't need to memorize things, you just cast them from your spellbook). That's because Legend was founded by some ex-Infocommies. S101, of course, features a wide array of improbable spells such as whale summoning. One of the funner spells was in S301, which had a 'spell mutation' spell. For instance, you had the Frimp spell of levitation, and could mutate it into the Frump spell of legislation. You could even mutate 'spell mutation' into 'shell mutation'

Oh yeah and I love Enchanter and Sorcerer, but found Spellbreaker entirely impossible.

Happy frotzing!

What I'd like myself is some way of searching for subratings. For instance, "ignoring graphics and plot, which game has the best puzzles". Or the other way around. Or "find a game that has easy puzzles and a good storyline".

So the reason I suggested expert ratings is so that I can filter out all the n00bs that simply give a game they like high ranks all over the board without considering what areas the game actually excels in. I'm kind of assuming experts wouldn't do that

Whether this should be a predefined list of genres, or some sort of tag system as Boyd suggests, I'm not sure.

I'd think predefined genres would work best; it's easier for the game authors to select one (or two) from pulldowns. New genres could be suggested in the forum, but really there aren't all that many if you want the categories to keep making sense.

We disagree, and neither of us are ever going to give up any ground. Let's stop.

Yeah, ok.

As lo_res suggested, let's instead discuss some of our fave IF adventures... anyone familiar with the Spellcasting series? The magic system is quite nice.

They're not perfect. Just because they're the most widely used and highly praised parsers in the world doesn't mean they can't be improved. What? Is saying that a sin or something?

No, the point is that most fans of the IF genre disagree with you that this would be an improvement, or this simple change would have been made long ago.

Many IF games, including most infocommies and legend games, even reject "look tree" because you didn't specify if you wanted to look AT, UNDER or IN the tree. And most people don't mind.

it shouldn't punish the player just because he used a FORBIDDEN VERB!!!

Code: ags

> Use key in lock
Your character has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated.
You die.
You scored 0 out of 42 points in 519 moves, giving you a rank of n00b luser.
Would you like to restart, restore, undo or quit?
> use undo button
#&*( Segmentation fault, core dumped.

Surely we all agree that guess-the-verb situations are evil, but including "use" is pretty much the opposite.

Agreed. Any good text adventure has such a large vocabulary that verb-guessing isn't an issue. It is often cited as a problem with text adventures, but in reality that's a straw man as it has never been a problem with any decent text parser, and only comes up with a few amateur-made games, or the far less versatile verb+noun parser of old Sierra games.

And, last but not least:
- win game

Monkey Island has that command

Code: ags

> use the Force, Luke
What do you want to do with the Force?

That's pretty neat.

Please tell me what you think of the ideas in this thread?

You're missing the point, Radiant. I'm not saying that those games are bad. I'm just saying that "use" should be acceptable if it's clear what the player wants to do. The parser should be the player's means of interacting with the game world, not another obstacle in that game world.

My point is that the most widely used and highly praised parsers in the world fail this criterium you're proposing. The dichotomy should be obvious.