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Cool, that was quick. Ok, I'll PM you later this week.

Okay, that concludes this Quizzening. The winner is KhrisMUC with thirteen points. That means he gets to make up the next one. I think this one was a bit on the hard side, that may be a recommendation for the future.

And here are the answers...

1.Charlie
J.Partner who lets you do all the work
From Larry Vales; he's Larry's partner who spends all day in the hotel room and casino.

2.Hetchell
I.Old foster parent
Dame Hetchell is Bobbin's caretaker in LOOM.

3.Jake
H.Long lost sibling
Jerrod Wilson's brother in Gold Rush.

4.Keith
C.Chain smoker
Sonny's police partner in Police Quest II, who frankly isn't all that useful either.

5.Marty
F.Hard of hearing
Maaaad Marty, the laundry man in Monkey Island II.

6.Roget
D.Green-skinned
Roget the Saurus, your trusty companion (and lost prince) from Quest for Glory II.

7.Participle
G.Just hangs around
The Dangling Participle from King's Quest VI.

8.Spike
E.Found among trash
The acidic alien critter from Space Quest V.

9.Sushi
B.Bedside companion
Zak McKracken's dear little gold fish.

10.Ted
A.Always wrapped up
Dead Cousin Ted, from Day of the Tentacle (and also from Maniac Mansion, although he doesn't help you in that game).

11.Trottier
L.Scared scholar
In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, he's the French guy who owns one of the disks.

12.Xavi
K.Purple-skinned
The alien babe from Space Quest Zero.

[used]

Wooo. So what you're saying is that famous IF games such as Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Slouching Towards Bedlam, generally considered the cream of the crop among fans, appear underdeveloped?

Wait... Did I say that? I can't find where I said that.

a parser that rejected "use" would appear underdeveloped.

Zork, AMFV and Bedlam all reject "use". So does S101, and iirc nearly every other game by Infocom or Legend. FYI.


Anyway,

Let's agree to disagree on this one.

Wait, are you actually saying you've never used a phone before, Radiant?  Never used a bicycle pump on a flat tire?  You actually haven't used anything?  :

Nope. I'm not using a keyboard to type this, either.

Oh and yes I agreee with Helm.

Small bug: the 'recompile voice packs' option includes any MP3/OGG files in the relevant directories, even though files not named "Music???" and "Sound???" won't actually ever be used (e.g. "backuptune3.mp3")

and a parser that rejected "use" would appear underdeveloped.

Wooo. So what you're saying is that famous IF games such as Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Slouching Towards Bedlam, generally considered the cream of the crop among fans, appear underdeveloped? I think someone needs to use a cluebat on you.

Nonsense. People "use" things all the time. See my examples.

Nonsense. If you would speak those phrases IRL, people would be confused by them.

Though I must say, I can't think of any situation where I have used the verb 'use' in an IF.

Exactly. "Use" is rarely if ever blatantly obvious. There is (obviously) a difference between allowing abbrev for common words or phrases such as "examine", and allowing a catch-all word to do most anything even if it really doesn't mean that in English. If you allow "use" in an IF, people will start "use"ing everything to see what the intent of an object is. And that breaks SoD.

Nobody "uses" a button, book, television or rope in daily life. You push/read/turn on/tie/climb them.

[obvious]

I realise that's the convention, but there's a case to be made for accepting "use" when the intent is obvious - when something has one clear use. For example, "use bed" is almost certainly "lie on bed" and should probably be accepted as one way of lying on the bed,

I disagree. In the IF genre, suspension-of-disbelief is increased by using actual English phrasing, rather than the lazy 'use' verb. Indeed, any IF game with a halfway decent parser will balk at "look window" and "use door" (but not at "drop all keys except the black one" or "greet Phil and give the apple to him")

I think somebody already mentioned this, but Slouching Towards Bedlam is awesmoe.

There was some talk earlier about increasing the maximum number of controls per GUI. Would it be possible to have that for 2.72? I'm hoping it's as easy as changing a #define for you



Bug? RawDrawFrameTransparent() disallows drawing the 'current' background frame over itself. However, after doing e.g. RawClearScreen, doing so may actually make sense.

WME.
If it didn't exist, too; then guess I would have to do the same with DGMacphee.

Hey, nice avatar
(yes, I read that too)

I would probably be coding in VC++ instead, the way I used to.

And now I would like to talk about Maniac Masion. This is Lucas Arts (Film Games) first adventure game, yet it deviates from any adventure game that was made after this (and before). There is only one location, but there are 3 characters playeble at that location the same time.

It never ceases to amaze me that this simple yet effective system of using multiple characters has, to my knowledge, never been duplicated since Maniac Mansion.

(ok, Zak McKracken uses it, but only barely; in every other game I can think of, the characters either cannot unite (DOTT), cannot split up (Gobliins) or aren't freely available (Indy4))

So, we should probably have a MAGS assignment that makes for multiple characters. Hm... maybe that means I should win this month's MAGS

"In an October 2002 interview, Microsoft's Craig Mundie admitted that admitted that Microsoft's products were "less secure than they could have been" because it was "designing with features in mind rather than security.""

This merely says that MS products aren't 100% secure. Nor is any product. It certainly doesn't say anything about relative security.

That's true. But the important point (to me) is that a browser or network system should be designed with security in mind rather than features. I'd take safety over bells and whistles any day. Judging by their past, Microsoft's chief goal has always been marketing rather than performance, so to me that means they have their priorities wrong.

Of course, I'm not saying that Firefox is designed with security in mind; that's why I still back it up with a firewall and adkiller. But the point is that it is possible to make an application secure from the bottom up, even though it is rarely done; there are certain core design issues that make Linux inherently more secure than Windows. Security works far better as forethought than as afterthought.

That's actually a rather nifty idea! I can see some cool games using this...

You are obviously unaware that e.g. the latest version of MS Outlook contains fifteen known security vulnerabilities, which is more than the other ten most popular e-mail clients combined, and the oldest of which has been known for over two years and remains unfixed. It helps being aware of security issues, but one of those issues is that Microsoft's track record proves them unreliable. Don't be a lemming.

Okay. Can I assume that you wrote this? Sorry to say, but it's rather lacking in quality. The first thing I noticed was a lot of errors in spelling and grammar, on the first screen. The second thing I noticed was that the game didn't respond in any way to the first group of commands that came to mind (e.g. take fishbowl, look under bed, talk to sushi, pick up phone). With a first impression like that, I'm not going to play on.

It is a known and verifiable fact that most MS applications are significantly less secure than other parties' apps, such as Firefox or indeed Linux.

I doubt that. It may be a known and verifiable fact that MS applications have significantly more known vulnerabilities than other parties' apps, but that's because the apps are more widespread,

That is what the Microsoft marketing department wants you to think. While it is obviously true that the most popular browser will have its flaws exposed quicker than any other, it is also true (although less obvious) that (1) IE has significantly more flaws than other browsers, some of which a result of flawed design, and (2) Microsoft is significantly slower in fixing those flaws than other companies.

"Exploitation of Internet Explorer's security holes has earned IE the reputation as the least secure of the major web browsers."

"Art Manion, a representative of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) noted in a vulnerability report that the design of Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 made it difficult to secure."

"The Apache HTTP Server, for example, had a much larger market share than Microsoft IIS, yet Apache has traditionally had fewer (and generally less serious) security vulnerabilities than IIS."

"In an October 2002 interview, Microsoft's Craig Mundie admitted that admitted that Microsoft's products were "less secure than they could have been" because it was "designing with features in mind rather than security.""

"Microsoft has also not responded as quickly as competitors in fixing security holes and making patches available. Not only are there more holes in Explorer, but holes remain unpatched for a longer time. ... As of May 28, 2006, Secunia reports 101 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, 21 of which are unpatched. In contrast, Mozilla Firefox, the main competitor to Internet Explorer, is reported to have only 31 security vulnerabilities, of which 4 remain unpatched."

(source: Wikipedia)

oh well, that's what you think. and thanks to you ignorant people we have to fear ddos and stuff like that

No, we have to fear DDOS and the like due to the ignorant people at Microsoft who can't build a decently secure application. It is a known and verifiable fact that most MS applications are significantly less secure than other parties' apps, such as Firefox or indeed Linux. Over 90% of viruses, trojans and malware use stupid exploits that exist in IE or Outlook, and can thus be avoided by using better applications.

Sounds reasonable.

I would also appreciate a warning level of "treat all warnings as errors" so that e.g. mixing up ChangeCharView and SetCharView stops the game instead of making a cryptic log entry without any line numbers. That would make it far easier to track down those errors.

Edit by strazer: Already on the tracker.

KhrisMUC and Redwall, thanks for your reactions.