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There WAS a Puplic Domain game released late nineties/early nouties on the Amiga called "Tony and friends in Kellogs land" and it was a platform game.

LOL.

I recall playing Cool Spot, a decent platformer with crappy graphics about 7-up; and Yogho Yogho (a Dutch brand of fruit-flavored milk known for its wonky advertising), a crappy platformer with decent graphics; and the very funny and well-made Avoid the Noid about delivering Domino's pizza. Oh yes, and Push Over was a rather nice domino-based puzzle game that for some reason was given an intro and extro which were basically commercials for a brand of chips.

(of course none of those are adventure games, but if we're talking games about common food products, these do stand out)

Actually if you already know AGS you should have no problem figuring out C++ as the syntax is very similar (if, while, return, etc). Plenty of helpsites exist on the web for more specific questions (planet source code comes to mind). The most important distinction of C++ is classes and inheritance, I'd recommend you read some tutorial on that (there's plenty on the web).

PHP is a standard programming language in the C family, by which I mean it is quite similar to C, C++, Java, C# and AGS, and quite easy to learn if you already know any of the above. Yes, PHP would be your best bet for writing something like this; Javascript doesn't cut it, and Flash is not needed.

You don't need SQL or indeed any databasing system (of course you could use that as well, but it requires learning SQL). The easiest to do is this:

Create a flat datafile that has several lines that go "name of game, amount of votes, average". Upon page load, read from that file into a STRUCT or CLASS and display the result as a HTML table. Upon receiving any votes, recalculate the averages ((cur_avg * amt_votes) + new_vote) / (amt_votes + 1), and overwrite the file with the structs in descending order of votes (sort on write is more efficient than sort on read). This is all just basic math and file IO, so you don't need to be a coding wiz to figure it.

In my opinion you should not, because Herge was adamant that nobody write new Tintin stories after his death (which explains why the Alpha Art was published as only a partial story). The stories are extremely well-written and other people simply would not do justice to the style. If you think of the way ElfQuest, Asterix and Spike 'n Suzy went downhill after the main storywriter quit (or died), I'm sure you'll see Herge's point.

Nine out of ten Cuppits disagree with you!

you could add your walkthrough to the wiki, though:

I don't think so.

But if you want to put it on Agagames, I could mail it to you.

Note that CallRoomScript is one of those functions that only gets called when the script you're running is done, and only returns the next cycle. Makes it kind of impractical to get any kind of return value.

(1) if (detectobject == oWhite) {collide = true;  detectx = 9999; detecty = 9999; }

Not sure where you mean to put this?

Put this in place of the current "if (detectobject == White) { collide = true }". Rather than checking for (collide == false) during every single iteration of the while loop, it would be easier to simply set detectx and detecty to ludicrous values when you find a collision, as this will automatically ensure you'll break out of the loop.

(2) creating a local value to store Game.SpriteWidth[oWhite.Graphic] and Game.SpriteHeight[oWhite.Graphic]

Implemented this. Not sure if the SpriteHeight and SpriteWidth commands are actually slow.

Well, it's a triple pointer derefence inside an inner loop. It might not make a huge difference but there's no real reason for doing it the slow way.

reinstalled php5, it fell back to 4 on some updates, everything should be working fine.

Nope, still doesn't work.

It it's slow, you can speed it up by
(1) if (detectobject == oWhite) {collide = true;  detectx = 9999; detecty = 9999; }
(2) creating a local value to store Game.SpriteWidth[oWhite.Graphic] and Game.SpriteHeight[oWhite.Graphic]
(3) simply using "if (Object.GetAtScreenXY(detectx, detecty) == oBlue)" rather than creating the unneeded temp variable detectobject

Is the walkthrough you want on called META? never heard of it.......

Yes. See my sig. It's very fun, but only if you're already familiar with AGS.

could you let me know what browser you use?
I only tested it on IE and Opera..

Firefox. With pictures turned off, I might add. That means you're probably relying on a background picture for the page to display properly, and it will likely also fail in Lynx. Try a backgroundcolor in your body tag as well. Also, for the record, frames are soooo last century

And I will add that walkthrough now .

Thanks. By the way I would really appreciate it if you would keep the lettering black-on-black. That way people will only see the spoilers they want to see (by selecting the text).

Appropriately enough to the kingdom quote, King's Quest IV has a satyr.

You have seent he two existing walkthrough sites mention in the Lone sticky thread in this forum, haven't you: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=2673.0

Actually that's just one site; all agshints.tk has are links to the walkthroughs actually on agagames.com. And that site doesn't seem to fully work, at least I am unable to login.

Anyway. The walkthru wizard looks like a nice site, but could you please do something about the color scheme? On my screen it shows up as yellow letters on a white background, which is entirely illegible.

Also, if you like please add this walkthrough to the site. Preferably with the black-on-black coloring intact, that's intentional. Thanks.

Agagames has a walkthrough site (linked from the forums here)... I went to the login form to be able to add a walkthrough (that would be here). But when I fill in the form and click send, I get an error message stating I should fill in all the fields. Which, of course, I just did. Anyone know what's up?

Any relation to the classic puzzle game named "Heaven and Earth"? Is this a remake or a homage or something?

Problem is that designing a game can be more fun than actually making it

Designing a game in forty hours is challenging but feasible. Completing a game is very difficult, let alone in forty hours...

Because magazine CD's are "free", its legal. Because the games themselves are freeware,

Ethically speaking, that would be a proper use of freeware.

Legally speaking, the term "freeware" is meaningless, and it depends on what disclaimer (if any) is actually put with the software. Unless the software is truly public domain (which is very rare) it is automatically protected by copyright.

Practically speaking, they will obviously get away with it since they're a semi-big company, and in the American legal system an indie author hasn't got a snowball's of taking them to court.

Two out of three ain't bad, I suppose.

Popping up a modal GUI should do the trick.

If I use a DynamicSprite to import the picture, then tell the object to change its graphic to the DynamicSprite's graphic, should I then delete the DynamicSprite or not?  If I delete it, will it screw up the pictureframe object?  If I don't delete it, will it mess up the game's memory somehow?

No, yes, and no. Deleting it when you're done using it, in this case, means deleting it when your game shuts down.

Secondly, I want to include functionality in the game where the player can press a button (say F3, or Enter, or something) and the game will take a screenshot (just as it would do when saving)

There's an easier way of doing that... use the SaveScreenshot() function, which in the default configuration is called when you press F12.

how to do the override-avoiding file-detection.

Basically, use File.Open to open screen0.jpg for reading. If it succeeds, close it and open the next one. Repeat until you fail to open one for reading. That's the lowest-numbered not-yet-existent file.

Strange bug... the compiler occasionally, but not always, chokes if two multiline comments are sequential. For instance,

Code: ags

/****** Dataset header ******/

/*
          Earth    */

gives the error "unexpected 'Earth'".