Messages

Have you tried giving it some cheese?

Ironically, I would find something naer the opposite useful - remove the options for importing at a special resolution, at least from the right-click menu. The reason is that (apart from potential confusion to newbies) it's easy to click on the wrong one, and there's no easy way to tell which sprites in a folder have been imported on the then-wrong resolution, except by clicking on all of them.

If there were three or more mistakes, the copy was burned.  These scribes took their jobs very seriously. 

This sounds like wishful thinking, and falls foul of Occam's Razor. Given the amount of time and people involved, and well-known transcription errors in other documents, it is unreasonable to suppose that errors were never made here.

If "the Kings" had been changing the Bible as they pleased wouldn't they 1) Contradict the Bibles found in other parts of the world

They do, that's the whole point. There are several translations, and interpretations, of the Bible, and all major versions are subtly different. A major part of this is because ancient Hebrew and Greek do not translate one-on-one into modern English. Some of the verses are poetic or allegorical and would lose meaning in a "straight" translation; some of the verses use grammatical structure that does not exist in English. And opinions differ on how best to interpret certain verses.

Example? In most modern Bibles, male pronouns are used for God. This is not the case in the original Hebrew.

Example? Apocrypha. Opinions vary on which works are canonical and which are not. Some allege that the selection done by Augustine c.s. is, to some degree, arbitrary.

Example? Catholics and protestants both claim to be Christians and to follow the Bible. Both have access to the same sources. Yet they disagree anyway.

Depends if the names are trademarked or not (as usually indicated by the 'tm' logos next to them).

If not, you're probably clear; a game about a car is rather obviously not the car, and this is pretty clear fair use, possibly free advertising. If they claim they sell less cars because of your game, that's a ludicrously weak case.

OTOH, if it's trademarked, it's technically not a good idea, but the odds of them ever noticing are slim; the car industry is not known to keep a close eye (or indeed, any eye) on small-time game designers.

Either way, the worst they might do to you is ask you to stop.
If you want to be even safer, use parodies of the name (e.g. a Horsche, or Fnord Mustang).

2. Absolutely not. Law is about rationality; belief is about passion. The two don't mix.

Are you SURE about that? Does reason completely devoid of passion even exist? Can it?

I didn't say law was purely rational, I said it was about rationality. Law should not be passionate; it should be objective and fair. Passion is, almost by definition, neither objective nor fair. Belief is not objective in that many people perceive it differently; in that it is roughly the opposite of law. This is an easily misunderstood statement, but religion is not rational - it stems from feeling and intuition, rather than from deduction and logical analysis.

It's a very nice way to look at things, Radiant, but Law is about imposing restriction

I disagree. The point of law is not to impose restrictions. The point of law is to create a workable society. Restrictions are a means to that end, but never the goal. Some misguided moralities or ethical systems see restrictions as a goal, but that is flawed. I kind of agree with Nikolas's point.
A society can (and generally does) have multiple moralities. These need to live together in a practical fashion. Allowing one morality to push its point of view over the rest will, in the long term, not work, and lead to discontent and societal instability. The most obvious example of that are the morally-imposed prohibition laws, but it goes equally for old laws oppressing women, homosexuals, or certain races.
Laws based purely on morality are inevitably overturned as a society grows more civilized.

However, truth is narrow.  You can't be open about certain things - either they're true, or they are not.

Truth is by definition narrow, but it is seldom black-and-white. That's a tricky but important difference.

One shouldn't lump different religions into one entity, and say that religion as a whole is against the idea of democracy and progressive ideas.

Religion is certainly not opposed to democracy. However, judged by history, religion does have a strong tendency towards conservatism rather than being progressive.

And for that matter, how can you be rational without beliefs? Logic relies on statements assumed to be true.

Logic relies on the least possible number of assumptions, as stated by Occam and Descartes. The rational man can certainly believe in God; that does not imply he has to believe what televangelists infer from their interpretation of a translation of parts of the bible.

I'm really wondering about this. If we can't involve our religious beliefs in politics, then essentially that means that religious folk can't be political.

Exactly. Separation of church and state. If you think about the core issues of both, you'll see that the goals of a church and of a state are wholly different. In particular, it is crucial to a state (but not a church) to pay attention to groups outside of it, and differently thinking groups within.

To say that religious beliefs are inherently less appropriate for politics is a philosophical assumption with which not everyone agrees. Anyway, if the majority of the population wants to involve religion in politics, then a democratic society would have to do that, right?

No, wrong. True democracy does not imply that the majority gets to assert their ways over the minority. The point of democracy is that minorities have rights and can be heard (incidentally, this once more illustrates the fallacy of a two-party system). Politics is about discussing and compromising and working out a solution for all involved parties, and would never work if everything was simply put to a majority vote.

So why did the staff of an American TV station get death threats if the latest episode of a drama starring Aidan Quinn as a catholic priest battling a drug and alcohol problem, and dealing with homosexuality and rape in his parish, from a large number of "Christians" claiming that they were acting on the Word Of God and the views of The Bible?

Anyone making death threats for whatever reason has entirely missed the point of true Christianity. Love thy neighbor. Judge not lest ye be judged. Do not unto others. It's really not that hard if you think about it. True religion is love, not hatred. Harmony, not threats.

1.  The reason why all these religious articles are permeating our politics is because right now there is really only one voice putting things out in the media. Was it nearly as bad when Clinton was president?

Well, that serves to demonstrate that a two-party system, in the present day and age, is inherently flawed.

3.  I believe in older civilisations they intertwined naturally becasue most were theocracies.

Greeks and Romans got it worked out pretty well, though.

Those are just liberal lies from Godless "scientists!!!!"

Oh believe me, I've heard that 'argument' before. If people are so narrow-minded that they're willing to contradict known and observable fact, there really is no point in discussing anything with them.

Ironically, one of the most important and most often ignored phrases in the Bible is "judge not lest ye be judged". If religious dogmatics wouldn't be so judgmental about everything else, we wouldn't have a problem.

For the time being, you can use as a workaround the fact that it uses the same resolution as whichever sprite you imported last. IIRC.

If I declare a struct containing an array like this

Code: ags

struct thingy {
  int a, b, c[10], d;
};

then variable d won't show up in the syntax completion.

If I use a non-existent operator such as *= the compiler treats this as an error in the keyword preceding it; e.g.

Code: ags

blup *= 2;

gives an error about the word 'blup' (even if it's a legal var) rather than about the operator.

Small feature request:

Code: ags

*=   /=   &=   |=   %=

I keep using these by reflex and they don't exist in AGS.


Game.GlobalMessages[500].LowerCase () is accepted by the syntax completer, but not the compiler ('instance required')

string s1; s1.LowerCase ()  is not accepted by the syntax completer, nor by the compiler ('not a public member')

"Scum, freezebag!" - Chief Wiggum

"Bake him away, toys!" - Chief Wiggum

(Homer driving to the park and hitting one of those hedge statues)
Homer: D'OH!
Marge: A deer!
Lisa: A female deer!

Separation of church and state is essential to democracy and freedom of speech. Blurring the border would quite literally be undoing five centuries of civilization (not to mention education) and returning to the middle ages. I could recommend any number of books on the subject (Revolt in 2100 by Heinlein, Endymion by Dan Simmons, and of course American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips), or the recent movie V for Vendetta.

1. You know they do, if you look into recent issues such as forcing school teachers to teach intelligent design, the pending overturn of Roe v Wade, and the Terry Schiavo case.

2. Absolutely not. Law is about rationality; belief is about passion. The two don't mix.

3. Quite possibly so, at least in the central states. The coastlines seem to be more open-minded about issues. An interesting study in Science magazine shows a strong inverse correlation between level of education, and belief in religious dogma.

4. Never go anywhere near the country again. I know several people that already don't.

The essence of the issue is that people should think for themselves. This implies two things. First, we must educate people to actually think and be critically minded; religious education tends towards the opposite. Second, we must be tolerant towards other people who think differently than we do; again, religious dogma tends towards the opposite. (For instance, pro-choice people want to be able to think for themselves, whereas pro-life people want to force the decision for everyone; and don't tell me that has no roots in religion).

A country with no freedom of religion would be lying to call itself home of the free. A society where people no longer think for themselves is stagnant at best, doomed at worst.

Another thing is that they should definatly sum something up, or at least pave way for the last season (as in the last season is the simpsons slightly older... eg bart and lisa as late teens?)

Ugh, that would definitely be jumping the shark (in case hey hadn't already). Couple years ago I used to watch the Simpsons daily and love it. Then it went off-channel for some time. Now they're showing some late season (13th or up, I'm not really sure) weekly and usually it's just, well, bland. So I bought some 4th season DVDs and those are great once more.

Movie. Hm. Well, I'll probably go see it anyway but with low expectations. To their credit, they did have Who Shot Mr. Burns which was pretty good and lasted almost an hour. They'd have to do something like that with him as the bad guy, I suppose, and they can pad the beginning with character exposition for people unfamiliar with the series (trust me, they exist) and they have to do a LOT of cameos given the hundreds of characters actually existent.

I want it must to style FLASHBACK & ANOTHER WORLD.plz lead me.

That's two entirely different and wholly unrelated games (even though they were marketed as sequels). Another World uses vector graphics (very innovative for its time), simple controls and a puzzle-like structure. That would be most conveniently made in Flash. Flashback uses well-animated bitmaps (arguably based on motion-capture), barely visible terrain tiles, complex controls and lengthy action sequences. That would be most conveniently written in Visual C++ using Allegro.

Neither is a particularly easy project. If this is to be your first game, I would recommend you try for a Mario Brothers-type game first.

Since it has graphics (but not animation, apparently) I'd certainly consider it an adventure game, along the lines of The Hobbit, Eric the Unready and Spellcasting - if not for the fact that it's not interactive. I'd say that makes it a demo, and we have a category for those.

I would actually recommend simply using Visual C++ for the job; if you get a decent graphical library (like Allegro) then writing a platform engine isn't that hard. In any of the programming languages you mention you'd have to write a platform engine anyway.

AGS is ill-suited for the job unless you also want to implement a tile algorithm (which frankly would be a bit of a hack within AGS). I'd strongly recommend against MMF because it tends to turn out subpar games because of its low flexibility. Game Maker would work fine, though. I've yet to see a good platformer in Flash (which is not to say that there aren't any, but it seems to be overcomplicated for the task unless a web platform is a must).

That was really fun

The QfG hero is actually the boss of the game; you get him after you defeat the other three. He's got a whole lot of missile moves, and an nasty shield move that reflects your shots, including Graham's goat attack. His name is Devon (I'm not sure where that came from) and I hope there's a secret code to play as him.

I'd love to see a sequel. It would be great if you could play as Guybrush or Purple Tentacle or something... actually since it's an AGS game it would be even greater if you could play as Larry Vales or No-Action Jackson

Oh yeah, I found out...

Spoiler

Roger's slide move is done by holding downward a while then press control.
Graham's teleport is hold down a while, press back, press control. Not sure where that condor comes from, though.
Oh yeah and Larry's dust cloud move is the same as Grahams (back, forward, back, forward, shift).

[close]

How about, just like the option that forces you to use new-style strings, creating an option that forces you not to use the lower case versions? IIRC char[].view == (char[].View - 1) which at any rate is confusing.

Good point. Also, some structs have a lowercase and an uppercase variant (for instance, character.Loop and character.loop) and it's not necessarily clear what the difference is.

http://www.ebay.com

Well, for starters, add GUIOff commands to that sequence.

Or, simply,

Code: ags

bool attack_success = (Random (19) == 0);