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Mills -> huh? You had to put your shields in the proper direction, and figure out to shoot at the enemy ships rather than at empty space. I don't call that much of a puzzle.
Not that I dislike SQ3, I thought it was very fun. But when I replay it I tend to stop once I enter the office base, because it gets boring from that point on.

Tough one. Ok, here goes.

>look
You are at the bottom of a pit, accompanied by enough corpses and bones to keep your thoughts from straying to morbidity. The complete darkness is only broken by a faint sheen of luminescent fungus above the pit.
>inv
You have a map of the caves, a broken flashlight, some spare socks, and your lunch.
>look map
Stupid map! This pit wasn't even on there!
>climb wall
You climb a couple of meters up the sheer wall of the pit, then get too tired of the effort and fall back down.
>turn on flashlight
You can't, you broke the lamp when you fell down.
>search bodies
There's nothing much useful on the bodies, as they're mostly skeleton. The only salvageable items are an old but good-quality helmet, and a single zorkmid.
>listen
You hear the faint flutter of bats, and the occasional trip of falling water. Other than that, it's eerily quiet.
>look bat
You don't actually see any bats, you only hear them. But from the brochure you remember them to be vampire bats.
>open flashlight
You open the flashlight and take out the batteries. They seem to be intact.
>get broken glass
You take a piece of broken glass from the flashlight, taking care not to cut yourself.
>cut yourself
Well, if you insist. As you cut yourself, you hear the bats rustling closer to the smell of blood.
>get bat
You flail around wildly at the fluttering bats, but fail to reach any. As they wing off in fright, your only reward is a load of guano dumped at your feet. And hair. And other places.
>get guano
Ok. Yuck.
>look lunch
Your lunch consists of a couple of fresh eggs. Well, mostly fresh eggs. Well, they were fresh when you bought them three weeks ago.
>break egg
Yuck once more! The smell of sulphur streaks through the air as you expose the rotten inside of the egg.
>make fire
How exactly do you want to do that?
>light map with batteries
Holding the poles of the batteries together, you create enough sparks to set your stupid map on fire. It burns up rather quickly, however, leaving you with a blackened mass.
>put guano in sock
>put egg in sock
>put map in sock
>shake sock
Ok. You hope these are the correct quantities!

Spoiler

note - yes, you actually make gunpowder by mixing charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter together. Charcoal = burnt stuff, sulphur is found in rotten eggs, and saltpeter is found in batguano. Don't try this at home folks!

[close]

>put sock in helmet
You place the helmet on the floor and put the sock underneath it.
>put rope in sock
You attach the rope to the sock as a makeshift fuse
>light rope
How exactly are you going to do that?
>with the batteries
Oh yeah. Okay, you light your excessively long fuse rope with the sparks from the batteries.
>sit on helmet
Ok
>wait
Time passes
>wait
More time passes
>wait
The fuse has come to an end! A tremendous explosion from your MacGyverish bomb sends the helmet flying sky high, with you on top of it! Wheeee!
>get stalactite
With lightning reflexes, you manage to grab a stalactite before gravity reclaims its pull on you. Wow, well done, you're out of the pit!
Unfortunately, without a map or a lunch, you have no clue how to get out of here. But you have heard some stories of a Great Underground Empire nearby... who knows what elven swords, old lanterns, and speech-impaired wizards live nearby...
To be continued!

If it's a textbox, you can set its contents to empty.
Or, for anything else, you can use SetGuiObjectPosition to something outrageous like (1000, 1000)

What is an oft-made mistake, is ending an otherwise puzzle-related game in one or more arcade sequences (e.g. Future Wars, Space Quest III). It would be more fitting to end with a climatic puzzle (e.g. FoA).

Ridiculous plot twists always put off a significant number of people. While I rather liked the ending of Monkey Island II, many people hate it. I found the revelation at the end of Spellcasting 301 too outlandish to cope with.

Finally, bugs bugs and bugs. Many of Sierra's later games are infamous for the horrendous amount of bugs (e.g. QfG4, which I couldn't even complete without savegame hacking, because of insufficient beta testing).

wikipedia has a couple of nice articles on it, that do shed light on the Big Brother'ish future that seems endorsed by upcoming windows versions.

Have you tried going to the Horned King's castle?
Try climbing the mountain

Spoiler

with the rope

[close]

How about sprites imported to the wrong resolution? Would that cause a slowdown?

Alternatively, use one of the obscure characters such as ~ and edit the font to change its appearance to a [

FoA was the fourth Indy game, actually. Look:
So assuming you count both Last Crusade games as one game rather than two, there you have it, FoA was the fourth Indy game created...

<grin> of course the Alabama Smith games don't count as they're nowhere near official.
However, I do seem to recall an old console game called Raiders of the Lost Ark, (out of the age of the colecovision and stuff) which would qualify.


Oh yeah. Fave puzzle? The gnomes in KQVI, and/or the time loop puzzle from Sorceror.
Worst puzzle ever? I dunno, several I suppose; the one that comes to mind right now is the Hell Gate from QfG5, since I figured I should stab myself to get blood (just like you do for the Ring of Truth) and that doesn't even give you a response.

I vote for bratwurst!

Er...
JudgeDeadd.

This is an interesting one. I was actually thinking about dealing with it by making the == operator return true for floats if the values were within 0.0001 of each other. Do you think this would be useful, or would this be annoying big brother interference when you did actually want to compare at a very fine accuracy?

From a purist mathematical point of view, I would disagree with that. If two things aren't equal, then == isn't true for them. Plus there's the matter of exponents (according to your defintion, 1 ex -8 == 1 ex -10, since the difference is 99 ex -10, which is less than 1 ex -4).
Maybe you could create a shorthand function for (abs (float_a - float_b) < epsilon), though.

1. only by reducing color depth (i.e. 8-bit graphics take up half as much space as 16-bit graphics). AGS stores backgrounds in its internal way, and you can't change that.

2. use MP3 or OGG for sound effects and music. Better still, for music use MIDI (and note that there is no feasible way of converting MP3 to MIDI, but quite a bunch of good MIDIs exist on the 'net)

3. note that an AGS game without extra files (e.g. no music.vox) can be run from inside a zipfile!

4. a CD can hold 650 Mb. I've yet to see an AGS game of that size

Pumaman -> Ok I'll be patient

SSH -> 1. Yes, 2. Yes/no/no
ERGOS? What's that?

So, since 2004 is now officially over - what's the status of the 2004 AGS awards? Pesty is hosting them, right? Do the awards have a website yet? Do they need help for making one? Is everybody supposed to mail in nominations now? Or do they get picked by the organizer like the Inventory awards were? Any new categories? Any changes to old categories? Am I asking way too many questions? Will I shut up now?

Yes.

...and maybe I'm just so way ahead that I've crossed the asymptote and only appear behind

In the sprite manager, if you right-click on the list of sprites, there should be an option for 'quick import GIF/FLI frames'. Use that to open your AniGif file.

How did it work in SCI?

IIRC similar to AGI.

Why dosn't he implement something like this :
http://www.amberfisharts.com/files/featured/featuredpic.png

Er, because that doesn't allow for intersecting areas either? Also I'm not sure if I see the point of setting height to an area.

You might be accidentally displaying an empty string.
Or a reverse quote (such as those Word tends to use, but they aren't actually in the ASCII set).
On some keyboard settings, the computer may automatically change letters to non-ascii symbols as you type, e.g. if you press ' then e, the result may be a French accented e. Even if you don't want that. I with accent is hard to spot.

Regarding Sierra-style-portraits with character speech...
the character only loops his talking animation for a certain amount of time depending on text length.
However, after this time, he will no longer blink either!

Plus a small feature request: portraits are alternately displayed on the left and right side of the screen... it would be nice if all portraits on the right side were mirrored horizontally.

A Tale of Two Kingdoms:
Probably in 2005. This is not an official promise, but it is our aim.

http://taleoftwokingdoms.com