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Well yeah, that's what HTTP functionality would allow, for highscores. Didn't know there was a plugin for it.

What I suppose you could do without it is tell the user the URL to enter their score at, as well as their score, and then some sort of key that is generated from the highscore, sort of like a registration key in many shareware applications.

As someone who has only played AGS games to date, I'd like to see improved multiplatform support. Allowing plugins to be ported (or maybe allowing plugins to be developed in some sort of multiplatform language?), etc. One of the reasons I think it'd be so desirable to make games for SCUMM, were it possible (even though it would be very hard) is simply the number of platforms ScummVM has been ported to.

I also think multiplayer would be interesting, either via some sort of access to a TCP/UDP/IP stack or by some sort of higher-level multiplayer abstraction which would automatically sync characters walking, and so forth. I think it would be quite possible to make well designed multiplayer adventure games, just so long as they've been designed for multiplayer in the beginning.

But what would be more immediately useful and interesting network-communications wise is some sort of HTTP facility, which could allow for high score tables and so forth.

The filename of the screenshot is 'tn-bar.gif'. I assume this means that the game is called T(something) N(something). Let the speculation begin?

Spoiler

Aagh - I thought I'd tried that. I tried giving it to the receptionist guy in the lab, but not the guy near the microscope. Thanks.

[close]

I'm stuck on day 3.

Spoiler

I have the hook and the two fingerprints. I've also given the blood sample to the lab.

[close]

I use realalternative and quicktime alternative, hooray for not having to use the slowest loading program ever which is quicktime!

...And let's not forget how nicely Quicktime rapes the system tray & browser. And how useful the Realplayer "message center" is, with nice ads coming up all the time. Unexpected and wrong time. Like when I play a racing game and this sucker pulls me to desktop just when I'm winning...

** cries unstoppably

Oh, yes. There are just too many drivers and other things nowadays that seem to believe they're important enough to have a system tray and an actual message center just for them.

Frankly, half of these applications are designed as if they're the only thing to be installed on the machine.

HP printer drivers, for example. (Ugh!)

I should have been more suspicious about teletubbies in the bar, because they were in the wrong order.

Edit: Whoops, misread it.

I have completed Riven once, and never again, because I can't bear too. The story gets to me too much.. the one time I completed it, it was pretty upsetting for me.

I mean, there is no real sequel to Riven in my eyes. There's Myst III/IV, sure, but to me, they're not sequels in spirit. Anyone know what I mean?

Eeh. I can't possibly say just one, so I'll put it in categories:

Sierra: Space Quest 5. Really nicely put together game, very smoothly going. And I also have a soft spot for the Sierra-style speech.

LucasArts: MI2, Sam and Max. Both were very immersing and had incredibly 'Wow. I'll miss you.' endings. Personally, I feel DoTT didn't immerse very well. It seemed to lack soul, which MI2 and Sam and Max had in leaps and bounds.

Cyan: Riven I'd say has to be around here. It's well disguised, but it's an adventure game, and what an adventure game.

AGS: GfW, with 5 Days close behind. GfW is really quite wonderous for an AGS game. I feel like it'd be a bit of an overstatement to put Poom here, but I think it's underrated.

Other: BaSS was excellent. The Hugo Trilogy was one of the first adventure games I played, with the second being the best of it (except for the pesky maze, but I guess it's just about excusable).

It's an interesting idea. You could merge it into one game where finishing 5 Days transitions into 7 Days, perhaps with a cutscene in the middle or something.

I'd check out http://nearlyfreespeech.net/
Their pricing plan is the most interesting thing I can find. Rather than a standard monthly charge you 'top up' your bandwidth credit and it just gets used up as it does. It's supposedly more price-efficient than standard monthly-fee packages.

They offer $1 for 1GB. If you run out of credit, your site automatically shuts off, so there's no chance of accidentially having a huge overage bill. Of course there are hosts out there which use the monthly fee system, and, if you do the math, it probably works out cheaper than $1 for 1GB, but for those hosts which offer very large amounts of bandwidth (I know someone once offered 1200gb), they're probably overselling, a practice where the host guesses that 8/10 people aren't going to use their allocation of bandwidth. The system generally seems to work, but I'm still in two minds as to whether it's a good practice or not..

BJ4 is 22mb and was downloaded 7791 times as of posting. That works out to about 167gb. If you're on a low-bandwidth diet, you'd probably be better off with Nearlyfreespeech. High-bandwidth diets might want to try and get away with an overselling plan or something.

If you want a good host with a traditional scheme, check out A Small Orange. They don't oversell, and their prices are divided into two parts, the first plans being normal paid webhosting, the 'Extreme' plans having very high bandwdith allotments, but nothing fancy like PHP and MySQL. So if you need to host large games, you might want to get an Extreme plan or something.

AGS has caused this site to exist, providing links to games in the genre I like most.
It was nice to know the genre hadn't been forgotten. 

I really don't like the newest series. It just seems..cheesy. If I wanted to watch the old, real Doctor Who and such. And as for who plays the Doctor.. I don't think they've chosen very well. The doctor needs to have 'gravity' so to speak, but I haven't seen any of it so far.

Well.. I'd just say my preference reflects my preference of adventure games (i.e. old-school style) than CGI-stuffed imagery and overused, modernised plots.

Have you tried windowed mode?

C# initially sounds like a nice idea, because on my fast, non-obsolete box, it's all speedy and nice. But on older computers (800mhz boxes than can run AGS games fine), .NET apps become slower and clunkier than Java, which in itself is pretty slow and clunky.

I don't see why, say, you couldn't make it so Linux devs could compile plugins to the Linux-equivalent of DLLs (.so?), then the Linux engine could just check for a .so instead of a .dll.

Of course, if all these ports are going to come out, isn't it going to make more sense to move all game data out of the EXE by default, more to another .dat file, making it easier for ports to parse data? That would be moving toward a more ScummVM approach, where the player provides the interpreter with the dat file, as opposed to it coming with it. Of course, a windows interpreter would still be distributed by default.

Erm..that's not what the TCP/IP plugin does. I think he wants to ShellExecute an URL, TCP/IP plugin would be more like implementing a web browser in an AGS game, which is a bit over the top.

I just noticed that Maniac Mansion Mania has the MM characters and GUIs available as source downloads here: Resources.

German page, but the GUI (with the characters and backgrounds pre-assembled into a game) is the first download link and the characters and backgrounds are the last two.

[You are posting in the Games in Production forum.]

I think the preformatted post idea is good. After the thread is created, the user should be able to modify the thread using the normal method to customize it to their liking.

Although, if people wanted to avoid the preformatted method, I think it wouldn't be hard to skin the board so the 'Think before you post' text is added to if you're starting a new topic in GiP, something like:

You are posting in the Games in Production forum.
Please note that there are prerequisites to posting in this forum. You must have at least two in-game screenshots (menus and GUIs do not count). If you do not have at least two in-game screenshots to display, your thread will get locked.

Just putting a link to the rules there would probably be less effective.

I think it's all about how diverse the actions the player is going to perform are. For instance, the later VGA series of Space Quest involved 'smell' icons which were never really used, but were there nonetheless. The two-click approach simplifies everything very nicely and is nicer to use. And TBH, I can't much think of any instance in any adventure game I've played which would require more diversity than that when it comes down to it. But this is all before inventory items come into the picture.

How exactly are you allowing item interaction? I think the 7 Days GUI was one of the best after you consider this, since it's quite mindblowingly efficient. Left-click is walking, right-click on an item brings up a menu underneath the mouse pointer containing generic items like 'Use', 'Look', 'Talk', and all the inventory items in the same box, and your mouse cursor is already near it, so there's no unneccesary moving your mouse all over the screen. It's like pie menus, really.

Of course, then you have the issue of using inventory items not on anything in particular, and looking at them. IIRC, in 7 Days, right clicking on an inventory item would 'look' at it. As for just using an item not on anything in particular, I figure using it on yourself is the most logical action I can think of.

Personally, I very much like the Sierra-style dialogue system. I think it works best if you use LucasArts-style for very short exclamations, or ones relating to physical actions.