Messages

Hi Nikolas,

I'm sorry that you initially thought that I was advocating that people not respect copyrighted works.  Here are the things I object to:

• I object to being charged an extra fee for each blank VHS tape I purchase to compensate Hollywood for any money they may have lostjust in case someone made a  copy of their stuff.   After they pressured (bribed) the US congress into making this the law of the land they started raking in massive amounts of dough, they hadn't counted on, from the movie rental and retail purchases. 
  
  
• I object to not having had the opportunity to purchase DAT (digital audio tape) machines because the US congress prevented that type of machine from being sold in the US.
  
  
• I object to attempts at restricting my fair use rights.   I shouldn't have to buy a new copy of content  I have already purchased so that I can consume  it on another device.   
  
  
• I object to being required to install and run software on my computer to reasure someone else that I am not violating their copyright with out being reimbursed for the computer time and other resources said program consumes.   
  
  
• I object to not being able to watch DVD's on my linux computer.   It's possible but it's not legal in the US.
  
  
• I object to my DVD's being restricted from playing on the family DVD player in Bolivia.  Why shouldn't it? 
  
  
• I object to the RIAA using the US legal system to extort money from innocent people.   And yes they have sue and continue sue people they know to be completely innocent.   They apparently sued one guy who wasn't actually the guy who they said he was.   Imagine for example the sheriff showed up at Nikolas' door one day and served him with a court summons  notifying him that he was being sued.  He hires a lawyer and learns that some guy named RickJ allegedy did something for which he deserves to be sued.   Nikolas and his lawyer explain that Nikolas is Nikolas and not RickJ.  However this makes no difference and the lawsiut continues.  Nikolas and his lawyer then goto court, perhaps more than once, and then after having spent his childrens future on attorney fees, the judge finally throws  out the case. 
  
  I suppose it would have better to have put "Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation" in the subject line.   However, the purpose of the post was to ask anyone who is interested to give their support to the EFF so that they (we) will have a voice in the congress when this comes up again.   The EFF seems to me to be an honorable organization.  I gave them money once when they were defending a Russian graduate student/researcher pro bono (that means free for those who are Latinly challenged) who was arrested for giving lecture about his research and how he wrote a program that  did text-to-speech conversion on DRM'd e-books for the blind.   In any case the EFF is comprised of laywers and so are considered to be officers of the court they and therefore not permitted to advocate lawbreaking.
  
  

  
  But we are aware that downloading mp3s is in fact illegal, right?
  

  AFAIK it is in the US since copyright was updated by the DMCA a few years ago.  Prior to that I am not so sure this is true in all cases nor should it be, IMHO.   What you say?    Suppose someone has a music collection and they want to listen to some of it on their MP3 palyer or computer or at some remote location.  Now suppose that person downloaded music which he previously purchased and is now in his collection.  Why should this be considered theft,  immoral, or a copyright violation?
  
  Having said this, let me be clear that I don't condone or advocate anyone violating a copyright.  It's just plain wrong, just don't do it. 
  
  ==========================
  
  Ok, one more thing I'd like to address is the "How will the artists get paid if downloading is allowed?" argument.   IMHO, this whole RIAA thing isn't about artists making a living or copyrights at all.  The RIAA doesn't represent recording artists, they represnt the companies that promote, manufacture, and distribute little plastic cositas (CDs).   In a digital world CDs and the companies that produce them are unnecessary, inefficent, expensive, and wasteful of resources.   The only function not obsoleteis promotion.   
  
  The RIAA's real concern is that artists will come to realize that they don't need a monster company to promote their work and that they just need a good agent/publishist.  In a world where manufacturing and distribution are virtually free of cost there isn't much left for a big record company to do.
  
  In a digital world artists, the really good ones, will make as much or likely much more that they would have in the old world.   Not only that there will be greater variety and it will be easier form artists to get started.  The winners and losers will be determined by us, the people, instead of a few of pin heads in the seats of power. 
  
  That's the kind of world I'd like to live in, how about you?
  
  [edit]
  Dag gummit Geoffkhan!!
  
  Hehehe  ,  not only did your beat me to the punch but you said it in a lot less words too.   
  
  Well said Greg..

I don't like having to pay extra for consumer electronics so that DRM can  be added to protect some else's interests.   I don't like anyone telling me when, where, or how I llisten to music I plegally purchased.  I don't like my "fair use rights" under copyright llaw bein eroded.   Don't encourage the scoundrels by purchasing DRM'd devices or music.  Please take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's petition in the link below.  If you agree with it please sign and submit it. 

http://www.eff.org/share/petition/

Here is a video of a guy ralking about one of the RIAA infamous lawsuits that you may also be interested in.
Video - Rant Against RIAA

Here is the blog of the attourney who represents Mrs. Swartz and a number of others.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

DG, after all these years a topuc has finally come up on which we agree.   

Don't by either one, or any DRM'd device.  DRM is the work of the devil.... Mahawahahaha.....

I think it's interesting that both sponsors of this quiz have offices in large buildings in large cities, Oakland Ca and Washington DC.   They likely communte on a freeway for an hour or more twice daily. The buildings in which they work likely don't have windows that open but instead have industrial strength HVAC systems to heat, cool, and ventilate 24/7.   

If these folks really believed in the dire consequences they predict they would not continue living they way they do.   Al Gore has a Mansion in Tenesse that he rarely visits, yet it's heated  and cooled year round.   He is still riding around in limo's and not a bicycle.  He could at least down size to a hybird.  It's sort of like the religious fanatic who goes around preaching about the end of the world comming next friday but still keeps his long term investiments.   I mean if it was a sure thing why wouldn't you go out and buy beer for everyone or feed the hungry or something? 

If you believe that human CO2 emissions are causing global warming and that, that is a really bad thing then what are you prepared to sacrifice in your own life to prevent it?  I have yet to hear a plan that actually puports to be a solution that actually prevent it from happening.  There are only half ass "steps in the right direction"  that would have very little if any affect.   What are you willing to sacrifice to prevent global warming and it's dire consequences from happening?

The solution is quite simple;  STOP BURNING CARBON BASED FUELS for energy.   Are you willing to do this?   Is Al Gore or any other enviromental activist willing?  If all these horrible predictions are a reality why wouldn't everyone be all for it.  Well, perhaps the doubters wouldn't be but what about the true believers?   So if you are really serious about it you would support the following:

• A worldwide ban on the production, distribution, and use of petroleumn.
  
• A worldwide ban on the production, distribution, and use of coal.
  
• A worldwide ban on the production, distribution, and use of natural gas.
  
• A worldwide ban on air conditioning
  
• A worldwide ban on electricity unless generated from Wind, Solar, Hydro, or Nuclear
  
  Well, who among you want to sign up?   I didn't think so.  How about just the first one?  Can we do just the first one?  It would be a step in the right direction and not only that it would show those asswholes in the middle east not to mess with the west.  Well is there anyone for banning petroleumn???
  
  I have listened and read a lot of what the so called experts have to say.   The idea that there is positive feedback and that the greenhouse effect will runaway is kind of silly.   In Earth's history there have been enough volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, comets, variations in the sun's output and the earth's orbit and tilt to have triggered any instabilities that are sensitive to a few percent increase in carbon dioxide or degrees in temperature.  If any such instabilities existed Earth would have become a lifeless Venus or Mars a long time ago.   Since it took us 4.5 billion years to evolve from a pool of amino acids,  the fact that we are here should tell us that the average temperature of the earth has been remarkably stable for a very very long time. 
  
  If you look at Earth's history the only thing constant about iit's average tempurature is that it is constantly changing.   The fact that it may increase a few degrees doen't bother me in the least bit.  I feel sorry for the poor bastards that have beach front property or live below sea level but other than that I don't see why I should give a shit.  The earth has been much hotter and much colder in the past; more than once.  We just finished a mini ice age just a few hundred years ago so is it that much of shock to learn that it is still warming up?   
  
  Since the Earth's temperature is always on the move the only other possibility if for it to be going down.  Now I ask you which would you choose, if you had a choice?  I guess it depends upon where you live but if you take a global view a few degrees cooler Earth would be harder to live with than one that was a few degrees warmer. 
  
  

Hi Doc,

If you set the RunAGSGame() mode parameter to a value of 1 then global ints are preserved from game to game.  Your module would have to use the SetGlobalInt() and GetGlobalInt() functions to read and write to global ints.

You may want to look into my MiniGame module.  It features an additional data passing mechanism and a Call/Return mechanism that restores the calling games's state when the called game returns.

I am in the process of releasing an updated version, It should be up sometime to day.  In the meantime you can find a discussion and a link to the older version here:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24879.0

I'll let you know when the new version is available.

Cheers

Thanks smiley!!  That's exactly what I wanted and it works like a champ.   

The following code runs inside a module and aborts with an "array out of bounds" error.   There are only 7 guis defined so apparently that's all that was allocated.   What I would really like to know is how to get the actual array size at runtime so that I can wallk the entire array?   I haven't found any global variable or constant other than AGS_MAX_GUIS that would appear to serve this purpose.  Have I missed something or is AGS_MAX_GUIS not being defined correctly?

Code: ags

	game_start() {
		int i=0;
		while (i<AGS_MAX_GUIS) {
			if (gui[i]!=null) gui[i].Visible=false;
			i++;
		}
	}

For the benefit of novice scripters who may be wondering why I just wouldn't just change the while statement to "while (i<7)", I did say that this is in a module so I can't know how many GUIs future users of the module will have in their game.  Presumably they would not all be the same anyway.

Google: open source text to speech

Pay particular attention to the ones on source forge.

Congartulations Snake!!! 

There are a couple of things you might try to gather data.

• If they were a US company I would try looking them up in the Thomas Register (a directory of US manufacturers and their offerings).  I suppose there is a UK equivalent but I don't know what it is.
  
  
• You can ask the US Dept of Commerce what they know about the company.  They will at least be able to give you phone numbers of the top executives in the company.  Ask them who in the company would be able and willing to tell you their earnings or give you an idea of how big or successful they are.   Perhaps Public Relations or something like that.  Again I guess there is an equivalent UK goverment agency.  (have I remembered correctly that you are living in the UK?)
  
  
• You can get a credit report of the company for a small fee.  That should tell you smoething about them.
  
  
• If the company were a privately held corporation you could contact the "Secretary of State"  for the state in which they are incorporated.   Each year corporations must file an annual report which I believe are of public record.   
  
  
• If they have been ever been in a lawsuit you may be able to find information about them in the court documents.
  
  That's all I can think of for now.  Hope some of this is helpful.

I think I asked about this before and the concensus was that we should be that we should be pureists in out programming.   I was unable to persuade anyone that "anything" could never be equal to a non-existent something (i.e. NULL) and that a comparisom operation of the two should return the appropiate status value rather than a run-time error. 

In my opinion this only leads to unecessary and redundant code, where you first have to check for NULL before you do anything else; When you could have just checked for whatever you were interested in. 

I also think it would be better if  NULL pointers could pass through the .AsFunctions()  without generating a runtime error.   For example Pointer.AsButton() returns NULL if Pointer is not pointing to a button; so if Pointer is NULL then it can't very well be a button could it? 

Just my two cents.  I would vote to NULL pointers a bit more user friendly.  I'm too old and lazy to type in extra stuff. 

I think Scite will do the syntax highlighting if that's what you are looking for.  It is based on the scintilla editor component the same as the AGS script editor. 

http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

ProgZmax, Thanks for the info.  I had a feeling I was out on a limb and didn't know what I was talking about.   

The point that stuck out in my mind was the part where the game was canceled because of the amount of royalities Garfield & co were expecting.   If Atari couldn't  afford it I don't see how Kairus could either.   

The interesting thing is this:  How many comercial Garfield games have been made over the years?  I'm no expert but I'm thinking the answer is around zero and so consequently the amount of royalties earned off of games is around the same figure.   I think it was a bit short sighted of Garfield's creators to not take advantage of the infant game market to sell their wares.  Even if they had to buy their way into the industry by giving someone a sweet  royalty deal the first go around, it seems to b\me it would have been worth it.  Once it was established that "Garfield" was just as succsseful as a game character as he is a cartoon character then the value of the royalties would be self-evident and easily negociate rather than being a show stopper.   

I cam across this a while ago while playing an old RPG and thought that perhaps it would be a useful/desireable feature to add to AGS.  The RPG seemed to use the concept of rooms similar to AGS.  Although the game seemed to have a huge and continous backgound or playing area it seemd to be broken up into seperate "rooms".   For example if the PC continued to walk right eventually he would walk into the next room.   The room transition would occur by scrolling the current and next rooms' backgrounds left until the next room's background was approx. 50% or 75% on screen.   Since the right edge of the current background matches up to the left edge of the next room  the playing area looks continous.  When crossing the top, bottom, or left edges of the room the transition works in a similar manner. 

There would be a number of advantages if something like this were available in AGS, provided of course that there would be a practical implementation.

• Easier to make RPG, platform, and other non-adventure game
  
• Easier to make maps and top down navigation,driving,etc
  
• Easier to work-around object and other room limits
  
  Anyway I thought I'd share the idea and see what everyone thinks.     

I came across this and thought it may be of interest to some.  It lends a little insight into the trouble Kairus had in getting (or not getting) permission to publish his fan game.

http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/garfield/garfield.htm

I just came across this and thought it would be of interest to the Linux and Mac users among us.   It seems like a fairly new project but it seems like it has a lot of potential.  If they get anywhere with it it may be of use to AGSers and other gamers.

http://alkyproject.com/

Quote from: RickJ on Today at 14:47
Here is a clip of Bush and an impersonator.   Objectively evaluate which was funnier to the audience.   It's hard to conclude that Colbert was funnier after watching both.

Bush's thing was very safe. It just left me with a "So what?" kinda feeling.

Colbert's bit had more edge to it. Some of the stuff Colbert's bit made my jaw drop, making me go, "He really said THAT?? Wow... What balls!!" The camera even cut to a lady in the audience with the same reaction as I had.

It's a roast for goodness sake, your supposed to insult the guest of honor, which in this case was the pres!  So why doe it take balls to do  that.  Do you not understand what a "Roast" is?  And you are avoiding my question "Who did the audience think was funnier?"

Also in a recent interview, Mr. Colbert stated that he doesn't allow his young children to watch his work because he "deals in insincerity" and that they would probably not understand why their father was being insincere.   Given that this is his work and he does it everyday, insult and make fun of famous people and by his own words in a hopefully funny and insincere way, why does that take balls?

I'm surprised people are expecting more from Colbert and calling his performance "mild".

Probably because you haven't seen his other work.  Comparatively speaking this act was pretty lame.   I did enjoy the Helen Thomas bit though.  Probably most of you non-americans don;t know who Helen and so didn't really get the joke.

Well it was supposed to be a roast, it was supposed to be funny, and Mr. Colbert is supposed to be a professional comedian.  The audience was mostly composed of left leaning journalists who oppose most of Bush's policies and therefore not hostile to Colbert's comments.    As someone in this thread correctly noted there wasn't much response from the audience in the way of laughter, especially during his initial comments about Bush.   The audience's response improved slightly when he went on to other topics.   

Here is a clip of Bush and an impersonator.   Objectively evaluate which was funnier to the audience.   It's hard to conclude that Colbert was funnier after watching both.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouHJuSbuTlo

[GUI Naming Convention]

I just saw Strazer's summary of the Script Module Guidelines.  He has done a nice job of simplifying everything and making it less intimidating.   I have a few comments I'll share below. 

GUI Naming Convention
I have mixed feelings about this proposal.  I understand the motivation behind using the module name as a GUI prefix but wonder if this is the best approach.   

When a Gui event occurs an event handler function is called and passed a pointer to the gui contol that generated the event.   The event handler calls one or more functions to service the event.   In our case here these functions are presumably defined in a module.  The passed pointer is the linkage between the GUI and the module and it can be used to access the GUI and all of it's controls.  It doesn't seem right to uneccessarily create other linkages.

The problem is that the pointers to all controls on all GUIs are global instead of being children of the GUI in which they occur.   So for example if a GUI has two or more labels you can walk through all the controls and pick out all the labels but you don't have a way of knowing which one is which.  If they were children of the GUI then you would be able to get to the one you wanted just by using the child's name (i.e. GuiPointer.Title.Text="Hello").   In this way external references to controls are relative to a GUI which is passed in as a pointer.  The module could then check for the existance of the Title label, in this example, write the title text if the label exists, and do nothing otherwise.   

Hopefully the above description is clear enough to generate some discussion about this.  I have only recently started doing some Module/GUI work so I'm a bit naieve about some of the practicalities but it seems to me that the passed pointer should be the linkage to the GUI and that a method needs to be devised to allow specifc controls relative to the GUI to be identified.   Most of the time the only thing you need to know is the control that generated the event.  In cases where this is inadequate, perhaps, there could be an initialization method where each control on each GUI could be indentified to the module by calling MyModule.GuiInit(GUI *GuiPtr, GUIControl *CtrPtr, int Id).   Something like this:

Code: ags

function game_start() {
   // Initialize Save Game GUI
   MyModule.GuiInit(gSave, gSaveOk, eMyModule_OK);
   MyModule.GuiInit(gSave, gSaveCancel, eMyModule_CANCEL);
   MyModule.GuiInit(gSave, gSaveList, eMyModule_SAVEDGAMES);
}

One other thing relating to GUI naming conventions.  I don't really see any useful purpose in using M$'s infamous hungarian notation (is  that what it's called? i.e.  lblTitle) in forming control names.   In the context of AGS and autocomplete it's redundant to include the data type in the name and it burns up a limited number of characters available to the name.    I suppose everyone has their own preference; mine would be to not encourage the use of this style of notation.   IMHO, it's more important to prepend the GUI name so as to make the most of the auto-complete feature.   Given this, and our use of camel notation everywhere else, this kind of prefix is just out of place and should not really be incouraged.   

What do the rest of you think about this?