Messages

.. or how inept gov can be.

Bender Rulez!

They setup an e-voting system and invited people to try and hack it.  Funny they used "admin" for username and paswword to login  to the super secure system.  Link to full story below.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/hacked-school-board-election-names-drunken-robot-winner-222831053.html

There is an interesting article on the Invent with Python blog about how to learn programming.  The author talks about using game examples to illustrate programming concepts.  It's a short but interesting read.  He uses the following cartoon to illustrate his points.



Two free to download and read e-books are advertised in the right hand pane of the blog which also seem to be interesting.

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Making Games with Python and PyGame

The blog also mentions and interesting game engine from MIT called Scratch that doesn't require much programming skill.   It looks like it can be exported to HTML5/JS  because the games seem to be playable from the browser.

Scratch

One of the commenters also mentioned something interesting called Processing that can be used to make interactive presentations etc.

Processing

Can you make our ship go?   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU2TA4lSuYI&feature=related

Simply hilarious.     Oh how boring life would be if we didn't get one of these from time to time.   It's times like this that make me nostalgic for Monty Python "... the parrot's not dead, he's sleeping ..." .  

[edit]
I'm also a bit of a Trek fan and this seems somehow appropriate here. Enjoy 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WmGvYDLsj4&feature=related

I came across http://vodo.net/, a website that hosts Creative Commos or similarly licensed films many of which are crowd funded al la Kickstarter.  There are other independently produced films around such as Drawn By Pain, Stranger Things, Star Trek: Phase II and I'm sure there are many others.  Star Trek Phase II actually have the blessing of Parmount, the copyright holder.  Walter Koenig and George Takkei have appeared in two of the films one of which was written by D.C. Fontana.  Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice) and Majel Barrett Rodenberry have also made appearances. (sorry, I'm a Trek fan)

Anyway, it seems like there is going to be more and more of this as time goes by.  Will this sort of stuff replace all or a substantial part of the traditional industry?  Is this the future?

At least they haven't designed them with a stinger..... yet.

Think of the military applications ...  Hehe I can just see a swarm of these beasties chasing the Taliban ...

This is article on Wired.com is very interesting and the video is absolutely amazing.

Harvard University engineers have come up with a production technique inspired by pop-up books and origami, that allows clones of tiny robots to be mass-produced in sheets.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/robotic-bee/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=MoreRecently

Welcome Draft. 

Your questions are concise and well stated making it easier for people to help you.  Other newcommers could learn from your example.   

As GrimReapYou says it's common and acceptable practice here to start new threads for new and/or unrelated questions, so please feel free to do so when you feel it's appropriate.

You are probably wanting to use a listbox.  You will have to do word wrap and justification yourself.  There are functions that return the pixel length of a string using a specified font. 

1. Post in Beginner forum
2. Indent code
3. Look at if-else in help

function chair_Interact() {
     if ((player.view==42)||(player.view==16)) {
     }
     else if ((player.view==17)||(player.view==59)) {
     }
     else if ((player.view==18)||(player.view==58)) {
     }
     else {
     }
}

I cam across an interesting TechDirt article,
The Rise Of The 'Professional Amateur' And The Fall Of Gated, Exclusionary 'Clubs', I thought may be of interest.  It talks about how barriers of entry into creative fields such as ours are falling.     

'# Kickstarter's big moment: 2 projects earn $1 million on same day

Eugene thank you so much for listening and for your thoughtful post.

[quote autor=fuzzie]
I would summarise as "the definition of derivative works is hideously complicated, ...
[/quote]
Fuzzie, I couldn't agree with you more on this point.  Lawyers can't even figure out what it actually means.  In the two documents I linked in my previous post they conclude that it depends on the jurisdiction, on what the copyright holders think it means, and a hos t of other things. 

That's why I said there needs to be clarification.  IMHO, the license is the best place.  But since it appears that this is not possible in practice then unequivocal statements similar to Sev 's post (see below) will have to suffice.

Game assets are not bound by the executable license.  ....
Putting several assets with separate licenses into a single archive or on same media does not affect their licenses. GPL governs only software source code which is linked (in terms of object linker, used by compilers) to it statically. I.e. your GPLed Linux libraries could be dynamically linked with your proprietary  executable without it being affected by GPL. If you have to link statically, there is LGPL license, specifically for that purpose.

If an AGS game will be using ScummVM, it will have links to our site as well as relevant copyright statements in the About dialog. Since our site contains full source, that is enough for complying to the license. Again, this is valid only for the cases when there are no modifications to ScummVM source code.

Sev, thanks for acknowledging the issues and offering a practical solution.  Putting this in  a FAQ is   
a little weak.  Perhaps, in addition,  there could be a separate "GPL Compliance" text file that would/could accompany any distributions.  It could include similar to the above statements and others as well as the offer of source code and the relevant URLs.

Now, considering that currently AGS is embedding the compiled game scripts into a single game executable, this is a bit problematic. ...  You still can consider this as a blob under different license, but purist communities like Debian require source code for everything which is in the executables. Nevertheless splitting out game data from executable is not a technical problem at all, not to mention, that keeping them together is a technical problem since it is not portable at all.

Up until recently AGS did produce a separate game file in addition to the combined executable and a separate game file isn't a technical problem at all or a foreign concept to AGSers.  However, at times the combined exe is convenient and useful.  Perhaps the licensing issues could be sorted out in the above mentioned compliance document and the remaining technical issues addressed by a "Project options/configurations" in the editor where the user could setup multiple compile/build targets.  It would then be possible to specify which files are to be produced for each target.   

ScummVM is GPL, but some parts of it are dual-licensed. So could be the AGS engine, i.e. it could stay as GPL/APL, but outside of ScummVM framework somebody has to implement all required APIs.

Something like this has been in my mind also but based on what everyone was saying it just didn't seem possible or worth the mention.  Thanks for bringing sanity into the discussion. 

Current AGS code is of low level quality, and is practically impossible to maintain and develop by any team beyond single person, which was admitted by Chris himself, and has obvious reasons to be such.

I think everyone is in agreement on this point.  There are recent discusions here about the need to refactor and how to proceed.   

... Thus, if some team is arranged on either side, e.g. AGS for developing 3.x or ScummVM for porting the engine, it must be refactored. Then, depending on the consensus we either will have 2 incompatible code bases, or still single one shared by both communities.

The proposed solution... My suggestion is that since you're looking towards portability, you are welcome to use our code infrastructure since it is proven in 10 years of the project history as reliable and comfortable to work with. You keep AGS engine under APL, which is forward-compatible with GPL, i.e. it could be published under APL as separate entity, and under GPL as part of ScummVM distribution. You are getting nice framework with tons of convenient and portable utility classes, and most probably also number of ScummVM developers, interested in developing the engine.

It was previously said on the ScummVM forum that nobody would be interested to do this and that nothing from ScummVM. not even the API, could be used in AGS/APL.  So I welcome this proposal as I suspect most (if not all) in the AGS community do. 

Also, I would highly recommend monkey_05_06 as a sort of technical liaison between the two groups.  I have no idea if he would be interested in such a role however he does possess excellent deep diving skills and is extremely tenacious when it comes to understanding, in great detail, how things work.   He and I often disagree in our technical discussions but I can say that he always makes good points and usually tells me things I didn't know or hadn't thought about.    He also seems quite interested in the re-factoring of the engine.

As of the proprietary plugins, we already have plugin subsytem with dynamic linking, so as soon as those plugins are not using our code, they could be closed source. Of course, this subsystem has to be extended a bit since these days it supports loading of whole engines, not some parts of them.

With a few exceptions, most of the plugins written for AGS ended up being closed source likely because nobody ever thought to make them open source or suggested that plugin authors  consider making them open source.   

Is the plugin system something that could live in an APLish AGS?   

I welcome everyone to start our discussion from this very message. Alternatively the moderators could consider splitting it out from this thread and starting from the scratch.

Eugene,  again many thanks for the generous helping of sanity.  I look forward to future discussions.

[unsettled legal questions]

The GPL in it's vanillia form is ill suited to the class of applications that are intended to be used to create or run other programs.   The reason for this is it's broad definition of derivative and combined works.  There is a considerable amount controversy and unsettled legal questions surrounding the issue even among copyright attorneys as evidenced by these two articles from the International Free and open Source law Review

• Software Interactions and the GNU General Public License
  
• Working Paper on the Legal Implication of Certain Forms of Software Interactions (a.k.a. linking)
  
  

We in the AGS community have expressed our concerns and have enumerated at least three specific concerns we would have distributing our games with a ScummVM binary.  In stead of our concerns being addressed in a serious manner we are told that we don't get copyleft and that if we just adopted GPL everything would be just fine.  

You need to get this straight in your heads:  The Artistic License was chosen by CJ who listened to our needs and working slavishly of over the past 15 years to satisfy those needs.  We are extremely loyal and grateful to him. The particular license he chose may not protect the AGS source code as well as some other license could but it does seem to satisfy the needs of the people who use AGS to make their games.  Everybody here respects this decision and support it's continued use.  Further, nobody here would benefit from a GPL'd Ags.

Further, you on the one hand say "Well game files are clearly not derivative works".  But on the other hand you won't say so on the license, thus reserving the right to file future lawsuits over the issue.  

You also say on the one hand, "Well it would be all right with us if people downloaded source from the ScummVM website and so game develpers wouldn't have to supply source" but on the other hand you again refuse to say so on the license.  Again preserving the right to file future lawsuits.

You keep reassuring us that your license already addresses these issues and that we don't have to worry.  But then you say you can't add a clarification clause to the license that explicitly makes the very same assertions because that would change the meaning of the license.  Which is it?

You also say that you don't know who all the contributors are or how to contact them and that's why you can't add clarification to the license.  However, if the clause that is added does not change the meaning of the license as you have said above then it wouldn't be necessary to contact everyone, Right?.   It ought to be a no brainer!  

Unless of course you have reason to believe that some contributors may have a different interpretation of the license than you do.  In this case any of the known or unknown contributors could surface at any time and file a lawsuit over these issues.  

So what you are really doing is encouraging people to engage in behavior that you have reason to believe would be understood by one or more ScummVM contributors to violate the ScummVM license and htier copyright.  Isn't that correct?

IMHO, this position is intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible.  

Realistically, a ScummVM port of AGS runtime(s) would be of limited benefit to AGS game designers if it couldn't be confidently and easily distributed with their games.  

I'm out of this Cheese Shop!  Cheers...

I climb the hill packing a case of cold beer, a laptop and 2 comfy chairs.  I setup the chairs and give Ali a nice cold beer and say our hill.  We then open the laptop and endlessly stream "King of the Hill" episodes and make fun of the guy on the left who wears fancy underwear.  Pity the fool who interrupts us before we run out of beer or episodes. 

Expand or contract a fold point.   Ctrl+Keypad* - Not sure if it works in 3.2!

Probably works with the Alan Drake version that has the folding feature.

The standalone Scintilla editor makes a good choice for the external editor feature.  To make it fully functional, I think,  it would only be necessary to publish the ctags file and some documentation explaining how to use it.   

Hehe, I just found this on Craigslist in the Free Stuff section.  

She is all yours I'm done with her. She is aged 30 years. Not good at cooking or cleaning. Not good in bed. So if you want her She is yours

http://spokane.craigslist.org/zip/2834975796.html

The requirement of them having to provide source or offering to provide source for a period of three years is a major inconvenience.   A way around this is that they be allowed to offer source from the AGS or ScummVM website.  However, when I made this this suggestion on the ScummVM forum it was met with much negativity and summarily rejected.

I've been trying to find this negativity of which you speak, but all I could see was someone responding that it depends. As I understand it, the GPL already lets you distribute copies of a program, with only its original offer to provide the source code, as long as it is done non-commercially. If so, that should handle at least some of the otherwise inconvenient cases.   ..,.

You are not being responsive.  do you or do you not support the idea of allowing game developers to offer  source code directly from the ScummVM website?

The other potential obstacle to GPL is confusion over the status of the game file and if it is a derivative work or not.  The game file ought to be considered a separate work don't have confidence that this is true.  The obvious solution is to add a clause in the GPL explicitly stating so.  This suggestion was also rejected by the folks on the ScummVM forum.

Well, it was pointed out that changing the ScummVM license may be difficult because the copyright isn't held by any one single entity. But I honestly don't understand where the fear that the games would in any way, shape or form become derivative works of ScummVM comes from. It certainly has not been the case for any of the other games that ScummVM supports so far. Not even in the cases where we have received source code from the original developers.

Adding a clause to the license that explicitly re-states what it already says wouldn't be a problem unless one or more of the copyright holders has a different interpretation than you and I do.  The reluctance to add a clarifying clause indicates this may indeed be the case.