Messages

*ahem* keep it flowing Miguel.

There's one good thing though with a system like the ACA. When things fail, they quickly get changed. It seems like it's one step towards a universal healthcare system (even though it's still shit) - or I'm dead wrong.

Such a barbaric system.

[Off topic - mostly]

While the hardest workers I know are fucking poor and working two or more jobs to try to make ends meet.

This is where I honestly get confused. Or the "UNaffordable Care Act" quote. Many of you have mentioned being broke and not being able to make ends meet (plus having no kids). Unless the USA economy is quite shit and pays their employees much less than Canada, I just don't understand this. Or perhaps you're all students working part time living in expensive schooling apartments.

Two years ago I was working management at a grocery store. It wasn't all that much. I was making $15 an hour. New ownership pushed me out the door and I was on EI for a year making about 60% of what my average income was ($1256 a month). I own a house, paying mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, etc. I'll admit that shit got really tight near the end, but I wasn't "broke". I even bought a $600 phone and many other things within that year.

Then when it actually came time to getting off my ass and finding a job, it was easy. An autoparts factory. It was easy to get in, they're always hiring. Making $17.71 an hour. Which isn't rich by any means, but considering what I made off of EI, it's a luxurious living. My paychecks are instantly 15-20% less mostly due to government deductions (Tax, EI, CPP, and Long Term Disability). I still easily save 50% of what I make (I don't have kids though and I'm single).

After mortgage and utilities, most of my money goes towards cell phone, fuel and food. Which happen to be considerably cheaper in the USA (it sucks, I know - even restaurants are half the price). Fuel, cell phone and alcohol being almost half the price in USA. Our sales tax is also 13% (where the USA is oftentimes half or even no sales tax). Sure for the care act, 8% is quite a bit, but I'm hearing mentions of being broke before this act will even be in effect. There must be something else about the USA, income and expenses, that I don't know much about. Or am I honestly really that stingy with my income?

Just make sure you disable the cursor boundary if someone presses ESC, which should make the menu appear. Then have the bounds enable when they return to game. Otherwise those playing in window mode can't easily escape the cursor - and it's VERY frustrating.

It's a really cool competition, and I guess I don't understand the desire to have so few of them.

Once it becomes a regular thing, every month or every other month, people will start to disregard the event thinking I'll join on the next one. Each contest having fewer and fewer contestants until it turns into the low popularity turnout of MAGS (which I still think should be an every other month thing, but that's a different conversation).

Once a year tops it should be. I have spoken. It is done. Make it so.

I feel it should happen only once a year.

We should have an ATC instead.

What's this you speak of?

Because, actually, engine does create (and re-create) number of objects (e.g. temporary bitmaps) during running/drawing routines.

Mainly you should try to allocate any memory for your objects at load time. In the case of AGS and these temporary bitmaps, if they're being created every gameloop instead of doing this (complete pseudo code):

Code: ags

void MainGameLoop() {
  Bitmap temporaryBitmap = new Bitmap(etc etc);
}

This would create that bitmap every single game loop (40 times a second), where you'd be better off doing this:

Code: ags

Bitmap temporaryBitmap;
void MainGameLoop() {
  temporaryBitmap = new Bitmap(etc etc);
  
  // OR - IF POSSIBLE
  temporaryBitmap.New(etc etc);  // where you're still using the same size bitmap, just editing over it (I don't know much about bitmap editing in C++, so this may not be practical)
}

Of course with a PC this isn't something that can severely hamper the CPU as it could with a phone. A year ago when I was creating a tower defense game for Android I was experiencing massive slowdown because of all the temporary objects I was creating each and every game loop, or sometimes even within numerous loops (30fps x 100 loops). I later rescripted it all to not constantly create an object pointer within each loop and game loop, the FPS doubled (and that was all I changed with my rescripting).

Even on higher end devices which have very successfully published 3D games available, the engine is slowing to a crawl.

Are the games experiencing slowdown full 3D games or a series of hires animated sprites (like AGS)?

The only other thing I can warn you about is the garbage collector. It's a beast and can kill almost any simple game on the phone. Avoid any looping occurrences of creating and disposing of objects; aka: temporary objects.

Edit (better link): https://code.google.com/p/libgdx-users/wiki/ForceGarbageCollection

Good stuff. I can't remember but have you guys talked about FTL before?

Technologies in Adore are currently being adapted into an engine that will power a game by the team that gave us one of AGS's most successful releases of the past few years.

Journey Down

(Or I'm terribly wrong and it's BT:DT, but I somehow doubt that)

Spoiler

Ah! NOW it's sexy!

[close]

He's wearing his dead cat? You're right, that IS sexy!

SpeechAnimationEndTime ?

As hard to believe as this is, I think the price tag scares me more than the drawing quality. But perhaps it's because of the drawing quality that the price tag frightens me.

That's wicked. I had no idea this was possible (eddy current that is, not this perpetual motion machine of scamming delight).

I agree that it sounds like a news channel scam. Just with how they can't ship outside of the US sounds as though they'll interview those who purchase it.

What's that copper colored tube he's dropping what appears to be a magnet into? Is that real or fake? It looks awesome.

I'd like to point out that the thread this conversation started in was this one.
Also I believe Crimson had meant he actually wanted to see the png files themselves as well.

Unfortunately the way the loops were made made it quite impossible to implement. I will keep what I have learnt about this for any future implementations of a similar nature.

How so? Your response confuses me.

It would simply be like this (your code for both conditions is identical):

Code: ags

if (PPColliding.OWithO(opurpbanana, otop2)) {
  if (omonkey.View == 84 && (omonkey.Loop == 2 || omonkey.Loop == 3)) {  
    cSpaceman.ActiveInventory = null; 
    omonkey.Move(opurpbanana.X - 0, opurpbanana.Y + 30, 20, eBlock, eAnywhere);
    opurpbanana.Graphic = 2472;
    omonkey.Move(omonkey.X + 200,  omonkey.Y - 0, 4, eBlock, eAnywhere); // THIS WORKS through to end ok
    omonkey.Visible = false;
    opurpbanana.Move(cSpaceman.x + 0, cSpaceman.y - 0, 4, eBlock, eAnywhere);
    mouse.Mode = eModeInteract;
    cSpaceman.Say("The monkey dropped the tyre for the purple banana. Good thing I helped that alien. I don't need bananas anymore.");
    cSpaceman.LoseInventory(ipurpban);
  }
}

I've finally gotten around to watching this movie. I have to agree with your suggestions, Andail. Although I did highly enjoy this movie, at least mostly up until the ending.

I had my predictions while I was watching it, but they were all wrong. When Jack had just been made aware of the surviving humans not being aliens, I thought the tet ship was actually filled with aliens that simply couldn't live on Earth as it was. That blowing up the moon was one step to speed up the terraforming process. That the large ships that were collecting hydrogen and such from the oceans, I had believed they were large terraforming crafts and the story of them "collecting" was to give him a sense of why he needs to protect them. Why else would a sentient alien machine need to blow up the moon? Why not just send that explosive towards earth and just start collecting the resources years later after all humans died - they're machines, they can all wait.

I really didn't like the clone idea. If the robot aliens were that sophisticated, why not just make their own robotic "clean-up crew". Why would a sentient machine ever believe that creating thousands of Jacks was a better alternative than to just create a massive biological weapon, or even more robotic defense drones.

I would've preferred to see the man from base 52 to not actually be a clone. One that he would have to explain that the "aliens" are actually humans and later team up with to destroy the tet mothership. Or possibly even having him turn on Jack because he believes he's an alien - or is brainwashed like Jack should've been, and sees other humans as aliens.

The whole time Victoria was onscreen I would feel absolutely nothing for her. It was as if she was a robot or had her own agenda. They're having a serious conversation, Jack talking about how the scavs wanted to capture him, not kill. She then decides to completely change the subject and seduce him. Everything about her felt fake - but probably so we're happy to see her die, and to agree with him as to not care about rescuing the second Victoria.

Too many plot issues with this movie. Overall, yes it was quite fantastic. Everything except maybe the last 10 minutes make one hell of a movie - just not as good as it could've been.