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My favorite adventure game is... Starcross.

...hey, nobody said it had to be point-and-click...

You're defining prevcur as a local variable, so it doesn't exist anymore once the Run Script finishes executing.  You need to go to the main room properties page and click the "edit room script" button so that you can see the whole room script instead of just one function, and add prevcur as a global variable so that it will exist as long as the room is in memory.

EDIT: Heh, a-v-o beat me to it.

Making movies based on games turns out worse. Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat and Street fighter anyone!?!?

dont forget tomb raider and resident evil. those sucked too

Ah, but what about Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer?  That little gem of an OAV was actually BETTER than the game it was based on! So much better, in fact, that the OAV is considered a classic by many long-time anime fans, but few of them are even aware it was based on a game.

Actually, the Super Marios Bros. and Street Fighter movies aren't all that bad, you just think they are because you go in expecting them to bear some kind of resemblance games they share a title with, and then find out that they don't.  People who went to see those (and Wing Commander as well) with no preconceived notions (from playing the games) of what they should be like typically found them rather enjoyable, excepting of course people who just plain don't like pulp superhero movies (like 99% of all movie critics).

Whichever way you go, I think the main problem is the franchise mentality: the producer of the adaptation thinks they can sell the product based on name alone, and just doesn't bother to put any real effort into it.  How many games-based-on-movies are just cookie-cutter platformers with different graphics pasted in?  This is probably why Gowcaizer breaks the mold: the game sucked, so they figured the OAV damn well better be good to make up for it.

Masters need not even think about the rules, they can operate on instinct alone.

But you forget: Most masters had to learn the rules first before they could break them.

You see, you seem to think that masters need not think about rules, when the opposite is true.

Masters need to learn the rules as much as anyone and keep them constantly in mind so they know how to break them the right way

No, I don't forget.  I described in my own post that mechanically choosing to break rules or not to is the intermediate step between novice and master.

Yes, masters need to learn the rules... when they're still novices.  They become masters when they don't need the rules anymore.  You yourself gave examples of people who learned the rules and then discarded them when they no longer needed them.

To put it in more metaphoric terms, the rules are training wheels, you don't need them anymore once you learn to balance the bicycle on your own.  The bicycle still needs to be balanced, of course, but it can be done without the crutches once you reach a certain level of proficiency.  The other side of this metaphor is that once you take the training wheels off, it becomes perfectly natural to do things that the training wheels would have gotten in the way of, like leaning into turns and popping up and down curbs.  Some people never reach the point where they can take off the training wheels without wiping out, but those that do are what I consider Masters.

I agree -- you must use education as a basic guide only and not the be all and end all.

Considering that this is exactly the point I've been trying to make, our disagreement is clearly stemming from some kind of misunderstanding.

People today seem to have the mentality that unbridled originality is automatically good, but quite often it just results in a mess.

I couldn't agree more.  But that's not what I was talking about.  I was talking about people who have the skill, experience, and instinct to create something really good without having to think about the rules.  They don't follow the mechanical approach of, "Okay, now right here I can create dramatic effect by breaking this rule, but here I need to follow that rule," they just do their thing and don't worry about what the rules say, and it works because they have the experience to operate that way.  Mechanically following the rules is for amatuers, and mechanically deciding when to break them is for intermediates.  Masters need not even think about the rules, they can operate on instinct alone.

I'll second this suggestion, since it should be a pretty easy thing for CJ to add.

In the meantime, here's a workaround:

function on_mouse_click(int button) {

 . . .

 if(button == WHEELNORTH) {  // reverse-cycle cursor
   // get current mode
   int mode = GetCursorMode();
   int i = mode - 1;
   
   // loop if we go past zero
   if(i < 0) {
     i = 5;  // change 5 to the highest standard mode number you use
   }
   
   // keep trying decreasing mode numbers until one is accepted
   while((GetCursorMode() == mode) && (i >= 0)) {
     SetCursorMode(i);
     i--;
   }
 }

. . .

}

The pressures of a different medium and commercial realities forced the film interpretation to present the stories intertwined [I'm sure even the most zealous of fans would have been disconcerted if they hadn't] and with no difficulty. There shouldn't be because the practice of telling parallel plots has been used for hundreds of years, and anyone who has been exposed to fiction in that time should have little difficulty following it.

Yes, intertwined storylines have been used extensively, but for every example of it working there are three or four examples of it becoming choppy and confusing.  I don't think it has much of anything to do with the skill of the writer, but depends mostly on the content of the story.  When it works successfully, it's usually because both storylines are doing similar things when they cut back and forth: two different fights, two different conversations, two different private meditations, etc.  In LOTR, we'd be jumping back anf forth between the action-packed combat adventure of Aragorn and the highly personal, introspective self-discovery of Frodo, which would be a much more jarring change of gears than in most examples.

The movies feature only short snippets from each storyline, and heavily rewritten to add more introspection to Aragorn's story and more action to Frodo's.  To tell the more contrasted narratives of the novels in an intertwined format might not work so well.

Tolkien could conceivably have switched back and forth more often than he did, but not by much.  He switched a total of three times between the Breaking of the Fellowship and the Final Battle, and I'd estimate that more than about five switches would have created an unacceptable level of choppiness.

So anyway, this may just be my opinion, but I think not intertwining the storylines provided a much greater sense of focus to the narrative. We can watch Frodo, Sam, and Gollum evolve without distractions from Aragorn and Gandalf, and we can watch Aragorn and Gandalf kick ass without interruptions by the more personal trials of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.

I am evaluating LOTR as a narrative, and not as a window into the greater mythology of Arda.

I, on the other hand, cannot at this point separate LOTR from the rest of the story.  It just doesn't exist on it's own in my mind.

I vaguely understand you claim about revealing a facet of the ring, but what facet is revealed has no integral place in the plot and even then the immense amount of space given to the sequence, especially when compared to later sections can hardly be justified under How To Write.

And even then I feel the sequence with Bombadil and the ring is about the nature of the former, not the latter.

But the nature of the former reveals something about the nature of the latter.  As for being important to the plot... one of the central themes of Lord of the Rings is Hope.  The fact that there is one being in Middle Earth over whom the Ring has no power gives that first glimmer of hope that the world can in fact be saved.  If not for the encounter with Tom, Frodo might have given up: for what would it profit to destroy the Ring if the damage was already wholey irreversable?  In the whole story, Tom is the only character with full confidence that the blight of Sauron is only a passing problem.

I've personally never been a big believer in the Doctrine of How to Write.  Like the Doctrine of How To Draw and the Doctrine of How to Compose Music, it's mainly intended for amateurs, the Great Ones are Great because they don't follow the rules.

The episode of the Old Forest is dealt with in immense detail although it is derivative to the main plot.

Actually, it ties in with the Ents later on.  And the encounter with Tom Bombadil is important because it demonstrates a facet of the Ring's power -- or lack thereof -- that wouldn't otherwise be discovered.

In general, the portions that don't seem particular relevant to the War of the Ring itself usually tie in to the bigger story of the Silmarillion, to which LOTR is just a footnote.

The dual narrative that occurs in the last two thirds was also a bizaare choice, especially when the "Books" 3 and 4 don't even cover the same time period. It becomes clear when you understand that he would continue with one narrative strand mainly because he was at a loss as to where to take the other. But what would then be done under the doctrien of How To Write would be to integrate the two, and interchange.

Ah, but once again, Tolkien shows his genius by breaking the rules.  Intertwining those two stories would have produced a confusing jumpiness in the narrative, forcing the reader to repeatedly and rapidly switch gears between two totally separate storylines.  Like a movie consisting mainly of flashbacks, it'd be nearly impossible to keep track of what was going on in either story.

And additionally there is a tendency to recount important events through dialouge after the event, instead of describing them as they happen, the most notable of these being the Sacking of Isengard.

And you'll note that on most occasions, it's the hobbits doing the recounting.  This is because Tolkien wanted to tell the story through the eyes of the hobbits, and having them recount the events in their own voice was a good way of doing that.  Kind of like Shakespearian monologues, only less tedious.

How can you structure a plot when you don't know what will happen yet?

When you do know what has already happened.  Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion before LOTR, and LOTR basically just wraps up a few loose ends from the real story of the Silmarillion.  Aragorn is actually a fairly minor character compared to Elrond, Galadriel, Sauron, Saruman, Gandalf, Frodo, and Ungoliant.  Those are the main title cast, Aragorn is just the guest star.

Like I said, everything that happens in LOTR is a causal effect of what went before.

I admire the art of Tetsuya Nomura, who designed the characters for a lot of Final Fantasy games. My favourite of his designs have to be the characters from FFIX, which looked as though they'd walked straight from a Pixar/Disney movie.

I also love Nomura's character designs, but if I said something looked like it came from a Disney or Pixar movie, I'd mean it as an insult.

I love the artwork in the Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer OAV, but I'm not sure it'd be appropriate for an adventure game.  Same artist did the Fatal Fury anime as well, I believe.

I'm not particularly fond of the character art, but Cartoon Network's Justice League series has gorgeous backgrounds.

If it was, it would have structure, and as it stands, it's one of least, or poorly structured books I've read. The fact it still evidently works for so many people makes it a curiosity.

That's funny, I think LOTR is one of the most structured stories I've ever read.  Every minute detail is intertwined with all the others in the most amazing web of interconnectivity I've ever seen.  Every single event in the story is the effect of several dozen events that came before and the cause of a dozen events that come after.  Furthermore, Ilu is about the only fantasy world I'm aware of that has a complete, detailed, and totally self-consistent set of natural laws.  The world of Ilu has a rigorously defined structure, and everything in the stories is ultimately rooted in that structure.

I occasionally have that problem also. It is related to when you use the emergency CTRL+ALT+END quit command. All you have to do is minimize everything else, and it'll still be on the screen. Click on it and it will return to the taskbar.

Actually, I've had it happen for all three termination cases (normal QuitGame(), emergency quit, and fatal error).  It happens more often in the latter two cases, but it does sometimes happen with normal termination as well.  But like you say, it comes back after you click on something, so it's no big deal.

I've also had the editor disappear from the taskbar after a test run.  In fact that's been happening since 2.5, at least.  It's never really bothered me because I'm usually flipping back and forth between AGS and PSP anyway.