Messages

Thanks for the info, we had a great time.

Despite what you said  we did somehow accidentally end up in Club Hollywood. We weren't there very long though until we realised that it was about 4/5 girls on the dance floor and just tons of blokes standing around the dance floor staring creepily. We also mistook a yellow painted cab for an actual yellow cab (we never actually found any yellow cabs around old town, it was mainly the other cab companies). The result of taking the wrong cab was that the 1-2km stretch to the beach ended up taking us miles out and costing us â,¬30 for the privilege. The cheeky prick also had the courtesy to say merry christmas. In the interests of naming and shaming his name was Alex Jaager, drove a yellow Volkswagen cab and we found him round the corner from the estate agents in old town.

We found that being dumped miles out on Pyrita Beach, there was a nice sports cafe. The staff there where miles politer than they where in old town. I get the impression all the dickhead stag parties they have in the centre put a bad impression on us english, and judging by the other english people I came across I dont blame them.

Getting the attention of a waitress can be a right pain. I sometimes wondered whether they were ignoring us intentionally or not. We had a fun time in the Dubliner trying to translate the estonian menu until we realised they had english versions too. We felt it rude to snap fingers or whatever you dude to get a waitresses attention so it took us a long time to get served. The worst part of it all was trying to settle a bill. It's like they disappear when they know you are going to pay up and go.

I think we may have accidentally walked into a brothel because it said nightclub on it. I guess nightclub has dual meanings  I was surprised at how unsubtle estonians are about the rampant sex trade in the area. We were approached countless times in the street to go to certain clubs/bars.

Nimetaa Baar seemed the best place in the area during the night. The stag parties seemed to disappear elsewhere (or where unconscious by night time). And the atmosphere in there seemed to be a lot nicer by that point other than some estonian girl stealing my shots at the bar for no apparent reason. Still not sure whether I was pissed off or impressed at the fact that she downed all three like they were nothing. The bar staff sorted it though, and in english for some weird reason.

Smoking rooms are awesome. It annoys me that they didn't do something like this in our country when they decided to ban it. I am also impressed with the 3hrs of darkness you seem to have.

We would like to go again possibly next year (do a tour of the baltics) as we felt we didn't get to do much with the weekend that we were there. Would've also been nicer if we didn't have to check out so early from our apartment.

And you are right. Our women are not even a patch on the women you have over there. 

Cheers InCreator, that's probably the most useful information I've found all month. Scouring google doesn't bring up much. I've pointed my friends to this thread too. You should write a book on it, most of the information I've found on Estonia is a bit out of date.

Yeah we are off to Talinn, heading out Friday. Not entirely sure what the plan is but I guess some usual touristy stuff during the day and drinking during the night. From the looks of things your weather is similar to ours, unpredictable, rains most of the time etc. I wasn't intending on bringing a thick jacket since we are only there friday, saturday, sunday and intending to get everything in hand luggage, but I guess I might have to reconsider it.

I'll probably get a cheap pay as you go sim over there (my phone is unlocked). Any advice on networks? I read somewhere that there was a network that provided free 3g (which I guess is a little useless if you have wifi everywhere) but I can't seem to find it.

Oh, and as someone who doesn't know anything about the Estonian language or the Russian language, how do you tell the difference between the 2? The Russian language is a little rougher and rolls it's r's more and Estonian is a little more softly spoken?

Again cheers for the advice, it's greatly appreciated!

A friend of mine is celebrating his 30th Birthday soon and as a result we are heading to Estonia for the weekend (next weekend to be precise).

Whats it like? Does the water taste funny? Anything weird I can eat? Places to avoid? Place not to avoid? Should this thread be posted in hints and tips? Anymore questions I should be asking but haven't thought of? Will Increator respond to the thread?


Just some general advice about it would be nice as it's always better to find these things out from people who have been / the locals as the information on the internet is sparse at best.

Allegro (assuming thats what you meant by Allegra) is a Game Programming Library. One of the issues the devs are facing with AGS is that it uses an older version of Allegro meaning that some parts of the engine use outdated methods that are not supported on other platforms.

To what extent are things going to be changing? Will the code that we use to make games stay essentially the same?

If you mean the way you use the editor, on the most part I think its staying the same. The first process (although a few people have jumped the gun) is refactoring the code. This basically means that the code is going to be tidied up, so that it is less complex and easier to read (for a developers point of view). This means that it is easier for people to improve on the code itself in the future. It makes absolutely no changes to the functionality of the program whatsoever (it just aids development).

What new capabilities are we likely to see?

Will this allow for new areas of portability?

I think the big things people are looking at are making games cross platform (osx, linux, android, ios etc), and releasing the editor for mac. Some people have already begun work on other resolutions, so your games wont be restricted to the ancient 320x240, 640x480 & 800x600. New capabilities are not really restricted - have a look at the plugin/modules forum for a small taste of inspiration that could be built into ags.

On what timetable do we anticipate all of this will take place?

How long is a piece of string? It could theoretically take years to see drastic changes to the code. When you bear in mind that one guy has been working on it for 13+ years and most of you still don't think it's finished, I'm going to say development of AGS is going to be ongoing for a long time and people will still put in feature requests.

I ask because I'm sure there are some folks like myself about to embark on making games, and want to know if, for instance, I waited a few months to start coding and just focused on art, could my game have portability through ScummVM, better implementation on newer operating systems, widescreen resolution, or whatever the new functions will be?

You are asking a question no one really knows the answer to. I'd just stick to making your game and if you really want to, make any changes that become available further down the line. You're talking about a hell of a lot of work, and this is just for a development release, not a stable version. As for widescreen resolutions someone is already working on resolution support over here http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=43955.0

This is something I had on my pc ages ago (its dated 2009?)

The AGS Tutorial Documentation (not sure if complete)

I believe this is what those broken links went to 

http://steecampbell.co.uk/AGS/AGSTutorial.pdf

EDIT: Before anyone asks the reason its in this format is because I compiled it this way as I felt a pdf format was better than needing to view the website all the time (turns out I was right  )

Thanks, AGA. Now I can relive both my crushing defeat and Stee's creepy obsession with stalking me for years to come! 

You shouldn't have moaned about all the characters staring at your screen Ponchy   

Spoilered this one up because it's NSFW

Spoiler

I fucked this woman last night and finished all over her face:

"You dirty bastard" she moaned, "you could have given me some warning."

"Sorry love, I'm a bus driver" I said. "I don't give any indication when I'm pulling out."

[close]

Happy Birthday poc301!

have a good'un 

if it helps, when I inspect element it tells me the whilst bgcolor is 65,70,87, background-color is 0,80,0 (a green).

In chrome it's not visible when loading, but if you refresh the page and keep an eye on your "advertisement" column you'll see it its green in the background before your image pattern overlay thingy (if that makes sense)

Same issue here (also firefox)

It looks like its an issue with the font and special characters eg. : ; ' < > [ ]

Please tapatalk the forums.

If this doesn't happen I'll probably cry  :'(

That's not the first time I've been told that on here lol. That's the module I was talking about and after what you said I see as more work for myself for something that doesn't really work the way I need it to with out extra scripting. And I mean AGS obviously isn't the program for my dream games but it works for something simpler and I've come so far into that I feel if I leave that I'll have to start all over on something that just wasn't as good as AGS.
I mean if you can tell me a program out their that'll let me do the following:

Use my current sized/left and right 2D sprites
Shading/ lighting
particle effects
RPG design
Online feature
A possible DLC adding feature
The ability to add 3d moving physics to things such as grass, water, and other things on a 2D background surface
and some other things I can't think of due to me being sleepy

Most is things AGS hopefully just can do right now but I mean I am serious that if you or anyone can find me a program that can do at least most most of said things then I will devote all my time to that program and leave AGS.

http://www.unity3d.com

Bye!

(PS: AGS can't do most of those)

One thing that has always annoyed me with the forum is the community section. Shouldn't  it be at the top?

It's more the general discussion forum. It's common place for this to be at the top of the board.

[projects]

Wow!  Nice artwork, dude!

I hope someone asks you to help out on their AGS projects, if they had not already.

fixed

I was just thinking about something like this. But moreso along the lines of a games jam.

Is there a restriction on slots? I'd like to provisionally put myself in, but would rather have something to show for it first if thats ok?

Also, if I can be a little evil, after talking with AngelicCharon, I'd like to put him in provisionally too. We were talking about getting him into the bakesale, but ran out of time, and I think the gentle pressure of having his name on the list might give him a bit of a boost. Of course, I will also pester him to agree 

cheers m0dsy 

That was the kind of gist I was getting at Dave. I think that is ultimately the role of project manager. technical lead is the coding side of things.

We probably have a different perspective on things than most folks here.  We approach things from a customer perspective (i.e., making things better/more fun for the player) than a developer perspective (i.e., making the games easier to make).  While we definitely would like to improve the engine/editor, usability for the players would be our main priority. There are a number of common technical complaints we get almost every day from our customers and affiliates, and we can only shrug and say "Sorry, it's an AGS thing." 

-Dave

My vote if you want to call it that, goes to Dave. He's the only guy in here that's been suggested that I can actually see continued development on AGS happening under. There a lots of qualified people in here that I'm sure could do the job, but with no disrespect to any of you, I think you underestimate the task at hand, and I doubt many of you will be able to put the required time into the project.

Dave's job is essentially AGS. Bar one game in his collection, all his titles are made in AGS (I believe). He makes his living from it, and if theres anyone who is going to be more determined to get stuff done, its going to be someone who has that type of interest in it. Someone who requires it to put food on the table. Dave also has a lot of resources at hand and the backing of a lot of AGS vets.

The stuff Dave wants to work on is probably not the stuff we want to get done as "priority" (pretend those quotes are my fingers quoting), but I would rather see things get done than see the project rot into abandonment which is the likely alternative. The guy has a track record of getting stuff done, and that's the guy I want working on AGS more than anything.


Dave, I hope you reconsider.


PS: Can we get a seperate forum for all this AGS Engine Dev stuff?

[to]

1) Transit. I arrive and depart from Luton Airport which is rather far from city center and hotel (30 miles or so)

I think there shouldn't be too much problems in getting to hotel (which located in far NE, near Lea Bridge rd/A104), but leaving is a problem: plane departs at 7:45AM and I have no clue if anything drives me so early there.
Also, I figured there's trains, metro and buses. What would be most reasonable/not too expensive and what operates at night?
Google maps for some reason fails to give me any directions also. Is there something else I could use?

No idea. Don't think trains start until 6am so you my have to look into buses or something. If I remember correctly train stations close around midnight, so last train = midnight, first train = about 6am. Buses run pretty much 24/7.

2) How does it work? Where do I get a ticket for rail or metro, etc? Are there booths, whatever? I have honestly no clue atm.

Depending on the station, there are either machines where you can buy tickets, or a staffed booth. Best bet is to get a visitor oyster card I think (a local may be able to help you better with this if they contribute). http://www.tfl.gov.uk <- transport for london website. They deliver visitor travel cards to a number of countries. 

3) What to see:
I figured basic touristy stuff like Tower of London, maybe National Museum or Imperial war museum, planned a long walk that would take me through all interesting stuff, but is there anything I should see?

And any other tips would be appreciated!

Never really been down there for the touristy stuff, but you seem to have missed off a few places. Buckingham Palace, where the Royal Family "live", Westminster Cathedral, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben. You can't really see Downing Street (where the Prime Minister lives), but you can walk past the big iron gate guarded by 3 policemen carrying MP5's and try and get a glimpse in. Not sure about Buckingham Palace, but the rest of those sights I mentioned can be done in a walk (they are all around the same area).

As for pubs, if you are a drinker, The Porterhouse in Covent Garden is worth a mention for it's really long beer menu (It's essentially a book). Not expensive, but I wouldn't spend a night out there, best to move on to a cheaper pub once you've experienced it.

If you're a Jack the Ripper fan you can probably get a guided tour around the famous Ripper spots, i.e. Whitechapel Road etc, but you'll have to do some research on where to go to get on those. Taxi's are best avoided if possible as they are expensive, buses are quite busy during the day, so when I'm in London I normally get the tube (trains) as it's easier to get on and off.

As cat said the hotel receptionist should be able to help. You definitely won't be the only foreigner they have ever had stay there, so they should know all the places to go like the back of their hand.

Hope that helps. I'm not a londoner myself, just have friends there, but that is pretty much the extent of my knowledge of tourist info for the place.

so m0ds you still haven't told us......

did she play nice or did she use the blackwell deception?

did it take a lot of effort for her to conjure your unfolding spider?

is she really the lifedrinker of landsdowne?

also, I know you are a pretty sick individual Marky Mark, but please tell me you didnt let her give you a Crimson Bath!  :o