Topics

I know that Beta versions aren't around for very long, but since I never bothered to download the Release Candidates, I still have Beta 4, and it won't let me create a new game. It tells me to choose a template, and there are none. Is this intentional? Or do I have to dig up some templates from a previous version?

[memoryalpha.terransoft.com]

My web site, www.harbinger-software.com, will expire in mid-August. I've been doing some thinking, and I've always wanted to put a lot of different things on the web, for example a Star Trek informational site called Memory Alpha, a gaming site, etc. I want to make "Harbinger Software" into "Harbinger Entertainment" and make it the gaming division of my "main company." Then, my other sites would be subdomains of this bigger company.

At first I wanted TerranSoft (suggested by RobertEric). I would have had something like memoryalpha.terransoft.com, harbinger.terransoft.com, bts.terransoft.com, etc. for each of my sites. However, TerranSoft is taken (as .com and .net addresses), as well as TerraSoft (without the N).

So now I'm stumped. I need a good name for this bigger, more general "company". Something short, like Terra[n]Soft, and something general...in other words, nothing specific. I've been mulling over a name for quite some time now, and I can't seem to think of anything. Does anyone here have any suggestions or ideas?

New topic. I wanted to respond to the other thread by Yufster, but teh Gen Gen Gestapo reared their ugly heads (in the form of TEH LEKS!!).

I usually tie everything about human behavior I observe into reincarnation. I believe that most feminine gay men were girls in past lives and vice-versa. They are so accustomed to being female that now that they are male, they can't help it.

They would probably argue otherwise. Then again, some would argue against reincarnation completely.

[<>]

Okay, beginners lately have been starting topics regarding paint programs. I will remind everybody now that this is not a subject that belongs in the Beginners' TECHNICAL Questions forum. Only the following topics belong here...

<> Questions regarding simple scripting (like basic stuff).
<> Questions regarding non-scripting basics, like GUIs, set-up, music, and icons, etc.
<> Short, small introductions to oneself ONLY if the post includes a question regarding AGS.

And please, always remember to RTFM...READ THE F***ING MANUAL!!! Failure to do so will result in us telling you this...



Heh, maybe not really, but seriously, check all avenues before resorting to asking us here. Also...

THE OFFICIAL AGS BEGINNERS' FAQ, hosted by ME!

Many questions asked lately can be answered here. So check it! Yeauh!


Keep in mind that topics should go to their appropriate forums... (what follows is only my understanding of the format here)

Tech Forum: Advanced scripting questions, bug & error reports, anything considered advanced.
AGS Chit-Chat: Anything regarding AGS, adventure games in general, and the AGS community itself.
Games in Production: A game you are working on currently and have several rooms done and work to show for it (screenshots, demos, etc.)
Released Games: Fully finished games you want to announce (not demos)
Critics' Lounge: Post your artwork and other stuff to have it criticized and commented upon ("C&C").
Competitions: Just what it says. BG Blitzes, sprite jams, et al go here.
General Forum: All other miscellany.

From now on, any threads started that don't belong here will simply get deleted. I won't clean up after you guys if you know very well where your topic should go.

By the way, there is already a stickie thread for paint programs in the Critics' Lounge forum, which can be found here:

BIG List of Paint Programs!

i am thinking about putting up a site with snippets of all the code you guys have posted as of late. But what I would like is for you guys to try to find as many as you can, and maybe put comments to explain everything. Even *I* get lost trying to read teh code.

Do you guys think this would be a good idea?

Heh. Would anybody be interested in a collection of 8-directional 3D pre-rendered character walking animations? The game they'd be used in would have to be pre-rendered 3D of course, unless you wanted it otherwise. I could pop out about one a day, and have all sorts of characters, from vikings to knights, to sluts and pimps.

Who'd be interested?

i've been here well over a year and have never posted anything in this forum...until now.

I have started designing rooms for Chapter 2 of my game, and I've done one room so far.



Forget for a minute that all the trees look identical. That will be fixed shortly. It was just a temporary thing to plan the scene out. It is obviously at twilight, as I wanted it to be dark, but still enough for the player to be able to see things. By the time the player walks out into the urban area of this world, it will be fully night. I am also going to try to make the mountain texture match with the ground texture. They are technically the same texture, but the slopes in altitude in the terrain causes darker colors to appear. I'm going to have to find a better texture than that.

What do you guys think? Anything I could add/change/remove? Hmmmmm???

I was pondering this just now. I'm not too familiar with fonts in AGS and high resolutions. If I wanted to draw my own non-TTF fonts (I need outlines), but use them in hi-res,  would I simply draw them twice as large?

I was really at a loss as to where to post this. it's not really technical, but not exactly General either.  

For By the Sword I have one room that has a random billboard that changes everytime you [re-]enter it. I have plenty of ideas (well, 2, actually for now), but I need more! This helps both of us,  because (1) I need names to fill up my miniscule ending scrolling credits movie, and (2) you get mentioned!

So far I have:
Spam & Wax Hit the Road With Their Heads - Now in 6-D!!!
Dickins' Cider: Your Girlfriend Will LOVE a Dickins Cider! (lol)
Vote Dick Stulittle for Planetary Advisory Committee!
And some I might ask www.dribbleglass.com if I could borrow (http://tinyurl.com/bpp3)

Any other ideas?

[through]

I was lying in bed last night after having an early nap and wasn't tired. So I decided to try having anohter out-of-body experience. I relaxed, took slow and steady breaths, and within 10-15 minutes i found myself in a deep sleep-like state of mind. From the exitement of the possibilities of it all, my heart was beating fast, so I tried a technique I had read in that book I bought awhile ago (the one that I used to try astral project/out-of-body experiences last time) and slowed down my heartbeat.

I did this by imaging my heatbeat in my mind and changing my imagination of it, which in turn actually slowed down my normal heart beat. The book's advice actually worked. Then, in a fit of curiousity, I tried something I'd always wondered about.

I stopped my own heart beat.

And it worked. My heart seriously stopped beating for a good 20 seconds, before it suddenly started beating again, this time 4-5 times faster than normal to compensate. The sensation was very weird and different. My hands and arms, then my torso and legs started to tingle and I felt myself becoming very heavy. Then, that's when my heart started kicking in on its own again.

I did this 2 more times before I decided it was time for me to actually start trying an out-of-body experience.

So I relaxed myself again, and this time tried my best to keep my heartbeat at a normal rate. Then, I felt myself go into the sleep paralysis again. For the next half an hour to an hour I tried to make myself move out of my body. All I managed to do was move my hands up and through the bed sheets. At one point I think I may have even sat up in bed. After it all, I had the feeling, and knew that I hadn't physically moved one bit, because my body felt stiff and rigid.

I just fell asleep after that until an hour ago.

This new knowledge fascinates me...the knowledge that I have the power to control bodily fuunctions that I had once considered involuntary-only. I know it's not really healthy to stop my heartbeat three times in one night. But I thought it was pretty damn cool that I was able to.  :o

I don't know what's going on in #ags and #agsfun, but apparently some French people banned Roger from #agsfun and Roger keeps joining and quitting.

I had to join #ags using all 3 of Roger's names just to keep him from flooding the room with join and quit messages. And as for #agsfun, there are four nicks with the same IP, and they're all ops. It's quite annoying. Isn't this considered a room takeover? Isn't that...illegal? In certain countries?

[Desktop Roger v0.6]

For those who miss Roger on IRC during his long and frequent absences, or his random and frequent bouts of stupidity, and could use his neat non-IRC features once in awhile, like Googling and IMDBing and Spelling, as well as BlueCup and her 8-ball and...stuff... here is...

Desktop Roger v0.6!!!

It seems as though transparency might not work on some computers. So the page above features versions A (transparency) and B (opaque-ity).

Desktop Roger supports messaging! Use "Tell Username Message" and "Check Messages" (or he'll do it upon starting up) to access this feature. And, to access BlueCup, or to just switch bots, type in the bot's name or "switch".

Also, you can search for images using Google, by typing "Image search words". See teh main site for a full updates listing for this version.

Download it...NOW! OR ELSE!!!11!!1

* terranRICH explodes

Lately I've experience a surge of interest in all things paranormal: from ESP and clairvoyance to past lives and astral & ethereal projection. In the latter subject, I am reading a book that give pointers and suggestions on how to astral/ethereal project, as well as several case studies and stories.

While reading the book earlier today, I saw that most of the times, just before projecting, the person would feel a vibration. This sounded similar to my experiences of sleep paralysis, where (upon drifting off to sleep) I would randomly and suddenly become paralyzed, feeling a vibration throughout my body and the inability to move.

So I started to become curious. What if my sleep paralysis was really me starting to project ethereally? What if I was starting to project, but became afraid (which I had felt before) and therefore halted the process, not knowing what was happening?

With this thought,  I decided to give it a shot. In the midafternoon, when no one was home, I sat on my oh-so-comfortable living room couch and closed my eyes. I started to relax every part of my body. In time, I started to "fall," as I call it. It's not the sense of falling asleep,  it's the sense of falling into some other state of mind. I think I might have become semi-conscious.

Then, the vibrations began. I started to feel the sleep paralysis take a hold of me. Instead of jerking myself out of it like I had done countless times before, I let it go for the first time ever. The vibrations (which felt like convulsions) persisted, and I was still paralyzed, but I started to see things, as if my eyes were half-open. There were two ways that I could tell they were not, however: (1) I could feel my eyes fully closed and even attempted to close them, but found that they were already closed, and (2) the images I were seeing were things that were not in the room I was in.

To explain in more detail, I will say that I saw what appeared to be pages of a book, and some other items I cannot remember in detail. Suffice it to say, those items were nowhere to be seen or found within sight. The only book I had was the Astral Projection book, which was to my side...and I had been facing forward, with my head resting back.

I don't know if I was starting to project, but something made me want (or need) to return to my physical body. But instead of gradually easing myself back into it, I sorta jerked back into the physical body and saw that I was still slightly shaking. Once the shaking stopped and I regained enough strength to move, that's when the phone rang.

Did I sense that the phone would ring and therefore stopped myself from going any further with the experiment? I think so.

Tomorrow I still have plenty of free time and plan to try this out again. I'm hoping I will actually project even more this time.

Also, I read the book more after this experiment because I was wondering what I needed to do exactly, in order to experience an astral projection. Apparently, I was supposed to wait for about 5 minutes while the vibrations were occuring, then let the vibrations pulsate through me until it subsided.

I'm surprised this bug hasn't yet been reported. if it has,  it still exists and was never fixed. When working on a new room and loading a background image in high-res, I have to save the room, load a new one, then load the previous one if I want to draw walk-behinds in high-res. Otherwise, it draws it in low-res.

Thanks.

[HERE]

This thread might have existed at one point (as allegedly, all threads have existed at one point or another), but I'm starting it anyway.

What little-known text adventures have you played that you would highly recommend to others? I'm not talking about the famous ones, like Hitchhiker's Guide..., the Zork series, Adventure, et. al.

One that I would suggest: Shades of Grey, where you play a...wait, that would ruin the game. Search for it, and play it. (HERE)

An imaginative psychodrama of self-confrontation and moral dilemma, by way of Haiti, Sherwood Forest, and an American Civil War battlefield. One of the most intriguing storylines I've seen in any game. You wander the city streets, or possibly the castle grounds, with a sense of temporal dislocation and confused memories of vampires, until a friendly fortune-teller helps you put your head back together through a series of visions about your past and what it means to you. Written by seven strangers, the game is divided into self-contained segments of highly variable style, subject matter, and quality. This is at once the game's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Just about everything you hate in games can be found here - mazes, time limits, obscure "guess-the-word" puzzles - but the flawed parts fit into the frame-tale so well, the effect is dazzling. Given a better parser and the removal of some of the more annoying puzzles, this one would easily rate five stars.

I highly suggest to everyone to download this and try it out. it's a compelling game with a few twists and a great story. if you can get used to the annoying parser that affeects many IF games, then download this game!

Any others?

I wrote in my journal tonight. Michelle broke off the relationship. A relationship that lasted a whole two weeks. Thing is, I fell in love with her. And it's not going to easy getting over her. Here is what I wrote:

I have to sever contact with the rest of the group yet again.

I knew it. I knew this wouldn't last. Nothing has ever lasted. I'm fucking sick of this shit. Nothing ever works out.

We hadn't even been going out for two weeks when she tells me that she feels uncomfortable. We had a fight the other day. Words were said. Words I regret. She said that this could never evolve beyond friendship. But hadn't it already?

We had sex four times. This doesn't include any other shit we did. ANd now it's fucking over. Just like that.

I can't do this shit anymore. I'm so exhausted, mentally and emotionally. I can't do this. I can't take it. I want to die. This has happened SO many times before in my goddamned life. Two-week relationships where I fall in love too fast and it's over before it's even begun. Why does this happen to me? What the fuck did I ever fucking do to deserve this shit? I need to get out, I need to go away, to somewhere far far away. Away from people that will tear my heart out and shit on it.

I'm too shocked and exhausted to cry. No matter what I do, the tears aren't there. It's happened too many times for me to react that way anymore. I give up.

Suicide is the pussy's way out. I wish there was a quick fix but there isn't. There is nothing I can do.

Just so you know, I'm not going to kill myself. I don't have the balls to do it. But things do really suck right now and you're really not going to see me around the boards or IRC much for awhile.

Also, "the group" refers to the four of us, Mike, Sarah, Michelle, and I who hang out alot. Or at least we used to. For the second time, I'm leaving the group. They can have fuun without me. I was ignored all day yesterday and today by Michelle. I just can't take it anymore.

[Project:]

Wow, right place, right time. The first post to the Games in Production forum...

Project: By the Sword: Conspiracy
Web Site: http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/
What's Available: A rolling demo, which only is the entire intro to the game. (Download not yet available) AND a fully playable demo of Chapter One of the game, which may be downloaded HERE!!

Summary:
You play Ronald Ganon, a lieutenant in the Star Force, in the year 2197. You serve aboard the U.S.S. Merrimack under Captain Jonathan L. Perseus. One day, on a routine survey mission, the crew comes across an uncharted planet, called Jel'ek IV. You go down on a planetary mission with the ship's second-officer, Lieutenant-Commander Nathaniel Hathaway, as the team leader. Little do you know that the planet is already inhabited. What happens? Check the demo/intro and find out for yourself!

Screenshots:
http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/bts_new_offlounge.jpg: An example of the new graphical style, the Officers' Lounge, complete with dead bodies.
http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/cargohold_new.jpg: The new Cargo Hold.
http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/crashsite3.jpg: The shuttlepod crash-lands on a planet's surface. Modelled using Bryce, the old style. Not sure if I can re-do this in Poser well.
http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/new_vipsuite.jpg: The new VIP Guest Suite. Not sure if I'm going to keep it as a one-room deal with bed and desk in the same room, or a multiple-room deal with only the office area available.
http://www.rain-day.com/harbinger/bts/newcorridor.jpg: The new corridors. Darker, rougher, and more ominous. Just how I like it!


Current Project Status:
Story/Plot: 100%
Dialog: 30%
Graphics: 10% (re-doing all rooms, characters, items, objects, etc.)
Speech: 5% (will recruit soon, a bit of dialog done by LGM as Narrator)