Messages

Very good and entertaining game, thanks!

Guys,

I need someone who speaks Russian (which I don't, unfortunately) to translate a simple phrase from English to Russian (with proper cyrillic spelling.) This is for a background I'm working on, the text will be on a banner that hangs from the wall (the background is in the early '80s, in the communist era.)

So this is what I need translated:

* The Glorious Soviet Union *

Thanks,
Traveler


Edit: got it, thanks to Slava.

Hahaha, very good game!   

Thanks for making it, I'm looking forward to more of your games.

Next: How to pick up girls - the geek approach

This is what I recommend:

Herbert Schildt: C++ The complete reference

This is the book I used to learn C++. It was excellent for that and I also used it when I used to teach C++ programming at college (I used a previous edition at the time.)

If you really don't know anything about C++ and/or programming I'd put the most effort in understanding pointers first (the basics will be fairly familiar from AGS, so I assume you'll get through those quickly.)

HTH

Next: Mohammed, eating his first BBQ pork  -OR-  Jesus, watching hardcore porn

Keep it tasteful!

Lame??? It's a good drawing! 

CJ, this was funny 

Donkey Kong met Max Payne:



Next: weapon of mass destruction

I think he means in lo_res_man's comments. And I agree with him.

Well, they plan to execute him in the name of the religion (and for converting to a different religion), so I don't see anything wrong with lo-res-man's comment. It's not like the religion would exist without those believing in it, so even though it's not the idealized religion that will actually execute him, but those people who describe themselves and their religion as tolerant, in this case I don't see a lot of difference.

BTW, I think it's appalling. I have no problem with the death penalty, as long as it is used to sentence real crime that cause a lot of harm and suffering (like murder, etc.) I don't see how converting from one religion to any other would harm anyone, so such a "law" is stupid and evil. To call this "tolerant" is abhorrent and outrageous.

If you go with Steve's suggestion, chances are, you'll get a discount on Painter after buying the tablet. When I got mine, I bought the full version of Painter for $149, which was not bad. (I'm not sure if these deals are tied to a given Wacom model.)

Why don't you create a folder in which you place shortcuts to your project folders, then put a single item in you places bar to this one top folder? This way, if you need to open/save something, you click once in the places bar and then double click the shortcut of your choice to open the folder?

You do the same 2 click as you'd do with that program, but for free.

Here it is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar

I don't know if you're used to editing the registry, so here comes the standard disclaimer     :

If you directly edit the registry without knowing what you do, you can irreversibly damage your system installation. Proceed at your own risk.

Edit: I quickly tried editing manually to see if a longer item would show up, it works fine. I don't think there is a limit in the registry setting itself.

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but you can download TweakUI from Microsoft and use it to set up folder shortcuts for the Open/Save dialogs, like this:



You have 5 slots to use. TweakUI is free and this featue is supported by Windows itself, TweakUI is just necessary to make the setting itself. (One could do it manually even without TweakUI, by editing the registry.) Here is the setting:



Here is the Powertoys link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

HTH

Out of curiousity, would switching to DirectDraw surfaces make the Linux or Mac ports more difficult to maintain, or would it make any difference?

I'm no DirectX expert, but I don't think CJ would have a difficult time with this, but he is the one who could tell for sure.

As far as Direct3D goes, I would say it will provide no benefit IF ags is currently fully directdraw functional; that is, if all the code is operating within directx handlers and such.

Correct me if I'm wrong but AGS uses Allegro that works with DirectDraw, which is not hardware accelerated. Moving AGS to use Direct3D surfaces instead of DirectDraw would actualy provide a speed benefit, because 3D routines are fully supported by the hardware. For example, a transparency calculation would not be done by the DirectDraw driver, it would be done by the video card. The same goes for scaling. This would provide a performance increase especially for 16-bit and 32-bit games.

The difference would be, that plugins could use the same functionality, so plugins could save whatever data they want in the save game file and then retrieve it automatically. The current limit is about 5K, which is not too big.

I don't have much experience with AGS scripting, so there may be far easier ways to achieve the same result - if so, just disregard my suggestion, please.

Oh come on , thats bs.  We are making fun of you to show you're one of us ? Maybe it would be better if they showed respect to the muslims I find that to be a more respectable way to win their favour.

I agree with you that the newspaper press release is BS. I don't think they actually published the images out of freedom of speech, they published it because of a lapse in quality judgement. However, it is their right to publish trash and it is your right to ignore it or to criticize them for it. If enough people criticize, the newspaper will lose customers and go out of business and then they won't publish more sh*t.

The way I see it, if the drawings were actually funny, there would be grounds to defend them. But they weren't, so muslims took them as offensive (which I can understand to some extent), and right now the newspaper keeps repeating "freedom of speech", like a dumb parrot.

The thing is ,most people see this from a western perspective, the muslim perspective is that this is an assault on their faith and a man they have an amazing love for. To give you  an example of this, Hassan Nasr-Allah said in a speech a few weeks ago "We will defend our prophet's honour with our blood".

See, here is where you're wrong. Defending the prophet's honor against a *drawing* is not a "different society", it's just plain stupidity. This person that you quote is an idiot, period. There is nothing to defend here, because nothing happened to whatever honor your prophet had. The only reason this idiot is screaming because he wants a fight and the drawings are a good excuse to start screaming.

And who would be the "enemy" he wants to defend something against? All the Danish people? Every westerner? The artist? The editor? When would muslims say that the prophet's honor has been defended?

Muslim culture is different from western culture , muslims believe in a society that has some censorship to protect its members, it believes in respecting others.

Muslims have all rights to accept censorship if they so desire. But they have absolutely no rights whatsoever, on any grounds, under any circumstances to apply such censorship to others. I may despise the drawings but on a theoretical ground, the newspaper had every right to publish it. As I stated, muslims have every right to boycott, stop reading western news, etc.

I also fail to see any respect towards the western society (and I don't remember seeing any for the past 20+ years.) There are individuals, who are respectful, educated and reasonable people (some of them are right here, on these forums), but they're not the ones who scream about blood. On a state level, I find muslim countries in general aggressive and trigger-happy. (I found the Bush government aggressive and trigger-happy, too.)

freedom of speech is the right to speak out against a cruel ruler, or to teach others something, its not to incite hatred and anger.

Hassan Nasr-Allah seems to think otherwise. He may not be an idiot, after all, but then muslims should scrutinize his motives. He may not act with other muslims' interests in mind.

I agree we took it too harshly and did some bad things.

I'm sorry to say, but this wouldn't be a first. 

As I said, this whole thing is a "scandal" because some people with interest in it make it so, and those people are all muslims. Let's not forget, that the drawings were published in November (or September ?? ) and the whole thing didn't come up until late January.

For your second suggestion: an alternate and more flexible solution could be if there were some statements that read/write data in the savegame.

AGS could provide an unlimited list of key/value pairs and when a game is saved, the game code would receive a callback to enter whatever data it would want into the list. When a game is loaded back, another script function would be called where the code could read back whatever data it saved.

This way, there would be an unlimited number of entries to save and each module could save/load its own set of values from this list. Here is an example mock-up:

before_game_save ( PropertyBag properties )
{
    properties.AddOrReplace ( "MyModuleGlobal1", globalvar1 );
    properties.AddOrReplace ( "MyModuleGlobal2", globalvar2 );
    ...
    properties.AddOrReplace ( "MyModuleGlobalN", globalvarN );
}

after_load_game ( PropertyBag properties )
{
    globalvar1 = properties.Read ( "MyModuleGlobal1" );
    ...
}

The PropertyBag object would have members like Add(), AddOrReplace(), Remove(), Count and ItemByIndex() and ItemByKey() to allow the manipulation of the list at save and load.

There could be a global function for the game itself and each module could also implement such a function so every module would have a chance to save its own data.

Are you SURE that your statement applies to ALL religions?

Of course, I'm not sure about all possible religions, but I'm quite sure about the major ones. Do you have an example where my statement wouldn't apply - I'm open to arguments.

(Now as I think of it, I could probably be convinced otherwise about Buddhism, although I'm not too familiar with it. This may be a very naive thing to say, but as far as I know, Buddhists are very relaxed, laid-back people, not trigger-happy as some in other religions.)


The very core of religion is belief in something supernatural, which needs admiration and unconditional acceptance - to accept statements without proofs. This also requires believers to accept statements from their religious leaders; if they have their own agenda, they'll use their immense influence to gain and stay in power. Take a look at Iran or the Vatican; there are other examples, too.

Perhaps it came through already, but in this stupid cartoon-scandal, what I find most appalling is the bounty for the artists' life, simply because it's not just overreacting: it's a cold-blooded, calculated call for murder from influential people who would do anything to anger their people by pointing out a common enemy and talking about mortal danger, so they can stay in power through the chaos they cause. The fake cartoons that were used to ignite the demonstrations come to mind, or the frequent mention of the crusades (which happened 800 years ago, for heaven's sake!)

This whole thing wouldn't be anything but a storm in a teacup, but the extremely conservative and authoritarian muslim governments can use it as an excuse to create one more enemy.