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I'm an American who recently moved back to America after four plus years of living in Japan.  When I left America, I was a young single twenty-something recent-college-grad who was healthy and didn't bother with buying health insurance because I rarely got sick and didn't see the need to spend as much money as it would cost.  When I returned to America, I was a married nearly-thirty father (and now father of two).  So, clearly, it was time to invest in some healthcare.  In Japan, I didn't have to worry about it.  In America it became a huge issue.

In America, it is impossible to have civil discourse with people of opposing views on healthcare because it is such a heated issue.  Part of the blame lies on the media which fires up controversy for ratings and money, and as a result, fires up tempers and divides the country on issues such as this that are about coming together, not being torn apart.  For example, when one politician suggests changing healthcare in our country to be more like another country, another politician will throw about a bunch of loaded terms ("Socialism!") and recite talking points dealing with one or two healthcare horror stories originating in that other country.  (Completely ignoring the thousands of horror stories we have here every year.)

Recently, I watched a PBS documentary about health care in a few countries around the world.  You can watch the whole thing here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=frol02p101&continuous=1

I found that it was a particularly even handed examination of what was wrong and right with the health systems in these five countries.  And even though each of these systems had some negative points, I couldn't help but feel that they were still doing things way better than America.  Particularly telling was the way that the interviewer got laughed at in every country where he asked the question "How many people go bankrupt every year due to medical costs?" 

I wanted more, though.  I would really love to learn about even more countries' health care and here about the pros and cons.

I won't go deeper into my personal views about the American healthcare system, or how it has caused me great distress in the 11 months that I've been back in the States.  But I really want to hear some real, unfiltered descriptions about the pros and cons of the health care systems of different countries around the world.  And since this is such an amazing, friendly, international forum, I thought it would be a great place for a nice discussion on the various types of healthcare around the world.

What I'm hoping for is to hear a general idea of how healthcare works in your country, if there are any particularly good/bad points about it, how much you pay for it (whether through taxes or otherwise), how you would rate it against any experience you might have had living in another country, any personal happy/horror stories you might have, or whatever other comments you might have on the subject.

I'm not sure what the problem is but something's weird with your background.  If you re-import the background (click the "change..." button) it works fine.

You'll have to redraw the walkable area and hotspot, though.

Actually I'd love to wear pink speedos and die my hair blonde...But I can't, I'm married!

Wait... was that a response about being the only gay in the village?  I'm so lost...    Why do I read this thread?

I have to second The Wire.  It is quite possibly the best show ever.  And so much more satisfying to watch on DVD without having to wait a week between each episode.  I've watched all five seasons twice, and they're even better the second time.  I'll probably give them a third go through sometime soon.

Better than being the only gay in the village!

  Because... your love would always be unrequited?

I feel sad about all this certainties that most forum members have, in their assumption that they don't need God they become bitter in their words, often mixed with ugly words that in no way rises their charismatic web persona.

Don't forget that you have "certainties" as well that you defend bitterly.  The problem with religious arguments is that nothing that is going to be said in an internet forum is going to change the minds of anyone else on a topic where people already have their beliefs so firmly implanted in their minds.  The whole thing becomes pointless.

Now lets bring this thread back to talking about how much the American health care system sucks.

You also had a review on IndieGames.com.

I finally finished the game over the weekend and started it again to have a run through with commentary.  Unlike other people who ran through it all in one sitting, I had plenty of trouble finding time when I could play, and so had to play through in five one-hour-ish sittings. 

I loved the story and how it brought together a lot of threads from the previous games and started some new ones to be followed up in the upcoming games.  Voice acting, as always, was first-class.  And the updated graphics were amazing!  ProgZ nailed those character graphics (naturally) and Big Brother's portraits were fantastic.  All around a solid game well worth my moneys!

Thanks!

I was just trying to be... well... friendly. 

1. Either set ShowPlayerCharacter for the room to 'false' or add the line "player.Visible=false;" to the room's room_Load function and then set it to true in the next room's room_Load function.

Edit: Matti beat me to it.  Character.Transparency works too!

2. To take it away, when you start making your game use the empty game template.  Or, just turn off the GUI in the game's game_start function.

Yes, you can make a custom Lucas Arts gui.  Or you can use a premade template.  I'm not 100% familiar with the templates that are out there, having never used them, but there is one in a sticky at the top of the beginner's forum as MacGyver mentioned.  It will work with AGS 2.72, so you'll have to download that, start the game with the template, and then upgrade to version 3.  You can download 2.72 here I think: http://www.agagames.com/ags/Adventure%20Game%20Studio%202.61.rar

Read the friendly manual.

I don't consider myself an artist at all.  But there are still ways around it. 

For Anna, I used uber-minimalistic backgrounds and traced over a 3d animation of a walkcycle made by someone else for the character.  I used my skills in programming to add a distinctive pseudo 3-d look to the game and, I hope, it stands out for it.

For Linus Bruckman, I spent a long time drawing the cartoon background on the bottom, but kept it simple.  It took me a long time to find a style that I was comfortable with that also looked decent.  The top section was all google image copy and pasting, with a lot of time spent making it look how I wanted it.  There's a long-winded explanation of how I made the art here. 

If you're not an artist, you just have to have the patience to keep at it until it reaches the level of quality you're looking for.  Doing multiple tutorials and reading various photoshop (or whatever tool you use) how-to guides can not only improve your skills at art, but also give you good ideas and help you down the road.  If you don't have the time and patience to devote to your art, then you just have to lower the level of quality you're looking for. 

Also, remember that there's a difference between artistic quality and technical quality.  You may not have the technical ability to do any jaw-dropping art like say, The Whispered World but with your own limitations in mind, you can give your game a style that is easy to produce and of a high artistic quality such as And Yet it Moves or Little Wheel (or, I would hope, Anna).

But again, you do not need to make an animated .gif to make a character.  If you draw each frame one by one and save each frame, or lay them out on a sheet in a grid, you can just import the graphics into AGS and create a view, which makes the animation for you. 

Making .gifs is good for previewing your work or sharing it over the web, but is not necessary for making an animated character.

Sweet.  This looks really cute!  I love the idea of a main character in a straight-jacket.  And your GUI design is awesome!  Good luck!

Oh, dude, you want WinDirStat

http://windirstat.info/

It gives you a visual overview of everything and you can easily find out what's hogging space.



And free!

AGS won't support cyrilic characters without a serious amount of work on your part. 

AGS supports only a very limited number of characters.  Look on a font screen inside AGS.  That's how many you have to work with. 

If you type

Code: ags

cCharacter.Say("Д");

into AGS, it will display ? or something because it doesn't support that ASCII value.  So you need to substitute every letter you want to display with a 0-255 ASCII.

To do this, you'll have to open up a font editor and replace the characters that you can see on the AGS font screen with your Cyrillic letters.  Then, you'll have to type out the russian translation, but substitute every letter for its corresponding 0-255 ASCII letter.

For example, if you put the character Д in the font slot replacing the letter D, then you'll have to do a find/replace on your translation document that changes all the Д's into D's.  Then when you type

Code: ags

cCharacter.Say("D");

AGS will load up the font slot for D, and will display the letter Д that you replaced it with.  Does that make sense?

Your translation document will end up looking like a mess of unreadable words, but when filtered through the font that you created, it will read perfectly.

I am against it because it is a coercive, overly complicated mess.    It creates a huge bureaucracy that will determine what treatment one can and cannot receive for any given aliment.  People will be denied life saving drugs and treatments because they are too expensive and/or not effective 100% of the time.   Things that ought to be decided by doctor and patient will be decided by an unelected, resource limited bureaucracy. 

Congratulations! You just described the current US medical system!  Except replace the word "bureaucracy" with "money-hungry insurance company interested in their own bottom line over the health and well being of their customers".  As someone who has been recently screwed into thousands of dollars of bills by the insurance company that has been taking my money and was supposed to have me covered, I'll take the bureaucracy.

If I knew that credit card information is used for my personal copy of the game to show the name I probably would not buy the game. Credit card information is something I don't want to give away anyway (thats why I hardly buy anything on sites I don't fully trust) so I wouldn't want someone to mess around with this information, even my name.
In this case, I'd rather pirate the game then buy it myself  :

I absolutely agree.  Just wanted to clarify that I'm not planning on doing this.  Just throwing the idea out there.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I still don't understand why I can't just distribute my legally bought Serial Number (or bought with a stolen credit card I guess, if I were willing to risk such a serious crime on such a cheap piece of software...) alongside the original .rar file. 

The only way I would know how to stop that from working would be to have the verification program check with an internet server to make sure that the same serial wasn't used more than once.  But then you're getting into "too annoying and insulting to your customer" territory.

That's not possible. Game locks if you do that. The purpose of this whole thing was to prevent exactly that. And it does.

Can you explain how your SecureFile works?  For example, what stops one person's serial number from working on another person's computer?

Just wanted to add that I think the super small indie game company's biggest defense against piracy is that they're real people.  Like WadjetEye Games is mostly just one dude working on games from his apartment.  Some people pirate because they're sticking it to the man (Fuck the RIAA, Fuck the MPAA, Fuck the ETCETERA!).  But how can you justify ripping off the dude who's making games just to barely make ends meet and does so because he loves games and really wants to share his creations with people?

On the flip side, when you ARE the dude in his apartment just barely making ends meet, you don't have a hojillion slobbering blind fanboys who will shell out $60 for whatever new piece of crap you have to ram down their throats (EA, MICROSOFT, ETCETERA!), and with so few customers, how can you justify treating them like criminals?  ("Thanks for your money, now put in this 20 digit code and then your game will communicate with our online servers every time you start it up to make sure you're not a dirty rotten thief.")  Only the huge developers can get away with that shit.  And by doing so, more people just feel like pirating their games to stick it to them.

So I say, in general, indies should stay DRM free and take the possible small hit to sales in exchange for the good will of their customers, who hopefully will enjoy the game and appreciate your trust enough to return and buy the next game too.

Regarding the strength of your security system, Dual, it's very easily breakable.  When a file is pirated and shared with others via bittorrent or whatever file sharing service, it was originally uploaded by someone who bought the game first.  So, to break this security, all the person has to do is buy the game, enter their code, and then upload it to the file sharing site.  If you have to enter the serial in every time you play (that would be really annoying to your legit users) the pirate would just have to include the serial number in a txt file along with the game.  And boom, your game is cracked. 

The one way that I can think of to combat this (And I've considered doing it for Resonance, but do not think that I actually will, because there's not really much point.) would be to have the purchaser's name (the name on the credit card used to purchase) encrypted into the serial number.  So, when they enter it in, the game is essentially tagged with their name.  Then, when the game shows up on a file sharing site, I can download it, find the name of the person who uploaded it and then... I don't know.  Something.  Perhaps, if the name of the purchaser showed up on the game's title screen, like saying "Thanks for buying the game, Bill Henderson!" would be enough to make people not want to upload it to file sharing sites.

Another way that I thought of for combatting piracy (and might do it for Resonance) is uploading versions of the game to file sharing sites around the web myself that look like real copies, but actually only let you play about 1/3 or a few hours of the game, and then tell you to buy it to play the rest.  It's like an extended demo to screw with the pirates!

DITR has many versions of pirated copies on the web, some even offer the leaflet in a pdf. And for a game that is worth 18 dollars approx, everytime someone pirates it Alkis is losing that amount.

That's actually very untrue, there.  When someone downloads Alkis' game, it sucks, definitely, because they're enjoying (or not) someone else's hard work without properly compensating him for it.  However, Alkis isn't cheated out of 18 bucks, because Alkis didn't actually lose anything tangible, like a box or a dvd or anything.  A file was copied.  And it wasn't necessarily a lost sale, because the person downloading the game might not have ever had any intention of buying the game.  So if he didn't download it, he also wouldn't have bought it.  Alkis wouldn't have any more money than he has now.  Therefore, no money lost.  However, like I said, it's still sucky that the pirate is enjoying something that someone else worked hard on.

Also, there's the possible creation of more sales based on people who tried the game who wouldn't have tried it otherwise and enjoyed it so much that they thought it was worth paying for, or decided to buy Alkis' next game, or suggested the game to his friends.  I'd bet that's a pretty small amount of extra sales, but still possible.

So, 1 download = $18 dollar loss is a pretty iffy statement.