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Haven't released anything in ages, so it's time to get into MAGS again!
Project codename: "Cold Hand" is a go.

Wish me luck!

It's free, it's new and it's interesting enough.
I've been running Win8 and lately Win8.1, mostly for the better performance and startup times compared to Win7, so I'll be updating just to keep up with the times and tech.

The ones I've seen were fairly well localized to look like the Finnish police had "locked this workstation due to illegal internet activity". The popup had managed to block task manager from opening, had disabled the CTRL & ALT keys and explorer.exe, and was demanding that I pay 40 â,¬ to an account as a fine to recover my PC.

I found that shutting down, starting Windows in safe mode and logging in with a separate user account allowed me full access and I was able to clear the invader out. As long as you have Windows 7 or later and have UAC enabled, no malicious software should be able to affect anything outside of the user account currently logged in, so that helps with the recovery.

In summary:

1) Ensure that your UAC is enabled (despite it's bad rep as "annoying", it's really useful for security)
2) Keep your antivirus up to date
3) Avoid any website with suspicious content or banner ads
4) Backup anything and everything

ISIS executes by fire or decapitation and the media goes "oooh, war-crimes".
The US still execute with lethal injection, electric chair and firing squad. China does god-knows-what and the French used the guilliotine in the 70's, soo I'd wager that ISIS is calling all of the above equally "brutal".

And as you mention: perhaps some people went out and came back because they felt that they no longer wished to be part of ISIS, even hated them. Yet the discussion that was being had would have politically lynched them just the same, suspecting them of what you described "fighting from the inside".

We can't really know, so my final opinion on the matter is: innocent until proven guilty.

I think we can all agree that the situation is pretty catastrophic either way. To get back to the original subject of what to do with people returning from the conflict zone: I do not see why people choosing to travel to fight in a war they believe in should be penalized for doing so. Rewarding them is out of the question as well, on that I fully agree, but as far as I have seen on the media, the talk has mostly been about deporting people who have fought as part of this conflict or revoking their citizenship or revoking their basic social securities, or imprisoning them as criminals, which I find to be equally wrong. If these people should be jailed for fighting in Syria or Iraq, then the Swedish volunteers who fought for Finland should have been treated the same, and (for obvious reasons) I cannot condone that idea.

People fight in wars. Some for money, some for nationalism, some for religion, some for other ideals. All are equal(ly stupid, since we are talking about war) and none should be criminalized in their home countries based on participation in a foreign conflict any more than the others, no matter which conflict is in question.

(And yes, if an individual is proven to have directly participated in war crimes, THEN we are talking of a completely different matter altogether. Lock 'em up, I say!)

So basically we're all going: "Yeah, western civilizations did all sorts of wicked evil crap in the past and still do to this day (via corporations), but hey, we got better. Kind of. And since it's in the past we can act all high and mighty towards fledgeling nations going through their birth pains. Those OTHER guys on the other hand, with their silly hats and wrong religion, they are wicked evil and that's that because I say so and anyone on their side must be banished or killed, because we have the superior worldview." 

You are saying that, in a part of the world where foreign invastion in the last decade was a reality, where civil war is a constant and the governments teeter on the brink of collapse, assailed by endless internal conflict, the creation of a new state (even through violence) is an inherent negative and 'causes suffering'. As if there was no suffering there to begin with. As if this is somehow new in the region.

Admitted: the brutal executions done by ISIS/ISIL shock people, myself included, but I can sort of understand where they are coming from. Hell, we did the exact same fucking thing back in the 40's!
http://nocandoo.servebeer.com/temp/suomisodassa/pics/hs4.jpeg
http://nocandoo.servebeer.com/temp/suomisodassa/pics/hs6.jpeg
(Pictured, soviet spy/agitator being executed in 1942)

True, my worldviews are far from those followed by ISIS/ISIL and I would never wish to travel to this 'Islamic Caliphate' myself, but instead of seeing them adding to people's suffering, I see a potential for an end to all that internal strife and chaos that has engulfed Syrian and Iraq long before ISIS/ISIL came to be.

RickJ: it all comes down to the end result. If Germany had won WW2, then those people who joined the German side would be considered heroes and their accomplishments cheeres, just as people today cheer those who jumped from the German side to the allied side.

Also, since we are ready to condemn the Muslim ideologies followed by the ISIS/ISIL faction, it's good to remember that pretty much all western powers have run very similiar ideologies in the past. The British and Spaniards (to name a couple) felt it was their right to colonize land and drive off or murder natives, and the Americans (read old-British) felt it was A-OK to keep slaves back in the day. There isn't an inherently correct or incorrect ideology, just differing ideologies and people who follow them. Just because people choose a different ideology and worldview as we do should not entitle us to condemn said people.

[legal]

Not long ago a Swedish politician / person of interest (Sven-Johan Dahlstrand) compared people travelling to Syria to fight for ISIS/ISIL as similiar to volunteers travelling to Finland back in the early 40's to fight against the Soviets. There was a lot of outcry in the media, but it did get me thinking about the matter. Hear me out, thought this may sound really weird.

In case of travelling to Finland, volunteering service to the finnish military to defend against the Soviets, the gesture was seen as noble and righteous, an act of brotherhood, and even encouraged to a degree. It makes sense, people were travelling to help their "neighbouring state" in a time of plight.

In the case of travelling to Syria, it's completely different. Or is it? This will depend on a couple of factors, most importantly: is ISIS/ISIL a state, or will it become one in the future, as it indends?
If no, then they will eventually collapse and are considered a terrorist organization and anyone working with or for them is considered a criminal and a terrorist, plain and simple (and life-shattering for those who were part of the attempt).

But if ISIS/ISIL manages to raise itself into statehood (as they are trying to do by capturing land, building schools, power plants, hospitals and infrastructure, raising political support, enforcing religious views and eliminating dissidents), then everything they have done will be considered legal within that new state and it's laws. Skip forward a decade or two and we might have to examine the whole situation again, but this time through the viewpoint that these people who travelled to Syria to fight were not, in fact, terrorists and criminals, but rather the noble volunteers who were ready to fight for a fledgeling nation and might have ended up bringing peace to the region (through massive bloodshed and murder and untold horrors, at least as seen by us westerners).

It's a weird thought and I, as a Finnish person, find it really hard to consider these 'soldiers' as criminals guilty of supporting a terrorist regime. By that definition we finns are a nation based on terrorism (see Finnish civil war), born from a history of bloodshed, prison camps and political executions. It's not all that different... In my view, condemning those who fight for a cause they believe in as criminals and saying "don't let them return to their homes" makes as much sense as saying that the swedes who fought for Finland in the 40's should not have been allowed to return, because in someone's eyes (Soviet Union and it's allies) they were as good as criminals as well.

I started writing, got first of my six story segments done and found I had written 1200+ words.
I think I'll scale the story back a bit and try again...

Heyo!

Thought I'd share a trick of mine, which I began using for backing up my AGS projects after a hardware breakdown cost me both my project files and my backups, which were on the same machine, but on a different hard drive.

The solution I use is Dropbox (www.dropbox.com).

Step 1) Create an account and install Dropbox (other similiar solutions might also work, I just haven't tested them. Onedrive is also free.)
Step 2) After installing, you should have a folder called "Dropbox" on your PC. Create a new folder within, called AGS or something like that.
Step 3) Start up AGS and create a new project inside the dropbox data folder (or just move an old project there)
Step 4) Use AGS as you normally would, without fear of critical data loss in case of hardware failure

What happens is, whenever AGS updates a file, it is immediately synced to the Dropbox servers and kept there. If you lose a hard drive, you can just download the project onto any machine connected to the internet. I use this to work on multiple workstations. Dropbox is also a great place to store sprites, documents etc, and you don't have to worry about backups.

Dropbox is free in it's basic version, providing about 2 gigs of storage space, though if you projects are massive (more than 2 gigabytes) then the paid version does get a bit expensive for my liking.

The only downside I've seen so far is that occasionally, when compiling the game, AGS gives an error due to a file being reserved by dropbox. Recompiling immediately afterwards works every time, so this is only a minor annoyance.

Never forget backups, people! Ever!

-WHAM

Ooooh, I like this a lot! The low colour count and the general style, combined with the themes on display, tickle me just right.
Sounds like you're also getting a ton of testing done, which is always a sign of wanting to produce great quality.

Can't wait to see this completed!

[Kconan]

I am terrible at keeping schedules, but here's VOTES!

Best Character: Kconan
Best Editing: Sinitrena
Most Unholy Analogy Gone Awry: Kasander
Best Plot Despite Weird Discrepancies: Kconan
Best Setting: Kconan
Most Substantive: Sinitrena

Wheeeee! *runs off to the sunset*

Will read and vote tomorrow, too sleepy now. -___-'

Planning the beginning and the end first is good, as that ensures that the game begins and ends strong, even if you get bored of the project towards the end. However, it also requires quite a bit of planning to work out, or you'll end up changing something and breaking your own ending as you develop the game.

I myself am a strong believer in documentation, planning and writing things down.

Here's a dev document I made for my old OROW entry "Sinking": https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wt0vn1YVT-SsoJBE9yO78Rw4h5SuHrYcpm6s8swtJKw/edit?usp=sharing
Here's an early dev document for a game I began and then quickly abandoned for lack of time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rt7_P-xNWVvHcYcJlCGi2Pnze2r1BMHVXbTScWVZgkM/edit?usp=sharing
Another doc for a project on hiatus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hlFVdce1JnmAn-yziCXzLzJPjcOg7TnFfKR3Ka4bLyk/edit?usp=sharing

Generally I like to outline the story, key gameplay mechanics etc, but I leave much of the graphic design to the later stages, since that is not my strong area. Focus on the things you are good at and build around those.

Heya folks!

I'm looking for a few testers, 2-4 if possible, to try out my latest project. It's in very early stages, consists of 99% placeholder visuals, has no sound and is all-around very basic.
The game is a randomly generated single-player variant based on an old 1980's board game that I decided to beef up with new ideas and content.

Contact me via PM or via e-mail (tomitkahkonen@gmail.com) if you are interested in spending an hour or two with a build and providing feedback and bug reports.

Note: the test build is still in progress and I expect to have it ready to run in a week or two.

I've made HTML forms that used PHP scripts to write into a database before, so that part I'm already cool with.
I'll come back to this thread once I get the ball rolling on this.

Ah, I've been away for a couple of days.

On the basic level, I want to have an online scoreboard to keep track of high scores from the game.
In the game, the player can enter a name and that, along with a few other bits of data, are then sent to the database, which can either be viewed on a website I can build, or perhaps there could even be a poll in the game that fetches the top 10 or top 100 scores from the board and displays them (again, via an online script, as Wyz wisely suggested).

Building an online script that acts and a bridge between the game and the database sounds like a very smart idea, though as I read through the older threads, it's looking like I might not have the know-how to make this happen. I'll keep looking this over as I continue to build the game, might even open up a help wanted thread at a later stage if necessary.

Thanks everyone, Wyz especially for the link.

Is it possible for me to have an AGS game write data into an online MySQL database?
Simply writing a new line in the database would be enough for my basic purposes, since I am working on a project requiring ability to maintain a scoreboard.

I was uncertain whether to ask  this here, in the hopes of being directed towards more information (searching came up with stuff circa 2005) or to ask in the recruitment forum if someone would be willing the help me out with this matter.

Sorry, won't be participating this fortnight, am working on a game for a change.

[Best Atmosphere:]

Best Atmosphere: WHAM - great descriptions and atmosphere, but I didn't quite figure out what Hitler and Eva actually tried to achieve and if they succeeded. Did I miss something?

Just wanted to explain that real quick: My idea was to sort of subvert the theme, by having Adolf externally appear as the historically accurate, somewhat inept and extremely impatient leader who led his empire to demise, while simultaneously pointing out that no matter how incompetent a man might seem outwardly, he might secretly be fighting a massive battle of wills against cosmic horrors attempting to devour the entire world as a mid-afternoon snack and thus save the world. A sort of trick played with reality and perceived reality.

Hope you enjoyed reading the story even if it might have seemed a bit confusing and ambiguous.