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Clear easy-to-read style. Only thing I had to look twice at was the inside of the fence - at first glance it looks like some huge boxes stashed behind the fence or in the background, because they don't have any defined boards and there are no posts supporting them like on the outside. Good job, though, so far!

Thanks alot for the screenshots  
Looks pretty impressive from what I can tell. Must've taken ages to make.

Anybody downloaded it already who can post some screens? - my download keeps failing :-(

I bought myself some soap and started cleaning. Didn't know how, but MY is this place clean now! Especially one spot on the floor, terrific!

Heh, I like it - I just *might*get it.

Oh, and we got a new host So www.3rdworldfarmer.com is up and running again.

If you buy the Half-Life 2 - Game of the year edition, you can download the Source engine for free. Im pretty sure it comes with the buggy and perhaps other vehicle models from the game, and nice physics. Of course you would then be making a mod and not a game from scratch. But if you want a driving/urban setting game with as little scripting as possible, you have to base it on as finished an engine as possible, so a mod is probably a good idea. The Far Cry engine is probably also good for this, since there's a lot of driving and sailing in the game. Engine comes with the game. Alternatively, I heard physics are pretty easy in Blender...

Provided that the game is still compatible with the newest version of python, there are downloadable python installers for those at the official python site:
http://www.python.org/

If this doesn't work, you can get a copy of python (the right version I hope) with the panda3d download:
http://panda3d.org/download.php

If you try it, and it still doesn't work (there's a real chance - it's been a while since I made the game)Ã,  please post about it so people don't get mad at me for wasting their time with a pointless download...Ã, 

I think there's been plenty of threads recommending 3d-engines, but yes, I once scripted a *very*simple car game in python using the panda3d engine. It supports your own scripted physics and/or ai with a set of base classes that make it a lot easier than starting from scratch. As far as i remember the panda3d engine was pretty buggy and un-documented, but there's probably a new version out by now, and hopefully some better documentation.

I uploaded a zip of the final 'game' (more of a coding course than a game design course) if you wanna check it the scripts used. I don't remember if you actually need python and panda3d installed to play it, but it'll give you a good laugh at my bad coding ;-) The file "RACE.bat" should start the race if everything is set up right.

Disclaimer: This is not a full game, it's a university assignment handed in to prove that we could grasp scripting physics and ai for a car game. No real gameplay - nothing.

file is here: (2.68 Mb) CarGame

Edit (1-18-07): I removed the file from the server, since I've been using up my disk quota. PM me, if you need it.

Gaah! Our web-hotel just closed down the site - seems their multi hosting server caused problems for other domains than just the 3rdworld-one once the fark-crowd swept in. And now our host can't live up to their "no-limit on traffic"-deal. Which seriously sucks, since it was actually the deal.

I've set up a temporary mirror here http://www.itu.dk/people/hermund/3wf/

We had hiscores - but none on the mirror. And no forums, they're lost in some database somewhere.

You can use the same method used for deciding the distance between lamp posts or fence posts when drawing in perspective:

1) Presume your sofa is 200cm wide in total and the armrests are 20 cms wide each. Set a vanishing point in the picture.
2) Draw the vertical line thatÃ,  will be the sofas height in the foreground of the image.
3) Mark a total of 10 points in equal distance from each other on this line.
4) Draw helper lines from each of the points towards the vanishing point.
5) Set the next vertical line, delimiting total depth of the sofa in the picture.
6) You now have a perspectived rectangle divided into 9 long rectangles
6) Draw a helper line from the "bottom foreground vertical sofa line" pixel to the "top background vertical sofa line" pixel. This line, if drawn correctly, will intersect each of the 10 lines diagonally. The intersections are where vertical lines should be drawn in order to divide the sofa into 10 parts of equal distance. You only need the top and bottom intersections, since they represent the widths of the armrests.

Hope it makes sense. I googled but couldn't find an image describing this right away.

EDIT: here's a rough draft to show the method. This one has a sofa where the armrests are each 1/7 of the total sofa width.

Red marks are point 3 above.
Green lines are point 4
Yellow line is point 6
Intersection points are between yellow and green lines.

OMG - the 3rdworldfarmer site was mentioned at FARK.com yesterday
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2065132,

and now it's officially "farked"Ã, 
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=farked

Anyone have experience with this kind of thing and how long it may take to wear off?

Mine is a quote from an Ashbery poem, "The Burden of the Park"

http://jacketmagazine.com/02/ashb.html

It just made me laugh when I first read it, and I owe a lot of you guys some serious cheering up, so there you have it.

I find it very "Hip-hip-hip Hooray, The Sun Has Got His Hat On!"-ish.

Good job! Quite expressive the way it keeps looping. The infinite chase. What is the song about?

Well, who says we should DEMAND anything? We'll just TAKE it, once we hunt them down with our dogs.

Isn't it only $500?Ã,  - and then the extra million.Ã,  Still, if we all pay $70 a month for a year, we would have more than that! (12 * 70 * 3,000 = 2,520,000). Besides, who needs an airport, we are honest pirates? And with everything going on, a hurricane will just be a welcome distraction, nothing critical, (especially now that the King has grown gills):

Rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated.

After getting involved in a fist fight with an angry rabbit over a parking space, I stumbled into the English Channel where I lay dead on the seabed for 2 weeks... whereupon a friendly mermaid breathed her magical breath into my lungs and I awoke from my slumber, only to find that I had grown gills.

Giddy with this new found underwater bliss, I remained under the surface, gently moving through the water whiling away my days, until I was attacked by a Great White Shark and had to beat a hasty retreat to the surface and back into civilization.

...still, we might need a few sponsors, just in case.

Seriously.... This one is only $1,500,000 - how many AGS'ers are we? Who's setting up a 'national economy' savings account?

http://www.vladi-private-islands.de/sale/site/html/cms_de-sale_detail_en-841/Governor's%20Cay.html

I just might read the book when I have time, but I do consider any film by Tarkovsky to be high art (at least those I've seen). I think the modern adaption was en excellent film too, but my impression may be tainted by having seen the original first. But wow, if the book is even better... And thanks for the tip on Peter Weir.

Just to avoid misunderstanding: I'm not in any way using the word cliche as a derogatory term about the work of Lem. I'm using the word in the sense discussed above, that all stories derive from something and have been told before (at some level of abstraction), because they all stem from human experience. You can fit most modern novels into a scheme from some Greek myth if you want (Solaris could be interpreted as a modern day medusa- or narcissus- or icharos- adaption). What's important is to be aware of the stories you're building upon because it's the only way you can hope to add something new to them (besides from changing the 'skin' of the story).

I think you're absolutely right about Lem masterfully avoiding the cliche of turning the ocean into friend or foe - it is simply 'unknown', like a very true reflection of what we are to ourselves and to each other.

Many movies/books have this approach as well - Space Odyssey for instance (the Monolith) or the 'Aleph' in the tale by Borges. A poet like John Ashbery also tries to maintain a core of doubt/unknowing in his poems, because, as he says, if there was a mystery or riddle in the poem, it could be solved, and then the poem would become uninteresting. That's what I was trying to say about always keeping a character in the story, a geniune 'subject', not an 'object' that can be fully explained (like so many b-movies treat their characters). 

Well, I'm new to PHP, but just yesterday had a similar (I think) problem. PHP is enabled on my server, but in order for it to execute, it needs to be in files with the .php extension. Now I didn't want to rename all my .html files to .php just in order to enable the php nested inside them, and I found this solution somewhere on the web:

1. Creat a txt-file with the following content:

Code: ags

AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

2. Copy it to your server (the public root probably) and rename it to ".htaccess"

Ths enables php within the .htm and .html files without having to rename them (and renaming all links on the site - which might be a pain). I don't know, but maybe you could add ".txt" to the code-line above and have php work inside the .txt-files you are reading from? I haven't tried it myself, but it's so easy I think it's maybe worth checking out :-)

Great that somebody brings up Solaris!!

I can only talk about the movies (the old one and the remake), which are both excellent, imo. Lem was also buliding on cliches, but he used them very well. His cliches are those of "the alien lifeform", and of "the nature of god/extreme being". Intelligently he wasn't so much concerned with these things by themselves, as with how humans use these "abstracts" as mirrors or objects of self-reflection, and as a way of understanding each other. The way I see it, this is the narrative 'engine' of Solaris, that drives the characters and story forward and give them shape. In a way, the characters are facing the unknown (god/woman/alien/themselves) and the story is 100% loyal to their bewilderment, using the weird setting where dreams and inner fears turn real (which makes everything seem unreal). But as viewers, we are in a suspension of disbelief for much the same reason that the characters are, we want to make sense of it all and understand ourselves better. Actually it's a highly psychedellic, self-reflective way of telling a story, and I think it succeeds because of two things: Reflecting on the archetypes/the myths on which it is based and, staying true to it's characters' psychology.

In a way this is more advanced storytelling than that of the folk tales, where supernatural thought-ups would be justified by "I learned this story from a _wise_ old person" or by following conventions of other "true" tales (magic numbers etc.).

So I couldn't agree more: use the clichés, but use them consciously (or they will be using you). And, keep a character in there, be true to it.

One slightly radioactive bead around their neck each, and specially trained mutated cats could help us fixate the moon!!



...but see if the people in power will ever listen!