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(I never really watched the films and so I'm not a fan anyway)

It stopped reading your post at this point 

It likes Back to the Future? It is an advocate of family-friendly entertainment?

Thank you everybody who said they enjoyed the radio show! Finally I had the chance of using all the stuff that had been stored away on my hard drive for years and never put to good use, hah. By the way, Zak's radio announcements and comments are all first takes, I really wanted to create an improvised live atmosphere, and it seems to have worked! Oh, and I am surprised nobody commented on my slightly jarring accent until now, I suppose this must be one of the advantages of globalization.

About the radio show and text confusion: I agree, listening to (narrating) text while reading text that is normally spoken is just too confusing. I've been thinking maybe I shouldn't have put it all together in one track, but rather in separate files, so there could have been an easy way to simply turn off speech? A radio with jabber filter, actually pretty useful if you ask me! And Zak could probably invent it quite easily.

About the drink mixing puzzle: I am starting to think that I am kind of a counterintuitive sort of puzzle solver, I mean, even Leon had problems solving this (!), and I solved the puzzle like 1-2-3, without even thinking. I talked to Rasputin, heard about the drink, noticed that you could mix drinks inside the bar - done. And then I got stuck forever on every single one of the following puzzles, haha.

I am not sure yet if and how we will release a soundtrack for the game, and I am not sure if it should be free, donation based or if it should cost a little money (I'm thinking $5 here) - I have no experience whatsoever with charging money for downloads, I have never in my life filled in a tax form, and I would have to ask my former band mates for two or three tunes if they are okay with me releasing the songs and maybe charging a little for it (all of my songs are band recordings, while David mostly recorded whole songs on his own, the only exception being the Kosmonaut Gonzalez tune - the only band we ever played in together).

Hm, this might actually be the one and only reason ever for me to draw something resembling a "character", haha. Count me in!

yeh, well perhaps you should work on pruning out the garbage.

What goal are you pursuing by digging up those old module threads anyway? Are you trying to build the next fantastomatic-super awesome 3D online game with AGS? If so, maybe you should look into using another engine, because AGS will not be your tool of choice.

Hm, a cat went missing. Paranoia ensues. I hope I am not offending any cat lovers here, but isn't it a bit too much to consider "locking that bastard away" or "showing that S.O.B." (misquoted, I know) or whatever revenge fantasies there are, when there isn't any evidence but gossip? That's cat vs. human, am I too much of a humanist here to find that kind of off-putting?

Cats run off all the time, and they return just like that all the time, or don't, whatever fantasies of a special relation and love and affection the former owner might have had. I hope that particular cat returns soon to prove me wrong, but I just don't believe that cats seek anything more but food, shelter and comfort while they are staying with people.

Oh, well. I hope you don't feel like I've hijacked the thread for a general rambling about cats and humans, and again, I hope your cat returns soon.

They didn't have Icey Cube, so I just bought Vanilla Ieyc!

Yes, some trackers actually allow you to import midi files, but the results vary greatly. You might want to try OpenMPT for Windows, it handles midi import quite well and is very user friendly (even though it might take you half an hour to get into the interface if you are used to working with piano roll style sequencers).

Hey anian - your spoiler text is exactly what the last puzzle is about. It is, basically, the last puzzle. How come it didn't work for you?

On the game:
You call it a "warm look" at Gandhi's life, does that mean the game won't mention the younger Gandhi was a racist who considered Blacks as animals and Indians as infinitely superior, who liked to sleep naked with several naked young girls and who liked to give them enemas to cleanse them?

Way to go, Khris, now you ruined it. Dbuske, I suggest a warm look at the life of Batman instead.

Hello!

I'd argue that "restaurar" doesn't work here, mainly because it needs a subject (restaurar algo). "Default" would be "valores por defecto", or "configuración por defecto", which is much too long to fit here. "Restore default" would be "restablecer valores por defecto", which is insanely long. "Por defecto" alone does not work. "Restablecer" alone does not work either, but (in my opinion) makes slightly more sense than "restaurar".

...and here we have another fine example of non-problem solving!

This just in: The thinking man's AGS blog interviews the friend of the AGS working man.

Conglaturations!

Okay, now I know what "void" means, but what does "OP" mean?

And one more thing, I opened the chm file, it seems that on my computer, the contents are alligned right-to-left.

It aligns just fine here. Is there any chance the chm takes its alignment from the OS default (if you are using an OS that is set to Hebrew)?

Feedback time!

I've briefly tested the Java version on all browsers I have installed (2,2Ghz Dualcore Thinkpad, Linux Mint) and had very different results concerning audio and game performance. The best choice seemed to be Chromium, though.

Chromium: Game runs smoothly, audio performance is pretty good, no stutters - but audio files are always cut off something like a second before they have finished playing.

Firefox: The zoom looks good and crisp (as you mentioned), audio stops after spending some seconds in a room and only starts playing again when you change the room (although sometimes it doesn't) - there is also a pretty heavy lag when leaving a room.

Opera: Really heavy graphics lag when leaving a room, funny colour confusion (if a conversation spans over two lines, they appear in two different colours, the @OVERHOTSPOT@! text will sometimes be displayed in blue or green tint, hovering over dialogue options tints them green. Opera had the best audio performance, it never so much as stuttered and the files played nicely to the end (even though they didn't loop seamlessly, but you already mentioned that issue)

Midori: Audio stops from time to time, heavy lag when leaving a room, but none when entering. Game runs pretty slow. I realize that maybe 8 people in the world use Midori as a browser on a daily basis, but I had it installed, so I wanted to mention it...

Maybe you can use some of this feedback - I guess audio handling and performance is still the weakest spot of your proof-of-concept, but this is probably because of the script necessary to play .ogg files. If you want, you have my official permission, as creator of the soundtrack, to convert from .ogg to .mp3 for test purposes.

[lost forever]

HA, fools!

Well, I pride myself on recognizing Vaporware when I see it, and this is what must and can only be one of the most outrageous cases I have ever had to witness! This project will never be able to live up to what it promises, if it does get released at all! Hope you haven't transferred your preorder money yet guys, because it will be, like, lost forever!

This is fantastic, really. Being able to run AGS games in a browser window without so much as an extra plugin (I suppose people who play games in their browser have Java or Flash installed anyway) is such a huge step towards a much, much broader audience. Adventure games are just perfect for more "casual" players, who in some cases have never even downloaded or installed a game (many of my friends are like that - they grew up playing games on consoles, while on the PC, browser-based Flash games are their way to go).

I mean, technically you could even think of facebook as a means of spreading AGS games, there are so many people on office lunch breaks or just browsing randomly, with so much free time on their hands, and adventure games have a very low entry barrier - you just click and things happen, no further gaming knowledge required.

And it's also a great way for AGS games to reach Mac and Linux users!

I would love to see this continued, this is just awesome.

...and also, sorry kaputtnik, but I didn't enjoy the music (it wasn't the synth that bothered me, it was too repetitive and lacking melodies for my taste).

...melodies?! You think they still have melodies in this dystopian cybernightmarish hell-future? Where would they get them, from outer space?

Well, I will have to ask good Mr Technocrat for permission to flood the cyberspace with melodies in part III, then. Sweet, non-repetitive, lavish and opulent* melodies, mmh.

*subject to adjustment according to talent, creativity, time and equipment

Yes, I definitely think this is important. We already have the bug/feature tracker here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/Newsite/BugTracker.aspx

Do we think that's useful enough for this, or do we need a more comprehensive bug tracking system?

Hm, I didn't even know about that bug tracker - did you or strazer generate this list manually (or semi-manually) from forum entries, or how do you go about entering a bug or feature request? The feature requests in there might actually be a repository of good ideas, but aren't some of them slightly outdated?

Well, I'm not sure what this tracker can do, so I don't know if a more comprehensive bug tracking system is needed - but setting up a more powerful tracker like Mantis (or any other bug tracker) is quickly and easily done. Mantis at least has a lot of import functions, so the content of the old tracker could be migrated easily and organized to fit the current project needs. There is no (out-of-the.box) working integration with the SMF authentication system, unfortunately, maybe another bug tracker can do this? Any experts around?

So we need to decide on a way that people can propose a change, we can agree whether or not to approve it (or whether it might be better as a plugin, for example), and then if approved they can go ahead and do it.

Since at the moment it seems that AGS development is heading towards a more or less structured model of a group of steady collaborators who have access to the code base, it might be a good idea to set up a bug tracker and a feature/feature request tracker. The active AGS community is quite large, and I guess we could accumulate lots of useful bug reports and maybe gather and choose from a list of features that make sense if people used a tracker, rather than posting on the forums. And the group of developers can split the workload much easier.

An editor plugin might really be the way to go, yeah. I wrote the post about your other project and have to agree with the concerns that have been uttered there: People shouldn't be able to modify the compiled translation easily, but the game author should be able to spread his text source in an easily accessible format if he wants to, and then probably release the translation as "official". I guess it works like that in most Open Source projects where one person retains creative control, and if there are major errors in the translation, sooner or later someone who speaks the language will get back to the author and tell him or suggest an alternative translation.

It would also be great to be able to sort the output by rooms, dialogs or characters - I think .po can do this quite easily. If you find a way to export these values from the editor, that would be awesome!

If it turns out to be too complicated and you decide to rather try and build a converter for the current format, maybe you could find a way to merge the translation file and the speechref.txt? This way every line could be identified as belonging to a certain character, and it is the basic way .po works anyway, as far as I understand.

I'm excited to see where you can take this!