Messages

I can connect and look at things I don't understand just fine, even though Firefox gives the usual warnings of dangerous self-signed certificates and other black magic.

Well, I have been doing some freelance translation work recently, and this is now the second time the client asked me if I was comfortable working with .po files. The last time I had simply opened the file with a text editor and replaced the former translation, but this time I got curious (I had seen .po files in Wordpress and Drupal projects before) and had a look at the format and its properties - and obviously, the GNU community has put a lot of effort into translation tools like poedit, gtranslator and pootle (and many more I haven't discovered, yet, I am sure).

I remember that the translation feature of AGS had some little irks, like only putting out one unique string for translation when the same sentence ("string") is used on different occasions and maybe in a different context, somewhat unsorted output and possibly missing text (I am not sure if this is still an issue, I remember one game where the GUI texts wouldn't get dumped into the translation file), and the slightly clumsy method of having to handle the speechref.txt file to be able to know who said what.

I know this is not really high priority, but I wanted to mention it and ask the people who know how the editor code looks like (now that it's freely accessible and I don't have to bother CJ with it, haha) if this is a good idea and possible at all:

Could AGS output .po files, or are there dependencies (gettext seems to be a rather huge framework, but I don't have the slightest idea) or technical issues that prohibit that? And it may make sense for websites and other purely text-based content, but is the format flexible enough and easy enough to handle to work with time-based (game) content?

The requests for a reformed translation system might be few, but I think CJ mentioned in some of the development threads that he was planning on rewriting a bit of it, so if this is done at some point in the future by one of the fantastic contributors who will appear from out of the depths of the internet pretty soon, using a GNU standard might be a good idea. Or not?

[The Man who sold the End of the World]

I want to go down in history as The Man who sold the End of the World.

I recommend Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas for the perfect mixture of nostalgic, sad and otherwordly emotions that hit you wile watching it. And then Fahrenheit 451 by Truffaut. And I second Dancer in the Dark. One of the best uses of movie as an artistic means of blending picture and sound and create a whole new kind of storytelling.

Haha, poltergeist, I love how you use the game's full title "Super Drug Adventure 2011" as if it were a brand name. I am pretty sure this thread will be google hit #1 for "Super Drug Adventure 2011" in no time!

But is there a lite versions that you get paid for if you use it?

Aye, but that's the one that can only be run on the iPod.

But you have to pay money to get one of those. You get paid if you stop using it and sell it, though.

Kaputtnik was the musician-in-chief for this episode, it certainly came out differently to how I expected the music for it would be, but I think it certainly helped build a significant part of the atmosphere!

It also came out differently to how I expected it to be, haha. By the way, that's my first all-Linux soundtrack, 100% bio-degradable, zero-emission, kid-friendly, sustainable, accessible and almost too Indie to be true.

Thanks for the compliments,

Duals (I already suspected that you might have heard even less epic music than mine in the past, but you never know...) and
buddha (I'm glad you enjoyed the sound and feel of it, the world needs more people who can appreciate the beauty of plain old FM synthesis!)!

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, my first shot for a main theme went so horribly wrong, I really can't remember what I was doing there and why I was doing it. A cheap sounding monkey island elevator party tune abomination with insinuations to classical counterpoint composition. Get it while it's, uhm, there:  http://www.box.net/shared/blqrxi4j7v

Haha, splendid.

Xan is a pig who lives in Xykynnonia.
Xan must USE the pillow with the container.
In order to GET the pillow, Xan must GET the toy AND GET the paper
In order to GET the toy, Xan must USE the paper with the shoe in the river.
In order to GET the paper, Xan must TALK to Vifidus, the bear.
To TALK to Vifidus, the bear, Xan must first TALK to Vifidus, the bear.

Do not miss out on this, good people! Even after the 5th beta it was still lots of fun to play, and I really think I'll download and play it again now. It's that good, really.

Yup. Those numbers seem to show that developing video games is getting more expensive as the audience is getting more demanding and wants cinematic games and epic universes and whatnot - I fear that the video game industry might be going the same way the music industry went.

Innovation going down, profit margins going up, more people trying to get their share who are not in the slightest way contributing to the production (licensing agencies, marketing, corporate identity departments, market researchers, statistical evaluation groups, stock brokers, massive human resources departments, talent scouts...). So, like ProgZmax, I feel that the industry has become a ridiculously bloated behemoth where creativity is not the driving force anymore.

But - remember my music industry parallel - that's where angry indie game developers come in! They offer innovation, and they offer it cheap. And they will continue doing that until they have reached asignificant market share of, let's say 3%, and then they will gradually and happily be swallowed by the industry behemoths and start working enthusiastically on a project that never gets finished, that does not turn out like they wanted because of label restrictions and so forth...

On topic: I think 20â,¬ is my game threshold. I won't pay more under any circumstances, no matter how new the game is, how high the budget or how badly I want it. It's just not reasonable to pay more.

But even "western" people do this, when moving from one country to another. I am pretty lucky, my name (Sebastian) works just like a native name in English, French and Spanish, and in most other languages it can be pronounced easily. Other German names don't work at all in foreign languages, so lots of people I know simply adopt an equivalent of their German name while they are abroad. I have yet to meet the Spanish person who can pronounce the name "Stefan", for example. All Stefans I ever knew magically turned "Estebans" in Spain.

Still, I don't know if giving English names to Korean kids isn't cultural imperialism in a way. I guess we should ask somebody with two names if he perceives it like that.

[again]

And if they do, good riddance! Because then they can come back from the dead - again, and we can finally start making some serious money with them, with all the excitement that will surely ensue.

No, but seriously, they can't die. They are cheap to produce, easily made cross-platform, have a potentially much broader audience than "core" games...It's just that the full potential of platforms like the Nintendo DS hasn't been used for classical adventure games, but rather more "inventive" twists on the genre.

Mark my words, you'll be playing adventure games on your favourite social media (TM) platform with your favourite portable gaming and communication device (TM) pretty soon.

P.S.: When  wrote "mark my words", I wanted the sentence to sound as if Charlton Heston had pronounced it. Please use your imagination.

I know Korean or Cantonese people who of course do have their "real names", but to make it easier to be remembered and recognized in business/science they also have English names. "Janice" is easier to remember for anybody from a "western" cultural context than "Teo Hui Ching" (which is also a transcription, of course, and arranged in an arbitrary way).

Because the concept of "first name" and "last name" is also something that does not always easily apply to Asian naming culture and tradition, some might really find it easier to just adopt an English name for simplicity's sake, I guess.

Have you considered rock bands already? I'd love to see young Joey, Tommy, Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone re-incarnated as kindergarten troublemakers. Or take one of your favourite novels. I'd call the kids Mack, Eddie, Hazel and Dora after John Steinbeck's Cannery Row any day.

Or, to get a whole bunch of kids in one batch, use a group of people like the Seattle Seven (as referred to in The Big Lebowski). Michael, Jeff, Joe, Susan, Charles, Roger...all good, sturdy names!

Or how about this list: http://www.retireat21.com/blog/the-most-successful-college-dropouts-in-history# ?

Not too many girls' names on there, regrettably. You can still resort to this list here! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

That got me really curious. What does Gödel have to do with AGS and adventure games?

Uhm, not much. If you try real hard, you could probably build a nice dialogue puzzle from his liar theories. I just thought a well-rounded speech should always make three important points.

Responding to the rest of your post, I would argue that there is no such thing as an "adventure game puzzle" and a "non-adventure game puzzle". There are genre stereotypes, but I can't see anything preventing me from adding any puzzle seen in an adventure game to a role playing game, a straightforward puzzle game, a story-driven car-stealing, racing and shooting game, a jump&run game or a good old first person shooter. If I implement it convincingly, of course.

Talking to somebody to get a certain piece of information which you then present somebody else is a puzzle. This is the most basic form of puzzle adventure games have to offer, and those are real puzzles. They present an obstacle and have to be overcome to advance the story, and in my opinion they are structurally equal to "activate switch" or "use red herring on chunky salsa". I fully agree with Babar that "puzzly" puzzles and the way they are presented in lots of adventure games detract from the gaming experience. But nevertheless, they are still an intrinsic element of adventure games when it comes to a definition of the genre, aren't they?

If there were no challenge and no puzzles at all, wouldn't adventure games just be some sort of interactive story? I love exploring and looking at all sorts of things and talking to NPCs in adventure games, but if I wouldn't meet a challenge anywhere in the game, I think I'd stop playing it pretty soon. Or is "open door" already a puzzle? If so, then adventure games consist of series of puzzles only, because they rarely contain areas where controlling skill, reaction or strategy are necessary. I thus conclude that adventures are a sort of playable comic books with added audiovisual atmosphere. (And not only aesthetically, but also structurally, if "turn page" in itself can be regarded as a challenge or a puzzle. It might be to the not-so-skilled reader!)



To make my point:

Please don't ever resort to the "use newspaper with door" and "use coathanger on keyhole" puzzle, ever, ever again.

To make another point:

The adventuregameness of adventure games depends on their adventurous value, as defined by Bruce D. Temkin in his landmark essay "The adventure gamer's experience value chain".

To conclude:

I should probably get back to work and let others decide if AGS is slowly dying or not, I think I just lost all credibilty on that subject.

Well, speaking with Chris Crawford, adventure games are basically puzzles rather than actual games. I might add my own definition of "non-time critical, yet time-based storytelling".

So they can not possibly have died, because every single game genre involves solving puzzles in one way or another. If it really matters if they are presented in a classical point&click fashion and look like a lost Lucas Arts classic, then you can probably say that "adventure game aesthetics as established by Sierra Online (TM) and Lucasfilm Games (TM) have died somewhere around the year 199x", but the concept of solving puzzles for entertainment in video games has spread so wide that most people don't even recognize it anymore.

About AGS dying a slow death: Just look at the amount of media coverage AGS games are getting by indie gaming blogs and review sites. AGS is an established and serious game engine with a community that is known as "helpful and enthusiastic", the number of releases is pretty high and their quality as well. And just look at the innovation potential compared to other game engines; the YoYo game maker community for example has an incredibly high output, but 95% of it is waste, and of the 5% of the games that are actually enjoyable, maybe 5% are in some way interesting or innovative.

About Gödel's liar paradox: It can not be fully understood without having a look at Tarski's undefinability theorem.

I just ran it in WINE under Linux, works pretty well, if a tad slow. A lot of times there was a strange flickering between dialogue lines, as if another line was displayed for a quarter of a second or so, but then after that the correct line would come up. And does Sissy have a walking animation?

Can't give any feedback on gameplay and story, yet, but it really had the Grim Fandango feeling (although this is probably because Grim Fandango is the only 3D adventure game I have ever played, other than I Was A Vegas Showgirl (TM), haha)

Haha, the soundtrack couldn't have been anything else but Mozart.

OCD: TLW? Sounds like a great new adventure to me!

Ocean Cowboy Dennis - True Love Waits

A take on the never failing "good old boys" theme in those short-lived times of androgynous communist pirates and iconoclastic space ninjas from 40,000 A.D.


If Dennis will still be able to change jobs, I suggest "miller", "wainwright", "peltmonger" and "frontier radiologist".

He can change jobs? Awesome.