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What looks wrong with the room is that it slopes outward as it moves up, rather than maintaining a square shape, and this skews all the doors and angles strangely.

Nothing wrong with that - it's just two-point perspective (with one vanishing point in the centre and one far below the image). This is geometrically correct as the eye level is closer to the ceiling than to the floor. I agree, though, that it looks odd in an adventure game, where one-point perspective is pretty much standard.

I've just finished this game and I thought it was great fun. Lots of humour, even if some of it won't be understandable outside the UK. Just to repeat what olafmoriarty said, I really enjoyed messing around with deliberately wrong interactions just to see what the characters said.

It's always great to see a game that has been worked on so thoroughly to make sure everything is working. I did spot two small bugs though:

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* When I gave the Underground technician the moonshine, all that happened is that Ben walked to the left (past the turnstile) and then to the right, past the technician. It worked, but this seems to be a weird way for the character to carry out this interaction.
* The only typo I found was "clammering" - this should be "clamouring". And I think the past participle of "smite" should be "smut".  That would be far more appropriate. Only joking.

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So excellent job, guys. I'm off to give you nice big fat top marks now. Hm, what do you have to do around here to get four cups, I wonder?

OK, thanks. I haven't got that far yet, so maybe that's why I can't do anything there yet.

Still stuck though...

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I assume I have to do something with the guys drinking beer in the pub to get them to fall unconscious so that the barman will give me his hat... but what? I know how to get their glasses refilled, and suspect I have to do something while the barman is doing this, but what? I have the lighter, scissors, zombie hand, Bible, stone, Blu Tack, coins, sponge and loo cakes.

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Ooh, power of posting...

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There's certainly something you can do while the barman is topping up their drinks!

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OlafMoriarty, you beat me to it! Thanks anyway.

Have a search around on the spaceship, there is something you have missed. In there, you will find a crowbar.

Would this happen to be

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the panel between the Max and yin and yang doors? If so, how do I get into it?

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Heh heh, I'm loving this game. Lots of cheeky humour.

Technically,

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"smote" is the past tense of "smite" - the past participle is "smitten",

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but hey -

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maybe the priest just got it wrong

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and it doesn't stop it being a good gag.

EDIT: Oops, sorry - I posted this in the wrong thread.

The only reason I'm still using 2.71 (the one you have to hand-crank to get started ) is simply that I started a game in it some time ago and haven't finished it yet! I suppose that might be true for other people too. But once that one's released, I plan to use 3.0.

AGS can grab single frames from a gif itself if I'm not mistaken- just import it there if all else fails.

I found out just recently that you can import an animated gif into AGS as individual frames with minimal effort. In the sprite manager, right click and select "Quick import GIF/FLC frames". Choose the transparency setting, then select your gif. The gif is imported as individual frames in one go.

Oops, I didn't read Ghost's message properly. Sorry about that.

paolo

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leave the tavern, go left and talk to the guy. Exhaust the dialogues, if necessary.

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Thanks. I had tried that but not got anywhere (or rather, not let him get anywhere), so I'll give it another go.

I still haven't got into the fort...

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I'm looking for a piece of eight so I can buy some rum to bribe the guard with, but there doesn't seem to be one anywhere.

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Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I hate to put a downer on your idea, but if your anniversary is coming up soon, it's very unlikely you'll be able to obtain a game of the quality of The Shivah or the Ben Jordan games in time. Games like these take months to produce. If you want something of reasonable quality in a short time, you'll need to recruit a team of people prepared to dedicate themselves to working on it full-time, which few people here do. For the most part, people who produce AGS games are hobbyists and earn their income by other means.

But if it's in a couple of months, I'm sure a willing team could produce a very respectable game for you. Like Akatosh says, give us some details and let's see what we can rustle up in the time available.

Thanks, everyone, for the helpful information and your patience with this audio newbie.

I exported my effects from Audacity in OGG format and the file sizes dropped by around 90%, so that's a big saving - 100K is much more acceptable than 1M, and the size of the compressed download file has come down from 7M to 2M, which I'm very happy with.

paolo

Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but why not use MP3 or OGG instead of wave?

Thanks very much, TwinMoon. I'm completely ignorant of the merits of different sound file formats. Is WAV uncompressed and OGG compressed, then? Obviously MP3 would be, if it's anything like MPEG.

I'm adding sound effects to the game I'm working on. Some of the longer effects are over 1M in size.

I don't want the game to end up requiring a huge download, so I'm wondering how I can make the files smaller. Obviously, all the files for the game will be zipped and compressed when the game is released, but already the zip file is 7M big with less than half the game done and the sound effects added to only one room!

Any tips on how to make sound files smaller (like you can do when saving a JPG) with minimal loss of quality? I'm using Audacity to edit the sound effects.

Thanks.

P.S. Paolo, maybe you misunderstood, but I'm just the translator of the game.....

Oops, yes, I think I did. Sorry about that.

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Sono bloccato di nuovo...

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Non riesco a togliere la moneta dal tombino. Ho letto tutti i libri nella biblioteca. Certuni sono significativi, si vede, ma non ho ancora trovato un modo di utilizzarli. Porto il nastro adesivo, la scheda-cliente e "Scoprire codici".

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Grazie.

Translation:

I'm stuck again...

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I can't get the coin out of the drain. I've read all the books in the library. It's obvious that some of them are significant, but I haven't found a way to use them yet. I'm carrying the sticky tape, the library card and "Discover codes".

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Thank you.

Good point, Emerald. Given that nothing is being done with these answers (they aren't being used to improve AGS or this site and they aren't being collated and published in a peer-reviewed sociological article on gamers), and I doubt that anyone is really interested in what people are saying here, I have to ask, what is the point of this thread except to perpetuate itself?

Ah, I've just read the original posting. It was for an essay, but that was in February 2006, so no doubt the essay has long since been written and so continuing to answer the survey serves no useful purpose.

Ho trovato un bug ma non e' molto grave:

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Nella biblioteca, quando hai la scheda-cliente, se prendi il libro "Scoprire codice" e lo dai al bibliotecario, ti chiede la scheda-cliente, ti da' il libro e poi dice, "Spiacente, nessuna schieda, nessun libro." Non importa molto perche' ricevi il libro comunque. Non succede per nessun'altro libro.

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Translation:

I've found a bug but it's not very serious:

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In the library, when you have the library card, if you take the book "Discover codes" and give it to the librarian, he asks for the library card, gives you then book and then says, "Sorry, no card, no book." It doesn't really matter because you get the book anyhow. It doesn't happen for any other book.

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Thanks, Rui, got it. Hm, that puzzle's not fair!

My only problem was that my eye was having a problem judging whether that object running along the mountain was a space ship or something sitting on the mountain.

The image looks fantastic.

Some suggestions for making the ship look more like it is in the foreground:

* Add more detail to it (as matti has already suggested).
* Make its colours more saturated (brighter). Making distant objects greyer acts as a depth cue, so making near objects brighter has the opposite effect (assuming your planet has an atmosphere, otherwise there is no attenuation of colour with distance).
* Sharpen the edges between different parts of the ship.

You can't let your images go to waste... rather than being commissioned to produce art for a particular project and then getting bored, have you considered just building a game around a set of images you already have or passing them to someone else to do the same?

Mannaggia ho! (That's "Oh, damn it!" in Italian.)

I'm stuck already...

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I've turned on the monitor and used the air vent/air conditioner (il condizionatore) but I can't find out what to do next.

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Grazie