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This trailer has been around for about a year, so I expect most people interested in psychonauts have seen it many times over, but it won't hurt to get more people interested... If you want to see some gameplay you could also watch http://www.gamespot.com/onthespot/index.html this which this week has Tim Shafer (with beard) talking about the game and playing through a bit of it.  (Starts about 20% of the way in)
I'm looking forward to it, we need more good action adventures.

GTA isn't "a game about violence" any more than the other games that contain violence, which is most of them.  GTA is just amazingly fun, one of the funnest game series ever, the combat and gore is actually one of the worst executed parts of the games (driving is probably best)... I think you probably should play some GTA before forming an opinion on it, the adverts tell you nothing.  (the first two games are freeware now).  GTA has a lot of style, especially the later ones, and gta2 I think.
Manhunt on the other side is largely about watching different kinds of execution animations while a creepy director eggs you on, it's done in a much more realistic style... there is some okayish stealth/action gameplay but it was mostly noticed for the gore.  I quit playing, the (iirc, unskippable) gore animations annoyed me from the start... should it be banned? no, but I wouldn't want kids playing that game particularly.
I think the original topic was about adventures coming back because people will see them as a more educational and child friendly game genre.  God I hope not, I think they can come back because they are good, and some less safe and chld friendly adventures might be nice.  Games will diversify as more different kinds of people start playing them, and I think story based games will appeal to a lot of them.  Even the GTA series has headed more toward a story based format from mostly arcade style beginnings, which doesn't particularly suit it imo, but you see it in FPS and other genres too.  Unfortunately I can only see purist adventures remaining a niche market... I really hope that doesn't mean all kids games.

I think AGS is safe, if they are approved or not. Ã, GIF wasn't added in until the gif patent expired in the US, we have a seperate engine for commercial games, without the MP3 support, so CJ is taking care as it is.
CJ could already apply for patents in the US, he of course has not, and won't in the EU. Ã, So it won't change anything for AGS.

No misstype but I'm used to working in 3D engines, so 80FPS for a few sprites moving around seems extremely slow in any resolution, especially on 2.6ghz..Ã,  However, most AGS games are capped at 40FPS so as long as you can reach that then there's no skipping, that speed is adjustable but less than 30fps becomes noticable.

Shortest time, <1 hour, we have "hour game" competitions, for a medium-full length game you could look at the Team Challenge games like ToaK, that was finished in around 5 weeks. Longest time... well, those that are legendary for taking long (FoY, Run Hot...) generally aren't out yet, Tierra's King's Quest remakes are a good example of a long project that has been completed, although I'm not exactly sure the amount of time they took I'd guess at minimum a year for KQ2 and they are seriously hardcore for amateur developers.

Remember that CMI took a couple of years, close to 1 million dollars and a large team of animators and other artists to finish.Ã,  It's amazing what amateurs can do sometimes but a CMI size and quality game is rather ambitious.


Edit: Yes and no on the sideways walking, usually that is caused by the characters only having side walk views, you can do up to 8 directions, which no 2d adventure has done more than iirc.  However AGS isn't particularly clever at picking the direction sprites so it will sometimes use one view when another would be a better.  As long as you have 4 walk directions drawn it's not too noticable.

A low spec P4 should handle anything AGS can do very well, when talking about speed concerns in this engine we're usually only talking about on 500mhz systems or less, which is not a concern to some developers.

Monkey island 3 would easily be possible in AGS, however that game is in 256 colours, very good use of palettes, AGS can do 16 bit (65k colours), or 32 bit (16.8 million+alpha channel) colour as well.

MP3 or OGG soundtracks are not a problem, if you don't mind the filesize that they take up.  Sprites can also get to be rather large at this resolution but as long as you don't mind your game ending up over 100mb then you can do what you like.

The highest resolution AGS can do is 800x600x32 bit, that runs at 80FPS or so on my system, not amazingly fast, but I expect a 1ghz system would do 40 just fine, and I expect flash would be just as slow or slower at these resolutions.

AGS script is fairly easy, someone who has done some programming before could pick it up near instantly, with the help file, but a week is probably a more reasonable expectation if you're less experienced.

Yes, but you take a screenshot, move the character to somewhere else and take another shot, then combine these two shots in your image editing program so no character is visible.

Actually, quite a number of people have been killed by tazers.  And people are concerned that they are sometimes used in situations where a gun carrying policeman would not consider using their weapon, because of the impression they are non lethal.  Still, I think they are a much better choice than guns, for the UK at least.  I'm not sure how effective they are though, apparently they won't go through thick clothing among other problems.

The system we have now is fine, imo, no armed police, except specially trained armed units to deal with gun crime.  A crack down on the increasing gun problem would be good, before it does become completely necessary to arm city police forces.

Not entirely sure what you mean, but perhaps you're mistaking anti glide mode for a low framerate? Ã, Turn off anti-glide mode in the game options and see if it looks better to you...

well I'm sure that is a part of it, but png is rather slower to encode and to decode, I have two 1mb images here, the png still takes longer, and the png is lower resolution.  Neither are too long to wait anyway, just a small thing in jpgs favour.

JPG personally The current system already compresses the kinds of image that PNG is good at fairly well.  Not that PNG isn't a lot better at some things... but JPG would add more versatility and PNG decompression is quite a bit slower, noticeable lag loading a large png even on my 2.6ghz system, I'd guess the jpg version is 1/4 of the time to load.
It would have to be optional of course, if it was jpg, png could completely replace the current system.

I think the Grim speech was flawless, can't remember thinking they put the wrong emphasis on words, something I notice a lot in the Lucasarts game I'm playing at the moment, KotOR.

Hardly any commercial game voice acting is a negative to me, I am even glad FotAQ had it, and that is among the worst.  Amateur voice acting is another level of badness, I didn't really like the KQ2VGA voices, and I can't think of any better than that.  Bad graphics, bad story, bad puzzles are all things we are used to in amateur adventures, but bad audio can make something unplayable.

Or alternatively, things are kept as they are in the room.crm files that the editor uses, and everything is compressed wih the desired settings and put into the exe at compile time, keeping the originals intact.

I don't see why you'd need to recompress, surely the editor can notice that the background has already been compressed and leave it alone  (Personally, I wouldn't mind if there was just an option not to save a background in the game and have it use an external background file).

Png would be ok, I find it's much slower to load and save than jpg, and is still more suited to line art than fully shaded graphics, but if you support one compression format that should be it.  Gets my test bg down to 1.2mb, which is acceptable.

I would agree exactly with YOke and Miez. I saw it a few years ago on tv, and recently downloaded and watched it again... I can see why it wou'd be many people's cup of tea but it I enjoyed it, and looked very nice.
Also agreement on it not being his best movie... and that Naked Lunch is.

I made a mistake looking at the size of the first background in PCX, it was saved at 1024x768 rather than 800x600.

I put the background into AGS, scaled down to 800x600.
Bare game, no rooms - 1.20mb
One test room, 32 bit - 3.80mb
I am not sure what the overhead of creating a bare room would be aside from the background, but I expect most of that is the background.
However that is a scrolling room, I expect an average one would be about 2/3 the size.

2mb per background I could live with I suppose.  If you ever support 1024x768 it would jump up quite a bit again, I know that isn't planned for now. Some compression would still be nice, in jpg that 800x600 scrolling room is 200kb (70% quality, enough for me), over 10 times smaller.

Just for comparison, PCX would appear to be around the same for compressing my kind of background as AGS's compression, that background ends up as 2.12mb at the correct size in pcx.

If there is compression there'd need to be lossy and lossless modes, jpg would play hell with most low res styles, and png isn't very good at compressing my kind of background.

Or if you want something free, you can use Audacity

I wonder about compression in AGS, I understand it's not such a big thing for people making games in lower resolutions but I'm working at 800x600x32bit, just one of my backgrounds using PCX compression is 3.25mb, at that rate just the backgrounds would be around 150mb in the end. Now of course I don't know how things work within AGS but in the limited programming I've done loading image data from compressed formats is almost as easy as loading uncompressed data when using something like DevIL.Ã,  Some 3d games save their data in compressed formats, sometimes even slowish ones like PNG, and it doesn't take too long to load the textures, so I think it's workable.

I played with a plugin that loads external jpg backgrounds and draws them (in AGSE_PRESCREENDRAW) placed over a blank background in AGS (which is compressed to almost nothing with AGS's RLE).Ã,  It wasn't hard to make but you still have AGS drawing whatever blank background you put in there which is a few FPS drop and you still need to get the hotspots and all placed in the editor, without a background in there to guide you.Ã,  So it's less than ideal.Ã,  By the way, that same background in acceptable jpg quality is 350kb.

If there are no patent issues I think JPEG2000 would be the best format to support, it gets better compression than png in lossless mode for people who want that, and better compression than jpg in lossy mode for people who need small filesize, I can get down to 250kb in that.  But jpg would be fine.

Perhaps I could write an editor plugin that allows you to use an external background within the editor... I haven't looked at that.

For sprites I have no idea what would be possible... I know JS is looking like it'll end up having a 100mb exe file 98% of which is sprites.  Zips up well of course.

This was confusing to me, until I remembered the different meanings antialiasing has in AGS... the alpha channel on sprites is usually used for antialiasing the edges, and that's what most people think of as antialiasing, then there is also "scaling antialiasing", which I think is confusing. Sprite filtering, similar to the term "texture filtering" in 3d graphics, would be better imo.
But you're basically asking for both to work together, right?  I think that's more likely to be implemented than scummvm type graphics filters, could be slow... but no slower than the alternative.

I'm hoping AGS will have a 3d hardware mode in the future, making all these graphical things so simple, but that's a long way off if it happens at all.

That was too obvious, I have had the links panel on my sidebar forever but never thought to use it.

Ad-Block is the main thing I like in Firefox, although I'm actually too lazy to block ads most of the time it's a bit more refined than the Opera thing I use (which I have never added an ad url to).  I also use Firefox+downTHEMall when I need to get all the links in a page (totally not just porn galleries, honest), if anyone knows of an Opera button or whatever to do that it'd be useful to have, because I do prefer the way Opera does downloads aside from that.

And of course nobody should browse without mouse gestures.  I only have a few things visible in my opera UI by default, the address bar, a bugmenot button, the page style controller thing and the tab bar.  Cutting out all the buttons I have gestures and keys for makes things look nicer, and I browse faster.

Opera is better for me, but I'm not trying to start an argument, use what you like, I do use Firefox sometimes.

Do you have stats, CJ?  Is IE still as inexplicably popular as it was before?