Messages

I was disappointed slightly, but it is worth watching (I watched it twice).  Like SS, I love Spaced, and other things the people involved have written/starred in, so perhaps I was expecting something as good as that. In my opinion, it wasn't nearly as well acted or written and it felt too much like a poor romantic comedy in parts.  I laughed out loud just a couple of times, I expected much more from these people.
However, I seem to be a lone voice, everyone else in #ags who has seen it loved it. Just thought I'd offer my opinion in case other people are expecting too much.
Also, I can't see how this can be described as a horror movie, except for the fact that it has zombies, do not expect to be scared.

It's off topic now but.. for anyone who, like me, wants to use higher resolutions and antialiased characters and have a chance to use some other graphical effects hardware acceleration is a massive difference.Ã,  I am talking about something like going from 20-30fps on my athlon XP2600+ machine (which is what I get now in test games) to 200-300fps (which is what I get if I load the same graphics into a 3d accelerated engine).Ã,  And the reason jpg is so good is precisely because it is lossy (yes, I typed lossless before the edit :'( ), just like mp3 and ogg, it produces massively smaller filesizes even over png and especially the gif style compression AGS uses now, with an acceptable loss in quality.Ã,  This is a big deal for me again, because my backgrounds get up to over 2MB each as it is. I am not saying AGS should default to using lossy compression on graphics, as it would make a lot of pixel art very ugly, but it more than halves the size of my backgrounds over the current compression type and would be a worthwhile addition for me.
Plugins are great, but this kind of thing could not be done as a plugin as far as I can see.Ã,  I am writing my own engine now anyway, designed for more high end graphics (and 3d too), but it would be much easier if I could add some of these things to AGS, or at least take pointers from AGS's code on how to do certain things.Ã,  I will be reinventing a lot of wheels, and I am not a very good coder at all

Of course CJ's work is good, and we don't need others to come in and mod it, but there are many things that some people want that CJ has no intention of adding to AGS himself.  Personally I would have a go at adding hardware accelerated graphics support (optional of course), or the ability to have backgrounds compressed as jpgs or the ability to resize games running in windows. If the code really is hard to understand then I probably wouldn't be able to do it anyway though, and some of these things may be added in time.

Personally I think the benefits outweigh the downsides, but then I couldn't care less if someone can decompile my games.  However if CJ wants to work on it alone then that is good enough reason for me not to have it opened it up.

Yes, both games will be released soon, Vel's team requires one last animation and ours is undergoing beta testing.

I would upload it, but I don't think AGA would appreciate that use of his bandwidth. You could get it from me in the #AGS IRC channel on quakenet if you want.  It is 96.7mb.

I think once there is a group of 2000 members that uses the software, it can't be very likely that it'll be ripped off and people won't notice or realise where it originally came from, CJ is a god around here and the adventure game making community is not very large. Ã, And there are so many open source projects around these days, it doesn't seem very common for bad things to happen from it.
I think CJ has other reasons for not wanting it open source, one being that it'd be easier to make a decompiler for people's games (wouldn't bother me but it probably would some people), and another being that AGS is his project and hobby, I wouldn't want to open up one of my games for people to make changes and "improvements" Ã, Perhaps it is a bit different for a serious piece of software, but I am sure there is some element of that.

If it was open it'd be fun to have a look around the code, and maybe see about adding some features I'd like that might not get implemented otherwise, but it is CJ's to do what he wants with, if he'd prefer the security and focus of working alone that's fine.

http://www.agsforums.com/games.php?action=detail&id=219 this? It's in the joke games section.Ã,  Note that there is a search function for finding games.

It would be nice to get an archive of games up though, before these obviously valuable and important artworks are lost to the world.

By the power vested in me by the state of OTG and ._. I now pronounce Artitude alive!Ã,  Let's hope we get some entries this time around.

The theme unanimously chosen by the secret elite is AGSer Portraiture.

Draw your fellow AGS community members, any resolution, any style, hand drawn, pixelled, 3d, finger painted, it doesn't matter.Ã,  I won't restrict it to faces, draw them doing something amusing if you like.Ã,  Practice your art skills or make everyone laugh.

This Artitude will end in one week, on the 4th of September.

Sex and violence encouraged restricted, we would love not want to see each other in such situations. Go art!

The boat picture could have a character trying to solve some kind of puzzle on it I am sure (perhaps like the waterspout room in Loom), doesn't have to have them walking about, so IMO it is fine, and a very nice pic!.  I don't think title screens or cutscene pictures are really in the spirit of BG Blitz but that one is ok.
Would anyone else besides Al take part in Artitude (general themed art activity for any type of image), if it was started again?  It was discontinued because of lack of entries iirc.  I liked it, and would take part if I had time.

This is how the demo quest should have been done.  Having all the code in one game makes it confusing even for an experienced scripter.  If they are all in seperate little demos then the code will be much easier to work out.  Keep them as simple and focussed as possible and it's a good idea.
Perhaps people could add their own demos covering topics that are requested.  I'm not sure how well the new demo quest is doing, this could possibly replace that.

Yeah, it is a real pyramid scheme, one that is paying people like YOU to spam your fellow internet users until you get a free product!Ã,  Sign up now!!!! but don't use the referral links Relik used because we don't want to reward him for spamming the AGS forums now do we... wait, actually we don't want anyone rewarded for spamming ever, so uh... how about people don't sign up for this, ok?
It'll soon fall under its own weight like all schemes like this, and the people running it will end up with more money, and a bigger list of gullible people's verified email addresses to sell the bigger it gets, at the same time more and more people will have signed up for things and not recieved ipods because they haven't yet managed to get 5 (or 10 in the PC scheme) people to do the same, and more spams will have been put on message boards across the internet.Ã,  I have even seen these spams in torrent files on our beloved piracy sites! This is obviously taking it too far

The majority of people who take part in this will not get an ipod, fact.Ã,  See if you can work out why yourself.Ã,  The people who are rewarded are those who got in early enough and spammed the most succesfully, and of course the people running the whole thing.

Not to get into another 3d in AGS argument because this has been covered extensively, but I'll go over what I said before because people don't seem to read... a plugin providing realtime 3d characters to AGS would be severely limited, almost worthless (only nice thing it'd provide is smooth, tweened animation, albeit on low poly characters), because the rest of AGS does not work in 3d, the walkables, the limited lighting effects and other things.  Adding 3d support (in a GF/MI4 style) to AGS is much harder than most people seem to imagine.  A lot of other things have to break compatability with the 2d setup, the walkables, the lighting, you have to set up 3d camera angles to get the right perspective (read the other thread for other examples of differences between how 2d and 2.5d adventures are set up)
So it is better off as a seperate engine in my opinion, the editor would have to be much different too.

As for people using it or not, I'm sure some would, I would (I am attempting my own 3d adventure engine which could be used for 2.5d style games), Yufster is working on a 3d adventure already (perhaps she could be persuaded to release her engine to the public when it is ready?), and others have expressed an interest in a 3d AGS.  The barriers to entry into 3d games are higher, you can't simply use MS paint and some of the scripting is a bit more difficult, so there would be less games made in 3d.  But I think, overall, higher quality ones.

A 3d AGS would be a major rewrite, not that CJ hasn't done that before, like from AC to AGS, I guess it could happen.  It is not at all a small upgrade for a new version though.  Best to look at other engines for this, imo.

Please God no.

I'm using OGRE for the 3d graphics part, I'd have to code most of the adventure game related things even if I was using crystal space, I think, so it's not that much more work, and I get to use more up to date graphics features this way (sorry for those of you with older computers ).
A plugin for AGS would be almost impossible, at least for what I want .

Yes, GF had pre rendered backgrounds Hotspot, that is what he is asking about, 3d characters on 2d backgrounds, however the 2d backgrounds were made, and what I am trying to make will support that (although I plan to use semi 3d backgrounds myself).

I don't have terribly high hopes that I'll finish my engine, and if I do it won't be very usable for other people, like AGS is.

Why would he guess that they would use a modded 3d engine if he wanted pre rendered graphics?
I'm not plugging ._. he asked if anyone was working in 2d/3d...

I have wanted to make one for a long time, and am kind of working on an engine for it myself, because I don't think anyone is going to make one any time soon (I am not a good coder though, don't wait for it to be released...).
The King's Quest 9 team seem to be creating their remake in 2d/3d, basing it on the free Crystal Space 3d game engine http://www.kq9.org/media/screenshots/
I don't know of another amateur team doing so.

My vote goes to Lightman, not that it matters, he has already won, well done.
Feel free to start the next blitz.

Woo!
Yes, erotic indeed.  Give yourself a goldfish.

Yes, those are soundfont archives, extract them with http://www.personalcopy.com/sfpack.htm this.

I don't want to have to think about it so I'll take an idea from the suggestion thread.  Tell me if it's been done already.

Evil Geniuses always have a lair, usually in a volcano, underground, beneath the arctic ice or in space and often with pits of sharks, trap doors and white cats.

So draw an arch villain's lair background, you can do it in any style you like.

I think I'll go for a slightly higher resolution this time, just for a change.
Resolution 640x480, colour depth 32 bit, it can be a scrolling background if you like.

And you know.. it's a background art competition so do try and come up with something that could actually be used as a bg in a game.  If you want to draw random art then we could start up Artitude again perhaps.  I would like that.