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Ah, good to see it still works. Don't know why you couldn't before.

That thread is very old, it was replaced since then. I don't know why it's not working if it isn't but I'll take a look some day.

Cool, Andail, I hope you make it this time, it's been a while, and I'm sure there will be room. As AGA said, if anyone else would like to come do put your name forward. It is looking kind of full but you never know how many people will drop out this early.

The manual's recommendation for 800x600 @ 32 bit is a 900mhz cpu, which is about right, although of course the graphics card makes some difference too, especially for 3D accelerated mode. My mother's laptop is 600mhz but it's fine with D3D mode.

You can decide for yourself if you care about people on slower computers, but obviously nobody that bought one in the last 5 years will have any slowdown.

There are two people that have been to every Mittens and every Brittens.

I don't mind about the dates or location. It seems that the main cost here is going to be the rental, especially in August... as long as that doesn't go too high I'll most probably be there

Most people in the "British Isles" would consider Ireland to be part of the "British Isles" although of course it's not (Great) Britain, which the name Brittens is based on. The truth is we've been sent to take back the province for Her Majesty... so this will not be an issue by the end.

Corofin seems fine to get to, just wondering about getting between the cottages and the town. You can get fairly inexpensive car rentals from Shannon airport if needs be anyway (less than 10 euros between the 16 of us, we could get everyone in cars if people thought it worthwhile). There's at least one bus in the afternoon according to buseireann.ie and 35km is probably not too far to share a taxi.

Don't worry dualnames, we're using an increasingly loose definition of Britain these days... maybe Brittens will be in Greece some day.

I was going to ask you about this, we were talking about it recently. If this doesn't happen CJ said he doesn't mind asking about his friend's place in the Lake District again, but most people don't seem to have a problem with the idea of O'Brittens if you're serious about organising it. I'd come, unless I really had no money. Travel sounds fine, Shannon is cheap enough to get to from all over the UK. Probably easier to get to than the north of England for most of us, £30-40 return from most regional airports.

My only concern (and it applies to both suggested Brittens locations) is remoteness, because there have been quite a lot of AGS meets without shops or pubs nearby recently. I personally don't find a bit of a walk much of a problem, but I know for some people it's an issue, so it'd be nice to work out how far of a walk it really is to the nearest source of food. Says "5 minutes by car" which sounds like it's probably slightly better than CJ's location, but doesn't seem to give the location any more specifically than that.

In AGS 3.0 there are no limits on views, loops, or loop length.

To see hints or spoilers, you need to select the hidden text in the blank area, by clicking and dragging the mouse over it.

Right, but people do celebrate his death and resurrection, and Easter is generally seen as the most important Christian observance, even if the presents are not as spectacular. Clearly the festivals were built off of old ones, including Easter, there are no rock solid dates for when Jesus was born or died, but that's not much of an argument about ignoring it, there are lots of less significant Christian celebrations.

Christmas and Easter are both religious festivals, widely celebrated by an unbelieving public, but we all know what they're about, there's no need to worry about Jesus disappearing from it, he's at least as memorable as the Easter Bunny!

I'd never heard anyone complaining about "Xmas", too, I always read the X part as referring to christ and the cross.

Yeah I don't mean he'll know all the details, or it's highly insulting, just that it's fairly clear a lot of work would be involved getting rid of all the Windows and Allegro specific things. It's quite a big thing to ask for him to do alone.

Such a radical refactoring of the code onto a different library and OS and CPU independance could make AGS run on all sorts of platforms. The advantages are clear, and it'd be a nice thing to see some day.

However, I think all these posts about how to port AGS are a bit patronising for CJ. Any decent coder knows what parts of their code are platform specific, and how they'd go about moving it to another platform. Remember CJ moved from DOS to Windows already. If he decides to do something like that he won't need technical advice from people on the forums. The reason it doesn't happen is it's a lot of work and people request all sorts of different platforms CJ would be unable to support. If someone with the abilities and time to maintain a port steps forward, then there's something to talk about.

Python is my favourite language of all, but unfortunately it really isn't an option here, phones are too slow for it, and their cut down version of Java doesn't support Jython anyway. You need to be fairly good at writing efficient Java to get good gaming performance out of them. I wouldn't suggest jumping into it for a new coder. Learn Java on the desktop first, write a few larger programs. I don't mean to put you off at all, but it'll take at least a few months of effort until you're doing release quality game stuff, as a new coder.

Most phone games run as MIDlets, a special format for cut down Java applications on mobile devices. Here's a guide to making your first: http://developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/articles/wtoolkit/ As you'll see it's difficult to follow if you aren't already proficient in a C++ style language. I'd recommend finding someone to work with if you're trying it commercially.

Ideally you'd switch your desktop resolution to something 16:10 when you draw, most crts should be able to handle it. I'd suggest setting Photoshop's pixel aspect to 0.833, which would work fine, except that when you have vertically stretched pixels in PS the single pixel brush stops working right. Bit of a bug I think.
If you don't do that you just need to remember that things will be stretched vertically somewhat in game, so make your characters slightly squatter than you might otherwise, and take care when drawing things that are meant to be perfect squares or circles.

If you want to make a commercial game for phones you'll need to find a coder to work with. It's not a difficult platform to develop for but phones are very different from larger computers, so AGS will never be ported to current generation phones. Or next generation ones.

The other problem is resolutions, speeds and input devices vary a lot between phones so it can be a lot of effort to make a widely compatible game. I'm interested in doing phone games too but right now the input options and tiny screens make it too poor for my purposes. Maybe in a few years!

I'd generally have said go for x240 or x480 under all circumstances, because I've almost never seen an AGSer drawing appropriately for x200/x400 but GG's point about the increasing popularity of 16:10 is becoming something to consider. 4:3 is more common for the time being, but in a few years it'll probably be the other way round. Shame LCDs still have horrible upscaling differences... perhaps it'll standardise eventually.

If you are bitterly old school and need to use 320x200@4:3 and 256 colour for authenticity, at least be aware of the fact that it's a rectangular pixel mode, even if you aren't going to switch to a similar display mode to draw the graphics.

Yes, do delete old messages unless you desperately need them. Every member having hundreds of PMs is a waste of space. Use email and IM for extended communications.

As long as you can compile exes with the editor it should work fine, the game is compiled to a special AGS format and appended to a precompiled AGS engine, so there shouldn't be a distribution problem.

As for AGS 3.0 on .net, it has come up before. I'm not sure how good mono's compatability is these days, but in any case it wouldn't work on pure mono because there's still some native Windows code there in a dll.