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The early Sierra style was born in programmer art and was pretty schematic, not much "style" at all. Green grass, blue water, fixed perspectives, rectangles and character templates. When they hired more trained artists, and when digital art had developed to allow it, a lot of games did go cartoony, yeah.

If you're making a animation that's the first thing you think of I suppose, but I would imagine the deciding factor was the comedy theme of most of these games. KQ didn't go cartoony until very late, right? But for Larry, MI, Space Quest, DOTT, S&M it's the obvious choice. The switch to cartoony style was long before high res came along. MI2 was cartoony! Look at most of the character and set designs, they are low res cartoons, that's all.

Are you not installing windows updates? Haven't seen any Messenger Service popups since before XP SP1. You can probably safely disable your messenger service anyway by right clicking My Computer and going to Manage, go to the Services and Applications option, Services, then right click the Messenger service, go to properties, stop it, and set its Startup Type to Disabled. Chances are you don't use this service for anything except recieving spam so it doesn't need to be on.

I do think there's a bigger market for high res games, if you're going to try selling outside the typical indie gamer scene, which is the only sensible thing to do if you want a profit. When you're putting your stuff on casual portals you're competing with things that are at a minimum 640x480, and people do notice, at least going by the forums. Retro isn't generally seen as a positive thing among people that didn't grow up playing games.

Not many indie developers have a lot to invest, but if we could afford it I think the returns would be worth it.

I'm sure we've talked to Dave about it before, he would like to go high res, I know that. It makes a lot of commercial sense. But it would cost him a great deal more, because of the increased amount of work. I think the artists he works with currently are generally pixel artists, and even if they were happy to work higher res, it'd still be a bigger investment of time.

As I say, backgrounds really aren't the problem as much as animation. I could paint a decent 1024x768 background in a similar amount of time to painting a 320x240 one, perhaps a little longer. Characters though... that's another thing entirely.

The biggest problem we face in high res is animation. It's something a lot of people don't like to do in low res too, but when you go high res, especially when it's higher than 640x480, you can no longer push a few pixels this way or that and patch things up afterwards. You need either a traditional animation approach, which requires genuine and consistent drawing skills, or you go for the 3D pre rendered approach, which many people find relatively unattractive. Good 3D animation is at least as hard as good 2D.

I don't strongly agree with any of the arguments from size or speed. It may apply to some people, such as those in developing countries with poor internet connections, but generally I think higher resolutions work better for most people these days, especially those on LCDs and graphics cards that do blurry upscaling.

I fully intend to do high res stuff if I start another adventure game, but I will sidestep the 2D animation issue by going partly realtime 3D. It would be too much work to 2D high res characters.

Every country wastes resources, no country is doing all it can to make the world a better place, that's an impossible expectation. This is all irrelevant when it comes to if the moon landing was for real of course, this thread doesn't need a national pissing match.

Related, one thing I like about the whole space thing is when people talk about the time "we" went to the moon. Like Swedes and Canadians and Brits and Slovakians have in this thread so far. It's nice to see that since the cold war, people think of it as one of the greatest human achievements in general, and not just a source of national pride. I think that makes it a fairly big deal for global culture, even if some people here don't feel that way personally.

I don't think I'd need to analyse it too much to say it wasn't the absolute #1 most pressing issue facing humanity at the time. That's entirely a matter of opinion of course, depends on your priorities. My point was that just because something isn't solving poverty, or whatever you think the biggest issue in the world is, it can still be of some worth.

I know there are side effects from the research that have helped people on the ground, the military, rocket technology for launching civilian satellites, down to providing jobs, all sorts of things. I did say it was a relatively good use of money compared with where a lot of spending goes. And I would agree it was one of the most successful space projects, although I do prefer stuff like Hubble overall, the moon landings were a wonderful feat of exploration.

AP: But the flags did not wave. They never fluttered in the videos or the photos because as you rightly state there is no significant wind on the moon. Look at the videos and see a wrinkly but static bit of cloth hanging from a pole... What sort of idiot would bring a wind machine into a presumably indoors low gravity studio anyway?

Sure there are more important things than going to the moon, it was in some ways a frivalous propaganda exercise but it's still an amazing technological achivement. Compared to all the petty wars, miscalculated policies and exploitative profiteering that has gone on in history, Apollo was pretty cheap and achieved something that inspired a lot of people. And hey, the money didn't even get spent on killing people! It most certainly wasn't the best use of resources... wonderful observation. That means it doesn't matter if it happened or not?

Oliwerko: Yes, but people attempt to defend any poorly supported belief by saying "Hey, you don't KNOW I'm wrong!". Of course... everything we say we "know" is based on our understanding of what we see, nobody is saying there is logical proof that men went to the moon. It's all about the evidence as you say, and acknowledging that there is evidence for both viewpoints does not say anything about the weight of evidence on each side. In the moon hoax case it's so overwhelmingly one sided.
The JFK conspiracy people strike me as more reasonable than the moon hoax people at least... there's more room for reasonable doubt there. I think the mainstream account is the most convincing but there's a lot of room there for something else to happen, sure. And lots of political motivation to do it. So I don't think these people are as ignorant.

You're willing to ignore mountains of evidence just because you like a false theory?

Ultimately, that's the only reason anyone believes in these theories. It's fun! I think the reality is more interesting but I'm not a conspiracy nut.

And why the hell man walked on the moon in 1969 and never after that?

I'm so tired of hearing this! I guess people walking on the moon is only worth remembering the firs time... but people do remember the moon buggy at least. That wasn't there in 1969. To remind people, there were three manned orbits around the moon, then 5 different manned landings, with some failed missions.

Lots of people went to the moon, and it's not that fantastical a thing, considering the amount of money spent, and considering how easy it is for small space programmes to send stuff around the moon these days. Obviously people don't go back anymore because the Apollo program is over, there's no big bad competitor to justify rebuilding it, and nobody would be all that impressed now.

As always the difficulty of making the conspiracy theory work overshadows any difficulty they might had getting people to the moon. There are a lot of people involved in a project costing 24 billion 1960s dollars, lots of people to realise it's all pretend. At the very least accept that if they did spend all that money on making a realistic special effects film they'd have got someone to work out how a flag moves in space.

Arthur, please don't make any more threads until you are 16 years old, or I'll use my hacking device on you.

The hippy approach is much more likely to gain acceptance on the internet, if any unified authentication platform is. One of the bigger pushes was 7 years ago, with Microsoft's Passport, now LiveID, but few web developers wanted to give any organisation the power over their signups. The point of the OpenID/Yadis/LIT approach is that you don't need to trust anyone in particular, which is how good internet protocols tend to work.

All these systems need browser support though, so it'll be some time before it can be mainstreamed.

Personally I don't think the typical html form sign up is a big problem, it's certainly overused on websites that don't need to identify me at all, but it does provide a very small protection against spammers and lazy trolls, for a one off effort. I predict even if an OpenID style service was used on every website we'd still be given hoops to jump through just to make it less easy. Online businesses would love it though, would make tracking people even easier.

Seems like a shame to throw art away. I'm sure you could find someone to continue in the same style, especially if this is still a semi pro project.

Judging by the image you produced, you're not too experienced with pixel art, and I'd say that it'd be quite hard to do anything close to FoA quality without a long time gaining art abilities. If you're happy to produce average quality low res AGS graphics then that's a realitic goal for a beginner, but otherwise you're going to have to find another background artist. I'd look for another high res one if you prefer that style. Actually your high res style appears to be much LESS labour intensive than true FoA graphics.

Radiant is right, a lot of people have considered this before, many times over the years, but I'm yet to see a convincing cooperative design. Even if we assume trustworthy players will agree to play an adventure game for some hours, save together and continue together, it's still tricky.

Imagine three players are doing DOTT style puzzles. How do you avoid all the time people are sitting around with unwinnable puzzles waiting for other people to do their part? And how do you make this feel different to a single player game when the puzzles are mostly solved apart from each other?

If you want coop then seperating players like that would seem to defeat the purpose. So people have tried designing puzzles that require more than one player to solve together, either requiring two or more actions to be performed at once, or giving different characters different abilities (consider Foster and Joey pairing up at times in BASS). This is cooperative, and possible, but tough to do, and it doesn't work if only one person wants to play. There are a lot of issues in AGS that would make it technically difficult too, but of course that could be overcome if there's a concerted effort.

If someone has come up with a great workable design for a multiplayer game then they should post it for discussion. I wouldn't mind writing multiplayer support, but there seems to be little point at present.

You can read and modify the c++ code in whatever text editor you prefer, but yes you'll need both VS and the DX SDK to compile it. The free Visual C++ Express is enough.

If you search for "walk cycle" on google images you'll see some examples of the basic poses you should start with. Once you have those right you can go in and smooth out the animation with more frames, but good keyframes is the most important thing. Animators know them off by heart because walking is such a common thing. There's no shame in using a reference like that, but we could probably do with less paintovers of existing animations.

You're not meant to make managed objects in script, they are for handling internal structs like Characters and Objects, so you can ignore that keyword. You're also not able to take a pointer to a script struct.

The problem with the first bit of code is you also can't use the assignment operator to copy structs, you need to assign each member.

eg

Code: ags

function CreateDoor(this Object*, int WalkToX, int WalkToY, int ToRoomID, int ToRoomX, int ToRoomY)
{
  Doors[TotalDoors].DoorObject = this;
  Doors[TotalDoors].WalkToX = WalkToX;
  ...
}

should compile.

Could you explain exactly what they do in SLUDGE? Is it like the AGS region light levels, but allowing for smoother transitions? Does it do coloured lighting, or just brightness?

It's possible you could work out a way to use your light masks but it doesn't sound like there is a built in way.

Don't know about the tinting colour depth issue.

Well, apart from the sprites this is pretty much already self-documenting; I'm not sure how much more 'public' you could want?

The XML and script files are very handy, but yeah being able to get the sprites from the .spr file reliably, as well as the room masks from the .crms, that's the main difficulty currently.

I was only ever nosing around because my interest was in porting an AGS game to DS, and I haven't looked into it much recently since I broke my DS, so I'm not desperate to work it out.

Alliance: yeah I've tried to explain to people how easy it is to take content out of a game, and how it doesn't matter in the slightest, but that issue is done really. CJ doesn't want to open up the engine for his own reasons, and that's up to him.

Well fair enough then! If you'd rather it wasn't then that's reason enough for me.

No one implementation is going to be portable to all systems whatever language it's in, and Python is far too slow for most handhelds, Java is too slow for many, or unsupported. Python running on a JVM is right out. Most Python games rely on specific C libraries like SDL which have their own platform requirements, and there is no standard Java graphics system (MIDlets on phones are a completely different world to desktop Java games, or games that use one of the Java 3D APIs).

Standard C with a sensibly designed interface for porting is the best approach if you want widest support. Like SCUMMVM. Anyone doing a port to a new device will have to write a bit of C but I don't think it's avoidable.

A C engine effectively rules out J2ME only phones, but you can't please everyone (without a lot of different implementations).

None of this matters of course. Unless someone documents the AGS file formats nobody could produce a compatible engine, be it compatible with exes or sources, and since (although I think they're shooting themselves in the foot) people don't want the file formats to be public, no compatible engine is going to be made.

I almost want to make a game ripper just to get this imaginary barrier out of the way. But of course I wouldn't do that