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How many commercial games are there now? Dave has three, Himalaya have one, and Herculean have one. I think there are a few more. It's probably less than 10 though.

It doesn't seem to me that the commercial games are very different to the non commercial so far. All are made by semi amateur teams, and although commercial releases tend to be better quality than average, they aren't in a totally different league. On the other hand I do think that if people want to, it could be a good idea for people to mark their released game threads as commercial or not, for those who are more or less willing to buy games. A new forum for it would be nearly empty, so I wouldn't go for that, but a special category listing on the games DB could be helpful.

A commercial project has organised to give money to CJ for special support/features before, but on the whole he's not been interested in that kind of thing. He has a regular job, and indie adventure game dev isn't exactly a big money spinner.

The important property of quantum computers is that their registers are not necessarily holding a 0 or a 1 until measured. They can hold a quantum superposition of both. This lends them to a whole different class of algorithms, some which solve things much more quickly than a Turing computer (for example integer factorisation, which is assumed to be difficult, and the basis of a lot of cryptography, has a very efficient quantum algorithm). When you read the algorithm result off the registers it may well be wrong, but repeated runs will near certainly get you to the right answer to whatever probability you're happy with.

Neat sounding idea, popular with sci fi authors and academics alike, but they aren't necessarily good replacements for a traditional computer, and nobody will be making really useful programmable ones for a long time.

In conclusion quantum computers have nothing to do with cooling your video card.

"I know nothing of Direct X, but rather than having genuine full screen anti-aliasing, couldn't it be achieved through alpha-blended sprites as it is now, but with smooth scaling?"

Yes, you're basically right, there's no need to do FSAA, the alpha + smooth scaling approach should work right. And of course scaling + alpha channel is nothing for 3d hardware. FSAA doesn't help much on sprites anyway, it's meant for reducing jagged edges on geometry by supersampling. On a sprite there's nothing to supersample at 100% or greater, and at lower MIPmapping is a fast, and often better effect.

3D apis will autogenerate mipmaps and texture filtering on a per texture basis, so it's easy to have the "Smooth scaling" option in setup govern that.

Edit: Yeah a Geforce 2 is old, but it's fairly powerful and should run games in D3D a lot faster than software mode, if the shader was optional.

Of course it is, even gmail is still in beta! Nothing leaves beta on the Web 2.0.

I've had the same ICMP message from all kinds of programs. I got it from the Knytt Strories editor yesterday. I assume it's some kind of false alarm that a few different firewalls get.

Yeah, but it would still be more friendly to the Linux/Mac version if OpenGL was used for the 3D acceleration purposes instead of D3D. It's virtually the same in terms of functionality to D3D, but is cross platform.

If it was based on OpenGL it'd port relatively easily to any OS, consoles, phones, handhelds, all kinds of things... being hardware accelerated on all of them.

As for Irrlicht, yes, that would be a bad idea, it's not relevant for AGS purposes.

It's not labelled either way, but yeah I guess the reason the reports are put up on their site is to drive traffic. The only mildly suspect thing it found is that whoever submitted the scan ran the exe right out of the archive, in a temporary directory. Seems a bit strange to flag that, but oh well, it's nothing to worry about.

These are the symbols that the text editing component AGS uses puts in for unprintable ascii characters. You can look up the actual values they correspond to: http://www.asciitable.com
They have no real purpose for ags scripting, unless you wanted to use them as control characters in a module perhaps.

It's probably too much to ask to make this compatible with the DX5 graphical plugins, which (although I've written a couple of graphics plugins) is a perfectly fine compromise as far as I'm concerned.

A readonly property can't be changed because it doesn't provide a write function. It's not a case of AGS blocking access so much as not providing it, probably for good reason.

In AGS an object's Name never changes at runtime currently (much like the ID), and it's likely the engine expects it to stay that way, otherwise it'd provide access. The point of extender methods is only to look tidier. You can't do anything with them you couldn't before.

Rui, :: is the "scope resolution operator" in programming languages such as C++. It's used to refer to things in particular structs/classes/namespaces. Just means "Name" that is a member of "Object".

I can see a slight advantage to that, but like CJ said, this is only a real problem if you're doing a lot of big rawdraws every frame. In the kind of situation you might predraw some static things in another room it's going to be barely noticable.

Rawdrawing onto sprites sounds more useful, GarageGothic's hack of drawing to the screen then capturing that to a sprite sounds a little messy.

Yeah, that would be a better compromise.

It does seem unavoidable unless a very different tint effect was used. Most games don't use tinting though, so the pixel shader requirement would only be for games that do, right?

A lot of AGS game players will be on older hardware, perhaps the AGS effect can be cloned in PS1.1? Doing HSV conversion for each pixel seems to run out of temp registers (is that what's making it require PS2.0?) but since the tint is the same for the whole sprite you may as well precalculate that bit, set it as a vertex colour and scale it by the luminance of the sprite pixel, something like

Code: ags

sampler s0 : register(s0);

float4 main(float4 tint: COLOR0, float2 tex : TEXCOORD0) : COLOR {
	float amount = tint.a; // getting tint amount from the vertex colour alpha
	float4 pixel = tex2D(s0, tex); // supplied colour should be the RGB equiv of the HSL value, with 100% L
	float lum = dot(pixel, float4(0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0)); // get lum from the image
	return tint * lum * amount + pixel*(1-amount); // scale the tint by the luma and blend it with the original sprite
}

the vertex colour supplied for object.Tint(are, g, b, sat, lum); would be HSLtoRGB(RGBtoHSL(are,g,b).h, 100%, lum) with the alpha set to sat. I might be way off the mark, but that looks similar to AGS's tint at a glance.

Edit: txt filter doesn't like "r"!

I haven't noticed a slowness on the site since the server switch. Am I the only person that it's totally fine and fast for, all day, every day?

It would make it more easily possible on one level (especially if plugin authors or script can get some access to the 3D context) but AGS is a 2D engine. Trying to impose 3D characters on top of gameplay code written for 2D rooms, hotspots, and so on, is very awkward. Anyone serious about doing a 3D game shouldn't really be using AGS or any of the other primarily 2D game engines. They're just not suited to it.

AGS's HSV style object tint isn't possible with fixed function 3d, and since fragment shaders aren't going to be a safe option for some time, it'll have to be done the way it is, unless people accept a switch to a different blending effect. Probably the most likely candidate available is the ModulateX2 texture operation, because it lets you overlay colours, darkening and brightening, but it can't control saturation so it's not as useful.

3D based approaches are a lot faster than directdraw on my PC, but that will vary with the hardware.

I think the size issue will need to be worked around, there are even cards that won't take a 1024x1024 texture (mostly old PCI ones or onboard, at least).
Most new cards are ok on 4096x4096 but earlier geforce cards go up to 2048, older ATIs and onboard stuff up to 1024, many PCI 3d cards had a 512x512 or lower cap, but hopefully nobody is running those anymore.

I don't think it'd be too bad to have some graphics functions specific to each rendering backend, it seems unfortunately necessary if people want to take full advantage of things.

Raw drawing and the like is often slower when you are working with 3d surfaces. For games that don't do pixel level operations there will be a massive speed up (if it was slow to start with), but if you're doing anything fancy... well... you may want to stick to the old methods. Perhaps some day when the 3d renderer is more established, some of the drawing can be exposed.

That "bitmap too large for texture memory" thing is a bit of an issue, though. What is the current limit? Many older/cheaper cards can't handle over 1024 pixels wide, and a background can easily go over that. Perhaps some splitting will be necessary.

Nice work so far though CJ, this is definitely worth it.

I'm confused, do they use the terms DSL and broadband to refer to different things in other countries? What do people mean by DSL being slower than "broadband"? Anything faster than dialup/ISDN is usually called broadband anywhere I've come across the term, cable, DSL, satellite, whatever. DSL and cable are comparable in speed in my area (up to ~22mbit, but less is cheaper).

As for installing wifi, $200 seems excessive... if you buy less expensive hardware online a router and three wifi PCI cards shouldn't be more than $80 (35 for the router, 15 each for the cards). Wifi PCI cards should be fine in your old computer, as long as it's running Win 98 or later. It'll be somewhat more at UK prices, those are US ones.

Specifically, if you're going for ADSL you'll need one of these and three of these which is £53.50 total. Many ISPs will give you a free wifi router, so you may only need to get the cards.

If you don't want to spend the extra on wifi, a few cables and an ethernet switch will cost nothing and will also work with your old PCs.

Nacho, it has been a big thing for ages. People just don't like to question someone that has been around for a long time I guess, to their faces...

Rui, if we didn't lock and delete useless threads, the forum would be even worse than it is, believe me... ignoring stuff is a bad approach to keeping things working. Unmoderated forums die fast. Like littering, it's about the cumulative effect.

I don't think this question is too bad, at least it's related to game making perhaps, so I wouldn't have gone off at Yufster on this occasion, even if she has been using the forums as a personal google for the past few months.

Yes, yes, the reaction is funny considering Yufster destroying people's well intentioned threads. I think this discussion is probably done now. Probably best to lock it if it continues as it is.