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The large majority of hip hop producers I can think of use samples from commercial records, or any other source of audio, only they're sensible enough to do it from either old, obscure releases that nobody cares about anymore, or have a bunch of lawyers to sort it out. Timbaland grabbed something off the internet, which was a bad idea because you really don't want to incite the wrath of the internet. Anything professional records he sampled on there were probably cleared by his lawyers, as with any other big label pop production.

Personally I'd be rather flattered, but legally, you can't reuse or base off any amount of any creative work safely, without permission.

Sure they do... using bot managed accounts on real large email sites is still one of the most popular methods, it helps them get past filters. Obviously nobody can blacklist hotmail or yahoo mail servers, because most mail coming from them isn't spam, so it's not as immediately suspicious. Sending millions of spams out from your web server is just going to get it blocked. Getting your botnet to spam through yahoo accounts is much more sustainable. People rent out their botnets to spammers for that purpose.

For scummvm to work you just need the appropriate data files from the game copied to a folder. Here are the required CMI ones. Are they not available to be copied off the cd?

Funny, AVG must have just started getting that problem, I didn't have any warning when I first installed it, but do now.

http://caverider.com/setup.exe here's the exe. You'll have to turn of AVG resident shield temporarily, unless they fix that false positive.

I don't see how it's completely unlike OROW, if you do both with a team, Andail... The main difference is the time frame. Are you saying you don't learn anything about teamwork and game develpment in a week? I think you learn at least as much in a week of OROW than in a week of ATC... with the exception of long term project management and team politics I suppose.

I brought up OROW because it is similar in a few respects, not at all the same, but it could appeal to some people that want to try ATC, if no ATC happens. As far as I can see the ATCs were not a great use of time for most former participants. Do I have the wrong impression? There were so many people moaning the other times...

Because it seems likely that people will try it again, I'll suggest some stuff I think would help, based on my experiences and all the people seen bitching about their teams on IRC:

Preferably do not have a required dedicated game designer role. If this role exists, ensure that the designer is told they're designing a game for the team, not for themselves. Working on something you aren't interested in isn't fun. If possible, get the team to agree to agree on a basic concept before the competition begins.

Less fixed team sizes and roles in general would help. When you're forced into grouping 5 people it's unlikely all of them are very enthusiastic, and yet you still end up giving them work and relying on them, because they have a job title.

Stee's suggestion about more mini deadlines is probably good. Keeping a lot of the development in public, seeing others work, should hopefully be a motivator. Perhaps encourage teams to keep a development blog?

Any people from the previous competitions have more suggestions? I think with some new rules it could work... maybe.

The spammer would have to have a lot of people working in real time (especially if you put a low timeout on the captcha, say, 2 minutes), but some do that... there are plenty of people who will spend time gold farming in MMOs, posting as friends on forums and social networks, or identifying photos on Mechanical Turk for a pittance, especially in developing countries. Filling in CAPTCHAS is no worse.
Of course only a few sites are worth targetting in this manner.

Well fair enough, I think the number of failed ATC teams speak for themselves though.
I removed the one room restriction from OROW long ago, but yes, it's a different form to the mid-long adventure game.

Last minute usually isn't as cheap as early, even real last minute, but sometimes you're lucky.
Airlines are really funny about one way flights btw. Try searching returns even if you don't need them. For example when I just searched you could fly TYO-LON on the 25 sep on Thai airlines (via bangkok) for SGD 1406 (£462) including a return in October, according to Zuji.com.sg (I use the singapore site because it lets you search flexibly unlike the others). It might take some long hours of shopping around but I expect you can get within your budget.

I'm fond of short, intense competitions. You can't keep up a sustained team effort for a month, except in very rare cases, but a week is possible, that's why we started OROW. I'd estimate the completion rate is at least 3x that of month+ long comps. If you have a wonderful big game idea, it's not best for a competition, imo. Competitions are the place for short projects you've wanted to try but haven't found the motivation or time for. They give you an excuse to take a short break from whatever else you were doing, and impose an external deadline so you won't drag things out and end up damaging your real projects.

If people want to officially organise into teams for the next OROW I'm fine with that, it's allowed anyway. If there's any interest I may as well run it soon.

This is a very nice look, good work so far. I can see what people are saying about the shadows, but I don't find it too bothersome myself.

I thought Albion too, does it start on a spaceship before travelling down to the alien planet?
It's not perfect but it's a game worth trying out if you haven't.

If it was at the stage where people felt it was ready for feedback it'd be posted.
I wonder how it got into google...

I second the idea about putting the 3+ games past second or third reviewers. It seems manageable.

I agree the bias towards rating things low is an issue. While most AGS games are quite poor in the greater scheme of things like those of any hobbyist game making program, I think people realise this, and we don't need to reinforce it by marking lots of stuff low. On the other hand, the massive amount of awful in the games database is the main reason why the cups system was discussed, and the one cup rating is there to say something is a test game, or unplayable. There are a lot more unplayable games than awesome games.

Things are mostly rated by one person each right now, which is one reason for the sometimes odd results if you compare one game's rating to another. I hope they intend to do another pass with each other's game selections and average things out, but it depends on manpower I suppose.

It's just an editor's rating on a single website... you're acting like it's a big deal. If you have a major problem with a specific rating, fine, I'm sure the panel will be willing to take a look at it. I think the ratings that are there seem generally useful, though. As for the making or breaking a game stuff, if you rely on the AGS games database to drive your traffic you're really not getting close to as many players as you could, 5 cups or 1 cup.

I think it'd take about 10 minutes to write a script to bypass this in its current form. A grid of colours is far easier for a computer to recognise than letters... more colours will only make it harder for the user, while being no more difficult for the computer - why would people think a computer is going to have trouble with more colours? It can accurately distinguish between millions, can you? . The only way this captcha could work is if nobody is trying to hack it. Which will be the case on most small sites, but if nobody is trying to hack it you may as well just make people type in 3 unobscured a-z characters, that's probably easier for most people.

Any slight complication of your forms will deter most automated form spamming bots. However, if you want a particularly robust captcha for a high traffic site it unfortunately has to be a slightly irritating one, at the moment.

Also, picture recognition captchas sound nice in theory, the main problems with them are noun guessing (is it a pistol, a handgun, a gun...? Like in IF - and this is made far worse for non native language users) and limited picture stock. If you only have 10,000 pictures it won't take long for a spammer to note them all. Even if he only has 1/5 of the images in a database, that's enough to send a bot to work.

It was mostly only funny because it could be quoted out of a tabloid newspaper.

My picture isn't of the sun, it's of nearby light sources of various sizes. Sorry if it's not clear enough from the shape of the shadow that the light is fairly close to the object, and not a 150 million miles away. The sun does occupy a relatively small area in the sky, so its shadows are indeed quite sharp. Usually between the first and second images in a typical scene.

Bounced light:

As Azaron pointed out, there's no reason for bounced light to become the opposite hue to the lightsource. Bounced light takes on the apparent colour of what it bounced off (which is why you see things that colour in the first place). There's currently a lot of green light pouring upwards through my window, because of the way the sunlight is on the grass here in the morning. People do often backlight things with a complementary colour though. It's common in the real world (diffuse blue sky light vs yellow sunlight) and creates a contrast. It's not bounced light so much as ambient light in that case.

Shadow hardness:

The hardness of a shadow is defined by the distance the shadow is from the shadow casting edge, and the size and distance of the light source. A perfect point light would only make hard edged shadows (directly), but real world lights generally have some noticable area. Essentially it's about how much of a light source's area is obscured at a particular point on the surface. Imagine you are looking at the light from that position on the surface. What percentage of the light's area is blocked? As you walk into the shadow, more of the light source is becoming invisible to you, so it gets gradually darker. The smaller the light source the faster this happens, and the harder the shadow is.



Obviously as the shadow casting edge gets closer to the surface it's casting onto, the shadow becomes harder and harder.

You can construct the shape of the shadow with perspective rules, but luckily in most cases you should be able to eyeball it. Lower lightsources equal longer shadows of course...

I'm not sure what your problem is, but it isn't enough just to type that in the windows Run dialog, what you should do is:

Open a command prompt by typing "cmd" in the Run dialog.
Change directory to wherever you have extracted the pyopengl files, dos style (cd c:\temp\pyopengl for example)
Type the "setup.py install" command (the majority of libraries install using this command, unless they have standalone installers)

If there are any errors at least this way the window won't close straight away, and you'll be able to say what they are.

Edit: also be aware of the dependancies listed on the installation page, you'll need those before you install.