Messages

Yes it is only a placebo.

There are a lot of free software programs for generating this stuff by the way, just search for them. Of course it's total nonsense, but that won't stop people falling for the pay service scams. Doesn't matter to me if people want to try it, but don't pay anyone.

With a video capture device you'd be capturing the same pixels as if it was scaled up from 320x200 with a nearest neighbour scaling filter, the only difference is you'd also be getting the degradation associated with DVD or VHS.
I should have made it clear to use a nearest neighbour filter rather than a bicubic one, because bicubic looks terrible on pixel art.

Your game is 320x240 if you capture it in a window or full screen, it makes no difference, and it'll look identical projected as a full screen video. So there's no problem with capturing a window and then scaling up to whatever resolution they require with a video editing/encoding program. It's the best you can do, and it would generally look better than going via VHS.

The positive reason for that (asides from dots look like we're doing OO code, cool!), is that partitioning the related static functions and data makes them easier to find. It's a slight improvement, with the autocomplete and stuff, and CJ already did it with classes like Room, Game, and so on, so it's consistent.

Media.PlaySound(id) is a bit ugly to me, because while the benefit of knowing all the sound functions start with Media is there, it's negated by the function being more annoying to type. Something like Sound.Play(id) is fine, though.

I think CJ has already said he has no intention to rewrite the engine in to use .NET, but I wouldn't mind a few of your suggested script features, implemented in C++.

Dynamically sized containers for the script, certainly, the array stuff is harder to understand, makes code more complicated, and wastes space.  Along with that if objects, characters, etc could be constructed with the script, and methods overridden and added, that'd be great.

I don't see any reason to hide the useful properties of the AGS objects, it's shorter to write things without a load of getX() and setX() pattern functions. They're reasonable in Java or C++, to prevent reliance on a particular implementation, but not so much for a scripting language with property support like AGS (when you say cEgo.x you're calling a function internally already).

On the other hand, the inconsistancies in capitalisation style and so on can improve of course.

Basically for this theoretical AGS 3 I'd suggest dropping AGS script entirely. It feels oppressive coding in a statically typed C clone when it's going to be interpreted anyway, and it'd be fairly difficult to add some of these features to a statically typed language. Squirrel is pretty good low footprint script language, supporing classes, polymorphism, dynamic containers, tables etc, and is probably easier to learn than the current stuff. There are lots more pre made languages to consider though.

Serialising things for saves... well, I don't see a reason to use a full general purpose object serialization library, it'd probably make for much larger save games than just saving the necessary data. The reason they exist is for convencience and speed of development, rather than efficiency. As long as saves work I don't think it matters a lot.

Since you say you did want to stir things up for the hell of it, even after people address your points sensibly, and since you clearly haven't used AGS to any great extent (and judging from your Game Maker forum posts, you haven't got a lot of experience with that either), I don't see any point in letting the "controversy" unfold. Any more continuation threads will be deleted. I think that's fair enough...

The thing about the Game Maker forums is that people are generally a lot younger than here, and there are a large amounts of silly, childish threads. It's unfortunate, and there are of course a lot of good people there. But (I'm hoping) not many people here want to argue about such petty things just for the fun of it...

Well since you are being relatively polite...

I use AGS because simply I'm working on an adventure game. AGS performs all the tasks that game needs perfectly well, which would make me or the person I'm working with scripting all the necessary AG parts (AG characters, pathfinding, GUI systems, etc etc) kind of redundant.

I still do use GM... lots of people use it Ã, for prototyping (mostly action) game ideas, even my game design lecturer is a big fan, it's especially nice for that. I wouldn't usually decide to use it for a full game these days because it doesn't really take much more effort to code a game in a "proper" language for me anymore, and it'd be more efficient and portable that way.

I can't really see why you'd draw such direct comparisons personally... AGS is ideal for making point and click adventures in the early 90s style. GM was made as a tool to help people to learn to make games in a quick and easy fashion, it's geared towards action games but not any particular game mechanic, so you need to script a lot of basic gameplay code before anything comes out. Different approaches, both have their uses...

I'd vote for mid June, about the 15th is ok for most people in Uni I've heard. I think it's far away enough from Mittens.

I don't mind Taff's Well again, but if there's another place I'd also be interested in that, because I prefer to move it around to places I haven't stayed.

You mean something like this?

String lines[100];
File* textFile = File.Open("file.txt", eFileRead);
if(textFile==null) AbortGame("Can't find text file.");
int i=0;
while(!textFile.EOF && i<100) {
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, lines = textFile.ReadRawLineBack();
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, i++;
}

That's also fairly similar to how you'd do it in C++ without using the Borland specific TStringList class.

Compared to Runaway, AGS has mainly one limitation, and that is that it doesn't do 1024x768. The highest resolution is 800x600. Note that the images you linked to aren't full size in game images, they've already been scaled down to around AGS resolution. As long as you're ok with that drop, then AGS is fine for these sorts of graphics.

Vince was taking about 1up, the gaming blog arm of Ziff Davis media, their PC games mag being Games for Windows.
Just another example of how games mags are obsolete Even their own content gets on the internet first.

No, you need to make a new user if you particularly want that.

Safer? Yes, generally windows has become safer, XP has a much better security system than 9x, Vista's security architecture is certainly a leap ahead of XP. Encouraging people not to run with full privs is a good step. Will there still be viruses and stuff? Sure.

Easier? Maybe, certainly not harder, Windows still works pretty much as it always has.

Prettier? Of course that's a matter of opinion, but you can disable whatever you want if you don't like it. Moving GUI rendering to the graphics hardware is a good step, in my opinion, and will reduce the burden on your CPU.

Would I pay for it right now? No, but it's not evil. It's just another Windows release.
It'll be several years before we're forced to upgrade because software stops working on 2k/XP, no need to panic.
I do plan to move to a free operating system when it suits me. Maybe that'll be before I upgrade to Vista, maybe it'll be after.

The most annoying thing I can think of when it comes to Vista is the DX10 exclusivity. That will push high end gamers to it over the next few years, even if they don't particularly want to go.

Linux isn't an option for you if you need to run many commercial software products.

What are you scared of with Vista? No, of course it won't do anything to your legal mp3s... or even illegal ones. DRM is only a bother to you if you buy stuff that requires the DRM, for now.

You can buy Macs lots of places, check any major computer web store, or head into PC World and take a look. They're not in as many shops as Windows PCs simply because they're less popular. On the other hand, you can find Apple iPods everywhere, and Microsoft Zunes? Well, ok, nobody has tried to find a Zune.

I see what you are getting at though, I too wouldn't buy into a general computing platform that one company controls, too used to the PC, with its thousands of hardware choices, and highly competitive market. But I have the choice not to so it's not a monopoly.

I wonder how long until I have to rename this thread "Lets have another Mac Vs PC Debate!"

Backgrounds are stored with gif like compression, sprites are stored with RLE compression if enabled. Not amazingly good compression schemes, but effective on graphics with a lot of flat colour and fast. The games still zip down a lot further.

Not currently, no. Anyone else can run it if they want.

If you can't watch your HD DVD on your perfectly capable computer then that is a restriction, not everyone wants to buy a seperate device. I don't have a dvd player, I have a computer that plays dvds.

Coincidentally, today people released the first unrestricted pirate HD DVDs to the internet, and the program for decrypting them. They'll never beat the pirates, and it's sad that even moreso than before, the people buying the things are the ones that are suffering from the DRM. A pirate will be able to play the videos off their hard drive or disc drive, in open source players, on any device they like, any graphics card, to any monitor, they'll be able to stream the video around the network as they like or recompress it etc. Whereas a legitimate user is struggling because their monitor doesn't have trusted graphics card drivers or any number of other problems.

I don't blame MS for this one, though, it's the fault of the HD DVD consortium and the movie studios. MS don't really have a lot of choice but to support the security systems, same as any other player device.

Can't you run it at all in Mono (on linux)? I don't know how good the forms support is currently, that was very much in progress when I last looked at it.

If anything, the shift to .net should make the thing more portable once the open source .net implementations are up to scratch. Might suck for non windows for now, though.

I like the new layout, nice work. Lots of ideas but nothing fundemental, so I'll let you get it more fully implemented for now.

While obviously they'll irritate some people... all programs get those warnings, even Microsoft releases. So it can hardly be an anti indie thing. I think they'd be fine if they would cause people to think about the trustworthiness of what they're installing, but people will get used to clicking through them and it'll be like they don't exist, unfortunately.

On the other hand, the games folder thing is a little bit annoying. If you read the tech forums, CJ already tried making AGS games work with the parental controls, but he hit the digital signature problem. While the majority of AGS game players wouldn't care about that, it's not a great gesture to the indie community.