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I think it's a worthwhile point that most people are very insecure and that the mass of personal information becoming increasingly easily collected (even outside the internet) is something that should be taken seriously.

The rest.. well, I don't think you're serious about it all either Conspiracy theories are fun to think about, sometimes.

For example, I wonder what people think that the security services would put into Windows... remote administration maybe? With all the hackers inspecting the code for little flaws like exploitable buffer overflows it doesn't make sense to think nobody would spot some massive security flaw like that. Compromised encryption algos? Makes more sense I suppose, but people don't encrypt their data with MS products usually, and the stuff used on the internet is the same for all systems.

Google doesn't control a majority of the searches actually, MSN is the biggest search engine, presumably because it's the IE default page for people that don't know how to change it.
Yes, all marjor search engines log your searches along with your IP, like the AOL ones that they unfortunately released a while back. If you don't like it don't use a search engine, or browse anonymously via Tor or something similar.

What's your point about skipjack? Who uses skipjack?

Also, most internet traffic travels over a few backbones with no encryption. The security agencies can easily tap into that, doesn't matter what google stores so much, so if you're extremely paranoid then yes you should encrypt all your communications. But then, some hardcore paranoiacs would suggest that the NSA have magic mathematicians from space that have broken all the publically known algorithms. They probably shouldn't use the internet at all.

It's a game programming platform for the 360, with ability to compile the same source for PC too. It is based on C#. No, it's not worth trying unless you're desperate to make a game for your 360.

IIS, assuming you are running one of the supported operating systems (2000, XP Pro, 2003, Vista...).

No, I can't really run it this week, so it's not. Unless someone else wants to.

I tried to stay true to the outlines as possible. Yeah you can't really see the object, I'm not so good at pixelling. It's cheese on a hook.


11 colours

Very few AGSers have bothered with promoting their games, and most games go unnoticed by many external reviewers, so if you're concerned about it try telling them about the games. FoY gets a lot of promotion because people remember the Indy games fondly, and it's a well made fan game. The Ben Jordan games, and the Apprentice games, or anything Yahtzee releases have their followings, so they usually get noticed too now.

I must admit I haven't seen the games you mentioned, I don't know how worthy of attention they are, but if you consider them very good and want to share them about then maybe send a link to some review sites.

Personally I wouldn't bother because I don't care enough about gaining a large audience, probably a lot of AGSers feel the same way, and that's why we don't do promotion.

Yeah it's pretty stupid, on both sides, I'll lock it (I should have deleted it at the start).

I personally have found Pmdee irritating since he joined, although he's not doing it intentionally, he's too childish. I think the majority of the regular users of the channel feel that way. It's a cumulative effect, and not something you're going to understand from excerpts. It's not like anyone permanently banned him. I wish he'd take notice of all this and try to tone down the "I'm bored" "Someone hourgame with me" "Roger madlibs" "I'm bored" stuff. It's not something you can paste quotes about, you'd have to read months of logs to get it.

As for ManicMatt, it seemed like a personal thing for Hajo because he was overly offended by something Matt said a while ago, I don't think any banning is justified, but it was a temporary thing right?

Nacho, you can't really have an opinion on the matter if you haven't seen it, this is the problem with people taking IRC stuff to the forums, there's no point. It seems like pmdee only wanted to cause some forum drama because he couldn't use IRC for a few minutes. Complaining about Nazi moderators will always work...

Assholes, vict0r? It'd probably be better to gain more of a clue about the situation before insulting people...

The thing is, C++ is about the same speed as C. It's also pretty easy for a programmer to use, offering the majority of the language features of the semi compiled languages so there's little incentive to switch to C# or Java, when they do and always will have a speed impediment, smaller or larger. Until commercial games stop competing for bleeding edge performance compiled and optimized languages will be used. In fact, many people still use asm in physics engine cores and graphics shaders.

For most indie games C# or even vastly slower languages are fine, we have plenty of cycles to run 2d or simple 3d games with.

My personal opinion on an XNA AGS, or for other consoles and handhelds is that it's not worth doing it as a remake of AGS for CJ. Making your own from scratch and releasing it for others to use is the only realistic option.

Some money, socks and crap, and a Paint Your Own Mug! kit, comprising of a mug, and 5 tiny pots of paint. I made this


That's about it really.

I wouldn't be surprised if CJ removed links to a game promoting racial violence from the games page, either for ethical reasons, or because it's illegal in many countries (including ours in some circumstances). On the other hand he might decide to keep it, and allow whatever people want to add. The thing about neo-nazis, white power groups or religious fundementalists is that to a normal person their beliefs are so abberant now that they only make fools of themselves when they release things into the public.

If you are a thinking, intelligent person, that wants to make a game about racism, sex, or anything else that some may find offensive there's no need to self censor yourself, just consider something easier if you aren't sure you're up to discussing it in a worthwhile way.

No, they generally aren't, but Microsoft wouldn't give us straight, complete access to their console now would they XNA is built on Visual Studio C# Edition, and XNA games run in the .NET virtual machine like all C# programs. Presumably this is to keep a layer of security around the system to disallow (for example) people loading commercial games via XNA, and to promote Microsoft's C# language.

C# is fast enough to make games in (it's JIT compiled), amd it's fine for the usually less demanding indie games, but it's not as fast as optimized C++ of course, which is what licensed developers use.

PHP alone can't compile to anything but PHP bytecode, but there are programs around that will bind an interpreter (usually in a dll) and the source into a standalone executable, as with most script languages. For php there are a few, such as PriadoBlender or Embeder.

That said, PHP really was designed as a server side hypertext processor, it's part of the name. I wouldn't recommend it for anything except that purpose (actually I wouldn't recommend it for that purpose, but it's the one thing it isn't totally awful at...)

For web programming testing I run apache and mysql on my PC, it's really easy to set up on windows and it's what we have on the server so I have similar config file settings and so on.

XNA is a C# language based system, and Torque X appears to be a rewrite of Torque in C# (or a completely different engine, it only properly supports 2d currently). Perhaps some people have made it possible to compile things in other .net languages and run them via XNA, but AGS is in standard C++. I can't see a port to XNA right now.

Oh, yes, AGS Uploads doesn't work anymore, sorry. Any files you have there will still work though. I'll remove this thread in a few days.

If you look around you can probably find many classical performances in the public domain, or under licenses that allow you to use them in your AGS games, that's usually not the case for music created after the 1920s however.

Flash isn't necessarily limited in terms of graphics, in fact it has some more options compared to AGS: bitmaps that can be easily freely scaled and rotated, vectors that can be antialiased, coloured, textured, transparent etc. The downside to game making in flash is that you need to do a lot more scripting because it wasn't designed specifically as a game engine. There are bits of code about to make game making easier though, and some people like the option of making the game playable in a browser.

Didn't we have this discussion last time? No it's not really... but we can pretend.

I don't think we'd bring back the one location rule, people seem to have a good idea of what is possible in an OROW game now, it worked ok last time.