Messages

Like the previous bg, this is unfinished and isn't a valid entry (missing items, mainly, but also doesn't really have a real walkable area). I just didn't read the rules when I did this, and I am too busy to add the items today...

What's unbelievable? It's a discussion about game consoles. On the internet. Props to those keeping the SNES vs Genesis arguments alive in 06 though... true fanboy soldiers! C64 Ã, > Speccy, btw.

I want a Wii so bad, but mostly so I can hack it and make games for it... the input device is a dream for me - should be for anyone interested in game design. I'm having fun messing about making games on my DS but this would be another level entirely.

Amsterdam to Toronto in July is about 561 USD (on kayak.com)
Cheapest I've seen from London is 462 USD.

Paying european taxes and all it'll be a little more, but it's only a bit more than flying to NY in general.

It's certainly not too early! I was going to post asking people to try and sort it out again. $2000 for the week is great if it can sleep that many sounds like a good location, doesn't sound too hard to get to.

Eric, they're american dollars, but still it's rather cheap. We've paid that much to camp before.

I'll probably attend. Most dates are fine for me, but we should probably work towards fixing some dates sooner rather than later.

"There are knife threats and attacks in schools far more often than guns" Yeah I expect so, that's certainly the case here... I did say large scale knife attacks. If you're a thug that's threatening or attacking one person, or a rapist wandering around at night, then it may as well be a knife. I didn't mean to imply that you don't get violent crimes committed if there are no guns. It's just when it comes to the topic of large scale random psycho incidents such as this school shooting, the availability of better killing tools is the main reason (imo) that they occur more often in America.

As a proportion of total violent crimes these big newsporthy things are pretty insignificant. I didn't mean to suggest anything other than that explanation for the higher rate of these specific types of crime.

Incidentally, 8 times more people are shot to death in america than stabbed to death, a large majority of that being handguns, it's certainly what I'd choose too, if I was violent and had a choice. Just because "people get stabbed here" or "I know how to make a bomb", doesn't mean they appeal to the average nut considering a mass murder+suicide.

There are lots of ways to kill your schoolmates but none quite as easy as guns. You don't, as far as I know, get large scale high school knife attacks, or bombings (lots of hoaxes though). Knives require you to get up close and are easier to run away from, they're a weapon for muggers. Bombs generally require a lot of technical ability, planning, and suspicious ingredients... so you get them but only from obsessives like McVeigh or the IRA over here. It seems clear that available guns do enable a lot of these lone madman massacre type things. Maybe some day some guy will come to school in a trenchcoat and shades with a guillotine strapped to his back, I might be wrong.

This wasn't a teenage "kill as many of your peers" thing like Columbine. It was a crazed adult man killing a lot of young children in a school, which seems very different, so I wouldn't lump it in together with any other shooting that has happened in a school. Something like this has indeed happened in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_Massacre Which is partly the reason why you can't get handguns here anymore, even with a license.

We haven't really had Columbine school shootings though, certainly one big reason is the lower availability of weapons of course. In America lots of people have parents with guns in the house. I don't think teenage life is all that different here, a few would probably blow up like that if they could.

I'm not suggesting america should give up guns... that'll never happen, but it shoudn't be such a surprise that there are crazy people who will do a lot of damage with them.

Yeah uploading doesn't work since the forum move and I can't work out why yet.

It's in Germany (old one was in the US), and it's rather fast! Must be a problem specific to you.

It WAS under maintenance, patching things to the latest secure versions, however there were some complications upgrading the kernel that Hajo couldn't realistically have foreseen, and as you might imagine that's taken a lot of work to sort out. The only time I've seen Hajo taking off this is to sleep.

Generally the websites have been back up for ages now, the IRC server is quite low priority, I believe the plan is to sort that out today though.

It's best for people not to discuss trolls or spam. It takes them time to write the posts yet it's just one click for us to delete their posts, so it's easy to keep under control. Sometimes though, you'll have to put up with there being spam posts for 5 minutes from time to time when we aren't there refreshing the new posts list.

It's only when people start replying or making threads that it becomes some (minor) work to sort out.

Not a fan of list threads, but I'd like to encourage certain people to keep working!

1: Donna
Every time I see him Goldmund says he's still working on it, and it's close to being done, and it sounds greater and greater each time. I want to see it released!

2: Passport
Not many will be aware of this one, but I do hope it's made... very interesting ideas. Adventure game format but with a genuinely innovative gameplay dynamic: wtf?!

3: Oswyn
Won't be a massive game but I think all technical and artistic aspects of it will be up there with the best the amateur scene has put out, and I know a lot of effort is going into the game design. I don't even think the stuff I'm doing for it is bad!

4: Drugbust
Simply a nice setting and idea, with a lot of effort being poured in. Custard and Progz have a strong idea of what they are going for.

5: Time Out
I want to play it because I've only seen fleeting glimpses of things Eric has been doing over the years... it's such a tease.

6: FoY
Of course. Hardly seems worth adding here, I know it'll get made, over the course of the next several years. So I'm not holding my breath, but I look forward to it always.

You don't need to be able to code to do Graphic Design, and even Game Design if you want to be doing the graphical side, I'm doing a degree in Game Design and there's not a line of code involved if you don't want to do any. That said, if you want to be a game programmer then you will of course need to learn to program. It's never to early to learn! I certainly wouldn't wait until college. School can only help you become a skilled professional in these areas, you have to learn on your own time too.

Use whatever you like. Programming isn't about learning a language, but the concepts involved. When you know the major programming concepts well and have written some larger programs you'll be able to jump between new languages pretty easily. All I'd recommend is finding a programming system that you can make working games or other programs in fairly quickly and easily... there's no point toiling away learning C++ if you aren't getting anywhere, because you'll be bored and give up before you learn it.

I suppose for me the progression was basically:

Age 8: C64 BASIC
Age 11: Klik n Play
Age 13: Javascripting
Age 15: AGS and Game Maker
Age 17: Serious languages

but find whatever works for you.

At each stage of that I was making things I thought were neat at the time, and making progress, which is the main thing.

I think the simplified style is fine, personally. I think the repeatedly tiled textures do hurt the image, though, as does the lack of lighting. The grass texture is especially obviously tiled, and that hurts natural features a lot.

So my main recommendation would be to use larger, simpler textures, or no textures, and to render with lights and shadows.

Some more decoration wouldn't go amiss.

It's quite possible to provide a video rendering plugin, I have partly worked on one before. What I wanted was to be able to play videos on room backgrounds. I don't really have time to make it unfortunately... perhaps someone else will.

It's quite tricky though, and I wouldn't attempt it if you aren't quite experienced in C/C++ programming because these open source video libraries tend to have quite complicated and badly documented APIs. The choices would be libavcodec, which can play many types of video and audio (including divx/xvid and mp3), but is quite large in file size and due to the formats it supports has patent issues, or libtheora which only plays theora (a good high compression codec but little used), but is small and has no legal issues.

Even a specially made codec that supported looping and such would be fine by me, as long as it had good enough compression to use in high res games.

From Nikolas: "it seems that most of us here are here, because of nostaliga above anything else." He's right. In some ways I find it unfortunate, but that's exactly the case, and what you'll hear from most people.

It's fine of course, for people to like what they like. It's only unfortunate for me because I'm the same as 2ma2, I mainly play games that look like they have something new to offer. I haven't played any of the Apprentice games, or KQ remakes past the first few rooms... they just didn't seem interesting to me, from all I've heard about them. The longer I think about games the more I see the issues and limitations in the older ones I loved. It's sometimes cringeworthy playing through some of the games I loved as a kid... not that they're all awful, just that they are so obvious to the experienced player, with their dialog trees and fetch quests and generic characters. The few that I still genuinely love stand up mainly because of their fantastic writing, artwork and sense of adventure, which can be enough.

Computer games are the most wonderfully free and engaging medium I can think of, I love being able to work on them, and sticking to some genre conventions bores me to death as a developer and a player. The old adventure games can teach us lots about creating atmosphere, game art, and developing characters in games, but I find them poor examples of engaging gameplay (often devolving to brute force clicking on everything). I think anything made in 2006 that apes them too closely is going to suffer.

I'm also a graphics whore.

I think people are encouraged to delete PMs now and then to help the site. I usually delete if I get to 100 or so.

You can't, the forum doesn't support attachements. You can upload a file to your own webspace and link to it, though.

Personally I wouldn't be too afraid to take on the responsibility, I don't think it's a real big problem having 14 year olds there in a legal sense, in fact we've done it before and if something went wrong we'd take them to a hospital and help them get back home, same as if they were an adult, nobody is going to sue the group of friends they let their kids stay with. We've had 15 year olds at Mittens before.

My problem with it is very few 14 year olds would fit in at Mittens, it's a group of adults ranging from 18 up to 40, and although you may consider yourself a grown up, it's probably not the case. I certainly wouldn't have fit in at mittens very well as a 14 year old. 16 is a pretty low age limit, and to be frank, you haven't been that involved in the AGS community for very long so even if you were 16, I'd consider waiting a couple of years and becoming well known to people before going to a Mittens. Not that it's required to do so, but you'll have more fun if you know people already.

I don't think a younger Mittens meet would work out, because most people under 16 are not experienced enough, or financially able to travel a long way by themselves.

Such a thing would probably easily be cracked out, it's just another key check sequence after all. Mount & Blade, a fun indie action rpg does this, the exe is verified and encrypted until runtime to avoid crackers, you need to be online to play it, and it's updated frequently, and still you can get pirate versions.