Messages

You're right, for a small scale game it'd work as a deterant. If you explain along with the download that there's a unique ID. For a big game it'd just be another thing to crack out of the file, but it could be worth trying for people flying under the cracker radar.

Setting it up automatically would be doable, but it's just impractical as a security measure, what you going to do when you find someone's ID on a pirate release? Sue them? All your profit and more down the drain, on trying to get damages from someone, for doing something pretty tiny, that is unfortunately very damaging to your business model...

Obviously it's impossible to stop people from cracking your game and sharing it. On the other hand copy protection will generally increase the time it takes for someone to put it up, and if your game isn't high profile, it may never get cracked. I don't think we need it as part of AGS, mainly because it's a feature that so few would use.

Reinstalling firefox is all I can suggest, I can't imagine what's wrong with it. I use Opera but switching browsers is a big step, probably easier to fix the one you're used to, unless it's IE.

As for Opera's CSS support... well, it's better than Firefox in some ways (and Firefox is better in some ways), and it renders Acid 2 correctly, unlike the other windows browsers. The newer versions are greatly better than older ones, in general. There are still quirks in all rendering engines, unfortunately.

It's because readonly and const are different things. The engine gives no guarantee that the readonly values will stay the same, it just makes sure that they can't be modified by external code. I don't know how many readonly variables that change there are in the built in code, but I've put them in plugins before. It's the same thing as making a "int MyClass::getCount() {return count;}" type function, without a setCount function to go with it, just less to type.

Also it's just not technically possible to allow the compiler to assume that readonly attributes are const and use them as constants in compilation, because all these built in data members and functions don't exist at compile time, they're calls into the runtime engine.

Actually you can, the Java usage is the same as the C++. The Java version of "const" would be "final" (but we're off topic now ).

Difference of terminology I think. Yes, it is a static variable, but that doesn't mean it is defined at compile time, it also doesn't mean it won't change during the game. It just means it's a singular static storage variable rather than a member variable of the Game struct. (the word static makes you think of values that won't change, but actually in C any global variable is by default static).

What you want is a constant, and AGS doesn't support const on variables. For a similar effect we have to make use of #defined values. So basically what you want is for the AGS editor to automatically do some things like

#define AGS_NUMCHARACTERS x
#define AGS_NUMROOMS x

when compiling. Sounds reasonable enough... I thought it did something like this already, but I probably imagined it.

Edit: ah yes, it does the AGS_MAX_CHARACTERS type symbols, but not these ones. They'd be a handy complement I think.

Yeah there's no reason I can think of for it other than they thought it helped graphically... I can't see how it does though. I don't like it or hate it.

Is there no local bus network at all? I'd be surprised if we can't get somewhere nearby on public transport. In Greece we got from Athens to some tiny village on a hill nowhere near a large town by bus. The place you linked is within walk/taxi distance of a town, unfortunately one that's slightly too small to have Greyhound stop at it (they go to the neighbouring town) but I'm sure we can find one somewhere that it's posible to get to without a world of hassle.
Otherwise if there are some legal drivers, rental is an option... we did it in Spain and it wasn't too expensive, but I still think it's better avoided.

It's more than one day now? Some more details would probably help people.

Currently I know the following people are coming:

Zoot
scotch
Creed Malay
Limping Fish

For a day: SSH

[The Epic, Ill Fated Voyage to la Isla del Descubridor (A Genuine Mittens Adventure)]

You want the sea odyssey? Ok! Unfortunately I don't have many pictures and I'm no good at explaining the peril we were in with words, but there's a tiny video that disco took.

The Epic, Ill Fated Voyage to la Isla del Descubridor (A Genuine Mittens Adventure)

There is an island off Benidorm (1), a mysterious sloped rock sticking out of the sea which was created during a sword fight between two giants. As soon as Disco and I saw it from the beach we knew we had to go there. There are two options: the first option is to take the ferry, it costs €10. The second option is to take your €10s and buy a 6 foot, inflatable, orange boat for two (children, under 210 pounds combined) and a pair of oars. We managed to recruit two more people from the Mittens group into our crew, so a few days later we bought two boats and made our way to the sea. The boats and crew were as follows.

Princess Peach*:
- Captain Scotch
- Navigator Disco

The... Other Boat**:
- Admiral Magintz
- Engineer Petteri

We brought with us supplies comprising of water, champagne (to christen the boats with), bread, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, potato chips, salsa, and to avoid scurvy, lemons.
We had to head out to the rocky bit at the eastern end of Playa Levante (2) to be able to escape the tourist safety barriers and get into the open seas. We messed up getting into the boats so that our shoes got wet and some of the bread. Disco and I were off first, and we quickly got the hang of rowing together. Gary and Petteri didn't seem to be doing so well on the rowing front, and we ended up leaving them behind and losing sight of them.

We rowed for a long while, and although the island was getting visibly closer, we realised it was a lot further away than it seemed from the beach. No matter, we weren't going to give up. We realised we were pretty far out for two guys in a children's small boat, so in order not to get any attention from the other big boats out in the bay we would stop and eat some of our picnic whenever they went past, in order not to look in any distress.

After an hour's rowing there weren't many boats about, and we were leaving the shelter of the bay... the waves were getting bigger, and the wind was picking up, making it hard to keep the inflatable boat going in one direction. Now and then a freak wave would take us by surprise, filling the boat up with water. My shoes were wet already, so we used them to bail out water. See video. There were a lot of large orange jellyfish about in these waters... luckily none of them decided to jump in on the waves.

Every now and then we'd start laughing at how absurd the situation was. It was about now that Disco mentioned that he suffered from RSI. We could no longer see the beach, but the sky scrapers of Benidorm were easy to spot over the waves.

We kept rowing... this must have been two and a half hours in... and we were both very tired. We started to realise we were drifting to the west of the island, and tried to counter, but however fast we paddled, we seem to be getting no closer. After a few concerted efforts we gave in to the fact that the wind was too strong and started to head for the beach. Unfortunately the wind was too strong even for that, and we ended up travelling mainly along the coast (3) rather than towards it. Disco was finding it very difficult to row, due to his RSI, and with one paddle I couldn't do much more than turn the boat.

Watching buildings on the coast drift by it became apparent we were going to go around the other end of Benidorm and off to some other town entirely, possibly one in Africa. We'd joked about it before, but now it actually seemed like we were in serious trouble. I felt bad but I had to make Disco row, and eventually we managed to get back into a position where at the worst, we'd hit some rocks and drown. A little bit further and we appeared to be heading for a secluded beach by some hotels, hooray!

But then something awesome happened (4)! We saw a speed boat coming out of the beach, bouncing over the waves. Disco decided to use the "what are you looking at? never seen some people having a picnic on the sea before?" approach again, and started to eat some cherry tomatoes. This wasn't just any boat though, it had red crosses all over it, it was the Red Cross! We tried to contain our laughter as they stopped along side us and pulled our boat into theirs. ¿Habla Ingles? we said. The man did indeed habla ingles and he explained to us that there was too much wind to be in an inflatable boat. Ah, we got it now.. We told him we had come from playa Levante, and he told the guy at the wheel to go there. They were very professional, and we tried to be too. The wheel guy radioed in that he had picked up "dos niños", to which Disco protested "WE ARE MEN!", but he didn't get it. It was so awesome.

We landed at the marina in central Benidorm (5), and a police boat followed us in. They stopped us as we got off and we had to answer some questions. Just our names, and where we were from.

"Where where you born?", asked the policeman to Disco.
"Michigan", Disco replied.

"Mexico", the guy writes on the forms. I don't know if Disco managed to correct him or not. And that was it, we were free to go. When we got onto the street the clock said it was past 5pm, we were at sea for about 5 1/2 hours. We walked back to the camp site with the boat (6), and told them this story and ate the remains of the food. Apparently Gary and Petteri stayed in the area that we set off from, and were eventually brought in by a dutch man's boat, and they got to see dolphins.

It was an awesome adventure and even when we thought we might die, we were having fun.Ã,  It was even crazier than the Brittens Storm Drain Incident. Disco is the best person to be with when you're in trouble. I'd be happy to try again some day, when there's less wind.



* Disco said that if it sank, at least he'd be able to say he'd gone down on Princess Peach.
** What did you two name yours?

Certainly is kind of awkward having someone's family around an AGS meet... I don't know what it'd be like if the family is meant to be part of the meet, but I can't imagine it'd work too well, and when there's a wife and two children for each AGSer present, it's not really an AGS meet anymore. I think the best thing for you to consider is leaving the wife and kids for a weekend and coming to a normal AGS meet, as Alynn considered this Brittens.

I'd probably go, if enough other AGSers were up for it, but it sounds like it'd put a damper on things... not because we'd have to work around kids, just because there'd be too many non AGSers and I'd feel sorry for them being dragged along.

Game fans are not game developers, and whenever they try to be they come off looking pretty silly... right or wrong, every game forum has people moaning about how things used to be better, or are better now, and (most bizarrely) how game developers they were once fans of owe them something today. It's not going to change. The worst thing we can do as developers is listen too carefully to game fans. Even on this forum it's a rare thing when we manage to have a coherent discussion on game design.

Very few people who play games have any clue about how to design a good game, all they remember is that at some time in their lives they liked games like X, which had 2d sprites and dialog like Y and some sort of gameplay mechanic and get fixated on these surface details. It's pretty sad that they list these things as important game elements, and say nothing about what was actually great about the early 90s adventure games. All it shows to someone that thinks about games, like a game designer, is that they aren't worth listening to. It was not the simple look, talk, walk interface, and it was not the (often well drawn) 2d backgrounds and sprites. That's really not what you want to be asking for, think about it.

If any game is going to give you something like the feeling you had playing your favorite p&c adventure game in the early 90s, it's certainly not going to be a clone of them because we've all changed since then. I agree that they had great things to teach us that we can apply to games that we make in 2006, but whoever started this petition hasn't identified what those things are.

I didn't find the drinking too excessive, at least there were plenty of people not involved (along with myself), so there were always people around to hang out with. And most of the time people weren't drinking. It's preferable to talk to people in smaller groups, so I am glad we went and did different things sometimes, I don't think there was a lack of planning.

To Nacho and Lorena: The location and activities of this mittens were great, I loved it. Contrary to what this argument and some of the photos might suggest, drinking was a tiny part of the week in general, and will be less most years... we were in an alcohol fuelled tourist town, what do you expect?

Disco... do you have your videos?

New versions of textbooks are printed every year, so it's not like they wouldn't have anyway, with numerous other small changes. How long it'll take before all the textbooks in schools list 8 planets instead of 9 I don't know... probably a long time because it's not really an important change for most people learning science, it is handy to have a solid definition for such a commonly used word in astronomical circles though.

Anyone that doesn't like it for some reason can keep calling Pluto the 9th planet of the solar system. There are plenty of words that differ in meaning from scientific to common usage.

The consensus was Canada. Probably Ontario... due to the concentration of AGSers, and preferably in either some rich person's awesome house, or a rented place, but not camping if at all possible.
Flights to Toronto are similar or less than those to NYC, so we should be able to manage a decent European turn out... and all the cool North Americans are required to come.

I want it to be mittens again, already.

Easyjet are already allowing it, http://www.easyjet.com/EN/News/down_graded_security_threat.html but there are tighter size restrictions than usual. Also they're still cancelling flights... so far not on our route though.

I'd be surprised if any of the AGS series that are going could make enough money to be worth it, unless your idea of worth it is quite a small sum of money. If someone expects to make about 100 sales through the internet then they might manage that, or a few hundred if you're willing to put in the effort promoting your game, otherwise you need a publisher and nobody is going to publish anything we've made.

Personally I wouldn't pay much for the current stock of AGS games, I do enjoy some, but not so much that I'm dying to play them. On the other hand I do think a lot of our games are better than much of the dross that gets put onto GBA and to a lesser extent DS/PSP platforms... unfortunately we couldn't get someone to publish our games on those platforms if we tried.

Yes I expect almost everyone has heard about it, it has also been mentioned in the Mittens thread, we'll be flying in a few days...
They weren't caught on planes by the way, they were arrested at their homes.

Also, a lot of us have tried to make IF games at one time or another. It's very difficult if you aren't a confident writer, and we mostly give up when we read over our own stuff.

I'm not sure which I prefer, but one advantage of text based games is I can specify exactly what I'd like to do, for example
> BURN YODA MAN