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I have to agree with CJ.  I can't tell the difference between a highly fragged drive and a freshly defragged one.

All those make sense to me except Contemporary.  What does that mean for an adventure game?

It's come to #AGSers' attention that, although there's a page about it on the main AGS site, a lot of forumites don't even know the IRC channel exists. If Radiant didn't, then anyone might not! So I'm putting this sticky here for a few days. Maybe we'll get a few newcomers.

#AGS was started over 5 years ago on Quakenet, it's been in constant use since, and averages about 20-30 people online (though half of those will be idle). It is now on its own server (irc.adventuregamestudio.co.uk) and has a bot called Roger. It's a general discussion channel, which is why I put this thread in GenGen, but there's also a tech help channel, #agstech, which unfortunately doesn't have many people to help, currently, perhaps some tech forum people would like to come there and help me help people.

AGS IRC Wiki page

Server: irc.adventuregamestudio.co.uk
Channel: #ags
Some recent stats: http://www.americangirlscouts.org/pisg

If you'd like to come, there's a guide on the site.

I haven't used a pda browser, but browsers like Opera for mobile devices do a lot of work trying to make normal pages display acceptably on tiny screens. I think as long as you don't do anything too unusual they're going to work ok.

It's quite surprising to me that some browser stats pages say there are more people running in less than 1024x768 than above it. So if I was being paid to design I'd have to make sure that it was viewable at that resolution without too much scrolling. I don't think it's a good idea to consider any resolution a standard, although half of people do use 1024x768.

I use a reasonably high resolution (1800x1350 or something) because I use a 21 inch monitor. Not the ideal resolution to view most websites, but I guess if you chose to use a high resolution, you get used to reading 40 word long lines in smallish fonts... it'c certainly better than viewing in a window. My mind can't deal with so many things on screen at once. You're right about the visible area varying a lot. I tend to browse with a sitebar extended, so currently I'm typing this in a brower window with a visible area of 1477x1244.

Must suck to be a webdesigner. Fixed size designs only look good around the resolution they're intended for, and proportional designs suffer from rounding bugs and no end of other headaches. Whenever I do some webdesign all I can think is "there HAS to be a better way than this!"

I don't think it'd affect the ease of use of the script language for newbies very much, they don't use the OOish stuff as it is, except that I think Strings and new style Characters and so on are slightly easier to use, especially with the autocompletion. The main benefit I think new language features would have on newbies is in using modules written by other people. Ã, A few things I've tried to write in AGS script have become too much trouble, or effectively impossible, due to language limitations. Writing, for example, a custom dialog system, becomes so much easier if you can simply make a ConversationLine class with a dynamically sized list of suboptions, and subclass it for different scripted responses to lines.

I don't think these features are essential either, and if it's really difficult to implement in AGS script, well... ignore that request, but it'd rock for a lot of us I think.

On C++ being an OO language or not... it's designed for writing very object oriented programs, that's good enough for me. Ã, Java is a bit more of a pure OO language. Ã, You could say that Ruby is purer OO still. Doesn't really matter to me, I just like having the features there to write understandable and extendable programs.

Also I didn't take offense at you saying it was an excuse for not making games, I didn't quite know what you meant.  You're right in some ways, a lot of the tech forum module authors probably won't make games... it's not a big problem, as long as they're producing something others can use, I think My work with AGS is mostly as an artist anyway.  Should have something out this year...

Yes, you're right Jet, early 90s games tended to be written in C... the object oriented languages we use now mostly weren't standardised back then.  Just about every game written today will have been written in an OO language.  I know it can be hard to get for a beginner coder to see why, I certainly didn't get it for a while, but it makes programming most things a lot less painful.
Note that in the source for any big game written in C you'll probably start to notice hacky object oriented patterns, even though the language isn't tailored for them.
I think anyone that codes extensively with AGS would appreciate more along the lines CJ has introduced.  Those that don't like OO coding can always stick to plain old functions and variables.

Staying at AGA's there aren't really any required costs, besides what minimum amount you can spend buying food at the shop.  I'm not sure what sort of stuff people would like to do... hopefully nothing too expensive because everything is going towards mittens for me too.  We have a house, so there's always stuff to do/watch/play if people want to skip out on some things.

I played the European version, Fahrenheit. It's quite a tame game compared to the two you listed. The sex scene is quite funny and blurry, and not exactly something I'd shelter my hypothetical children from, but it's not even present in the US version as people said. I would hope that you wouldn't get into trouble for playing this game.

Sure, just... return a String.

String example() {
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  String a = "Hi there!";
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  return a;
Ã,  Ã,  }


Edit: I just realised that might look odd if you're used to only seeing AGS functions declared as "function name(arguments)".Ã,  Functions are actually declared like in most C like languages: "returntype name(arguments)", but to make things more readable for newbies AGS has #defined "function" to "int" somewhere in a header. So "function name(arguments)" is identical to "int name(arguments)".

There's no public AGS decompiler, but if it's an old enough version of AGS I think CJ may be able to bring the game source back to life. Ã, If it's newer, it's not possible to get back the game code...
The only stuff I know how to get back from a compiled game, currently, are the sprites and music from vox files... but it's not like I've tried hard to get them, perhaps CJ can get your backgrounds out too.

I'm not sure what the problem is from that, perhaps you could post the actual commands you're using, and the full error messages produced.Ã,  That'd make helping easier.

I'd recommend getting an IDE too... especially when you code larger programs than one file. I used to use Netbeans, and I liked certain things about it, but it's so amazingly slow for me, and certain things about the newer versions bug me.Ã,  If you want a big, featureful IDE I'd recommend Eclipse (Which you can use for languages besides Java, but Java is the best supported), or for a simpler one, try JCreator LE.

Pedantically speaking, the Windows command prompt shouldn't be called a DOS window. It's a Windows program and so are most of the commands you use in it, so it's simply called the command prompt.

I'd like to eventually see a new version of AGS, presumably called AGS 3, that doesn't attempt to maintain backwards compatability, so we can have things like:

Resolution independant code, no 320x200 coordinate system.

Rather than using allegro, introducing a more abstract rendering system, so we can plug in a hardware accelerated graphics one, or system specific ones, for easy ports.

TTF rendering, unicode strings... no more hacking for people trying to write in japanese or hebrew whatever.

Expansion on the script language's OO features... (useful) inheritance for structs, virtual functions, perhaps some sugar like operator overloading... possibly a tall order, but I feel like I'm really wrestling with the language if I'm trying to write anything beyond the basics, like a reusable module.Ã,  On the other hand I can understand if this didn't get put in, AGS script is for scripting AGS games... which it does pretty well at the moment.

Also in the script: structures such as dynamic arrays, and dictionaries, being able to dynamically create managed/reference counted user structs, and refer to them with pointers. Access to dialog trees.

A switch for people that script, so they jump straight to the script editor, instead of the interaction editor.


Just rattling off stuff I think would help AGS grow in the future. I think most of these suggestions would help module authors add more things to AGS, more easily.

The best one of those things would be VLC media player, which is a great backup player for all formats.

Hey, my penis is 9 drives long! 10 when I have the camera plugged in.

Ok... enough with the drives already.

We have Best Character Art and Best Room Art and Best Animation.Ã,  The reason there isn't a voice acting award is because there aren't enough AGS games released with voice acting each year.

Perhaps you should have looked at what categories there are before starting a thread asking for more?

I think this would certainly be more effective than the thread, which I always saw as somewhere to direct people to when we really want to say "Nobody wants to be on your team, nobody even wants to read about you needing a team, go and post somewhere nobody will read!".  Can anyone offer some success stories about games they made with random people from forums that they never spoke to before? We seem to have trouble doing that even if we know the people... I'm wondering if it'd even be worth having more/any facilities to hook up teams like that.

Oh, yes, most sites are very poorly designed for high res... you get used to it.

It's mostly missing alt text for images and some unescaped special characters, nothing major...
I think a user survey on the download page could be useful for CJ, as well as us game developers.

Edmundo, maximise fails at high res in windows? Not sure what you mean by that, I run most things full screen at 1856x1392, including my web browser, just fine.