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I imagine the reasons for AGS's compression are historical mainly, AGS originally ran in 256 colour mode, this is a mode jpg doesn't support, and png hadn't taken off in those days, also png and jpg are rather a lot slower to decompress than what AGS does use, which is a form of compression similar to gif, so in the old days AGS would be taking in bmp and pcx background images, and storing them in a fast (on old dos computers) and smaller form of compression.
Another reason why jpg would have been decided against was that jpg pretty much ruins things at 320x200 res, at higher resolutions, which we have now, jpg is often a better choice.  If CJ were to change the internal compression format for backgrounds either switching entirely to png (which does reasonably well on all colour depths and sizes, and doesn't mess up pixels), or giving the option of storing in either png, or jpg (which does very well on what it was designed for, photo like images, many colours), would be great.  Backgrounds aren't generally most of the file size of a game btw, even in high res.  Ogg music and animations comprise a larger part of the filesize in games that have them, but more bg compression would still give a significant space saving. On the downside it'd introduce a small amount of lag between rooms on slow computers.

I'm sure a lot of people here have played it, I played a fair amount but it never occured to me that AGS should be able to do something similar... it's so far outside the AGS realm, and 3D.  I don't think AGS should ever become a general purpose game engine, these are ten a penny, and very labour intensive to use.

irc.bigbluecup.org is the correct, official url, I don't know what your problem is...

I was just implying something both popular and big like KQ2VGA was, I have no idea what whoever is going to do KQ3VGA will end up making.

If there is a virus on the disks you're ok just putting them in to the computer (unless you reboot while they are in the drive and it contains a boot sector virus... if any of those still work), you should also be ok getting documents off there (unless they are say, MS Office files with macro viruses in).  The only way you can get a virus is to execute some code from them, so I wouldn't recommend running any programs that are there.  On the other hand if I really needed to I might risk it, after running them through a recently updated AVG (or another anti virus), I've never seen a virus that got past a virus scanner, as BOYD said, they're added to the virus databases pretty quickly.

Yeah, you'd have to be releasing KQ3VGA to get through that much bandwidth.

"If you want people to get your game, however slow it may be, but reliable, use AGS uploads."

AGS Uploads is served off a dedicated 3ghz 64 bit, 1gb ram server with a 100mbit connection (which drops to 10mbit after 1000GB are transfered, but can be switched back up), no bandwidth limit, so it's almost certainly faster than any cheap hosting would be, we only serve some low bandwidth sites, AGS IRC and a cs:s server on it at the moment.Ã,  What puts people off using it? We could add an ftp upload option if people don't like uploading in a browser... I guess.

We plan to mirror all AGS games into an archive anyway, this just makes it easier to collect them, and gets the links pointing to somewhere reliable

You posted while I was typing this:

As Gil says, void is just another return type to give a function, like int or Object*, only this one indicates that is doesn't return anything. Ã, Use of that is encouraged in languages where you can specify it to make it clear that the function doesn't return anything to whoever is using the function, and so that the compiler can catch errors when people are trying to assign the result to something. Ã, There may also be some minute performance advantages.
I guess people just discovered it by accident (it's available in just about every statically typed C style language), the same goes for static member functions in structs... because they certainly aren't documented anywhere I have seen.
Are non static member functions allowed? Could someone please write something showing the various undocumented script language features? I feel like I'm doing things more laboriously than I could be...

For GarageGothic, functions inside structs (aka classes, in object oriented programming) are called "member functions", or "methods". Ã, When you call one you need to call it on an instance of the struct like:

struct MyStructType {
Ã,  Ã, float method(); // this is a normal method, I don't know if AGS can do them or takes this syntax
Ã,  Ã, static int staticMethod(); // note that "static" isn't connected to "void" at all, it's can be used with any return type
}

MyStructType s;
s.method();

which is very useful, the function will be able to manipulate stuff inside that struct instance "s". Ã, Sometimes you want something more like a global function, but would prefer to put it in the struct definition, just to look tidier really. Ã, This is what the "static" modifier is for; it basically tells the compiler that this is a global function that doesn't operate on a specific instance of the class, in fact, you can't call it on an instance of the class at all, you call it like:

MyStructType.staticMethod();

Elliot Hird runs a 1gb limit upload service, and at americangirlscouts.org we have AGS uploads (which is currently limited to 25mb, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be increased to 100), our server is fast and has unlimited bandwidth... presumably Elliot's is too (although, someone just cruelly broke Elliot's upload service by uploading a .htaccess file! Shouldn't take more than a second or two to fix when he notices).

Basically we have enough bandwidth and space to host all AGS games ever released, so it's slightly annoying when people refuse to use these services and go and upload their games on rapidshare type services, which are often slow, and become dead links after a while.

Having a server (or a thousand of them) is not the most significant part of running an ISP, you can't just get a server and be able to provide internet access to people with it, people generally need internet access to even connect to your server.  ISPs enter arrangements with people who run the phone and cable networks to be able to provide their services to the public, and arrange to peer with other ISPs on extremely fast and expensive connections, so that they can connect to each other quickly.  They buy bandwidth from higher up the heirarchy, in "megabits per second per month", and this is how they communicate with the rest of the internet.

As for kinds of servers... well they would use all sorts of things, basic PCs or other sorts of general purpose servers, which are in the hundreds of pounds each, as well as custom hardware for routing massive amounts of data.

Other stuff you'd want would be phones and employees (preferably ones that have some clue about things) to hande customer support, techies to keep the services running (including mail, news, etc).

This is all millions of pounds of invenstment obviously, so a lot of the smaller ISPs you see aren't really ISPs at all, they are just resellers of other peoples connections as SSH said, marking them up from the wholesale price, doing their own advertising and stuff, and trying to make a profit on that.  This works best for companies with some brand loyalty already I'd imagine.

I didn't prepare anything... but here's a bg from The Chronicles of Oswyn Rodgerick Throckmorton (quite long, it scrolls):

Hi, I'm a bit confused, you say you don't need to book at the site, so are we officially having it for 16-23 August? It'd be nice to book while prices are kind of low.

AGS is not for everyone. To make more advanced parts of a game, such as cutscenes, you will need to be prepared to learn the scripting language. It is recommended that you have at least a basic knowledge of computers before attempting to use AGS - such as, you know what a PCX file is, you can think logically and you know the difference between your hard drive and your RAM.

I doubt anyone that can't unzip something would be aware what a pcx file is (or be able to use AGS to make a game), but I am not averse to an installer.

What do you mean? It seems fine to me...

It'd be great to be able to have videos play on the bg but it's not possible at the moment, you can have 5 background frames, but that probably isn't enough for you, you can also have a lot of full screen sprites and display them manually but that is slow and HUGE for filesize... I am not sure what is the best way to handle your situation.

A more useful comment: I don't think these filters would work well on the majority of AGSer's art, some would look better, I think... if it's no trouble to add them I don't have a problem with it, but before that some more standard scaling options could be nice... for example, I run in 1600x1200, and that makes it very hard to play a 320x200 game in a window, even if I run it at 640x400, so a 3x or even 4x scale option would be handy.

Should we also be able to turn off the option to run in a window or to play if you have your audio muted?

Do you really want to bring your family to mittens? I'm not sure how well that'd work... unless you don't intend to spend much of the time with the AGSers.

What happened was yet again our server's hard drive broke. We're dumping Server4You, the providers, because they failed to fix it all these times. The new server is being set up, just wait for a bit.

(This also affects: AGS Torrents, AGS Uploads, AGS Wiki, #ags IRC, Grundislav's games, AGA's games, some other people's sites, but all these should be back soon)

^^^^




Seriously though, please try to write a proper first post in a topic.Ã,  I think probably what most people will tell you is that sounds can add a lot to an adventure game; most of the games that people remember as being very atmospheric, or tense, or otherwise engaging did at least some of that through good sound design.Ã,  On the other hand, poor sounds, and especially poor voices will tend to bring a player out of the game even more than poor graphics, so only use them if you can use them to good effect.
Animation, I find, usually adds somewhat less to a game... it's mostly just extra eye candy, but it can help you add some more personality to a character.