Messages

There is one ready, I think, AGA's handling that.  I'll post it in a day or two once some people have finished playing.  CJ will add the notice to the forums later I hope, so that a wider audience gets to see the games.

I have only played four of the entries so far, all very different and quite evenly matched, looks like it will be a tight competition.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/aga/ get them!

Ok, you should have entered your games now but I'm waiting for one last entry at the moment.
Looks like we've got a couple more entries (12 or 13) than the last OROWC, which is nice.  I'll post them in a few hours.  Unfortunately one person's entry is broken, hopefully I'll be able to get a fixed version of that tomorrow.

One hour left! One hour, people. ONE HOUR LEFT*.
So get any remaining entries to me.


*You have an hour.

A zip file containing the games will be posted here, and I think a link will be placed at the top of the forums.

It would be a very large job to switch to another graphics API, probably not worth doing considering the limited demand for PocketPC adventure games.  If ScummVM downloads are anything to go by less people are playing adventures on them than on Macs.

ScummVM running AGS games sounds very unlikely too, ScummVM only supports a games they've specifically tried to support, they run on a few versions of SCUMM and two or three other engines.  AGS is updated all the time, with incremental changes to the script engine and graphics systems, things are added and removed constantly so it'd be virtually impossible to make a program to run all AGS games.

LAST DAY, EVERYONE! 16 hours to go...

No problem with your testers of course.

The deadline is Friday 15th 23:59+1 minute, British time, which is currently UTC+1.
If you are a bit late it doesn't really matter, I'll likely be asleep at that time.  If your game doesn't make it to me before I put the archive of games up then it will be disqualified.

Turbo C is an ancient DOS compiler, which may well be why SDL won't work for you... DOS isn't on the list of supported platforms, SDL was created relatively recently so it just supports modern platforms.

What I'd recommend is getting a windows C/C++ compiler and IDE, there are two options, one is getting MS Visual Studio which comes with the MS compiler.  That's probably the nicest way to develop on windows.  The other option is a GCC based compiler and IDE, dev-cpp is a freeware one that comes with everything you'll need.

If you have either of those setting SDL up is fairly easy, there are even percompiled libraries you can use.

SDL is written in C and doesn't have a C++ interface at all, so yeah, you must be.

You need to define an entry point in most programming languages, in standard C that's the main() function, it does make "Hello World" a little larger than you'd expect... actually the whole setting things up and compiler/linker settings is what gave me the most trouble when learning C... the language is not very complicated.

What compiler/IDE are you using? Perhaps I can explain how to set it up.

It will be midnight GMT, like when I started the competition... but in case anyone was confused you can all have one more day.Ã,  It will end on Sat 16 Jul 2005, 00:00.

You won't be disqualified for not playing and voting... but anyone that can should.

GF is my favorite adventure game and I firmly believe that 3d has a lot of potential to enhance adventure games which is why I'm working on using 3d in my own games, but I wouldn't say GF made much use of it being 3d, for gameplay purposes.

Speaking about the graphics only I think the reason people don't hate how it looks when they dislike EMI (which is on the same engine) is because GF worked with the 3d technology of the time, not against it.Ã,  You can't make an expressive cartoon character in low poly software 3d, not one good enough for Guybrush who everyone had seen before as a sprite.Ã,  The characters in GF are completely different, the artists seem to have realised all they could do was blocky shapes with simple textures on them and worked with that to produce a constent style that isn't trying to be something it can't.

Nowadays a lot of the limitations of realtime 3d are lifting, we can shade characters however we like and put so many polygons in you wouldn't really notice they are polygonal at all... and the animation front has come a long way, we can merge various skeletal animations at run time, even blending them with morph targets for the mesh. Unfortunately most developers are still trying to make their characters look photographically real, which they won't be able to do... it hasn't really been done in pre rendered 3d.Ã,  So like artists trying to recreate Guybrush in 1998 3d they'll only be making bad artwork.Ã,  Those who understand the technology will be able to produce pretty games... I hope one day I'll prove to those of you skeptical about 3d adventures that they can be as graphically pleasing, and as expressively animated, along with the other benefits of working in 3 dimensions.

The day that 3D actually (practically) looks better than 2D (ie. when they can have about 2 zillion polygon's per character), I'll accept it. Right now, the only "look" that 3D can accomplish is the "3D look".

which you follow with a magazine scan of a game developed 5+ years ago

Graphics card demos aren't known for their excellent artwork, but at least you get an idea of the detail level that will run just fine on new cards:

http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/images/3dmark05_shot03_big.jpg
http://www.nzone.com/docs/IO/23049/screenshot2.jpg

might not be able to make a good guybrush even targetting new machines, because 3d would just be too different, but new games designed for 3d with skilled animation... they could look nice.

No... not really.  But CJ has no interest in doing that, personally I'd be against any tacked on 3d... a 3d game engine needs to be 3d entirely for it to work well enough for me.  We discussed it a lot, and it won't be done.
Anyone who wants to use 3d characters is encouraged to use Wintermute instead.

The sprites are from the new Bestowers of Eternity that Dave Gilbert is developing, they were drawn by BigBrother.

That photo was in the newspaper when I was in London the other day, along with several other "funny" fake pictures of that sort... seems so childish to me... but what do you expect from English tabloids.
I don't think I know enough about the economics to say if the olympics being here is a good thing or not... I know personally it'll be irritating when it's actually happening, it's bad enough when it's happening over the other side of the world, people are just not going to shut up about it this time.
At least it's 7 years away.

http://scotch.agagames.com/mirror/LarryVales.zip
http://scotch.agagames.com/mirror/LarryVales2.zip
http://scotch.agagames.com/mirror/Larry_Vales_3_-__Time_Heals_All_'Burns.zip

Got a few hundred gb of spare bandwidth per month currently, so hopefully that should not be a problem, you can link to the files.

No gotchas, except that they have not paid for the use of patents on codecs they implement, so they are afraid of being shut down some day.  Google use ffmpeg in their video player I believe, Video LAN player is also based on it.  It's good, and  plays pretty much any avi or wmv without problems or external codecs.

3 million bytes is 3 megabytes, well, a little less than.
It's not a totally insane amount of memory to use... but I can't think of many sensible reasons to do so in a game script.

The OROW competition is on.  I know for a fact there are people who want to enter who haven't posted.  Hopefully it'll be a good one.

AGA and I are fine, we were walking around Central London most of the day (carrying all my camping stuff which weighs a ton, damn you terrorists!), because all the trains and busses and our coach home weren't running. Ã, Police everywhere, but all the armed CTs were base camping at Scotland Yard, not a lot to do for them now, I guess... Anyway, we managed to get a train out of Waterloo and made it back to Wales without paying.

Doesn't seem to be that huge of an attack now I'm back, thankfully. Ã, We didn't really know what was going on at the time. Ã, It's no 9/11 (though AGA suggested that today would be called the 7th of the 7th, while having lunch).

Aside from the lack of busses and tubes and mostly just police traffic London was quite busy, and nobody was panicked. Ã, I'm not sure what Dave would be doing now, I expect he'll find an internet cafe and post soon.

At Staines train station it put the tubes being down to "an electrical fault" too Ã, Stupidly we ignored the announcer telling people not to bother going to London today.