Messages

They are on the page
http://606u.dir.bg/avicheck/ffmpeg.exe.gz
http://606u.dir.bg/avicheck/cygwin1.dll.gz
http://606u.dir.bg/avicheck/cygz.dll.gz

gzipped, but any decent archiver should support that.

I guess it might be a different version of the dll than what my version is expecting http://606u.dir.bg/avicheck/ has some precompiled binaries with the appropriate dlls.

Haven't tried, but ffmpeg appears to be able to work with that codec. I'm not sure what good frontends for ffmpeg exist, but if you get ffmpeg the command line would be something like this:

ffmpeg -i myvideo.duk -b 1500 -ab 128 myvideo.avi

where 1500 and 128 are the video and audio bitrates you want to get out, I think that'd proably encode it into an avi with mpeg4 video and mp3 audio, you can specify a codec to encode with if you want to, just run the program with no parameters to see a list of the things you can give it.

I know precompiled ffmpeg binaries can be hard to find so here http://217.172.186.14/~scotch/fmg/ffmpeg.exe

Again, I don't know if this'll work, and I expect someone has an easier way.

5 people are interested in staying for seven days instead of four, I'm one of them.  I'd be glad to hang around with just those people if needs be, but I think a few more people staying that long would make it more likely to happen.

Their silly java client puts bold and colours on everything, I left before the end (not being terribly interested in KQ myself), but the new screenshots, which you can see at the site, are a huge improvement over the old ones.  I'll look forward to the release date, which was revealed to be December, I think.

http://www.summonnight.net/snworld/snex/snexpv01.flv is the actual url to the file by the way, if you want to save him some bandwidth, I would have linked that but I didn't know there were easy free flv players.  I encoded it into an avi but I get beeps all over the audio for some reason, and can't get rid of them so far.

Wow they still make 2D rpgs? It does look quite nice.  Getting the video is a bit tough, the player is embedded in a flash movie, the flash animation gets the video content from elsewhere, however it won't tell you where because flash animations are encrypted, and the video is in macromedia's .flv format anyway.  The server is so slow at the moment I haven't even managed to download the whole (only 15mb) thing yet.  I'll convert it to a sensible format and post it if I manage to get it.

360 degree backgrounds are... possible, but hard to script, not really worth it I think.

Yes... just render the background into a 2d image and use it.

Well, yes, maybe not 10 times, but of course it's not going to work right on a 486.  And who doesn't have a 600mhz processor... It's only useful to compare it to other 2d game creation systems, and it's definately faster than those, if I made an adventure game in it it'd run a lot faster than AGS, it's pointless comparing it to a tightly coded custom engine that doesn't even run right on modern windows or have most of the features of GM.  It's a shame there are so few good games made in the GM community, because it's a really nice engine, imo.

GM's drawing functions are pretty fast, it's just really bad coding that makes these games slow, GM script isn't a particularly highly optimised scripting language and RTS games made by people clueless about pathfinding (it can easily become the most processor intensive thing when you have a lot of units) are a nightmare in any engine.
I don't really follow the GM community, they rarely produce anything worth playing... so I can't think of a good example of a well made isometric GM game, GM definately doesn't have a problem with isometric though, it's not really any slower than a standard 2d view. Ã, I'd make one to demonstrate but I don't have any iso art to use... I did make an iso game in old slow gamemaker, and that ran pretty well, I think I've lost that though.

Uh, InCreator, have you really used GM? It's way, way faster than any other 2d game engine I've used (aside from specially coded, custom ones, of course), even when it wasn't 3d accelerated (version < 6) it was fairly speedy, but now I can easily go over 400fps with average complexity games at high res. GM is just so not slow I can't imagine you've really used it.  Most of the GM community are 12 year old kids who have no idea how to program efficiently, but even their stupid little game demos have run fine for me.
If it really was less than 30fps and the game wasn't completely insanely coded then you have a hardware issue.

Except for adventure games that AGS could do, I'd recommend people use GM... use GM 5 if you don't need easy sprite rotation/scaling/alpha but would rather keep high compatability or GM6 if you want more graphical possiblities.  The only reason I'm not using GM for my current 2d non adventure game is because I need to use a complex physics engine, so it was more feasible to do it in C++, it'd be GM otherwise, for sure, it's a joy to develop in when you understand it.

It does not have a 9 Ghz processor.  It has a 3.2Ghz CPU, with three cores... completely different, it also has a high end ATI graphics chipset, and 512mb RAM shared with the graphics.  It is basically like a current top of the range gaming PC, for gaming purposes, ok, a little faster perhaps.
I will get one, when I can get it for £40 second hand, like all my consoles.

I expect the multi core CPUs are going to encourage more use of physics engines.

It isn't possible, if you want to do this look at Game Maker, which is much more suitable.  Unless you have some idea of programming 3d games you won't be able to in that either, but there are some demos around that should help you.  AGS is extremely unsuitable for this.

Oh and I'd prefer the earlier dates personally, because they're sooner.

Gilberfest rekindled my interest in another British meeting, so I'll go too.

Wouldn't it be best to put all the AGS award winners on, or something like that?  Not to put down people's games... but it'd be nice to make the best impression possible.

No it is probably not worth the money.  I used A5 I think, that was pretty antiquated, this doesn't seem upgraded a lot.  Even if you can put up with the low quality graphics and not particuarly nice editors the thing with it is that you have to write games in a C like code that is not a lot easier than actually coding in C, if you can't manage that you probably will not be able to make a good game in 3D Gamestudio.  And if you can there are engines around with the same features, for free, or a much smaller cost, Crystal Space (free), Torque ($100), Quake 2 (free)...
If you're serious about making a 3d game, I'd suggest getting a programmer to help you, you can't make a very good 3d game alone.
It's not very easy, check the forums to see how many people use it, and then look at how many good games have been made with that program, approximately zero.

Adventure means text adventure, first person myst adventure, third person point and click, platform games like Psychonauts and other types of games, to most people including me and the games press.  One guy thought I meant Tomb Raider type games when I said I made adventures.  By no means has it become synonymous with point and click games, not even in this community.  That's good, I love point and click, I don't think the interface is dead, but there are more adventure game interfaces.

It is in the AGS directory, named "AGS.chm"