Messages

What year is this game going to be happening in?

You mean "the mid-1950s" isn't accurate enough for you?

The background looks very interesting, but as most of the preceding comments point out, please do something about the table. Consistency is more important than your choice of style and/or perspective.

It costs my girlfriend probably 3 cents for a piece of paper. She then draws someone's portrait on it and sells it to them for 10 dollars... Frankly this is absurd and I'm going to start stealing portraits of myself from her from now on  until she charges me the proper price that I've arbitrarily set, not taking into account anything else but the single cost of a piece of paper!

Wouldn't this work better as an analogy if you extended this little story a bit? Maybe by adding a third party who produces massive amounts of relatively cheap copies of these portraits and sells them for 20 dollars a piece, taking most of the profit. Sure, it's good business and all that. Nothing wrong with good business.

What's not good business is putting a significant part of the profits on something that cannot possibly work. Like stopping piracy. That's where I fully agree with Darth. (If you call gleaning profit from lawsuit settlements good business and/or more ethical than piracy, there's something wrong with you.)  I also agree that lowering their prices to a more reasonable level would be another example of good business.

Also, cars are expensive, and shoes too! These are all up for grabs now!

If you steal a car, someone loses theirs. Same with shoes. And if you download an mp3? Does anyone lose anything? I'd bet that as often as someone doesn't buy an album just because he can get it for free, someone discovers an artist through a pirated mp3 and subsequently buys an album they would otherwise not have known they wanted.

Wouldn't you agree that wailing about pirates who are killing the industry is pretty daft, if you're not exactly doing any worse because of them? Granted, CD as a medium is slowly giving way to digital distribution, which more than explains the way CD sales have been decreasing since the year 2000 or so while online sales have been gaining speed. On the other hand, MPAA is doing better than ever while movie piracy flourishes, and the game industry isn't any worse off.

My point is, no, I don't think piracy is ethical or right or whatever. But there is more to this than the black-and-white imagery some corporations and corporately backed/brainwashed individuals like to paint.

I am talking about the basic concept that it's impossible to put a correct price on a software (in general sence; not only programs, but also information, etc). It's free by nature, and nothing can stop its spread (as various p2p networks show us), and, more important, its spread benefits mankind (with the exception of VERY few people whose 'losses from sharing' are only imaginary), so why must we stop it?

I'm all for stopping software patents and all that nonsense, but honestly I can't see how your argument applies to pure entertainment of no actual information content whatsoever. A typical Hollywood blockbuster can hardly be considered beneficial (in the strict sense of the word) for us consumers. Unless you consider relieving boredom such a benefit. It definitely doesn't make us better in any way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not agreeing with all that piracy is stealing crap. Although as soon as you make money selling your pirated products, you cross the line. By the way, has anyone (outside of RIAA/MPAA and the ilk) ever shown any evidence to back the claim that things like file sharing actually have a negative effect on record and movie sales? Personally I'm not likely to ever buy entertainment I don't already know to be good. Books are an exception, mostly due to the price of a paperback being much lower than that of a movie.

Great model. The ears are to far back though. Looks like they're attached to his shoulders or something. Check the photo Erwin_Br posted and you should see what I mean.

A well written game with beautiful graphics, gotta love it. The stolen borrowed music was admittedly a low point, but I'm sure you'll have no trouble recruiting a musician for your next project.

Venus: It's already in the database.

ALSO; YAY FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO INCLUDE PROPER PUNCTUATION DUE TO CAPS LOCK BEING ON ALL THE TIME:

(AT LEAST; I'M DOING THIS PROPERLY: SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE; AFTER ALL:)

Except for the fact that any proper piece of software knows that caps lock should only affect letters.

Personally I can't bring myself to write in all caps, caps lock day or not. Because of, you know, it being stupid and all. At least everybody talking like a pirate (well, trying to) was mildly entertaining for the first couple of times.

[good]

There are several good references and tutorials around the net if you're willing to learn (x)html, google should help you. WYSIWYG gives me the heebie jeebies, but that might just be my perfectionism and software designer/coder background talking. Just pick a good html/text editor that does syntax colouring. Can't think of a windows app from the top of my head, but there are bound to be plenty.

I find myself doing the odd php/html/css hacking job with nano (or whatever console text editor is available) directly on the server just like that fellow crazy finn suggested, but definitely not because I find that method particularly enjoyable. And whatever anyone says, writing good, cross-browser html and css markup is far from easy.

PS: I can't understand why anyone would put up a webpage just for the sake of having one. But then again, I can't understand why most of this stuff they call web 2.0 is so popular either...

Although, if memory serves, it has a fatal bug around the halfway mark; at least the ST version did. A a certain item sometimes fails to appear in one of the cabins, leaving the player stranded between hours. It took a lend of a friends save disk for me to continue.

You must be talking about

Spoiler

the screwdriver in the engine room?

[close]

That's the only such bug I bumped into. I just loaded a game I'd saved a bit earlier (and did things in a slightly different order, can't say if that helped) and the item was where it was supposed to be.

Mine (From Abandonia, as well) works if I use a diskette... 

Try changing the drive using the Save Game Disk option. I guess the default is a:, the floppy drive.

The one on abandonia saves and loads fine for me. Using dosbox that is.

I'd say this background is ready if you're satisfied with it. But if you want more suggestions, here's a couple of nitpicks:

- The door frame positively glows. It's so bright white it almost hurts my eyes. Could you tone it down somehow? Would the yellowish color of the desktop calendar fit the room better?
- The bottom of the topmost shelf and the top edge of the case should not be visible. Just compare them to the perspective of the door frame.
- The inner walls of the book case are lit too brightly. At least the right and top edges shouldn't get that much light (well, as I said the top shouldn't be visible at all).
- The shelves are not symmetric. They extend all the way to the left edge of the book case but there's a one pixel gap on the right. It's like the right end was set deeper in the frame.

I know what will fix it!

Take away the guns.

Oh wait..

At least those school stabbings rarely seem to result in more than one casualty. It's quite a bit harder (both physically and mentally) for a teenager to go on a suicidal killing spree armed with a knife than with a gun.

AFAIK no-one said that making it harder to get access to guns would make everyone just get along, but to me one less casualty would be enough of a justification, especially when there's no good reason not to.

So I think your sarcasm is a bit misdirected.

You might be able to remove the Google toolbar via the Firefox add-ons dialog (Tools -> Add-ons).

The way I see it, is that if you lose your wallet, you're a dumbass.

So people can't be careless or absent-minded without being dumb? Would you call Einstein a dumbass? Ok, maybe I'm just taking this personally due to my tendency to lose stuff... :

I fully agree with shbaz and stupot here. I would definitely do my best to return the wallet to it's owner with the contents intact.

If this was a game, i'd suggest you get a proof reader. Hell, I might offer to proof read it myself. Granted, the style you've picked here would take considerable skill and talent to pull off.

Is that an official offer?

Seeing as I've got that little magnifying glass icon thingy under my nick and all, I guess it is. Not a native speaker though, don't expect miracles.

I have no problem writing them in Russian (why should I?) but I feel how a whole lot of the tale dies when it comes to translating (actually, rewriting) the thing in English. So. I'd appreciate any comments, suggestions, corrections and wtf's, so feel free to click "reply".

I can't say how much the story suffers, but the there are grammatical problems (mixed tenses, missing articles, pronouns-gone-wild etc.) that make it all a bit hard to read and in a couple of places difficult to understand. If this was a game, i'd suggest you get a proof reader. Hell, I might offer to proof read it myself. Granted, the style you've picked here would take considerable skill and talent to pull off.

The story itself is far from hopeless and you've definitely got potential as already evidenced by the inventiveness and humour of your games, but your English still has some uncomfortably rough edges. Maybe try a story-driven game, putting extra emphasis on the writing as a learning experience? If fact any writing would do, as I guess the only way to smooth those edges is to write (and read) a lot.

Blind people can look just aswell. Just not with their eyes.

Not really, but they can instruct the game character to look, unless (s)he's supposed to be blind as well.

All in all, I have to agree with those who say that this is all a bit pointless. It would probably be easier to simply develop a text adventure / IF game with the same story and basic puzzle structure as the graphical one on the side, and the result would surely be more enjoyable. Most of the proposed interfaces (based on echolocation or whatever) sound like they would make the game very hard to play, let alone enjoy. Not that they wouldn't be interesting as scientific experiments.

Tube, my dear tube, it was a pun. A very bad pun. Dung means manure means s**t.

I know what it means, dear Rui. I was just venting the frustration of having to work my ass off on a Sunday (again) by being a pedantic ass.

I dunno Mao Tse Dong either. Was he a cousin of Mao Tse Dung's?

And were they both related to Mao Zedong aka Mao Tse-tung?

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

I could, but chose not to.

Maybe try http://www.google.com/search?q=free+video+editor then?

Here's a couple of links to free downloads of Windows video editors that might or might not do what you want. I found them both in less than a minute using the google search above.

http://www.zs4.net/downloads
http://www.virtualedit.net/home.htm

I've never even heard of these before so you're on your own. Documentation and tutorials are available on both sites. I'd try the zs4 one first, as the second seems to be a trial.