Messages

"CROUSTIBAT" is a short promotional game for fish fingers created with the Gobliins 2 engine, previously only available online in Portuguese. I recently made an attempt at an English translation:

https://archive.org/details/croustibat_en_v1

You can play it in the browser or download the zip and play it offline in DOSBox (ScummVM won't work yet, but should eventually).

Ron shares some thoughts: "When I Made Another Monkey Island"

https://returntomonkeyisland.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sahskKAxSCY

Oh, hah, I didn't even notice where it was linking to -- thank you!!

Great stuff!

A general AGS archiving question - I discovered a German AGS game called "Sandmen" from 2003 that never got added to the main database:

http://www.marco-huellen.de/Sandmen/screenshots.html

Unfortunately the only download links I've found are dead. There was a thread about it in 03: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=7347

And there is a download link here: http://freewareadventuregames.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/sandmen.html but it seems to be an invalid/truncated ZIP file that won't open, it's 10mb when that thread talks about an 85mb file.

I dropped the author an email, but if that doesn't work, any chance there is another copy floating around somewhere? The original filename seems to be fanadv_sandmen.zip

Fantastic! Thanks so much. I missed the existence of mags.agsarchives.com completely...

(There is also a v3: http://mags.agsarchives.com/2010/2010-09/Abduction%20v3.zip but might be enhancements after MAGS)

And thanks for clarifying this -- to be honest I'm not even sure how many of the games I didn't mention only seem to exist as post-MAGS editions.

This is brilliant Denzil, thanks for the info! , will take a better look next week.

Thank you!! As you can see I've been crossing a few off the list as I took another look... 2010 seems to have the biggest memory hole now.

[could]

Yep, well spotted! I was going to try to make it as complete as possible before mentioning it on the forum... the ones I could find, I set up a mirror there. I put about 50 into the "Community Software" area that anyone can upload to, then sent an email to info@archive.org requesting a dedicated collection for MAGS games and listing all the ones I already uploaded, which they did after a couple of days.

Since it's the 15th anniversary of the first MAGS this month, I went through and found all the games that I couldn't find any working download for online (at least without contacting people directly) - it would be great to have some of these available again!

2001:

• August: "Monkeyville (or How The Dread Pirate Jakob Acquired An Unhealthy Animosity Toward Primates)" (Nickboy77)

2002: (complete!)

• December: "MuuYeeb the Ghost" (Trapezoid)

2003:

• June: "Barry Snotter and the Meaning of Life" (wOoDz with Hotshot)
• September: "Terence Independent Terminator" (Paranoia)
• September: [winner!] "Genbus Favour" (taryuu)

2004: (complete!)

2005: (complete!)

2006: (complete!)

2007: (complete!)

2008: (complete!)

2009: (complete!)

• June: "Souls Quest" (jerakeen)
• July: [winner!] "Billy Boy's Important Wine Lottery" (Gudforby)
• August: "The Secret Plan 1 - Running to stand still" (tzachs)
• October: [winner!] "Samarkand" (Babar)
• October: "The Energizer" (tzachs)
• October: "Ted McBinky and his Steam Engine" (FSi)
• October: "One Of A Kind" (Crimson Wizard)
• November: "The Hunt for Goldbeard" (Bulbapuck)
• December: [winner!] "Snow Queen - After The Apocalypse" (Kastchey)

2010: (complete!)

• April: "Dead Hand" (Limping Fish)
• April: "ALPHABETA" (Crimson Wizard)
• May: [winner!] "Wall-E: The Fan Game" (markbilly)
• May: "Living Nightmare: Endless Dreams" (Domithan)
• June: [winner!] "Tale" (Calin Leafshade)
• September: "Abduction" (mode7)

2011: (complete!)

• January: "Death as it Is" (Zetsaika)
• April: "RunAway" (Matti)
• September: [winner!] "Forest Dweller" (icey games)

2012: (complete!)

• January: "Scum Pub" (Ekeko)
• January: [winner!] "HUBRIS" (Ghost)
• April: "Between the Pillars of Creation" (Cogliostro)

2013: (complete!)

• May: "Deep Hope" (Cleanic)
• August: "Summer Woes" (Adeel S. Ahmed and Oldschool_Wolf)

2014:

• May: "Urgent Quest" (Hedge)
• July: [winner!] "The New Familiar" (Granary)

2015: (complete!)

• June: "Fanbots" (LostTrainDude, Kastchey, CaptainD)

Hey, the first MAGS was June 2001 right? Happy 15th anniversary!

There is actually an even earlier snapshot, from May 2001, back when RoN was a subsite of AdventureDeveloper.com:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010516224500/http://reality.adventuredeveloper.com/

Thanks for working it out Taxler. Crimson- right, that all makes a lot of sense, it's a perfect storm of bad luck more than anything else.

I tried moving every dialog out to the root of Dialogs, and deleting all the (empty) subfolders - curiously, this fixed the dialog I was having problems with, but the same problem is now happening with other dialogs that (I think) were okay before.

So, let me clarify this. You have Dialogs named like dDialog0, dDialog1, dDialog2, etc, and when you call, for example dDialog5.Start(), dDialog0's lines and options play instead?

Essentially, yes - the actual ID was 7, and I did give it a custom script-name instead of keeping the default, if that makes any difference.

Couple of questions: how many dialogs you have in total, and do you use subfolders in the dialogs list? I recall we had number of issues with folders before (although I think they were fixed)

55 in total, and yes - the dialog in question is 2 folders deep.

I have recently opened a project that was started in AGS 3.3.3 in version 3.3.4 and discovered that one of the dialogs is now consistently being replaced with a different one when I try to .Start() it. The one that it gets replaced by happens to be the dialog with ID 0. I tried going back to AGS 3.3.3 but the problem persists, so maybe it is just a coincidence that I noticed this now.

There are other dialogs in the game that do not seem to be affected. I tried creating a new dialog, but the new one had the same problem.

I did have a custom dialog rendering routine, but I tried disabling it and that didn't fix it. I also tried putting this in dialog_options_get_dimensions:

Code: ags

Display("%d", info.DialogToRender.ID);

...and confirmed that the ID of the dialog is 0, not the ID that it should be.

I also tried dialog[<x>].Start() instead of dDialog<x>.Start(), but that didn't fix it.

Has anyone had a similar problem? And any suggestions for what might fix it?

Thank you!! Wow, this thread is a great success - I had no idea if I'd get any replies at all, let alone all this so quickly. Amazing!

Did more digging, here's the earliest versions of the following that I have:

Amazing!!! I'm so glad these still existed somewhere. Particularly Cabbages and Kings - it was playing that original version that led me to meet Creed Malay and a friendship that's lasted over a decade now. I can't thank you enough!

Dead Man's Political Party (v1): link
While you didn't ask for this, I've included it just in case you didn't know there was a version 1/had the version 1.

Oh, sure - don't take my list too seriously, it wasn't meant to be exhaustive, just the ones I'd noticed from poking around.

Why would you want the earlier versions of Night and Day? The upgrades were just bugfixes. I still have them though...

I know there are surely cases where a revision was done purely for bugfixing (or even just to run on Windows instead of DOS, for those really old games!) but I'm still interested, I admit, purely out of a purist/completist streak to preserve a (tiny) bit of history. I was only slightly exaggerating when I used the word "archaeology" in the thread title, these are historical artifacts to me

Having said that, I'm not going to pressure you if you're not comfortable with it. I do realise it's a weird thing to say to someone: "Thanks for all your hard work - now give me the crappier, more broken version please!" But hopefully you can see where I'm coming from.

Thanks guys! I've edited my original post to remove those two, and add a few more.

I'm going to keep looking through my backups but they're on CD and so will take longer to go through but I'll be wearing by fedora while I do this because hey, why not? At least I'm assured no ancient traps from long dead civilizations

Thanks so much for doing that!! I really appreciate it.

[found!!]

I'm trying to track down as many earlier versions of Reality-on-the-Norm games as I can, particularly the original releases of games that got updated later.

If you are someone who has a long history of downloading RON games as soon as they were released, and you still have access to the computer you did it on, you could be the one to help!

(The one that I would personally really, really like to see again is the original DOS version of Cabbages and Kings...)

Here are some that I know about, there may be more:

Cabbages and Kings v1 - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

RON Beach Party (incomplete) - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

Reality Check v1 - found!! thanks to Retro Wolf

Night and Day v1 - found!! thanks to HandsFree

Night and Day v1.1 - found!! thanks to HandsFree

I Spy 1 v1
Date: April 9th, 2001
Filename: ispy.zip
Filesize: (unknown)

The Postman Only Dies Once v1 - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

I Spy II v1 - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

The First Stitch v1 - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

Disappearance Time v1 - found!! thanks to Renegade Implementor

I'd be hugely thankful for any help!

[or 255]

The effect now looks like this:


The code looks identical, but the effect is very off. I'm not even sure how it's getting those non-blue colours.

I think there's something odd going on when you use DrawingColor zero. I tried changing Lua's Colourise() to draw every pixel to zero, and got a lot more of that colourful effect:



Then I tried the same as Calin's except with or 255 instead of or 0:



So it looks like (I'm guessing here) drawing with DrawingColor 0 is adding transparency, punching a "hole" in the image, but what is showing up "behind" it happens to be a lot of weird pixels when Lua does it, but solid black when AGSScript does it. I've got no idea why though.