Messages

Leon: Sadly the g4g edition has the cutscene bug :/

Playing AGS games with DOSBox works quite well. The only gripe is that transitions between different rooms are sluggish, other than that it's a fine way of playing older pre-2.5 games on Linux.

My brother has an original boxed copy of it. I'm not surprised people haven't torrented it, it is the RPG equivalent of syphilis. It's bad enough that it was made during that wacky period in 1998 where all 3D PC games were mandated to look hideous (i.e. software rendering in spades), but the voice acting is corny and shameful (despite Westwood nailing it a year later with Red Alert 2), the music becomes grating and repetitive after four minutes, and the gameplay is best left described as arse-clenchingly bad.

Of course, glowing reviews like that will only prolong your interest in finding it. InCreator is right, eMule does have a copy of every single game, video and MP3 ever released. The big caveat is waiting 7 weeks for the bloody thing to download...

I have investigated SDL recently, and in comparison to Allegro it doesn't really seem to have any benefits. They both run off DirectDraw behind the scenes, and SDL doesn't seem to have any advantages that would make porting the code worthwhile.

SDL would probably be better in some aspects. However, it doesn't provide the software wavetable sound system that Allegro does and its more of a generic platform library for graphics and audio. Allegro, on the other hand as you well know, is a *game* library as well.

Suffice to say that for now, Allegro remains a good choice for AGS best I can tell.

Normally I'd agree with you about the usefulness of software wavetable support, but won't on the grounds that it is damn-near impossible to get working. Sticking patches.dat in the same folder as AGS and forcing Software Wavetable gives "[Problem: DIGMID patch set not found]". The dodgy ancient wavetable engine bundled with SDL_mixer loads fine.

ALSA's software and hardware MIDI support (timidity and snd-emu10k1) also fail without error on my system, probably something to do with the dodgy OSS layer. By contrast, running AGS under Wine with ALSA produces perfect MIDI.

The main reason why SDL shines over Allegro is its cross-platform robustness. Take, for instance, the Nintendo Wii. A brilliant hypothetical platform for adventure games. Right now it's closed off, but a month ago some bloke figured out how to dump the console's private keys. Yesterday someone figured out how to perform a buffer-overflow attack in Zelda Twilight Princess. Give it another month or three and it'll run Linux, at which point SDL should just compile off the bat without having to change a single line of code. I can't remember what the cross-platform robustness of Allegro is like, however given that sketchy OSX support is relatively new there might be issues building on an undocumented PPC Linux system.

The big question now is, will AGS v3 get ported? I'm on tenterhooks, as I have the script/dialogue for a game prewritten and am tossing up between AGS2 or 3 to develop it in. (The other option is to write an engine from scratch in pygame, but that'd probably look worse and be easier to cheat and have a much smaller target audience)

with the new Asus EEE Pc, which is running linux, it would be cool to be able to play AGS games on it. But unfortunately they're using a stable, old, version of Xandros / Debian, and there is a problem to run ags because of glibc. Would it be possible to release a version of ags for linux compiled with an older glibc ? (debian etch would be fine)

If you're feeling adventurous (see what I did there!), you can always install Ubuntu on the EeePC. It's guaranteed to be more up-to-date than the ASUS-branded copy of Xandros.

and the idea behind the 3dfx card being more compatible is that any pc that came with one is probably so old that any 3D game that can run on it will be supported by the card.

Indeed? Hmm, I've been reading the delightful list of titles with a native 3DFX driver, and I can honestly say I wouldn't mind if 80% of them were consigned to the exploding dustbin of history. Of course most of the devs realized that 3DFX exclusivity was a death sentence, and made DirectX/GL drivers anyway. You know, which play faster on a proper card.

and i stand by my accusation that the MX440 has terrible compatibility with OLDER games, you see a lot of games NOW listing what cards they're not compatible with and the MX440 is always on that list along with the GeForce2 and older ATi cards.

A point well made, Contradiction Jones. Of course the card isn't supported for today's titles, since it was released back in the olden days when shaders were a luxury. Today if you want a passable game experience with your Morrowinds and your Bioshocks, you're buggered unless you invest in a PCI-E capable board. But I'll say that the MX440 (still supported by a NVIDIA driver release) has a better chance at running games than the 3DFX.

I can say that my lovely $5 post-office edition of Grim Fandango works both under XP and the latest Wine (however due to the terrible way graphics worked in 1998, 3D acceleration must be turned OFF).

Too bad Scumm VM doesn't support it. (yet?)

There's an alpha engine for LUA based adventures (i.e. MI4 and GF) called Residual, available from the ScummVM SVN.

I actually met one of the fantastic blokes who head the ScummVM project. He told me that the main reason why Residual is a bit neglected was the unfinished savegame support; apparently there's only so many times Grim Fandango can be unsuccessfully played from the start without the tester going nuts.

eww, MX440, such a horrible card (i have one in an old pc), don't let that GeForce4 badge fool you, it's basically a GeForce2.

You take that BACK sir! The MX440 booted the arse of all the GF2 boards on the market, which is why it had a big fat 4 in front of it. Fantastic workhorse, that card. I have about 4.

personally i would have kept the 3DFX card as it's probably more compatible with games you can run on your system than the mx440 (or i would have went for a TNT2).

More compatible with games? Bollocks, the 3DFX doesn't even support proper OpenGL! As for the TNT2, by today's standards it's worse than Intel's integrated sandwich and slightly better than SiS's integrated turd-on-a-chip. I say "slightly" better because it isn't made of rusty staples and probably won't catch fire.

Hah, there's a reason why Australia is listed by surveys (which are always biased, but yeah) as the TV piracy capital of the universe. Granted, it's probably aimed squarely at sad people who only watch Heroes and Lost and Prison Break and all that other rubbish, but there's a grain of truth that Australians think that the television planning people are doing a crap job and BitTorrent does it a lot better. Right now I'm watching Top Gear which aired last Sunday evening in the UK, normally I'd be waiting for 18 months for the semi-privatised SBS to air the same show with station ads spliced in and the news section cut out.

As for music, the whole "is uploading or downloading the real crime" argument is pointless. That doesn't address the moral dimension of whether you're supporting the artist or not.

My system works like this:


(sorry if the largeness of the image offends someone, several other posts in this thread are bordering on ninety pages too!)

If memory serves, try cancelling the Quicktime 2.0 install and going ahead with the game install anyway.

If that doesn't work, just let it install its dodgy 1995-era libraries. Hey, it can't be worse than the current version!

How do monkeys make toast?

Spoiler

They put bread under a gorilla.

[close]

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2007/10/08/how_to_write_an_adventure_game/1

Contains commentary from Grossman; the bloke who had a hand in designing MI and MI2, DOTT, and later moved to Telltale Games to pitch in on Sam and Max. Also featured is some advice from David Cage; French adventure game designer and CEO of Quantic Dream.

I started by asking Dave Grossman about how puzzles were used to slow players down in adventure games and how he worked to placed puzzles in the world realistically. As it turned out I was already way off the mark and both Davids had a radically different idea of how puzzles and challenges are used in games â€" different both from me and from each other.

“I use the challenges in an adventure game to entertain players, to let them feel clever, and to let them drive the story forward, but I'm never really trying to slow them down,” said Dave Grossman, giving me an entirely different idea of how puzzles should be used. What I had originally assumed were placed in games to help lengthen the experience, Dave saw as being used primarily to heighten the fun.

“I think of adventures as a storytelling medium, and I don't want there to be too much dead space in the experience. I try to set up the puzzles to be just challenging enough that you'll be pleased with yourself when you solve them, but to stay short of the line of frustration.”

David Cage however had an entirely different view of the topic â€" one which fitted with his past games and how they often leave various options open to players.

“A game does not have to be a challenge at all, it can also only be an experience where you affect what's going on, make decisions and deal with the consequences.”

And I'm sure it'll give you months of trouble-free use! Except maybe if you want to use Internet Explorer without getting spyware. Or a Bluetooth dongle. Or wireless with mildly-difficult encryption turned on, or software that demands SP2 to cut down on support calls from pesky Windows ME users. Other than that, it's fine.

Anyhow, it's your choice most of the problems stem from it being online, so there's no harm done using it as a standby.

There's scarce little reason to avoid using a Service Pack. Service Packs are lovely, round, bubbly things full of hotfixes that really should have been in the final product but turned up a belated 3 or 4 years on. This Service Pack contained such luxuries as a real Bluetooth stack (instead of an imaginary one), slightly less shit support for exotic USB mass storage devices, and even a pissweak firewall to give you false hope about browsing dodgy sites in safety with IE.

SP2 even unbuggered wireless support to make it work 80% of the time, improving on the previous Microsoft record of 24.8% with a tail wind. This, along with the scientific fact that Service Packs don't noticeably destroy system performance, is reason enough to migrate from the 5-year-old SP1. Or, Christ forbid, an unpatched first-edition XP install from October 2001.

The "popping up messages with everything you do online" can be disabled by clicking a checkbox in the "Security" section of Control Panel. Or by using Mozilla Firefox. If you can't deal with WGA, ask someone competent to find a crack for you.

BOYD1981: Close; the Microsoft/Sony rumble fiasco was a patent infringement case. The company Immersion held several patents for certain bits of force-feedback, and filed suit against MS and Sony on the grounds that they were making millions from controller sales without licensing their technology (i.e. giving them a cut).

Microsoft initially filed a countersuit, then soon settled for bucketloads of money.
Sony filed a countersuit and tried to fight the decision tooth-for-nail; the result being that the company was fined, all DualShock controllers were recalled from sale in the US, and the company decided to start a lame campaign with the PS3 to convince people that rumble wasn't cool anymore. Days later (presumably after reading the opinion polls), Sony caved in and coughed up the full amount to Immersion.

Quite a different case with copyright infringement, where the number of uses doesn't necessarily translate to the number of lost sales. Roger and the SQ4-like font are, at worst, derivative works which can be protected under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law (I'm guessing that's where Santiago_Joven lives).

Vivendi Univeral have had 10 years to send a Cease and Desist notice. If they do in the future, who cares, get the community to replace them with nicer ones.

You're a loony. If you're worried about copyright infringement with regards to decade-old bitmap fonts, please take it as read that the entertainment industry as a whole no longer gives a stuff; they're too busy ruining all the new games with intrusive copyprotection.

[Addendum:]

This is beautiful. Thanks for posting

And yeah, this is probably a management issue. Australia is a different market to America in the respect that corporations aren't above the law; there's no chance that telling their bottom-line indie book suppliers to get stuffed will improve Angus and Robertson's already-marginalized image, any more than changing their name to "Books 'R' Us" and only offering volumes with a "New York Times Bestsellers List" boasting on the front would.

Addendum: Teresa Nielsen Hayden appears to have nailed the problem. A terrible example of what can happen when you let beancounters start making all the management decisions for themselves.

[much]

Even though Apple's grudging move towards the Intel platform removes some of the more unforgivable problems (DOSBox now runs at full speed, for instance, and MS Virtual PC is now consigned to the dustbin of history), I wouldn't recommend buying an Apple laptop. As someone who's worked in a software support position at a large Apple-using institution, I can tell you the following things about them:

• Mac OS X is much nicer than Windows, but regardless what you hear about people saying "oh it's UNIX underneath" installing Linux software is bloody hard.
  
• While the MacBook is reasonably priced, the MacBook Pro is shafting you by an order of $1000-$1500 AUD. You can get those same features for less.
  
• Sadly, the MacBook only has an Intel Hamster-Wheel 950 for a graphics card. However, the MacBook Pro has a more sporty NVIDIA 8 series. Both are very friendly with Linux.
  
• Apple laptops have the worst possible ventilation in the world ever, as evidenced by the forced suspend when you close the lid. (There are programs which hard-disable this, but chances are you'll end up cooking your machine). My personal philosophy is never to trust a computer without a large vent.
  
• You'll soon get very, very sick of using iTunes/QuickTime. That goes double if you've ever used Amarok.
  
• Codec support out of the box is a joke. Thankfully VLC is there to play things properly.
  
• When the laptop fails (and it will fail eventually), you will end up having to send it into an Apple support chop-shop to get it mended. Chances are it'll be the ever-mystical "logic board failure" which naturally requires a replacement. In short, be sure to get the laptop with a warranty.
  
• Productivity suite apps (e.g. Office, Adobe) are native, which is useful if you're into that sort of thing.
  

In closing, I'm very happy with my Linux-powered Toshiba

Not at all! They could be carried.

R4L: You might be better off installing the .egg package available at http://sf.net/projects/pyopengl

Alliance: Yes, considering the new AGS editor is done in .NET, it could indeed be ported by someone mad enough under the basis of "anything .NET can do, Python can do better". The only problem is that since WinForms isn't very cross-platform, two parallel editors would have to be maintained and there might be issues with seeing the source code and everything would get quite hairy. Probably just better to use Wine (0.9.33 is the magic release which doesn't crash at all) and wait for Mono to catch up...

I heartily recommend learning Python. One of the quickest ways to write lovely clean working code, all the benefits of OO with voluntary encapsulation, blah blah blah everyone can see it's completely brilliant and that's that ;P

I've written a Lemmings engine in it using pygame, although it's probably not a good idea to look at the source too closely as I wrote lots of it during a crash course.

Right, well your monitor and DVI connector are both fine, as you're getting an initial picture. The problem most likely lies with your graphics driver. Try installing the newest Catalyst driver pack and see if that improves affairs.