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Ahh.. Now I see the light. When creating a new project I have the choice between Visual Basic, C#, C++, etc. Hmm. Which one is the best/easiest format for creating a normal windows based program? I imagine Visual Basic?

Go C#. Visual basic is so far removed from most, more powerful languages that you end up reinventing the wheel.

Seconded. If only because the code will look pretty much the same as the script in AGS (C-like).

Well you can use C++, VB.NET or C# with Visual Studio. I only have used Express editions, but I don't think they differ that much.

I have only used it for C# and am not very good with C++, so I don't know if I'm much help. But I just tried it with C++ and if you just want to draw a rectangle on the form, add a paint event for your form in form designer. Use the example code from MSDN documentation inside newly created method for the paint event. Now if you run it you'll have a blue rectangle starting from upper left corner with the size 200x200.

Could you clarify what programming language and edition of Visual Studio 2010 you use?

If a sentence of speech begins with an ellipsis, is it correct to capitalise its first letter?

"...maybe not."

or

"...Maybe not."

?

As others have said there is no proper grammar for it. But I would go with lower case. Because how I see it an ellipsis breaks the sentence therefore when beginning the line with an ellipsis it would be continuation for the previously broken sentence and should be lower case. That is how I see it. I am not a native speaker so this could be just guessing.

My suggestion is to buy two cheap ones, and regularly mirror them. The only safety is in duplication.

Seconded. Hard drives today are so cheap that you can easily afford buying them double for you invaluable files.

My green audio jack (hole) popped off the motherboard of my laptop...

Open it, check if the jack is fixable, probably not, and then take the whole jack out. If the machine says that plug is connected there might be a short circuit or something. This should be fixed when the whole jack is removed from the motherboard. If not, then the short has caused some damage to the board and the only thing left to do is probably getting that USB-audio.

Why does the moon shrink when you look at it through a camera?

Moon also shrinks when it goes up in the sky. When the moon is near the horizon its huge, but when it's directly above its tiny. This is a common illusion and I bet with a camera illusion breaks. See wikipedia about moon illusion.

Download some screen recorder tool and record the video with it while displaying the page. Something like camtasia perhaps? I don't have lots of experience with these, I have only used VirtualDub to capture video.

Yes, on a weekend it would be best, but I have a feeling one competition per week would be too often. And ofcourse not at the same time as hourgame, probably not even on the same weekend. Maybe bi-weekly would be good?

Tijne, you do have a point. Actually I was thinking about Australia/Asia and thinking about how many members are from those regions and I totally forgot America.
If only we could have a gps-time-locked-envelope that would open at 1pm local time and then you would put your game in the envelope 8 hours later before it would get locked.
Then 24 hours would be ideal?

Well, the benefit with a 8 hour against 24 hour is that you can take part without losing sleep. Sure, you can only work on a game for 12 hours and then sleep for 12 hours, but competitive people will work on a game for the full 24 hours. I'm sure there are people here who just can't have the whole weekend for themselves, but would still like to participate in a such competition. Like people who have children, wifes, girlfriends etc. Benefit with 24 hours would be that everybody around the world would get the same amount of daytime to work on.

Since hourgame has been running quite nicely recently, one round could be used to test a longer timeline?

Has there been other game creation competitions besides hourgame, OROW and MAGS? I'm thinking something longer than an hour and shorter than a week. Something like 8 hours (workdaygame ). That would give you some more time to polish the game. You might even get some animations done in that time. And compared to OROW you don't have to feel that it's unfair when you have to go to work and other can just work on their games .

This has bugged me couple of days now.
If I had bucket of room temperature water (10 liters), would it be possible to cool an object (like a rock) so cold that it would freeze all the water in the bucket. Let's say the bucket would be 20 liters so no water would escape even if the object would displace 10 liters. So how cold the object would have to be? How big would it have to be? What material would it have to be?

Well, in Photoshop you can select the color and adjust it accrodingly in RGB mode using the normal color adjustments. But what you want to do is to use paletted colorspace and adjust colors in palette. This you can do in Photoshop and Graphics Gale and probably in most of the drawing programs.

2) Let's say there's no air on earth and I'm stanting ontop of mount everest or tallest skyscraper. I throw a baseball. Can I make it orbit earth? Would lack of air friction make my throwing speed high enough to achieve needed speed? Also, since there's no air friction in space, why do astronauts in suits move so damn slow?

The baseball would need a velocity of 8 km/s to make it to the orbit. Since there is no air the air drag doesn't deccelerate the ball, but gravity drag still does. So the ball would need to leave your hand with even greater velocity.
Maybe astronauts move so damn slow because their suits are so big and clumsy? Also, they want to be careful so they don't drift away from the spaceship/-station. That would be a sucky way to die.

In Finlands biggest magazine for new technology and computers, MikroBitti, there was a whole spread just for cheap and free adventure games. Featured on the free page there was three AGS games (out of four). Ben There, Dan That!, Ben Jordan: Case 7 - The Cardinal Sins and Duty and Beyond.

Since you are using Gimp this might not be much help, but Photoshop has this nice mesh distort which is probably pretty much the same as you described, but it has more control points. So it is suitable also for pillars etc. And you can control the blurriness a bit by setting the program to use different interpolation techniques. Nearest neighbour will give crisp but jagged look and others give variying amount of blurriness.

[What word do you use for carbonated soft drinks?]

What word do you use for carbonated soft drinks?

Limu, limppa or limppari.
And I'm not from UK.

Now on to another older subject, is there any, serious interest in bringing back the Photoshop Biweekly competition?

Yes.

Nice. If we ignore the rule about being a forum member less than a year then it looks like I would qualify for the beginners competition.  Roughly counting I have two months experience with AGS (one month when I failed to finish a MAGS entry and another month when I did finish one).

To make it look like same character from different angles you should first create a character and then make a sprite of character. Sketch the character first and think about what basic geometric shapes it is composed of (think 3D). Then you can sketch it in different angles. After that you can start making a sprite.

Also this tutorial by ProgZmax at cgempire will be most helpful.

I would probably start with box or boxes as boxes are easy to draw in any perspective. Then refine the car shape inside the boxes maybe using some car blueprints and photos for reference.

Something similiar to technique used for making a 3d model of a car. See www.suurland.com for blueprints and tutorial for making a 3d model of the car.

I'm not sure if you understand anything from my explanation but it's pretty hard to explain. But you can take some important dots/corners/points from the blueprints (like the corner of the door) and then place it on the faces of your box (which is drawn in perspective), place it in the side face of your box and the top face and then draw lines to the same place on the other side of the box (for the top face draw the line from the dot from the top face to the similiar position on the bottom face) and then you find the correct place for that dot in the intersection of the lines. Add more dots and then draw lines between them and you have a picture of a car in perspective.

This is hard work, but if you have a good understanding of perspective you can cut some corners here. This is just one technique, I'm sure there are better ones...