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[three]

There have been three non-commercial winners since 2012: Heroine's Quest, Urban Witch Story and If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers (the last two are "pay what you like" donationware, but you can choose to pay nothing). And in 2021 (so within the last two years), three of the five nominees were non-commercial. The year before it was four.

Just a technicality: the game itself is free, and was released as such initially on itch.io; what you're paying for (if you so choose) is the DLC, which we only added after the Steam release. Among other things, this is because due to some of the licenses of the music pieces I used we are not allowed to charge for the game, even if we wanted (not that we want to).

In any case, if the best games are commercial, why wouldn't they deserve to win? It's the AGS Awards, not the Freeware Awards.

(I was going to reply to LimpingFish directly, but since I'm already replying to your post anyway, I'll do it here.)

I completely agree. The idea of outright removing commercial games from the awards would only reinforce the idea that AGS is not a "serious" engine, and is meant only for hobbyists. Besides, we should be celebrating the fact that more and more devs are using AGS to create commercial games that stand tall against those created in other engines.

Furthermore, many (most?) commercial AGS games are created by small, in many cases one-person, teams, just the same as freeware ones, and these devs have to put in a huge amount of work and effort into polishing their games to a commercial standard. Excluding these games from the awards would feel like the community is "punishing" these devs for going the extra mile.

[Reducing the number of categories:]

So the hot issues seem to be:

Reducing the number of categories:

I agree that reducing the number of categories will probably help streamline the awards (some of them like "Best programming" were kind of absurd, for reasons already stated by others), although it's depressing that writing the name of a character in a simple text field seems to be "too hard" for some people. But if that's what it is, then I guess that award should go too. Shame, really.

Streamlining the nomination process:

I know this might not be a popular opinion, but the way the nominations are set up right now is probably the most optimal way it can be done without dumping any additional work on anybody (site admins or devs). Yes, it can be quite daunting to open a drop-down menu and find every single AGS game added to the database that year listed there, but at least this method is automated and fair, as it ensures that no game is left behind and it doesn't depend on devs adding their games themselves to the "for your consideration" thread, which could be an issue in the case of holidays, illness, unexpected circumstances, etc.

Also, definitely start the process earlier. Nominations in the first two weeks of January, votes until late January at the latest, ceremony (or results) in the first week of February.


Streamlining the voting process:

I like the idea of opening the voting process to non-forum members, as long as there is some anti-cheating measure available (recording IPs or using cookies, or both), BUT the problem with that is that the most popular, commercial, better marketed games would be the ones to always win, whereas if the vote stays within the AGS community, the process is likely to be more neutral. I think the community here cares more about whether games are good than whether games are popular, and that's pretty valuable.

The Ceremony:

Like many others, I love the ceremony, but if the organizers feel that the turnout is not worth the work, then it's absolutely their call to "retire". And there is no need to have any kind of ceremony: a simple forum post would probably do perfectly.

I don't believe I've said anything that hasn't said before, but I wanted to at least chirp in. A lot of people put in a lot of work every year for this to happen, and it's only fair that we try to find a solution that works for everybody (but especially for them).

Bomb the Bass (Kruder & Dorfmeister remix) - "Bug Powder Dust"

This was always one of my favorite K&D tracks.

K&D are soooo good, their mixes are great for AGS coding sessions.

PJ Harvey - "Lwonesome Tonight" [sic]

On Halloween I went to a PJ Harvey concert (the last show on her I Inside the Old Year Dying tour), and I haven't been able to get this song out of my head ever since. I'm not even sure I really like it.

I find the album as a whole pretty whatever, but I love that song. Also the opening track and I Inside the Old I Dying are fantastic. Everything else, eh.

The Beatles - "Now and Then"

Just out of curiosity, really. It's... OK?

I went in quite cynically and found it unexpectedly poignant. But maybe it has to do with how old McCartney looks in the video (81! My god!), and having the sudden hunch that maybe he's pulling a Bowie and setting things up as a last goodbye...

I've never followed any of the Beatles' solo careers with much interest, but every once in a while I take a dive and find a gem here and there. This one is from his latest studio album in 2020, a bluesy/gospel-y piece that reminded me of Antony and the Johnsons on a first listen, and when I showed it to a friend she said it reminded her of Johnny Cash. So now I can see both, like one of those duck/rabbit optical illusions:

DJ Shadow (featuring Run The Jewels) - "Nobody Speak"

I'm old enough that a song from 7 years ago feels like "a recent track" to me. But then I guess it's been 25 years since I first heard DJ Shadow.

Hahah, love it.

I'm old enough to remember when El-P was known not for being part of Run The Jewels, but as a member of Company Flow and one of the most revolutionary producers in the underground hip-hop scene. Kids these days!

Mine was The Cat Lady, in 2016, but I had no idea it was made with AGS because I didn't know about AGS at all back then! I only connected the dots a couple of years later when I started making my own games with it.

Would it be possible to make these arrows a bit taller, or replace them with elements that are a bit easier to click? It really is a bit of a pain to have to click on an area that's like 4 pixels tall in order to scroll through lists of room elements.

For my games I've used @morganw's "ags-tar" script to set the correct permissions and pack everything into a tar.gz archive that you can then simply upload directly to itch: https://git.sr.ht/~mew/ags-tar

I would lie if I said Slasher and I got along. In fact, we butted heads quite strongly a couple of times.

And yet, in my very very very early days as an AGS newbie, he showed me a silly trick that I still use to this day. So no matter what, there's a tiny part of him in all my games.

Rest in peace, you goddamned boomer.

I always use BackgroundColourNumber 32 (or like CW said, 0,4,0) as the background colour of any black GUIs I might need for fades and other stuff. Maybe it's not technically pure black, but I've never been able to tell the difference.

Would people be interested in doing a small test for the new client, on May 20th a Saturday at 18:00 GMT?

That would be 20:00 CEST, right? I think that should be fine for me.

What an amazing milestone, thank you to everybody involved!

[EDIT:]

I did a quick test and can easily reproduce this. If the first loop of the view is empty, AGS falls back on sprite #0, then plays sound #0.

Of course! It didn't occur to me that the sound that plays is precisely the one with ID 0. Good catch!

I can't test this right now, but what happens if you try to set another loop that doesn't exist and isn't loop 0? For example, in my case, FIRSTVIEW only has loop 2, so what happens if you try to SetView (FIRSTVIEW, 1)?

EDIT: I was finally able to test it myself and the same thing happens if you assign any existing but empty loop.

If, on the other hand, you assign a non-existing loop (for example (FIRSTVIEW, 3) in my case), the engine will crash with an "invalid loop number" error as expected.

[3.6.0 RC 2]

This is kind of a weird one and it might be difficult to explain, but I'll try my best. Using 3.6.0 RC 2.

In a test room for my game, I'm doing the following:

Code: ags

oExampleObject.SetView(FIRSTVIEW);
oExampleObject.Animate(2, 6, eOnce, eBlock);
oExampleObject.SetView(SECONDVIEW);
oExampleObject.Animate(2, 6, eOnce, eBlock);
oExampleObject.SetView(THIRDVIEW);
oExampleObject.Animate(2, 6, eOnce, eBlock);

I know that when you call SetView without the optional loop and frame parameters these default to 0, so that what I'm doing here is equivalent to oExampleObject.SetView(FIRSTVIEW, 0, 0).

However, I made a tiny mistake here, because loop 0 for FIRSTVIEW, SECONDVIEW and THIRDVIEW is empty.

I would expect the game to maybe crash or throw a warning in this case, but what it's doing instead is playing a frame-linked audio that belongs to a completely different view from any of these three every time the SetView command is triggered.

Furthermore, I have not called SetView on any object or GUI button before this.

Obviously what I need to do is set the correct loop in the SetView command: oExampleObject.SetView(FIRSTVIEW, 2). Still, this is very confusing, because I have no idea why AGS is choosing to trigger that specific view and frame when it finds an empty loop.

Anybody have any idea what might be going on here?

The Cursed, aka Eight for Silver

Thank you!

You're up.

Some weird remake of that 007 film with the villain with metal teeth? 

Moonraker II: Moonrakerer!

Nope.



I don't think any more images will make it any easier at this point, so if nobody guesses it correctly with this one, I'll reveal the title and pass it on.

Ginger Snaps?

Nope, similar theme, much more recent.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I'm not 100% sure if this is a serious guess or not, but... no.

A clue: the movie is not about vampires.

Apparently it was called The Nightingale.

Not The Nightingale.

Nothing?

[absolutely]

Correct, Laura Hunt! An adaption of Angela Carter's novels!

It's actually an adaptation of a couple of her short stories To anybody who doesn't know her work, I absolutely recommend checking her out. The collection where these stories appear, The Bloody Chamber, is a great starting point, but my favourite by far is her novel Nights at the Circus. Her prose is just dazzling, especially towards the end of her career (The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, Black Venus).

So, on with the next film...