s_d

You should be doing whatever it is that brings you some happiness. It's all too easy for us to demand more, more, more, from talented and prolific artists without considering the toll it takes on them (no, I'm not saying Spikey is doing that... I'm saying all of us are prone to that on one level or another). Those that are friends, and truly appreciate your work will be willing to wait for inspiration to strike, and will (again) appreciate whatever effort you make. It's clear that you have a love for adventure games and fan fiction... I suspect that it will strike again at some point. When it does, there is no reason you couldn't have the same level of help and support from friends here, and even (hopefully!) a whole new generation of brilliant adventure game fans spawned from this current revival. For what it's worth, I'm honored to have been around for this "small" effort of yours, and to see your creative process in action. Thank you for that, Akril.

Hey, you're welcome! I'm glad it's working. Consider the "asks for network access" to be one of those things that could be tweaked were it a bigger project ;-) I have no earthly clue why it's doing that. I barely spent enough time reading docs & following tutorials to just build the installer, which turns out to be a trivial affair, by the way. The only aspect of it which would pose a challenge for *any* forum member here who can click a mouse and type into a text entry field is prior knowledge of subtleties in the differing Wine engine versions (not even developer experience on the Wine project). And that, it turns out, is a matter of being able to use Google and read & understand Wine project changelogs (and a tiny bit of background into stuff like X windows input conventions to help with understanding the changelogs). That's it. With that knowledge and the browsing, anyone can probably choose the right Wine engine version and do what I did, as long as they have beta testers.

Awesome work! I knew I was missing something, but just had no more time to spend looking, and had never worked with Allegro before. That's such a big help, thank you for taking the time to root-cause the issue and point me in the right direction!

The package I've posted now has the updated version in it (the URL is the same).

Well, I personally thought it was hilarious and brilliant! It's definitely more subtle and would benefit from additonal writing, but I completely understand not feeling comfortable with exposition (especially if, as I assume, English is not your primary language). If that is the case, I'm fairly certain that your English is a hell of a lot better than any other language of mine. I've packaged it up for Linux, exactly like PledgeQuest, and it is available here: http://www.40hex.com...0_linux_x86.zip It dawns on me that I could have trivially made, and probably should have used, UNIX tarballs instead of zip archives, but I was basically replicating bero's package style, lock, stock & barrel... I'll edit this post to add a Mac OS X version in a bit. Edit: Mac OS X package at -- http://www.40hex.com/projects/TheMysteriousCartridge.app.zip

Um. Wow, major brainfart on my part. I have no idea what I was thinking, because I did know that before. I was packing madly this morning to get ready for my drive home and it appears that I basically babbled into a forum post. Mea culpa.

No takers? I'd really like to have some test feedback by the time I arrive back home (driving all day today). I'll probably be lurking, via mobile, but will not really be able to interact much. SO! If you test it and report some results, don't be upset if I don't reply. pcj; if good test results are posted (two perhaps?) then please go ahead and mirror it. If you do, you may wish to rename it from Beta2 to just "PledgeQuest.app.zip".

Not sure which Linux stalwart you are, asdfasdf (guessing Speedster1 maybe?)... but great work! I spent a couple of hours reading docs and trying stuff. I got about halfway to your point, and decided that the game needed to just go out, and we'd look at the audio problem later. BTW, I'm not entirely certain that this is a general MIDI-on-Linux problem (i.e., difficulty of setup), but it is certainly an AGS on Linux problem. Take a peek at Space Quest: Vohaul Strikes Back, and you may see the same situation as here; gameplay is good, but audio requires a MIDI softsynth chain set up with specific device nodes, etc. There is some AGS configurability, including a config file, that I've not looked much into. There may be some help there via config tweaking.

Beta 2, Mac port of PledgeQuest at http://www.40hex.com/projects/PledgeQuestBeta2.app.zip This version uses settings nearly identical to Lunchbox's packaging for VSB. Again, it worked for me, but I only have access to one machine to work with (2010 MBP running OS X 10.6). Mac folks; please do test this and post your results. Problems with the other beta port included erratic/dysfunctional mousing, blank screen hang, and failure to launch. Please note these. I hope this works well for everyone!

Yeah, dude, she's good!

Do it!! Drop a build here and I'll package it for Linux (and hopefully Mac once I figure out the right tweaks...)

Beta Mac port of PledgeQuest at ... needs testing though. Worked for me, but I only have access to one machine to work with. Perhaps we can reclaim Rahul's pledge ;) Edit: Tester found some strange behavior... we're looking into it.

Wow, you're quite welcome! I'm humbled by your hospitality here (all of yours, really). From what I've seen so far, Akril, your work is amazing, and I'm honored to have contributed in any way to this project. Bea looks amazing... she totally needs to be reused in a larger game, sprites, personality and all! I'm so inspired to learn AGS now, but I'll need to go make up an entire Windows build environment (Wine perhaps?) unless I (single-handedly?) figure a way to port the Editor. And, I haven't looked through the code, but depending on what C# is used, it very well may be impossible to port directly. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, and I do have the awful Mac laptop issued by my company (which is what I'd be doing the Wineskin-wrapped PledgeQuest installer on)

Hey, thanks Jess! That means a lot to me. I'm loving this community, and this project. I really want both to be a success.

Hey! My pleasure! It's the least I could do after Akril put all that work into it, and after I was spamming the crap out of this thread. Agreed, MIDI is a problem still. I think, long term, I'm going to need to come up with some sort of wrapper implementation where I package a statically-linked soundfont/MIDI daemon in with the game assets and enhance the launch script to detect which sound system is running (Pulse, ALSA, ESD, perhaps a fallback to OSS), fire it up prior to the game binary, and then clean up that instance after completion. So, I'm still researching audio support (no good solutions yet), but yes, absolutely a software synth is required. We really want one that happens to create a character device called "/dev/snd/midiC0D0" :-D And then, there's distro variations to consider, as well. I am working on a solution, but I can't do any audio work while I'm at this conference... people may notice! Also, there have been requests for a Mac port of it, and since nobody stepped up when I asked who did that work on VSB (who Lunchbox is and how to get in touch with them), I'm going to try to learn to build one when I get back to my hotel room. The approach is straightforward. It looks to be Wine-wrapped, so just a matter of learning to drive the specific packaging tools (Wineskin, in this case). I'd personally prefer a native app, but I have no source level examples to work off of.

The installer seems to be a lot more involved than I can accomplish in a day, but I think the port is working well enough to test. It's from Akril's final posting. Could another Linux user give it a shot? Setting up MIDI for audio (if it's not working out of the box) is beyond the scope this demo... so if it doesn't work out of the box, I'll have to do support via these forums the best I can. Basically, it's a zip archive like Akril's, and you run "./pledgequest". That's it! Also, my bandwidth is pay-per-MB so please do not mirror this URL, or it will run out of money and go down quickly: http://www.40hex.com/projects/pledgequest1.0_linux_x86.zip If it looks good, maybe PCJ wouldn't mind hosting it here.

Anyone have a splash screen for the Linux installer? It would need to be a 292 x 136 x 24 PC bitmap file...

Ok, loaded but didn't play (everyone was looking up at the projector ;) ) ... looks awesome Akril, I'm so impressed with your work. Also, the preliminary Linux port looks good, but I can't test audio right now (also need to set up the MIDI soft synth on my laptop). I'll do installer work instead... because that just looks like code for the most part and will help me blend in nicely with my co-workers... Not to denigrate Linux (which I love), but is anyone considering an OS X port? It would be really great to put Akril's game out there for the widest audience, considering that we're under a week now. But, man... her amazing effort has got to draw some press, especially geek press. If it doesn't, then I really don't know what will...

Can't wait to try it! I'm stuck in a conference room with my co-workers all around me. Watching me type my posts... it's quite creepy, really. :P

Haha! Too funny... but good luck getting Scott to put this one up on facebook.

Oh, dude... there's nothing like the boxes that were actually yours. I say ebay only if you want to go the display-case route. Otherwise, those were somebody else's big-box versions. Personally, I feel that if I were in that position, I would preserve the parts that can be saved, and see about getting Mark & Scott to sign them. Even damaged, a front cover from my own game box would mean more to me, especially personalized that way. Though, that is a big pledge. Anyway, I intended more to give sympathy than advice, SQIV survival being the only occurrence to soften the blow.

When one ports a game to a new platform, tweaks are made, features added, sacrifices made. This does not necessarily mean that design compromises always have to be made; simply that differences exist between ports. For example; the tablet version of the prototypes use a touch-and-wait interface to present the action icons. I doubt that the desktop versions would need such a feature. Likewise, the tablet versions of SpaceVenture may eschew parts of the parser; perhaps they will have slightly different hotspots to accomplish the same puzzles, etc. The point is that if there is a way to export the game assets and some large aspects of game logic to multiple platforms (such as engines that can export to Flash, etc), then the possibility of a playable HTML5 target could be a reality. It has been my experience with code generation tools that such an exercise is invariably coupled with hand-massaging on each port. But, this is fine, and ought to be expected. The higher quality the output tool, the more flexible the game assets, and the more skilled and funded the development team, the easier this process is. I'm extremely excited at the prospect of playing this game (and, with luck, its many successors) natively on my Linux desktop, and then later working a puzzle on my Android mobile while waiting in line, having a friend help me with a difficult part that he demonstrates on his Mac laptop, watching Let's Play's on YouTube posted by Windows gamers, etc. I see no reason that HTML5 can't play a part in that, and be a vehicle to sell the game commercially on the Chrome App Market, the upcoming Mozilla HTML5 App Market, and of course iOS. I hope that this vision of an open web utilizing open standards can be realized alongside the traditional desktop paradigm (the one on which I rely more than anything else).

Haha, epic, dude! Love it...

Lastly, I'm close to having Linux builds (I think), and I'm going to test it out on Troels' first whack at the minigame that he posted earlier (since he included sources in the zip archive) as a test. Assuming that I can compile AGS & libraries, and I do not have AGS Editor (because it's .NET, apparently, or at least I can see it's written in c# from the sources), how do I build an AGS game with a working port of AGS? It appears that in Linux, the game compiles as the actual "ags" binary... so it looks like I build the engine and the game basically all at once or some such. Edit: Got it all figured out. Once the "ags" binary is built and working, I just pass it the the Windows executable as a parameter, while running in the same directory as the game asset files. Wrap that part up in a nice little script, and it's ready for installation; just looking into other installer options while bero hunts down his installer code (thinking perhaps mojosetup if I can learn it quickly).

So glad this discussion has moved off the KS thread