The noscript plugin should probably help, especially since the scripts are apparently hosted externally.

From what I've gathered, it actually doesn't seem to use a script, but exploits a hole in the Media Player plugin for non-IE browsers. No idea. Firefox seems to block the domain, though.

There are gonna be a bunch of SotC demakes here, I bet. I've never played SotC.

You WHAT?!?

Dude, do yourself a favor.

Neither have I. I'd like to, but I don't have a PS2.

So maybe this demake contest is my chance 

I'm looking forward to see if you can even fit that entire name on a GB-resolution title screen

It's true, the iframes are back.

THUNDERENTERTAINMENT

THUNDERTAINMENT.

You win a to be determined amount of, but no less than two, internets if you pull this off.

Oh and I need a goofy satirical name, I haven't come up with one yet, so I'm open to ideas if anyone has any.

Gang Castle.

EDIT: No wait, even better: Mob Castle.

Dodging I'm not sure about at all. Right now, it just moves you quickly to the side, but takes a short amount of time to execute. The main problem with this system is that it's difficult to make dodging useful for avoiding attacks without making it too useful for travel.

It seems there is already a short period of time after dodging where the character is effectively frozen. Perhaps that could be made a bit longer.

Muhahaha  :D :D Awesome. Title cracks me up.

[Moonbase Commander]

Moonbase Commander - tethered strategic goodness.

Hey yeah, that game is huge fun in a LAN match. Really challenges the bonds of friendship though


Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot by Chris Crawford
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_&_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot
Perhaps the game with the most esoteric game mechanics I can think of. It's basically a social simulator where you are one of a group of acolytes which compete for a position called Shepherdship. At day, you wander around and talk to the others via a unique simple language interface where you construct sentences by clicking on icons. The freedom of interaction is amazing, you can build trust and even friendship with other characters, while others will resent you; you can threaten, lie, backstab and betray the others, or you can choose to play honestly.
At night, you compete in "mind combat" which is basically a rock/paper/scissors game, but it's crucial to use the information you gathered during the day in order to win.
It's a fascinating game, I recommend trying it if you're into exotic game mechanics.

The reason why I dislike Wikipedia is because as an authoritative resource it's largely, if not completely, unreliable.

Agreed. You'd certainly make a fool of yourself if you'd cite a WP page in any kind of scientific paper. But, like you, I use it all the time for "disposable" information, or for looking up facts which I basically know but don't have memorized. It's a great timesaver in such cases. And often WP pages link to more credible articles which one might be able to cite, so it's also good as a bibliography on a given topic.

Not true in my experience. I've seen lots or articles marked for deletion or simply removed straight away because they weren't notable, "unencyclopedic", pure nonsense or violated whatever other Wikipedia guidelines.

Which means that for a space of time there was a notable,  "unencyclopedic", pure nonsense or other article on wikipedia. And unless it had written across it in 24 point helvetica "This Sucks" it could be mistaken by some unknowing numbskull for fact.

Again, true. That's the reason I always have my bullshit sensors on whenever I read something on WP. It's usually pretty easy to tell a competently written article from the work of a clueless hack.

Really, these arguments aren't against Wikipedia, but against people who misunderstand what it is and are too dense to use it correctly. Everything can be misused.

Awww crap why didn't this thread come up two weeks ago when I had the chance to design my own free T-shirt...

Sure you might be writing similar stuff, but not identical.

That's why I advocated the "salvaging" kind of code reuse in my first post: rip stuff out and adapt it to fit into the new project. That doesn't mean that you have to rewrite it from scratch.

My point though, is that it is much easier to bury yourself in the "engine" side of things, polishing your framework and making your code flexible enough to be reused, than it is to tackle the real problem: making a fun game.

Looking at it that way, we seem to have the same opinion: I warned against over-generalization too.

What we need to realize, I think, is that we are game creators, not programmers. And most of the tools in the programmers toolbox are not useful for the game creator.

I'll respectfully disagree here, but that's another discussion entirely.

it's more programmers indulgence and attempts to avoid the real work 

I don't really get what you're saying. So you think rewriting the same code over and over for every game is a good use of my time? And if I don't do it I'm lazy?

I don't know if it's been posted before, but there's a neat "report" on the E3 trailer park on Zero Punctuation:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/157-The-E3-Trailer-Park

Basically, anything that doesn't rely on the specifics of your particular game can usually be reused. E.g. all the "plumbing" code that sets up a window and creates an OpenGL context (or whatever it is that you use), perhaps your main game loop with frame rate limiter and event handling, a matrix/vector library, a texture class... that kind of stuff. I usually also have a source file containing all those little utility functions that are at most a few lines long and don't really fit anywhere else; as long as you keep those generic, they can often be reused pretty nicely too, though not everything will be used in every project.

There are really two ways to reuse your code. One is the "formal" and "correct" way, where you pull all those bits you want to reuse into a library of their own and just import that when you want to reuse it. The other is what I have heard somebody call "code salvaging" instead of code reuse, where you just rip source files or even just individual chunks of code out of an old project and drop it into a new one. To be honest, I recently use the latter, "dirty" method much more often than the first one; it feels much simpler, there's less overhead, and you don't have to try and accommodate every imaginable future situation in your code right now.

This last point is also the reason I wouldn't recommend specifically planning ahead with respect to reuse in a later project. Sure, try to keep unnecessary dependencies to a minimum (so if your vector class includes some game-specific code, there's probably something wrong), but apart from that, I'd recommend sticking to the YAGNI principle: You Ain't Gonna Need It. Don't try to make your code so general that it can handle everything and the kitchen sink if it's not required for your current project; if new needs arise, you can always refactor, and the actual use cases probably look different than the "general" case you envisioned earlier anyway. That's one of the big lessons I learned about programming the hard way, namely by experience.

Shout if you need help with maths.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Heh

(I'm a maths postgrad as well, you see )

Ah, sorry then. But that's cool to know.

Because anything, ANYTHING can be put on Wikipedia.

Not true in my experience. I've seen lots or articles marked for deletion or simply removed straight away because they weren't notable, "unencyclopedic", pure nonsense or violated whatever other Wikipedia guidelines.

I find this whole backlash against Wikipedia a bit strange. There seems to have been a huge surge in this over the last few months, or anyway I didn't notice much of it say a year ago. I guess it's become some kind of trend. Sure there are badly written articles, and there is cruft like this particular article, and at times you're not going to find the exact piece of information you're looking for, but more often than not I find Wikipedia an extremely useful source.

Any idea how this stuff got onto the site in the first place?

Awww, what a cliffhanger to end the demo on.

This seems like a great game, and this is coming from someone who rarely plays RPGs and has never played one that was as console-ish as this one. I really like how the character choices you make at the beginning influence the dialogue; it must have been an awful lot of work to write all these customized bits of dialogue. Plus I like how the party incessantly bickers among itself

The combat system is weird, took me a while to figure out despite the tutorial, but after that it's not too complicated and sort of fun.

It's hard to say something about the story after the short demo, but its at least okay so far. I can actually see myself buying this, the price seems very fair, it's really more the thought of the time I'd put into this keeping me back right now instead of the money...

Oh, and the music is definitely very nice.