Hi,
Dangerous water sounds grate! When will it be finished?

Yes, dangerous waters should be released in the time frame you outlined.
Dangerous waters is all audio, but it isn't at the arrowkey navigation, yet... It would be awesome if I could learn autoit like that, *snaps fingers*, but I don't have the time. Making a 3d audio game is one thing on my list, but don't let this make dangerous waters seem second-class, it'll be an experience unlike any you've experienced in prior gaming!
P.S. I'm glad you think dragon slayer is cool!

I don't if using the audio game maker will be a good or bad thing. I don't want to sound insulting, but I'm not sure I'm sold on using the game maker. If anyone can make games, then it kind of defeats the purpose of making games. In the ag comunity, there are those who develop and then there are the consumers. With everyone being developers using the same game maker, won't most games be the same to some extent? I may be missing something, but these are my current views.

i am planning on using the audio game maker. until i learn programming, i have no clue when that'll be. i am hoping to make an rpg. audio game maker is probably going to be over 100 mb, i hope my rpg will be over 500! well, perhaps not that big, but... well... perhaps more than a hundred.

I suppose it will all depend upon the limits of the audio game maker software. If I understood richard correctly when he was talking about it, I gather that the audio game maker is simply a set of ready coded game modular elements that you can put together to make games, adding your own sound files. So for instance, you coulduse a variety of menues and inventory items pluss occasionally occurring left-right sterrio targiting sequences to create something like chillingham, or use a continuous loop layout module with racing controlls module, pluss a left-right sterrio targiting module to create battle racing games, with added stats module for your vehicle's energy and amo count and number of laps.

what I'm hoping though, is that you will be able to combine these modules in a huge number of ways, and perhaps even define different objects with different properties within each module as well.

so for instance, in a superliam Style side scroller, creating different sorts of enemies. Enemies which move and can be shot, enemies which move and must be jumped/ducked, enemis which are stationary, maybe even enemies that create moving/nonkillable enemies (fireball throwing guns for example). It would also be good if things like layout creating modues are fairly fluid. So for instance, one idea I've been playing with for a while is having a superliam esque game which involved various side scrolling sections separated by ladders (yes, original Mega man and Donkey Kong were on my mind here).

If people will just bare with my verbose ramblings a bit more, I've recently been looking into freeware created non-audio Pc games. what's interesting there is, that any of them are created with several games creation tools, something called game maker, game factory, and blitz2 basic, which is I presume, an extremely high level programming language with many pre-defined objects and such, sinse people talk about creating games using it in a matter of weeks. in fact, that's what I really want for the audio game maker, a very high level programming language which will let me define game charactoristics in something approximating english, ----- or at least some kind of reasonabley basic loglish.

Btw, Another interesting factI noticed whilst playing the freeware Pc games, is that many of them are about the same in terms of complexity as the audio games produced with similar resources, which says something interesting both about our pals in the Agdev community, and about what would happen if the main stream companies took up audio game developement.

Sorry about the long and rambling post here.

Well if it was below 30 I would be very scared.

As to programming tools, most have to be bought. I know at least some of the developers use Visual Basic, but that doesn't exactly cost peanuts.

Perhaps it would be possible to use the syntax of the language Basic and apply it in a game maker context. It could work. The trouble I see is to make it easier you have to preprogram functionality, meaning you restrict flexibility. Now if it were possible to include conventional programming languages to be involved, maybe to add modules or something similar, would help. This could mean you would write the game in the game maker, and if it didn't do what you needed you could write the extra code required in something like traditional Basic.

Basic doesn't mean the language is simple, the fact that it is fairly easy to pick up is pure coincidence. If you can get your head around basic maths formulae it is not hard to use... just for heaven's sake don't use "goto", ever

Eliot: I use just basic downloaded from justbasic.com It is rather easy to learn, but that might be because I'm lucky enough to be able to think pretty logically.
Cx2 And Dark: The idea of creating a game maker using pre-defined mojules and maybe some simplistic physics engines + using your own scripting knowledge was something I was dreaming up just last night. That way, it would take some skill to make games that are considdered acceptional.

I think I get what you're saying; I'm not quite with it today. Things would get pretty messy if so many things had to be checked; especially when you try to add your own functionality.

Well, I'd normally say read the helpfiles and be creative, but since I am sick and have nothing better to do, here it is:

[top]
guesses = 0
thenum = int(rnd(0)*10) + 1
[guess]
prompt "Guess a number from 1 to 10."; guess
if guess > thenum then goto [higher]
if guess < thenum then goto [lower]
if guess = thenum then goto [youwin]
[higher]
notice "Too high!"
guesses = guesses + 1
goto [guess]
[lower]
notice "Too low."
guesses = guesses + 1
goto [guess]
[youwin]
notice "You got it!"
notice "It took you "; guess; " guesses!"
confirm "Would you like to play again?"; playagain$
if playagain$ = "yes" then goto [top]
goto [end]
[end]
notice "Thank you for playing this insanely basic game!"

Hmm, I actually understood all that,both from Cx2 and from Sk8!

this is actually what I meant by "loglish" which is a philosophical term used in formal logic, which is where you convert sentences to a semi-formal logical syntax with brackits, properties and formal logical opperators, and such, before completely removing the English words so that you can do logical analysis to them.

I could well probably cope with Justbasic, and maybe basic as well if that's the sort of thing it involves.

As to the audio game maker, I do remember richard saying it'd probably be lots of code in various modular chunks that you could play with, with accompanying help on the language sintax, sentence structure and operators and such. This is exactly the type of thing that I'd like to see. I believe in the Audio game maker topic there was a brief discussion of the audio game maker being used merely to create multiple glorified mods of the same few game types, but hopefully if what Richard says about continuous developement of the project is true this shouldn't happen (well, not if people are sufficiently creative anyway).

As reguards the difference in terminology, I did always assume "mod" in the main stream sense meant creating a twisted version of an original game, using different sprites and sounds. for example, I once saw something called "sonic Vs mario" which featured a Mario sprite running through Sonic levels grabbing mushrooms instead of rings. As Audio games are just sound, doesn't it make sense that a modified soundpack counts as a mod?

Please excuse me if I'm getting my terminology mixed up here, up until this time last year, accept for interactive fiction and online link based games I'd never really tried anything that wasn't produced on consoles.