AGDI Birthday Competition!!!

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Gronagor
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#26 Post by Gronagor » Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:52 am

I'm pretty sure Erpy won't announce the winners (or how many have finished) before everybody had a chance. Might be that Radiant's the only one so far.

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#27 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 8:41 am

Seeing that it's now april the 2nd, I guess I'll spill the beans, it was indeed an april's fools prank. The slot machine worked as followed:

- The email adress-stuff was just there to make it seem slightly more legitimate.

- The slots WERE determined completely at random, but the program checked the results before actually displaying them and if it didn't agree with the results (for better or for worse), new combinations were picked until it matched the motives behind it and THEN the player would be informed of the combination.

- As people probably figured out, it wasn't possible to get to 15000. The machine simply would not allow a combination that'd get the total dinar sum over that number. Since the amount of money you could lose was 10 dinar per turn maximum, we also disabled the jackpot above 7500 dinar and the three-of-a-kind (if you were betting 10) over 10500. Above 13500, it wasn't possible to win 100 or more anymore.

- The idea was to keep people floating around 11000 or so. While the slot machine behaved "normally" the first 15 to 25 turns, it'd behave like this afterwards:

- Less than 100 dinar (safety check): 100% chance of getting a losing combo turned into a winning one.
- Between 100 and 1000 dinar: 75% chance of getting a losing combo turned into a winning one.
- Between 1000 and 5000 dinar: 50% chance of getting a losing combo turned into a winning one.
- Between 5000 and 6500 dinar: 25% chance of getting a losing combo turned into a winning one.
- Between 6500 and 7000 dinar: 10% chance of getting a losing combo turned into a winning one.

- Between 8000 and 10000 dinar: 25% chance of getting a winning combo turned into a losing one.
- Between 10000 and 14000 dinar: 50% chance of getting a winning combo turned into a losing one.
- Between 14000 and 14900 dinar: 75% chance of getting a winning combo turned into a losing one.
- Between 14900 and 14999 dinar: 100% chance of getting a winning combo turned into a losing one.

So while it was impossible to win, it was also impossible to lose. The idea was to crank the dinar sum up to a reasonable amount rather quickly, so the player would be encouraged to keep playing. :D

We weren't sure how persistent people were going to be, so the maximum amount of turns was 2400. (good for about a little over two hours of button pressing if we calculated it correctly) After that, the following slots were displayed and a message appeared:

Image

Image

Image

That said, I apologise to those who were offended at the fact we made them waste time achieving an unobtainable goal. If it's a consolation; it took more than 2 hours to construct this thing.

If that's not enough; like The Pal said, the slot machine contained various pictures of previously undisclosed dialogue pics, so see this as a preview of some sort. In addition, Navynuke created a QFG2VGA avatar gallery yesterday and all 6 pics in the game have been added for our visitors to use on these forums. Just enter your profile and click on the button "Avatar gallery".

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Pidgeot
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#28 Post by Pidgeot » Sat Apr 02, 2005 8:48 am

I had a feeling when I browsed through the EXE and saw that message - but nothing relating to the resulting code. :P

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#29 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 8:57 am

Yeah, next time we should put the message in a sprite slot instead.

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Gronagor
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#30 Post by Gronagor » Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:04 am

That's... evil!

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#31 Post by Alias » Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:06 am

I should of known. That IS evil!

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#32 Post by Jafar » Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:08 am

I should of used the magnet... :p

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#33 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:10 am

Now there, Gron. We provide you with an avatar to match your custom title and you complain. That's equally evil.

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#34 Post by Swift » Sat Apr 02, 2005 9:56 am

New avatars? Cool.

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#35 Post by Gronagor » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:18 am

Hmmm... you're right. I apologize.

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#36 Post by Meerbat » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:57 am

We trick animals with similar machines, which are called "Skinner boxes". The slot machine has been known as the human equivalent of the Skinner box, because even though the machine operates at random (well, not always :p), some people develop "gambling tics" hoping to be able to somehow influence the results. You were also in on it, weren't you Radiant? ;)

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#37 Post by Radiant » Sat Apr 02, 2005 2:27 pm

Who, me? Do you really believe this is some kind of Dutch conspiracy?
:p

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#38 Post by Broomie » Sat Apr 02, 2005 2:37 pm

I might make a poll of this. Best April Fool's Day prank?

-2001: I have no idea, I wasn't here.
-2002: Wasn't this QFG2VGA cancelled?
-2003: The infamous voicepack and version 3 prank which shocked many.
-2004: Old forums broke down, losing all content yet to be revealed was new forums.
-2005: Rigged slot machine.
-2006: AGD1 + 2 get together and have a baby.

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#39 Post by Alias » Sat Apr 02, 2005 2:46 pm

:lol

Im not sure about the last one. Maybe they could make baby adventure game developers to help make games faster.  :p

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#40 Post by Peter Swinkels » Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:24 pm

I like several others suspected that the contest was an april fools prank and even if it wasn't I didn't feel like wasting a lot of time trying to win.

I did give the Slot Machine program a quick look though. I used a viewer that allows you to see the plain binary contens of a file. I used the viewer to search for the words "april" and "fools" to see if I could find any message that the program could use to inform you that it was a prank (if it was.) I didn't find any such message. If I had taken the time to read all readable text in the thing I would have mostly likely found the message described earlier in this thread...

Any way, I noticed a few things about the program: 1. It didn't complain when I forgot to enter my e-mail address once (which seems strange if the e-mail address is so important for being able to enter the contest.) 2. The program ran at a graphics resolution of 640 x 400 (or was that 640 x 480?) pixels. Could this be a hint as to the graphics quality that Quest for Glory II VGA will have?

One more thing: I think that this whole contest was a good joke. A lot of effort seems to have been made to play a good prank on every one here.

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#41 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:33 pm

Any way, I noticed a few things about the program: 1. It didn't complain when I forgot to enter my e-mail address once (which seems strange if the e-mail address is so important for being able to enter the contest.) 2. The program ran at a graphics resolution of 640 x 400 (or was that 640 x 480?) pixels. Could this be a hint as to the graphics quality that Quest for Glory II VGA will have?
Nope. QFG2VGA will be 320x200. If you really must know, the slot machine is an edited version of a similar (non-rigged) slot machine in Himalaya's upcoming game. (which is 640x400)

The advantage of retaining the 640x400 resolution was the fact we were able to keep the dialogue pictures in at the size they were created in. Using 320x200 would have required us to shrink the dialogue pics down, causing in significant loss of detail.

Image

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#42 Post by Alias » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:00 pm

Will AGDI actually have this version of the game for download? If would be very cool. If they can't handle the bandwidth or dont have enough space they could get other people to host it for them. It shouldent be too big.

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#43 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:27 pm

What version of the game? I'm afraid I don't quite follow.

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#44 Post by Radiant » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:32 pm

I think he meant the extra-enhanced version that was to be the prize.

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#45 Post by Erpy » Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:36 pm

Ah, that. To be honest, I'm not sure yet whether we'll have those debug codes available to the player or not. There's definitely not going to be a separate version for it. Either everyone gets to use them or just the members of our team.

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#46 Post by anathoth8 » Sat Apr 02, 2005 11:13 pm

I did notice a small bug in the way the slot machine operated. I wasn't even going to mention it until you said it was part of another game.

It should subtract your bet amount as you spin, rather than after. As it stands, you only have to pay your bet if you lose. For example, if you bet 10 and you get an Omar in first position, you should break even, right? (You put in 10, you get 10 out) But in the program, you actually come out 10 ahead, since the money is never subtracted.

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#47 Post by Angelus3K » Sun Apr 03, 2005 7:46 am

Yup some of us werent fooled. Sorry Erpy  ;)

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BTW Any chance of releasing that slot game un-rigged? Its quite a fun game!

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#48 Post by adeyke » Sun Apr 03, 2005 8:24 am

Tsk, tsk.  So many cheaters :p.  It's a good thing there wasn't actually a prize involved.

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#49 Post by PotatoSlayer » Sun Apr 03, 2005 12:34 pm

i refuse to lose, i shall keep on playing

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#50 Post by Peter Swinkels » Sun Apr 03, 2005 1:01 pm

Cheaters? What do you mean, adeyke?

Any way, here is a tip for any programmers here:
To prevent people from finding string data in executables you could convert an executable to a compressed executable that extracts itself to memory each time it is executed. (I believe Pklite was used to compress certain MS-DOS programs (Inherit the Earth and Pc Globe for example) this way.)

In Basic for example, you can use this technique in your code to obscure strings:

Code: Select all

 Chr$(72) + Chr$(101) + Chr$(108) + Chr$(108) + Chr$(111) + Chr$(44) + Chr$(32) + Chr$(116) + Chr$(104) + Chr$(105) + Chr$(115) + Chr$(32) + Chr$(105) + Chr$(115) + Chr$(32) + Chr$(97) + Chr$(110) + Chr$(32) + Chr$(111) + Chr$(98) + Chr$(115) + Chr$(99) + Chr$(117) + Chr$(114) + Chr$(101) + Chr$(100) + Chr$(32) + Chr$(109) + Chr$(101) + Chr$(115) + Chr$(115) + Chr$(97) + Chr$(103) + Chr$(101) + Chr$(46) 
8o  8o  8o

BTW: This probably isn't important any more, but: I noticed one more thing about the slot machine program: When right clicking my mouse the mouse pointer first disappeared and then changed into a walk icon. I couldn't change it back again.

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