As announced earlier to some users
I am working on GOA 2 from time to time.
Written from scratch it will be very cool,
very browser supporting, very SCI supporting
very inventory supporting, etc.

Don't expect anything in 2004 though...

In the meantime, hear this: if you own an
Xbox / Playstation 2 / GameCube
then join me on the free online game network
that is Xlink Kai ! Play all your favorite
system-link games over the internet, like
Halo, Star Wars Battlefront, Rainbow Six 3,
Project Gotham Racing 2 and more!

Join and challenge me, my tagname is
commanderkeen

:-)

Please make sure you have read the HELP section on this site before you start playing. It explains all the controls, and you'll find lots of other valuable information there too.

One more thing. Once playing, please avoid using foul language, it won't be appreciated by most people. Besides, why risk the chance of getting banned from the site for life? Don't forget, if you find someone to be annoying, you can always ignore that player by clicking on that character.

So, Good Old Adventures had been online for over a year now, and we all had a good share of fun here. And I know there are several people creating AGI and SCI fangames (by using the excellent AGI Studio and SCI Studio), and it is time people started making online games as well. Therefore, we (Martin and Q42) have released the sourcecode to both Good Old Adventures and its development kit.

However, it does not come with the multiplayer libraries, but it is the fully playable (from either file or http) singleplayer version of what is online here, including all worlds, all characters and all the gags that can be found throughout the world.

So what does it do?

Well, it does a whole lot more than just be an online AGI world, in fact it is a very powerful gaming engine in a browser, that can easily be modified to recreate the newer Sierra's SCI games (ask smartguy over at the forum for details on his Hero's Quest implementation, it clearly demonstrates some nice possibilities! Great job smg!), or Lucasarts' SCUMM games. Hey, why not Legend Of Zelda - A Link To The Past Online? Just to mention it, I've once modified this exact engine into a scrolling worms-like game :)

The sourcecode is not the prettiest, nor is it the worst you've ever seen. It has some nice touches and lots of comments, and people on the forum will definitly know how to go about stripping the entire world and using this engine to recreate just one single AGI game. For instance, meelworm has done quite some work on Space Quest, including the intro scene, and me and others done other parts of the game, so it's a nice challenge to recreate whole games with it perhaps. Those are just some ideas though.

Downloads

open source download section

And I've tested them to work in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firebird, so it gives a nice start for online game developing.

About the license

The license included is in fact quite similar to the Apache license. All it does is make sure both myself and Q42 are not held responsible for damage by using the sourcecode, and stating that redistributions (in source or binary) retain the copyright notice. So you may use it for both commercial or non-commercial purposes, without even placing copyright notices visible on the screen. Though mentioning the use of this source on your site would be nice.

In fact, I personally would love to hear from anyone who uses the code in any way, let me know about your project! Mail me at martin@q42.nl and for any questions, use Chris' excellent forum.

I just had to add this to the news section
because I really think this is superb:

Finally you can play Sierra games on your
Gameboy Advance!

http://www.bripro.com/gbagi/index.php

1 year Anniversary

Hello all, and congratulations to the development team of 2003. Now you all must be wondering, what happened to Good Old Adventures, and what is Martin doing? Or as how meelworm would say it: "how's the new engine coming along?". Well, it is time I shed show light on some of these queries, clear up what happened to Goa, to me, and what the future might bring and what not.

In short: Goa -as it is- will not be updated in the future. Why? Well, let me explain how things ended up like this. Me and some collegues were working on a great new engine, and I have discussed the cool features with the devteam quite often. I saw great potential in this engine for GoA, and -enthousiastic as I always am- rewriting GoA was well under way. The new engine would make quest possible, and multiplayer puzzles, and lots more.

However: as implementations of the new engine were made in funded projects, I discovered that things like quests and multiplayer events and puzzles couldn't be made editable in a downloadable development-kit, for it required much serverside programming. I could see the pile of work to be done on GoA stack up: rewriting the entire engine, thinking of ways to implement the new features in a new devkit, converting old sources, etc etc. To give a precise ETA, I think june 2006 would be when I could've done all that.

Take into account that this would mean more or less a complete redoing of work that already has been done, and you can understand my lack of enthousiasm for it. Plus the fact that I have had quite some problems with my wrists -being a programmer- and I wanted to spend way more time with more important things (girlfriend, family, friends, other hobbies), I decided to drop GoA for a while and see if I could pick it up someday where I left off.

As I re-read what I just wrote I must say it is an accurate explanation on my view on the hole subject. I had great expectations of GoA and I am proud of what we all managed to accomplish. Especially the minigames that were added later on, man I didn't know those things were possible! And the people I worked with -yes devteam, you!- were great guys, I even got a package from the US (thnx Kenny!) with SQ2, PQ1 and BC in it!

Is there a future for GoA? I don't know and I dare not say the things I would WANT, because that would just make lots of people happy with -perhaps- nothing. I do plan to release the clientside singleplayer engine source so people can build their own goa-like sites and expand the code to their liking, but I cannot guarantee anything about that yet.

As for a small fact, Mike reminded me that there WAS an update since the last one in the news section. Conrad was added. And if you don't know who Conrad is, you're not supposed to understand ;)

Signing off,

Martin

It's been some time since the last update, but once again the development team had gone totally mad in creating rooms and avatars.This time, it is action-packed with famous mini-games like the skimmer ride from Space Quest 1 and the Fruit Toss game from Donald Duck's playground, and new games got introduced, like an old time favorite: Gold Rush!

Well there's just so much more, let's just sum up some of the things:

• Smartguy send over 200 new avatars over the past month, including the *complete* sets of the famous PQ1, SQ1, SQ2, BC, etc etc etc, and of course ALL the characters of this new game that Kenny made:
• Goldrush! Need we say more? Thanks Ken, you're the man! ;-) And glad you're back on the team!
• Donald Duck's Playground! Done by our valued member Meelworm, who did a great job, as always, but he's gone totally berserk on the other project of his:
• The Space Quest 1 Skimmer Ride Arcada Sequence! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH YEAH! This is cool. This is sooo cool, Meelworm threw in a second bonus game as a surprise!
• The development team got a new member: Snake, and we thank him for sending lots of new avatars (like SQ1's Orat! Yes, now we can replay the old cave scene!)
• Snake also send us some of our favorite movie characters: Neo, Morpheus and Agent Smith. So there never was an AGI Matrix game... who cares? These dudes kick butt!!!
• Smartguy introduced Mixed Up Mother Goose as a pack of *ALL* playable characters, including the cute sheep, all the kids etc etc. Yes, we at GOA owe a lot to him.

And there's a lot more too, just go and play.

First of all, the entire development team has gone berserk into building rooms and characters, and lots of new ideas have made the entire engine a lot more powerful. However, there was too little time to test this all in multiplayer, so therefore this is an "experimental update"... yes, things can go wrong, and will., but this is for learning purposes :)

Because, yes, again, too much new stuff to name, but here goes: Kenny joined the development team and brought us the well known Kernona!!! With lots of cool stuff in it of course!!!

Then, MeelWorm made quite some cool Space Quest 2 stuff, YES check the screenshots, these guys did a lot of experimenting with new features...

and last but certainly not least there was smartGuy again who sent me like 34 characters one morning hahaha. And he built most of the Black Cauldron!

Also, there is a nifty clock which shows the exact time on the GOA server, so you can set a nice meeting time with friends from different timezones! All the other new features and gadgets and upcoming stuff is all mentioned at the forum. Hope you all have a nice time, look through the minor glitches that might be in the current release, and appreciate all the work that has gone into developing it all for you - the fans of those good old adventures.

Ok, there's just toooooo much new stuff here. Earlier this week I announced some new things to come, and well, except for the server update they're all here!

• Space Quest 2: Vohaul's Asteroid Fortress is fully playable, and as meelWORM made this one, there's more to do than you first expect. Shrink yourself to a tiny Roger Wilco, find other secrets, and have a lot of fun around one of the best AGI parts ever done, and one we've all had great memories of!
• Then smartguy240x expanded the world of Prydain... and if you don't know what that is, it's the Black Cauldron!
• Also, meelWorm surprised all of us with the first section of King's Quest 2, while he told me he is also working on Police Quest 1's hotel Delphoria! Boy is this guy busy.
• I got several updates from Eric Grynier, and other people, so the world is quite new and fresh again.
• Don't forget to check out the slot machine in Ulence Flats... but beware, you don't want to end up getting fried! :)
• Lots of new actors too. Some special cute ones like a Pikunz Leprechaun surely make my day, but what about a twirling Labion Terror Beast, or King Graham on a carpet?! It's all here!
• And there's a new devkit online, making it much easier for you to create characters and rooms. Check it out!

Also, SCI and SCUMM support is coming up in a few months as well, as for the long awaited server update. Lots of talk on that one can be found at the Forum. Now get on playing people! That's all for now, thanks to all contributors and let me know how much you get fried by the slot machine! :)

Sorry for the long delay in updates. This so-called new update is merely to inform all of you what's coming up and why it's taking so long. In short, Q42 is working on a brandnew communication technology that will be nothing we've ever seen before. Allowing much and much more users to be online, saving us all a lot of bandwidth while playing, and being more precise so we don't have the glitches anymore like when you enter a room and don't see people there yet. But the implementation of this is very time consuming.

In the next update(s) you'll get a lot of other new treats as well. I can tell you that a lot of members of the development team are working on huge parts of the original games. We've got a lot of Space Quest 2, Black Cauldron and other games and characters coming up, and after that, we'll start working towards the first SCI implementation!

So there's no real update right now, this is just to inform you of what's to come, and why it is taking so long. Believe me, it'll be so worth the waiting! :)

Loads and loads of new avatars were added. Most of them come from Police Quest 1 and Space Quest 1, so you can now replay your favorite drugdeal in Lytton Park (errr... I mean buy your favorite ship at Tiny's).

Some bugs were fixed as well, and the new devkit will be online later this week. It will make the creation of avatars a heck of a lot easier!

Oh, and did I mention we passed the 60.000 visitors? Well, we passed the 60.000 visitors :)

Good Old Adventures is constantly being updated, and more and more people are building rooms and characters to make this thing a very cool place to be. Due to the forum, a lot of nice ideas and suggestions are taken into consideration, which can result in utterly kool new features. Here's a list of the recent updates:

• You can type commands! Finally, a small text parser is online, which has a lot of similarities with the one used in the original games. Things like "look around", "turn on the computer" and "open the door" are now possible. Currently this has only been implemented in the Police Quest headquarters. Once this update has been implemented in the development kit, other worlds will have this too
• Ulence Flats from Space Quest 1 was added! A BIG thanks to Eric Grygier for that one
• There's a new character calculator add-on for the development kit written by smartGuy240! Check out the development kit section for downloading instructions. A documentation should follow soon. Thank you very much, Patrick!
• The Police Quest headquarters now has all rooms except the parking lot. Eero Ränik takes full responsibility for building the Narcotics division and Lt.Morgan's office
• Then meelWorm and Mike did a nice job in developing some new characters, and smartGuy240 has gone totally berserk in sending me like 8 new characters each day! Probably with help of his new character calculator ;) Check it out people, because right now it adds up to 34 characters to choose from!
• Also, meelWorm suggested we use PNG files instead of GIFs, and how right he was. So all images of the world were converted to PNG, which should give all you players a download speedup of approximately 33%
• And some minor updates, like all characters now being able to have their own cars (yes you can now change car when driving on the Lytton map. Check out Larry's taxi), removing the option to chat html and last but not least: the dropdown menu's now show clearer spotnames and actornames

Have fun!

First of all, thanks to meelWorm there's a huge new part of King's Quest 3 playable! With secret doors, new characters, and a few very well hidden nice secrets! Yes, this is some high quality work. Big thanks meelWorm! All made with the new development kit!

Which brings us to the next big news section: THE DEVELOPMENT KIT is live! Check the development kit section of this site for more info. Start building, people! And use the http://www.agigames.com/ forum for questions and answers.

Life after slashdot... Seems we're heading up to 50.000 hits today.

Time for a sligt update. There are new spots in Police Quest to drive to, and you might want to check out the PC room in the headquarters as well, just for sheer fun ;) 

Also, Black Cauldron's "very special animal" Hen Wen is now present.
And we've got some more nice updates to come... stay tuned!

What were we thinking, posting a message on slashdot. We just passed the 15000 hits and it's early in the day. And yes, our little server cannot cope with this amount of users. We had to put a maximum on it for now, we apoligize for the inconvenience. To quote one of you: "their server got quite a beating". And yessirreebob, it did ;-)

As a short workaround we did put up a singleplayer version online. It probably loads pretty slow but it'll give you an impression on what you're missing if you can't get in the multiplayer version. Just go to the PLAY section and choose to launch the singleplayer version.

And yes, we know this isn't the ultimate experience as a real game or chat environment, right now it is merely a demonstration of what javascript and DHTML can do, because so many people think it's dead. We have really enjoyed all the positive reactions so far. Loads of people came here and enjoyed their nostalgic stay, and we have lots of nice ideas for the future of Good Old Adventures, and everything else we do...

Hope this makes life online a lot easier! The second update involves the implementation of another Sierra game: the first two rooms of Space Quest 2 were added!!! Yippee! These are of the famous Xenon Orbital Station 4, and sorry for the missing elevator :)

And last but not least, as a little fun bonus you can now pick the Goose from The Black Cauldron. There's a little bug when it walks, because it seems it can't pass narrow paths, but hey, have fun! ;)

Wow, didn't know things would go this fast. Overnight, all you adventuregame fans dropped by to explore this world and talk to eachother. We had such a good time reading and seeing where you all been and what conversations were held. Some nice quotes:

• "THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!"
• "I didn't know javascript could do this."
• "Good Old Adventures is the latest multi-user DHTML chat app from Q42, mind boggling as usual."

But we also saw some people walking around and saying "yoohoo, anybody there?". Since the world is quite big (and will only get bigger) and you can only see who's in your current room, you don't know if it's worh the effort exploring because maybe nobody's there. So that's why we've added a LIVE counter to the controlpanel, indicating how many people are actually somewhere in the world of good old adventures:

(this one here is an example, the real thing is LIVE ofcourse)

Good Old Adventures (GOA) is a FREE multi-user chatworld, based on the classic adventuregames made by Sierra On-Line in the '80s and '90s. GOA tries to let you relive those good old adventures, but this time with your friends. Play your favorite character and travel through your favorite adventure gaming world, meeting other fans as you move along.

Right now, there is no real story or gaming element, and the number of rooms and playable actors isn't that big, but we do have several nice plans for the future (like minigames, multiplayer puzzles and inventory-related things). If time and income permit, of course. Also, you can contribute rooms yourself soon! Check out the Development Kit section for that!

And of course, the GOA engine is capable of a whole lot more. Just because the current world only consists of the old blocky graphics that featured the original adventure games (made with Sierra's "AGI" engine), that doesn't mean we shouldn't go any further. Right now, the GOA engine offers all functionalities to recreate a whole new gaming world in the newer Sierra style called "SCI", or even Lucasart's "SCUMM" style. Yes, you are reading it correctly, there is no problem into creating a multiplayer Day of the Tentacle where you can play Dr Fred, Guybrush Threepwood or Indiana Jones!

Good Old Adventures is built with an entirely new technology: it is called HTML which is short for HyperText Markup Language. It also uses some sort of programming language to make special things happen. This is called script, and we use the "javascript" variant. There is also a Visual Basic scripting language which looks like "DIM AAP=10".

The communication between you and the other players requires no plug-ins whatsoever. No java applets, flash or other stuff needed. Just a browser that is listed in the following system requirements:

GOA runs on the following systems

For Windows:

• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
• Netscape 7 (or higher)
• Mozilla 1.0 or higher (or similar redesigns of Mozilla, like Phoenix)

For a MAC:

• Netscape 7 (or higher)
• Mozilla 1.0 or higher (or similar redesigns of Mozilla, like Phoenix)

Other systems:

• Well, we expect most systems to use a Mozilla browser to be able to run GOA
  

• Moving: You can move around using the mouse and keyboard. We recommend using solely the keyboard, because it is easier, and because that's how we used to play these games when we were kids (remember?!).
• Chatting: To chat, simply start typing and press ENTER. You do not need to click on the input field first, just type and hit ENTER will do fine.
• Changing your name: Just click on the name field and change it into whatever you want.
• Changing your skin: Just select a new skin from the dropdownlist and you'll automatically change into that character.
• Changing rooms: Rooms are logically placed ajacent to one-another, so you can simply walk around the world, entering rooms, driving a car or whatever. Right now there are two different worlds that are not logically connected to eachtother, therefore you can select a starting-point from the SPOTS dropdown list.
• Other people: If other people are in the same room as you are, you'll see them walking around. Everything they say will be placed near their characters, and in the chatlog (the right part of the control panel).
• Finding other people: In the controlpanel is a counter that indicates how many players other than yourself are online right now. You can immediatly go to another player's location by selecting someone from the dropdown list.
• Ignoring other people: If you find someone to be annoying, you can click on him or her and choose "OK" to make that person go away from your screen for the remainder your online session.

From time to time, people might pop away from a certain spot, seem to be dead silent or perhaps jump from one position to another. Maybe other things will go wrong. Most of these things are normal behavior, because we're still in a beta-stage here and the communication server tries to synchronize everything, and sometimes needs to make sudden adjustments. Oh well, get used to it ;)

Q: Sometimes the game runs very slow, why?
A: This depends on your browser. Mozilla is sometimes a bit slower than Internet Explorer, when it comes to rendering HTML and images. GOA quite frequently updates image positions, and therefore might take quite a lot CPU Power.

Q: Players don't seem to walk naturally, but pop up from one spot to another. What's wrong?
A: The communication with you and other players is asynchronous, meaning it takes a short time for other players to see what you are doing, and vice versa. If things seem to get too much out of sync, GOA tries to restore this by putting everybody on their most recent correct position.

Q: Can I have this on my website?
A: We are thinking of releasing a closed-source single-player version to enable you to create your own website like Good Old Adventures, except for the multiplayer part. We are not certain about that though, so for now, you cannot simply "have" this. If you want to start a project, please read the "I WANT THIS" section on this site.

Q: I Want to build my own room. How can I do this?
A: Right now this is not yet possible. Soon, a development kit will be released. Please check out the "DEVELOPMENT KIT" section on this site.

Q: Can I pick up and use things, or interact with the world?
A: The only interaction with the world is opening and closing doors. These will practically remain in their state forever, until someone else changes it (i.e. closing an open-door). In the same way, we could implement features like shared inventory, and other nice gameplay stuff. But it is not in the near future that those things will happen.

Q: Can I enter commands, like in the original games?
A: Nope.

Q: I have a nice suggestion, why don't you build ...?
A: The forums are the best place to talk about things like that.

Q: Will there be other games in this world? Like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle?
A: Currently, the GOA engine allows other graphical styles, like the Lucasarts adventure games. So this will only be a matter of time. We did have some SCI (new Sierra games) rooms for testing purposes ;)

For ideas and suggestions, new features and other stuff, go to Chris's AGI Web Site

Several years ago I wrote a little experiment in creating my own Space Quest engine in C++. It was practically the first thing I ever did in that language, and it was originally called Magic++, meaning "Martin's Adventure Game Interpreter in C++" ;) The nice thing is that the entire engine is only 27 Kilobytes.

The game I tried to make was called SpaceCom and of course it was never finished. All it does is load up a screen with boundaries and layers, and put our hero Roger Wilco in there. You can walk around using the cursors, and there's a dummy menu just like the original games when you hit the ESC key.

Here's the zipfile containing the spacecom.exe file and a brief documentation: spacecom.zip 

As for the source code, I found a directory somewhere back home on a backup cd, so I just took all .cpp and .h files and zipped them. It also has a room-editor, to build rooms for this little DOS application. Back when I wrote this it was compiled using Borland C++ 4 (I believe). I bet it is way too much code and you'll probably have no use to this package but hey, here it is: spacecomsource.zip

So, Good Old Adventures had been online for over a year now, and we all had a good share of fun here. And I know there are several people creating AGI and SCI fangames (by using the excellent AGI Studio and SCI Studio), and it is time people started making online games as well. Therefore, we (Martin and Q42) have released the sourcecode to both Good Old Adventures and its development kit.

However, it does not come with the multiplayer libraries, but it is the fully playable (from either file or http) singleplayer version of what is online here, including all worlds, all characters and all the gags that can be found throughout the world.

So what does it do?

Well, it does a whole lot more than just be an online AGI world, in fact it is a very powerful gaming engine in a browser, that can easily be modified to recreate the newer Sierra's SCI games (ask smartguy over at the forum for details on his Hero's Quest implementation, it clearly demonstrates some nice possibilities! Great job smg!), or Lucasarts' SCUMM games. Hey, why not Legend Of Zelda - A Link To The Past Online? Just to mention it, I've once modified this exact engine into a scrolling worms-like game :)

The sourcecode is not the prettiest, nor is it the worst you've ever seen. It has some nice touches and lots of comments, and people on the forum will definitly know how to go about stripping the entire world and using this engine to recreate just one single AGI game. For instance, meelworm has done quite some work on Space Quest, including the intro scene, and me and others done other parts of the game, so it's a nice challenge to recreate whole games with it perhaps. Those are just some ideas though.

Downloads

goodoldadventures_source.zip
devkit_source.zip

And I've tested them to work in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firebird, so it gives a nice start for online game developing.

About the license

The license included is in fact quite similar to the Apache license. All it does is make sure both myself and Q42 are not held responsible for damage by using the sourcecode, and stating that redistributions (in source or binary) retain the copyright notice. So you may use it for both commercial or non-commercial purposes, without even placing copyright notices visible on the screen. Though mentioning the use of this source on your site would be nice.

In fact, I personally would love to hear from anyone who uses the code in any way, let me know about your project! Mail me at martin@q42.nl and for any questions, use Chris' excellent forum.

As you might have noticed, the current world is almost but not quite entirely unlike completed. So, in order to make it so, why not help out and create the missing rooms and characters from games like Space Quest 2, Larry, Black Cauldron, King's Quest or whatever AGI game you prefer?! 

If you want to help out in a different way, then how about doing this:

What GOA could really need is a functionality in AGI Studio to export resources straight to the GOA format. Of course not everything can be done at once, but to sum up the seperate functionalities that would make our life a lot easier:

• Exporting a background still to a 16-color .png image of the correct size (max 160x168)
• Displaying all of an ego's cells in one image instead of seperate ones
• Exporting the ego image to a .png too
• Exporting the different layers into cropped transparent .png images
• Writing the required script code in GOA's locations.js file

AGI Studio is written in Delphi and the source is available at www.nailhead.org/agistudio

Q42 is a small and innovative Dutch internet agency that focuses on the creation of user friendly internet related projects and applications. More information can be found at www.q42.nl

QUEK

The chatworld that inspired Q42 to develop Good Old Adventures: www.quek.nl

XOPUS

The friendly xml editor: www.xopus.org

Q42 has worked for or with the following companies:

VPRO

NBE

TeleacNOT

FilmFestival Rotterdam

Laika

ING

Holland Festival

IJsfontein

Mediamatic

Valkieser

Taskforce Digitale Duurzaamheid

Wyona / NZZ

Ooiptech

Ilse / VNU

Oad

DokterDokter.nl

Museum voor Communicatie

Framfab

Stichting NOB

LocoSoft

VBAT

Universiteit Groningen

Advies.Overheid.nl

burger.overheid.nl

DCDD

BestuurRegioUtrecht