Messages

Well done tampie85! The new design looks great!

The registration: At least some bar to entry, please, keep out the riff-raff, haha. When I registered in 2016 I was surprised there was a test but thought it was funny. There were a few minutes of ranting from my partner when he registered, however. Maybe an 'introduce yourself/why AGS' requirement, and as has already been suggested, a brief probationary period with limited posting capabilities.

Obviously, we don't want spam on the forums. But I've never seen the value in making a niche genre any more exclusive than it already is. I think the days of people downloading AGS because they're trying to make Tomb Raider are long gone.

I've got a lot out of AGS over the years and it frustrates me that I don't have the time or the skills to contribute to the site or development. I do have some experience with crowdfunding, so if there ever is a Patreon or a Kickstarter I would be happy to help set it up and create graphics.

I think the current AGS website is aimed equally at players and devs, which I think no longer makes sense. In the early 2000s I came here because fan games were the only point and clicks I could find. Now, Steam and GOG are full of them - some made using AGS. If I were a newcomer, I would not download Jessica Plunkenstein (even though I know it's hilarious). I could be wrong, but I don't think players are coming here. AGS's advantages are: a) it's the engine Wadjet Eye uses, and b) it's very easy for writers and artists who know nothing about programming to make adventure games that just work using it. Nothing I've looked at is more straight-forward for getting a point and click game going. For me, those are the people everything should be aimed at.

Apologies all round, especially to Gunnar. The important thing is - definitely think twice before doing pre-rendered 3D. Don't make the same mistake I did!

I'm seriously considering doing characters in 3d in Blender, then using an art program to pixelate it.  Not sure yet.  The thing about Blender is you animate the character once, then just move the camera for different views.  I've done some modeling so that's not that big of a problem.

Honestly, this is a pretty neat workflow that I myself have considered. I believe Blender has a way to render animation frames at a low resolution? You might be able to render a very plain "basic" model to convey movement, and then paint over those frames in a pixel editor to make it look like regular pixel art. In a way, it's like rotoscoping, but using 3D models instead.

I've (sort of) done both of these things. I did pre-rendered, toon-shaded 3D characters in The Fowl Fleet, which I would deeply, deeply not recommend. There's some logic to a 3D protagonist in a 2D game, because it makes doing lots of animations simple. But modelling and rendering all the OTHER characters in 3D is an enormous waste of time. I could have made the characters look so much nicer! With pre-rendered 3D you lose all the advantages of actual 3D and gain none of the nice bits of traditional 2D animation. I think Broken Sword 5 is the only game I've seen do pre-rendered 3D well (I especially liked the way the characters are lit differently based on context). But even BS5 isn't that likeable.

For the full-body shots in this video I did a 3D animation and then rotoscoped it. And I would recommend that, because it can be a big time-saver.

This is great news. Well done to all the devs involved!

In my opinion, adventure games between 2000-2010 were mostly bad, retaining all the awful features of 90s adventure games and almost none of the good qualities.

But... but Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! came out in 2007... I think the second half of the 2000s was already quite decent actually. Wadjet Eye was slowly raising its head, I actually enjoyed Dreamfall back in the day, there was Machinarium, early Telltale stuff, a couple of Daedalic games, a fair amount of quality AGS freebies. I mean, even in the so-called golden ages of point & click games, there were only a handful of quality releases each year. How many true classics there actually are from that era, 10-20?

Ha ha, well I don't think Nelly would register on the game-o-meter. But you're right about Dreamfall, Machinarium and Dave's early games. But, for me, the turn of the century was dominated by dozens of virtually indistinguishable Adventure Company / Frogwares-esque games with banal rendered realist graphics and incomprehensibly silly puzzle design. Perhaps the problem was exacerbated because, as an English speaker, I began playing games that were translated (infuriatingly badly) into English - bad translations being something that non-English speakers were probably already inured to.

The reason I came to AGS in the first place was the dearth of decent commercial adventures in the early 2000s. And so many more great games came out just between 2015 and 2020: Her Story, The Walking Dead, The Witness, Firewatch, Unavowed, The Outer Wilds, Night in the Woods etc. It saddens me that some people stopped playing adventure games in 1999. When I see people on social media asking for recommendations, so many of the suggestions are 30 years old - I get the impression that some hardcore adventure gamers still won't trust anything without wacky inventory items and a verb coin. And they're missing out!

And here is something I learnt when I published novels: a good critic never writes a negative critic unless the target is a big one.
Here is a personal story: I published my first novel and it ended up with a positive review by a TV host. So of course when I published the second one I sent it to him in hope he would do it again. He answered me that he did not like the book. So of course I started being afraid he would tear it apart on TV. He did not. I asked him why. He said because I'm a young author barely known by anyone, if he tears me apart he looks like a jerk who uses his influence to crush others for his own glory. I found that interesting so I pushed the conversation further. We looked at a review my first novel had in a newspaper, a review that was also positive, and he showed me the review just next to it: the critic had panned another book, but it was written by one of the very top authors in my country, someone famous and praised on every level. This guy was worth a bad review because he's a big shot, it's actually brave to challenge his position and say something negative about him because he would have fans who would attack you, and he probably needed a bit of humility. But me, I was too small to warrant a bad review, if he doesn't like my book he just needs to stay silent about it and no one will buy it anyway, there is no need to put me down.

I always remembered that story because it is the whole difference between making a bad review so you can look clever and making a bad review that actually makes sense. This is why I am vocal about disliking Thimbleweed Park, it's a big successful game made by a successful person who could use some humility. I played indie games I did not like but what is the point of letting everyone know, when the devs are already struggling?

This is a really nice story, and also - I agree about TWP.

I find it baffling that people are still bringing up that - distinctly obnoxious - Old Man Murray article. The cat-hair moustache puzzle is terrible, but the idea that the genre died because of one bad puzzle or ugly game is silly. Publishers stopped selling 2D games (because the game industry was booming and selling a million-or-so copies wasn't good enough any more) and adventure games worked badly in 3D.

In my opinion, adventure games between 2000-2010 were mostly bad, retaining all the awful features of 90s adventure games and almost none of the good qualities. I suspect this was a consequence rather than a cause of of publisher enthusiasm waning. All the experienced developers went and did something else.

But the rise of indie devs has turned that around completely. Adventure games are as diverse and interesting now as they ever were. But, they're no longer AAA games with Hollywood voice actors, and some fans are caught in an (understandable) nostalgia trap. I mean, I made a pirate point and click game, so I see the appeal. But I don't understand the hostility towards innovation. True adventure games, according to some fans, must marry incredibly high production values with a 30 year old point-and-click interface. So successful/brilliant adventure games like Obra Dinn and The Outer Wilds are quietly discounted.

Sorry I wasn't more clear. Disney's characters DO squash and stretch - as in the animation principle of how squash and stretch is taught.

But Å vankmajer's figures are plastic - they're not like elastic/rubber - they don't snap back into shape. Fleischer characters are often ductile - they can extend their arms and legs. We talk about Fleischer looking rubbery, but that's not actually how rubber behaves. Disney characters are more like actual rubber. When they stretch they get thinner, like a piece of rubber. When they squash, they get fatter, so their volume is conserved.

I agree that Disney's realism isn't particularly likeable or realistic (especially while he was alive - I prefer the background art from that era.) But this is taught as a principle of animation, and it's enormously influential.

[Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry]

I remember a Basque friend of mine saying he though Jan Å vankmajer's animation was terrible. Which, I think is interesting because my friend is a Basque leftist, hardly the stereotypical "Anglo Saxon" westerner critiqued above.

I would say it demonstrates the influence of Disney's "realism" on what we think of as good animation. Å vankmajer's motion is often linear; characters don't squash and stretch, they don't anticipate and follow through. Measured by Disney's standards, Å vankmajer is doing it wrong. In Disney animations, volume is conserved. Characters arms and legs can't stretch off into tentacles, which is part of what makes Fleischer cartoons (and things like Cuphead) feel creepy to contemporary viewer. The big hitters of Hollywood animation have defined, for many of us and whether we like it or not, what is normal and neutral in animation.

I'm also a big fan of folktales, and I can't stand the way Disney has created fossilised, definitive versions of folk stories that now (and maybe forever) reflect 20th century America. Jack Zipes's Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry is a fantastically interesting take on this, from a broadly Marxian perspective. Apologies if this is all too off-topic.

I don't think anyone here believes that there really is a western monoculture - the only people who actually think that are crazy ethno-nationalists. Even the term "West" is silly, because the planet is spherical.

But there are parts of the world where US and North European culture (more anglophone, more capitalist, more protestant) has more political and cultural influence. We can make an observation about (for instance) Walt Disney's influence in these areas, without approving of that influence, or suggesting that there actually is a clear delineation between West and East. Just like we can make observations about the construct of race without actually believing in race as a biological reality.

But more seriously, this is also a symptom of another problem, which is ideological colonialism through the use of language. Or in other words, when somebody hears/reads you using their language, they also expect you to use their culture to communicate. For example, I was once "called out" by Americans on tumblr (sigh) for using the word "victim" rather than "survivor". However, in my culture we don't use that expression. In my culture, the word "victim" has not been "rebranded", and it even feels weird to us to conceptualize it that way.

Having said that, I think this is a really good point.

Just think about how it is seen as very rude to curse in English and how women in particular never curse in English

And I guess I see your point about generalisations... because this is entirely not my experience of English speaking women in Britain.

No, they stopped doing racial caricatures because racial caricatures stopped bringing money and could actually cost money. 

I don't know that this is accurate. Aladdin had several edits after it's release in response to criticism. (Not in terms of character design, which obviously, wouldn't be possible.) Similarly, no longer releasing Song of the South can't be said to have made them any money, but it has saved them from (I would say, valid) criticism. No one's praising Disney for doing the bare minimum, here.

You can also use Blender for traditional 2D animation now, thanks to the improved Grease Pencil tool. It's surprisingly easy to use, especially considering Blender's reputation. It would work really well for a traditional 2D high-res adventure game. If anyone was mad enough to try animating one.

What you're talking about is particularly noticeable in The Animator's Survival Kit. If anyone hasn't got it, it's a marvellous and incredibly useful guide to character animation by Richard Williams (the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit). It's concerned with capturing and exaggerating the way different people move, but it also reproduces tropes and stereotypes - how a homosexual man walks, or the "flapping ancient breasts" of an old woman jogging. It's based, in part, on observation (I guess Italians do tend to talk with their hands...). And caricature is rarely kind to its subjects. But it's a reminder that the conventions of animation reflect the (mostly) men who established those conventions.

I guess Jessica Rabbit is a bit of a have-your-cake-and-eat it ironic take on sexual objectification - she's not bad, she's "just drawn that way."

I've never used Sierra style speech, and frankly I don't know how to set it up (the Sierra template in AGS 2.5 seems to use LucasArts style speech and switching on SierraWithBackground doesn't seem to do anything...). So I haven't managed to test the dialogue and GUI going out of alignment with each other.

However, I'm not sure the module has control over this issue. SayAt uses screen, rather than room co-ordinates. But (as CW says) AGS pins the text to the background, so if the viewport scrolls the text moves along with it. Presumably because it would usually be attached to a speaker. As far as I know, a module can't make SayAt behave differently.

"I believe in equality, but men should be allowed to force women to bring pregnancies to term." If this is your actual belief, I find it terrifying and appalling. If it's not, then you're a disingenuous troll.

EDIT: I've edited the swearing out of this reply - out of respect for the forum rules, and not out of respect for WHAM.

[currently have]

You are literally saying that women shouldn't have the final say in their own pregnancies. You're debating rights that women currently have in our countries, and it's taking the piss.

bringing gender into the matter seems extraneous to me.

You don't say?

Equal rights between parents is a great idea, but an embryo inside a woman is not the same as a child. The idea that either an embryo or a partner could have any "right" over a pregnant adult's body is completely incompatible with equality and personal freedom.

"Men and women should have an equal say over women's bodies," is not equality.

There are lots of injustices women face, Honza just posted an article giving relevant examples. We could look at the rate at which men kill women by contrast with the rate at which women kill men, but the purpose of a thread like this is not to convince you personally of a reality you will never accept.

The thread has not turned into a demand for WHAM to show his egalitarian credentials, from the start it turned into "Blondbraid, prove sexism exists, because I just don't believe in it."

And you can say sexism (in the west) doesn't exist and then a moment later imply that men ought to have rights over an embryo inside a woman's body. This is incomprehensible to me, and seems totally incompatible with egalitarianism.

What I've seen of that essay looks interesting. If I were being generous about the standard conservative perspective on affirmative action, I'd say it seems to be rooted in the misanthropic view that there are very few great books and very few great people. And of the few greats we have, most are men. And great men (we tend to imagine) are society's engines of progress (winning battles and being captains of industry and whatnot).

So prioritising the voices of women, especially women of ethnic minority groups, is seen as profound risk. Because society already is pretty much fair, and great men are at the top because of their greatness. So raising up a woman means casting out a Great Manâ,,¢, and what are the chances that she's really up to the job?

The tiny flaw in this understanding of reality being - to paraphrase Blackadder - that it's bollocks.