Background, music, sprites and more needed for AGS Awards

Started by Jack, Sun 07/02/2016 23:18:54

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Jack

The time has come again to do the AGS Awards, and it looks like I'll be putting together the client to run the ceremony. We can use last year's assets if we had to, but it would be really great if we could make some updates this year. The parts we need are as follows:

Auditorium background screen

1280 x 720 background of an auditorium with a stage, ample standing room and a large main screen behind the stage. The screen should be undistorted (not at an angle) and in aspect ratio 16:9. The height of characters populating this background is 100px. The perspective should be such that no character scaling is needed for the walkable areas. There should be a light and dark version of the background, the dark version being where only the stage is lighted and the crowd is minimally lighted. Have a look at last year's BG below to get a general idea. 20-25% of the screen on the right side will be used for a hide-able interface, so this part should not include the stage. It would be a good place to put the entrance. I think for this year the auditorium's style should be relatively modern. Please send links of designs and examples of the art style you would like to use as a PM.

[imgzoom]http://i.cubeupload.com/N62Son.png[/imgzoom]

Music

Music is needed for the gathering before the show, or when the host spills their drink. Anyone is free to contribute music in any style they wish, but I would prefer to use a handful of tracks all in the same style. My wish list is 3 or more muzak (relaxing, instrumental) tracks with melodies inspired by great adventure games.

Sprites

We will probably re-use all of last year's sprites, but it would be good to add a few new ones. A full walk cycle of your sprite is needed with four directions. Character height should be close to 100px.

Performances

Last year there was an excellent performance following the awards by Pixel Hunt of their song about trolls. (See it here at 1:46:15) It would be great if we could have one or more such performances again this year. Typically this will be an audio track accompanied by an animation.




That's it for now. Comments, suggestions and drunken rants below.

Snarky

Good luck to you on this. I do think before you set out there are a few things you might want to clear up:

Quote from: Jack Lucy on Sun 07/02/2016 23:18:541280 x 720 background of an auditorium with a stage, ample standing room and a large main screen behind the stage.

Did you check out the asset pack I provided with last year's build? We have a 1280x960 version of the existing background.

Some good reasons why it's scaled down are:

1. For consistency with the characters, since most of them are low-resolution. I'm not sure you gain much by running in 1280x720 when most of the characters are 320x200.
2. For performance. Because of engine limitations, you have to run the awards client with DirectDraw (i.e. in software), and it may run slow if you display lots of sprites in high resolution. This is something you should definitely test properly before switching to higher res.

You argued in the other thread that higher resolution would make it less crowded in the audience. That's not automatically true: It depends solely on the size of the characters relative to the resolution. To get more space, you'll have to draw a background where the characters are smaller. With the dimensions you propose (100 px height in 1280x720 resolution), that will be the case â€" they'll be about 88% the height of Ben Jordan in the current version, but of course the tradeoff is that everything looks smaller/farther away, as in this mockup (Nelly and Ben are both ~100px tall):



Whether this is preferable is debatable. Personally I think the people on stage become a bit remote, though it's not too bad. However, if we need much more space in audience, I would instead suggest making the background scrolling (left-right). I feel like the wider aspect ratio shown here isn't ideal, given that part of the height is taken up by the chat window; I think scrolling would make more sense.

Switching to higher resolution also means you'll have to replace every graphics resource (buttons/UI, titles, some of the fonts...), redo the intro screen, and probably fix the code in a number of places. Oh, and since AGS limits character scaling to 200% max, you'll have to upscale low-resolution characters outside of AGS and reimport them. All in all, it's a significant effort.

Oh, and another important point! The client runs in a special build of AGS 3.3.3: it requires late_repeatedly_execute_always(), which has only been included in the latest 3.3.5 build â€" AFAIK not in any 3.4 build. I don't believe 3.3 supports 1280x720 as a resolution; the closest is 1280x768.

On a personal note, I quite like the current background and the traditional look of the ceremony hall, like an historic theater, and I think it would be a shame if a new background lost that classy charm.

QuoteMusic is needed for the gathering before the show, or when the host spills their drink. Anyone is free to contribute music in any style they wish, but I would prefer to use a handful of tracks all in the same style. My wish list is 3 or more muzak (relaxing, instrumental) tracks with melodies inspired by great adventure games.

We do already have a number of music tracks for these bits, but sure, could always use more.

QuoteSpritesWe will probably re-use all of last year's sprites, but it would be good to add a few new ones. A full walk cycle of your sprite is needed with four directions. Character height should be close to 100px.

Because of work I did last year, characters can be any size (though in practice I pre-downscaled very large ones to improve performance), and will be scaled appropriately in-game. It's not feasible in practice to require all provided characters to be the same size.

Oh, and I think I know what you were talking about with trophies. There was one in the offline game version of the ceremony, but it's never been used in the online client (partly, I think, since the graphic style doesn't quite fit):



If someone creates new trophy sprites, it shouldn't be too hard to somehow integrate them into the ceremony.

As a piece of general advice, if you haven't already I'd highly recommend starting out by familiarizing yourself with the code and testing that you can compile and run it, and actually host/guest over IRC.

Jack

Good points. I wasn't aware that it was many sprites that caused slowness here. I'll test that on some older hardware. IMO directdraw should be avoided at all costs if it can be helped. In windows 7 it goes into ancient mode to switch to DD5, like you just executed a DOS game from the 80s.

One thing that would be nice with a higher res is that there will be more space for the interface. One thought I had was to make a high res version and another version which has lower res and is meant for slower hardware.

Who was sitting in the balcony? The bots?

Snarky

I've PM'd you about the technical issues. I would advice against two versions: because a lot of resources and some of the code is tied to resolution, and AGS doesn't have good source-control support so it'd be very hard to keep code changes in sync, I think it would make development and debugging a bit of a nightmare.

The bots in the balcony are Daft Punk acting as DJs. They don't do anything except nod their heads when there's music playing. (They're pretty much a joke from a few years back that no one ever bothered to take out again.) People on text-only IRC don't show up in the audience, but if they're granted voice or host/admin status they appear on stage dressed as Indy (one request from last year was to make them appear as different characters, not all the same).

If I can just throw some feature requests out as a regular AGSer, the sound system could use some improvements:

-better applause clips and fix applause logic
-better volume controls: currently the volume of fanfares and applause can't be adjusted independently
-allow people to choose their own music (overriding the host's choice) when outside the actual ceremony

m0ds

I'd like to overhaul the music with some particular tracks, can you get in touch with me? Part of the provisio if I'm hosting it this year... ? ;)

Out of interest, beyond the ones that happen as part of the design, who controls the sound/music cues? And the videos/image cues? Or who did previously? Just curious :)

Snarky

There's a "director" who handles the whole show, deciding what goes on the screen, what music to play, etc. In all previous years that's been the developer (Dualnames, and then me last year â€" with Dualnames stepping in when I needed a break).

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