AGS Awards 2018 - Awards Client (Feedback and future improvements)

Started by Snarky, Mon 14/01/2019 07:36:20

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Snarky


Hi all you beautiful people!

Update to officially announce that we will be running a Beta Test of the awards client on Monday, 25. March at 20:00 GMT. It will be very helpful if you can attend.




It's that time of year again: the AGS Awards are coming up. This year there's a small team working on the awards client ceremony, and deadlines and stuff, so hopefully things will be a bit more in hand than last year â€" sorry about that! (We'll be asking for your help in the upcoming months to run some beta tests/dress rehearsals in this thread.) The remaining caveat is that we still have busy lives with limited time available, so although we started slowly last summer, there's still a lot left to be done.

A few improvements have been implemented, though: one is copy-paste from other applications (which should make giving prepared speeches a lot easier), another is animated speech!

However, we don't have all that many avatars that actually have animated speech views: a lot are from games with Sierra-style speech that never had it, for starters. However, there are also a bunch of LucasArts avatars that don't have them imported:



We're asking for your help to get them AGS-ready, so the client team can focus on core features. Otherwise, these avatars will be removed from the client!

What we need are AGS .chr files (which you get from exporting a character from AGS), with standing, walking and speech views (with the heads merged to the bodies in a single sprite). The characters should be in their original, unscaled resolution. Most of the relevant spritesheets are available online, e.g. here:

Monkey Island 1: http://spritedatabase.net/game/1513
Monkey Island 2: http://spritedatabase.net/game/784
Fate of Atlantis: http://spritedatabase.net/game/1629
DOTT: ?
Sam & Max (missing Sam): http://spritedatabase.net/game/1682

If you have some of the other sprites already ripped, that would be helpful too. Any assistance will be credited in the client credits file. Thanks!

PS: This is also pretty much the last chance to make client feature suggestions and requests. (Anything you say will almost certainly already be on the list, but it can be useful to know which things to prioritize.)

Privateer Puddin'

Are you still taking avatars from AGS games?  :cool:

Snarky

Yes. Please fill in this form and send me the avatar character in .chr format. For AGS avatars, I'm interested in the walk/normal view, speech view (if LucasArts-style), and if available, a "special action" view (a short animation of the character doing something cool, flashing a grin, or similar).

I should add that we're not planning to remove AGS avatars that lack speechviews this time around, but in the future we'll probably have to start culling avatars that haven't been used.

eri0o


Snarky

Let's say a month from today to be safe.

Snarky

*bump*

I haven't received any avatars or speech animations so far. That's OK â€" there are plenty to choose from â€" but in case you forgot, here's a reminder.

Cassiebsg

Just wondering, I know my Starbuck had speech view and other animations when I packed it, do you have it full, or did you delete the extras that were not needed last year, and now the characters are missing those extra views?
Don't know if I should send it again or not.

Unfortunately I currently have no time to do those LA characters, so can't help there.  :~(
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

cat

Since this is the AGS awards and there are plenty of AGS game characters already, I think it would be okay to remove the Lucas Arts client anyway.

Snarky

Quote from: Cassiebsg on Thu 24/01/2019 10:47:56
Just wondering, I know my Starbuck had speech view and other animations when I packed it, do you have it full, or did you delete the extras that were not needed last year, and now the characters are missing those extra views?
Don't know if I should send it again or not.

I believe speech views are included for any avatars that were submitted in previous years with them, apart from a couple that had the head animations separate from the bodies. In any case, I have the source files and should be able to add them back if not already included. When we do a beta test you'll be able to verify for yourself.

Cassiebsg

Oh, that character has head portrait as speech. I thought you were talking about portraits.  8-0
Guess I'll see about rendering a speech animation for him then.  ;)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Snarky

Nobody has submitted any avatars yet, so this is a final reminder to do so soon if you want them in the ceremony. This can be your own game character, or the LEC characters with speech animations I asked for at the top of the thread. (Again: PM me a link, preferably in CHR format, and fill in the form here).

For nominees, cat should be sending out a message soon about the assets we need to make the presentation of the game in the ceremony as good as possible.

Jack

I would go dig out Stan and the other MI2 characters if you make Stan the IRC character :)

Stan has a great talk cycle.

Snarky

Quote from: Jack on Sat 23/02/2019 23:17:57
I would go dig out Stan and the other MI2 characters if you make Stan the IRC character :)

There isn't a single "IRC character" any more: each IRC participant's avatar is picked "randomly" (based on the username). But I'm planning to restrict it to avatars with a speech animation, so if you get me Stan's he'll be in the mix.

AGA

If you want I can give you a page that will return a user's avatar URL from the name, if you wanted to use people's actual forums avatars.  No idea if that's technically feasible though?

Snarky

Anything's feasible with enough work.  :-D

This would involve:
-A plugin to make an http connection and download the avatar image files
-A plugin to decode jpg, png and gif images and provide them to AGS as sprites
-Client logic to load these images in the background and add them as they become available
-A new AGS GUI widget that could display a user list with avatar icons (or I suppose they could show up over the character on mouseover)
-Possibly some way to verify users, so people couldn't just steal someone else's forum name

There's not nearly enough time to implement it for this year, but it could be a cool feature to keep in mind for the future.

(What would be much easier would be to download a package of avatar images converted to bmp and just load them from disk. Still a bit too much work for this year, though.)

VampireWombat

Okay, I should be able to put together speech views of the DoTT and Sam and Max characters. since I guess no one else has yet.

Snarky


Cassiebsg

Snarky, sorry been meaning to pack some character for the client, and keep getting busy & forgetting.

Does the "special" animation go in the Idle view? Or something else?
I''' go pack them now an upload

There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Snarky

Yes, you can put it in the idle view, blinking view or thinking view.
Or you can add it as additional loops for the NormalView or SpeechView.
(Thanks, I've received the characters you sent.)

Privateer Puddin'


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