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That blinking pocket is awesome. How can I sew that on my own shorts? 

Seriously, my main problem is that he looks way too straight to be running. His shoulders should be a bit ahead of his hips, I think, with his arms moving so far back, he looks like he should topple over. His torso definitely should be turning too, following the movement of his arms.

The movement of the arms and legs look alright to me.

Well, damn. There's a "workaround", which is to put a black background in my button sprites. No transparency, no problem. But still, bleh. =/

So, here's a GUI background:


Here's a button:

And here's how it looks like in Photoshop and AGS:


I clicked on "use alpha channel" when I imported the sprites. Am I doing something wrong, or is this an engine limitation, or what?

When a while loop is running, it's the only thing that's running. All you do in your loop is call fakeWaitCursor over and over again. You need to change the value of bReady somewhere in there to break the loop.

Array support is limited. You can't dynamically append an element, clearing them has to be done manually.
Just like standard variables, arrays hold 0/false/null when they're declared.
You can compare two arrays but only manually, there's no built-in functionality.
Other than storing the size when creating it, you can't get an array's length.

Well, curses. That really limits the use of dynamic arrays, doesn't it?

Unrelated question: is there any way to toggle between full screen and window mode during the game? I could only find the Windowed property in relation to this, which is read-only.

So, I can't find a section in the manual devoted to arrays. How would I go about appending a value at the end of an array? And clearing the entire array? Upon creating an array, is it filled with null elements, or some default value depending on the type I set? Can you compare two arrays? Is there a way to get the size of an array?

I also need a refresher on import / export statements and using script headers.
Say I write some function in a script, and I want to use it in another one. I gathered that I should write my import statement in the header of the script where the function is defined. But am I not exporting said function from that script, rather than importing it? And what exeternal scripts are able to access my newly "imported" function, exactly? All of them?
As for importing / exporting variables, I get that I should write my export statement somewhere below its declaration in the body of the script. Where do I write the import? In the header as well?
And lastly, if I define a custom struct in the header of a script, am I able to use it wherever I want?

If this stuff is answered somewhere in the help file, direct me to the right section. Thanks.

It might be easier to script your A-RPG engine in RPG Maker, actually. The base architecture of the project will be more adapted to an RPG and you can do whatever you want with Ruby. I've even seen passable A-RPGs done exclusively with event programming in RPG Maker.

Enterbrain also released Indie Game Maker, which is designed for platformers, shmups and A-RPGs.

I tried to look at references of birds walking. Talons still don't work like that, but I think it looks better. Any thoughts?

This is the first walkcycle I've "finished". How does it look?

I did shift the hue as well as the brigthness and saturation while picking my colours, but maybe not enough. I'll definitely try to change that and see how it looks.

As for the edit of the stonehead, the grass looks far less dry without the hie shifting, doesn't it? I personnally think the grass looks pretty good like that as well (not the stone, though. Making it go towards blue was definitely a good choice), it just doesn't convey the same mood as the original.

I'll sit on that sprite for a while and probably come back later with an updated version. I'm making some faces NES-style for a friend. Khris would love it, I'm using about 7 colours per drawing. :p

ProgZ: Your sprite seems both brighter and less saturated than mine, which is what I meant by "washed out". I wonder if mine is objectively too saturated, too. I posted it on a forum with a much darker background, the effect was really different. (And hence my little parenthesis about your background colour of choice while working on a sprite.)

loominous: While I'm not going for a realistic style (the sprite is SD after all), I still want the shading to be coherent and believable. If you see anything wrong, point it out.

Khris: 14 colours, so... 7 shades of green and 7 shades of blue/grey? Makes me think I didn't go that overboard in my colour picking.

ProgZ: Thanks for your time. There is good advice in your message, like separating the eyes (mine was looking cross-eyed, wasn't he?) and maybe toying around some more with the shading of the hair, but the style and pose you chose really don't work for me.

I wonder, what colour do you use as a background when working on a sprite? I use a medium grey myself, which I'm sure influences some of my colour choices. I comparison to mine, your sprite looks... washed out.

loominous: Which parts still look bad?

Khris: While I can appreciate the exercise of limiting your palette so drastically, your sprite looks bad, in my opinion. So 16 colours, nowhere near enough. Your edit was most helpful to finally make the face look right, though, so thank you for that. And I did simplify some of my colour ramps.



I think the jacket looks alright now. I'm not too sure about the pants. Please tell me he's pretty. ^^'

Edit: The whole point of pillow shading is to put the brightest colour in the middle when it has no business beign there. In my understanding, it has nothing to do with the number of colours you use. There's even a tutorial about it, quite entertaining in a "so bad it's good" sort of way.

Thanks guys. I got some advice from elsewhere as well and here where I'm at right now:

I'm currently working on the jacket, I have to fix its palette and shading.

I'm posting here right now to answer Khris. Don't worry about being harsh, that's usually the most useful type of criticism. But on this particular occasion, I disagree with what you said.

I started shading with 3-4 colors per region, actually, and what appeared quite clearly was that for a sprite this size, it looked bad. For smaller stuff, around SNES size (16 px wide), yes, 3 colors is all you need. If a sprite is larger, I'm afraid you'll need more colours as well or the shading would look weird. I guess another way to go at it is to use textures (that's called dithering, right ?), but the whole point of that was to simulate in-between colours back when technical limitations prevented pixel artists from using more than 16 colours per sprite, or some such. In this 32-bit era, why wouldn't I actually use these in-between colours?

Though, I did up the contrast of the highlights on the latest version, which I think addresses your problem with colours blending too much together.

On pillow shading... Shadows are going to be a gradient from lightest to darkest colour, no matter how many colours you are using ; if they don't, you're doing something wrong. Pillow shading occurs when you don't know where to put the lightest colour and just put it in the middle of whatever shape you're shading. That is, instead of highlighting the top of the boots, I'd have put the lightest colour in the middle then gone in concentric circles. I don't think I actually did any pillow shading here, and if I did, please tell me exactly where so that I can correct it (you'd be surprised how hard it is to see you've done your shading completely wrong).

I'm aware I must sound like a petulant child that doesn't want to listen to critique right here, but that's really not the intention. It's just that if I disagree on the fact that something's a problem, I'm not going to correct it. ^^'
(That post was a bit rambly, wasn't it? Sorry.)

I need some advice.


I don't quite know what to do with the face. How should I draw a mouth ? Are the eyes all right ? I know the hair looks a bit odd, I'll correct it. I'm not quite sure about the placement of the arms. I tried marking the shoulders a bit since then, but I'm not sure it's such a good idea.

Comments and edits very welcome.

In case you're interested (and can read French).
Thanks for the helpful links, everybody.

Is there a working link for Cosmos Quest III somewhere? I'd feel bad if I didn't link to it when the game is mentionned.

Hi.

I'm currently writing a little news article on the AGS Awards results that will be posted on a website dedicated to the creation of amateur games. Link (the focus is currently on RPG Maker but we're trying to expand). Being slightly lazy, I was wondering if the winning games' creators had any screenshots handy for me to illustrate this article ; if not I'll just keep reusing the same screenshot over and over again each time a game won something.

Here's a little list per game:

Time gentlemen, please!:
Best game
Best gameplay
Best dialogs
Best non player character

The marionette:
Best original story
Best background art
Best music
Best tutorial or documentation

Shifter's box:
Best puzzles
Best short game

McCarthy:
Best player character
Best sound effects
Best animation
Best voice work

I you feel like giving me something thematically appropriate with the award (a song for best music, an animated gif for best animation, etc.), it would be awesome, but just different screenshots for each time the game is mentioned would make me happy. If the people who won only one award don't wan't me to use the screenshot present in the AGS database, they can of course give me something else. If anybody (among the people who had games nominated for this session of the AGS awards :p) wants me to include a link to a personal website or blog, or write something specific, I'll be happy to oblige.

Cheers. ^^

Hi. I want to implement something like that in a completely different game engine and I thought this module could help me out. ... But I've trouble understanding how it works. ^^'

Starting here :

Code: ags

a[i] = IntToFloat(Random(2000)*(2*Random(1)-1))/scalar;

Get a random number between 0 and 2000, multiply by... either 0 or 1 ? then divide by 2000. I think I'm reading something wrong.

Then in get_gradient

Code: ags

float x = IntToFloat(xi)/160.0 - 1.0;

What's that 160 doing here ? Why -1 ?
I'll just trust you on the way to calculate dx and dy.

offset_a_block

Code: ags

int xoff = FloatToInt(1.0*get_gradient_x(x + w/2, y + w/2));

We're using the center of the chunk of background to displace as the argument for get_gradient, right ?

repeatedly_execute
Are you displacing 128 random chunks of background ?
I understand that first loop (I think), the rest of the function lost me.

I hope I'm not too annoying. >.>

The IsButtonDown funtion will be useful for this.
Basically, you'd set an object coordinates to mouse.x and mouse.y while the mouse button is pressed.

I haven't thought about this in detail, I just hope I can help you get on the right track.