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Greetings everyone!  Progress is slow, but existent!

I'm looking for help with one specific item at the moment:

As the guts of the Enterprise D continue to get mapped out, I'm noticing that some background screens are very ugly compared to the rest.  This is because I ripped them from old Quicktime movies in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual" CD-ROM (1995).  Certainly not the best quality, especially when you can see big, chunky Quicktime compression all over the place.  See below for a good example of one of these bad backgrounds.  Mostly, these are in the corridor shots.

I'd be looking for someone who could help touch up these screens so they don't look quite as messed up.





Please reply if you're interested and I can get you the backgrounds.

I am also always accepting help with storyline, background images, background animations, additional PC sprites/animations, NPC sprites/animations, etc...

Cheers,
Ian

Update -- I added a few more screenshots to the main post.

The turbolift system is now working!  Right now you access the various decks via an LCARS style interface.

Also finished the base components of deck 1 (Main Bridge, Conference Room & Ready Room).  Rolling out the other decks as listed on the panel.

I NEED HELP!  All kinds!  Looking for trekkies who would like to get involved in this fun project.  Message me if you're interested and what kinda skills you got!

Best,
Ian

Hahaha yes!  I think it would be fun to have little easter eggs in the holodeck that could send you to scenes from Space Quest and other various adventure games

Hey this is great! Maybe for the ensign you could have Wesley Crusher, or Miles O Brian. If this takes place later you could probably have Ro Laren.

For a story if you do anything that includes Q, you can do just about anything random you want.

Let me know what you need help on, I'd love to help with anything! Maybe even voices?

If you want to help grab "heads" of those ensigns (ideally one from each of the 8 walking directions), I could probably fuse them onto the existing TNG-uniformed "bodies" to create new characters for Wesley, Ro, O'Brien and others.

I also would be interested in custom storyline if you would like to take a crack at that.

The possibilities are endless provided we can get similar-looking sprites of Q and various other characters.  For this, I may need the help of a 2D sprite artist or two to actually create these, as I don't think there are any "character-ready" sprite sets of classic TNG aliens at my disposal that would match the sprites I grabbed from Final Unity.

As for speech, we are not nearly ready for custom voice-acting, but I'll bet we will eventually need talent to do voices for Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Starfleet Admirals, etc...

Ideally, some millionaire who lurks on these boards will find this message and gift me with enough stipend money to live so I can quit my dumb job and work on this full time.  Barring that, I'm going to need a lot of help from a lot of different people.

Ian

Looking forward to this! Where did you find the sprites though? It would be nice if they were available for others looking to make Star Trek games.
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Heh, it only took 7 years and contracting about 12 different people to try to extract the sprite frames from the .spr files in Final Unity (nasty RLE compression for these sprites and a custom palette).  I finally found a kid-genius on IRC who was able to leverage the work the ScummVM team has done on this game, and he wrote a ripping utility.  There are still resources that I'm trying to get out of that game (like inventory sprites and other various animations) so there is more to be lifted.

In addition, there is another person who has been working on ripping and cataloging the speech files from the games "Final Unity" and "Generations."  He has been at it for a few years now and is about 50% of the way done with the job.

I have concerns utilizing AGS forums to post links to these resources (as they aren't my IP) but I DO want to get these resources out there.  I love Star Trek TNG and there aren't any fangame point/click adventures out there!  I'm all about sharing the resources but I'd like to do it in a fashion that prevents a bunch of people all reinventing the wheel, (or should I say warp drive?).  Once I have a good base model of a working enterprise I'll probably release the full AGF project source files so anyone could add new features/enhance existing aspects of the Enterprise "template."

Eventually, we should be able to form a community that develops different "episodes" that can be played.  It might be fun to pick a real TNG episode and try to recreate it in-game.

Also, having a holodeck on-board pretty much means you can import other rooms & characters from other games to utilize as resources in simulation.

Lots and lots of possibilities with this.

Having said all of that, PM me if you want the 9 character sprites, as these are completely ripped.

Ian

btw You DO know that there's an official TNG point & click adventure game that you could rip off some audio/visual stuff from, right?

Indeed I am aware of STTNG:FU ... This is one of the games from which I am recycling sprites, videos, and voice acted sounds.  I recently fell into a windfall of sprites from this game (they were nearly impossible to extract) which has re-ignited the development process.

It would also seem the much panned "Star Trek Generations" game may have some resources worth grabbing.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up!

Ian

<3

Is there a particular pixel editor that you use to create your backgrounds?  I have always been amazed at people who can do this.  Are these drawn into the computer with a light-pen?  Looks great!

[Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Point-And-Click Adventure Game]

Greetings everyone!  I am excited to announce a new project I am working on.  Introducing...

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Point-And-Click Adventure Game

It's a working title.

The big idea is to gather all the resources I have at my disposal to create a "living model" of the NCC-1701-D.  Essentially, a fully walkable ship.  This model includes up-to [currently] nine playable characters (Picard, Riker, Troi, Worf, LaForge, Crusher, Data, and a no-name Male/Female ensign).

From there, a storyline will either be selected from a previous episode or book, or a new storyline will be crafted.

46 backgrounds currently exist to accommodate the following rooms in the current AGS project.  Almost all backgrounds are coming from the old TNG Technical Manual CD that came out back in the stone ages:
Main Bridge x2
Captain's Ready Room
Conference Room x2
Turbolifts
Sickbay x3
Ten Forward x4
Transporter Room x3
Engineering x4
Shuttle Bay x2
Shuttlecraft Interior
Data's Quarters x3
Picard's Quarters x3
Troi's Quarters x3
Worf's Quarters x3
Holodeck
Corridors x ~10


Some screen shots:




















Development Progress:

Story: 0%
Scripting: 0%
Graphics: 50%
Sound/Music: 50%

Expected completion date: N/A *I need help!*

There is no way I can do all of this myself, so I am actively looking for any adventure-loving trekkies who like what they see and would be interested in helping with:
2D backgrounds
2D sprites & animations
Grabbing video from episodes and cropping out items/animations
Audio and image cataloging
Storyline / puzzle ideas

All ideas and input are welcome.  Looking forward to meeting some like-minded nerds.

Cheers
Ian

I'm working on some sprites of Star Trek TNG folks, and I would like to create an animated GIF of my progress so I can share with my friends.  I'm running into a problem, though, because the frames that constitute the animation have varying widths.  This GIF program I'm using (UnFreez) is left justifying all the frames, so the result is choppy (see below).

Does anyone know of a way to take a bunch of frames like this and create a "centered" animated GIF?

Thanks!
Ian

IndieBoy -- Yeah ... I was thinking I might need to employ the help of an actual 2D graphic artist in order to make all the sprite sets that I'll need to make this idea come to life.  Until I can find/fund someone interested in helping with this, I'll have to keep tweaking the methods I use to grab these images/animations from broadcasts/DVD stills.

If I just need to know the dimensions of the screen before I grab the image, I could make the initial downscale to-scale, then strip the background.  That would make for a slightly better end-result, but I still feel like there should be a way to cleanly downscale images like these.  Perhaps I'm asking for the moon...

Ian

I'm not really wondering about what color to use for transparency (it doesn't matter, as the engine takes the pigment of the top-left pixel and applies that as the 'transparent' color for the rest of the image).

I'm more concerned with 'do i even need to do this?'

Is there some sort of built in sprite downscaling feature of AGS that I'm not aware of?

OR

Do you have to make sure that your sprites ACTUAL size measures up exactly with the resolution of the background image?

If you need to pre-scale the sprites, can anyone think of a better way to do what I am trying to do?

Thanks...
Ian

I am taking screenshots of a television show, erasing the background pixel-by-pixel to extract the people, then saving the resultant 'sprite' files as bitmaps.  It actually looks pretty good, but the problem is, when I go to import them into AGS, they're enormous and don't fit into the background at all.

I've tried scaling them down manually so they fit, but every time I do that, I have to cleanup the sprite again, because downscaling the image causes artifacts to appear on the edge of the sprite.  See the process below of zoomed in sprites (ignore JPG compression):









So, the question is ... is there a better way of doing this?  Is this even necessary?  Am I a total maroon?

Thanks for your time...
Ian

just for everyone's information (and in case someone runs into this problem in the future), i think this is caused because the files can't be overwritten because they're open by someone else at the same time.  i had the same ags game opened on the same computer by two different users (i forgot i had left a remote desktop session active with my remote account with AGS open ... i was working from a computer that didn't have AGS installed).

anyway, since the files were open by the other user, when i tried to save the game, it tried, failed, and my sprites went bye bye.

I'm having this same exact problem!  Whenever I import any new sprites into my game, I can see them and set up views with them, etc ... but the moment I save/run my AGS game file, they all turn to blue cups and the sprite is gone. 

I looked around but couldn't really find much information on this.  Is this a common issue?  Anyone else have this problem?  I guess I'll try re-installing AGS.