Topics

Hey pals!

Last night I was in the car thinking of something else entirely when Maniac Mansion popped into my head and my brain urgently asked me:

"Can you pick up the meteor, climb into the drained pool and then fill the pool with the kid and the meteor down there?"

I did not have an answer for it and I do not own Maniac Mansion to find out!

Any takers?
Eric

*The only reason I could see not being able to do this is if you can't switch characters when you go into the meteor's room.

TO THAT I ask, what if you microwave the radioactive water and leave it in there, grab the meteor, head for the kitchen and then open the microwave... I guess you're wearing a rad suit... DAMN!

Hello People of Earth!

I just wanted to post letting people know that earlier this year the Tex McPhillip trilogy was completed. The first game was one of the first fan made AGI games I played many moons ago in college and I loved it and now he's finally finished the series.

They start out a little rough but I just love the humor in them and the final game is very nicely done. There are only a few times where I got stuck and sadly had to consult the code to see what I had to do but it was not enough to make me dislike the game at all. These games are just hilarious and well put together.

http://www.geocities.com/magickpoultry/

He is also the creator of Tonight The Shrieking Corpses Bleed if that means anything to anyone!

Anyway, enjoy or don't!

Eric!

Hey dudes!

So I was watching a mythbusters marathon over the holidays and I was remembering an interview I heard with Adam Savage where he said they shoot like 20 hours of footage for each show. That's almost a day of shooting, probably two 10 hour days [just guessing]. 10 hours is a good chunk of the day and then the editors distill it down to an hour show. So I thought, "I wonder if the mythbusters can recall days better if they watch an episode?"

The idea being that because 2 days were filmed and then edited that they could be triggered to remember more about their lives than someone who didn't have a recorded history of it [albeit edited].

So then I thought that I took 400 pictures at Mittens France, do I remember more about Mittens France than I do Mittens Canada and even less about Mittens America and even less about the entirety of college?

So then I think, all these digital cameras hanging around, it's easier to take pictures than it has ever been for everyone. And then I thought all this internet hanging around... There are tons of journals and blogs and myspaces and twitters just documenting people's days. Can they go back and remember their life better? Do people have more hindsight?!

And then I remembered this forum, if you go back to the last page of Gen Gen it goes back to 2004, that was a long time ago! The majority of us still around have probably changed quite a bit from then!

There is all this past us hanging around on the internet, a breadcrumb trail of the path we took to get from one version of us to the current version. I mean in the past 4 years I have changed quite a bit. I moved in with my girlfriend, I did some freelance, I now have a salary job making games, I've made one AGS game [....shut up...], I've changed my hair style three times, changed apartments twice, I've changed drawing styles twice and I've changed my underwear... Gosh, at LEAST 4 times...

But there I am, still hanging out on the internet. This forum to be exact. I used to have an online diary but I deleted it after remembering it and then reading it years later. There was more of me spread out on the SCRAMM forums but that is all gone now, AGS ezBoard is also gone for the most part, a good chunk of Gen Gen threads on this forum are gone also... I have a livejournal now but that's for posting art.

So this forum holds the majority of breadcrumbs on the path that I happened to take to arrive at 'me' now. It's very interesting [to me at least].

Has anyone else gone back and summarized their years here? It's a little scary sometimes and a little weird. Seeing posts you've completely forgotten about and reading them as if someone else wrote them [which basically they did!] and it's a little embarrassing, I would sometimes say to myself while time traveling into the archives "Why do I care so much about this?" or "No Eric, that is not what she said, you read it incorrectly and are also wrong!" or "Holy shit I don't remember having this much fun with [random AGSer who is now gone]!"

Or does anyone use Twitter, or make video logs [Vlogs, as they call them] or use these other social networking sites to document days? I feel that this new way of recording your life is specific to this age. We have the technology to do it and I wonder what consequences it will bring, if any.

So in conclusion: Hi, my name is Eric Feurstein. I am probably not who you remember me to be.

I hadn't seen that anyone posted this but the email went around work and I thought it was quite interesting:

http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/site/just_one_more_grim_thing/

It's interesting reading the descriptions of the characters, especially the Glottis one. Seems there's a puzzle in there that was scrapped about turning a fan on for Glottis... Oh adventure games.

256 Colour mode! I still use it! I think I'm the only one!

Anyway I'm curious if it would be possible at all to allow pasting over sprites from clipboard in the sprite manager like you can in the other modes. I usually import all my animations using FLCs and sometimes my animations get up into 13 or 14 frames, if I have to change something in say a death animation I'd have to import the animation again, replace the view slots with the new animation and then delete the old sprites. I'd love to just be able to copy and paste the new art right on top of the old sprites.

Or, as a random thought, you import a FLC and it gives you all the frames as individual sprites but there is also a sprite that represents the entire FLC... If that makes sense. So if I import over that it updates all the sprites associated with the representation... Or, ya know, just clipboard paste would be great.

I figured since you were updating the editor anyway you might take pity on a poor 8bit robot and look into it.

Thanks!

Eric

http://www.bobross.com/news.cfm

I'm going to say that this is possibly the best license ever and will make me buy a DS and a Revolution*.

Eric

*These statements are possibly just jokes.

Anyone know what happened to the underdogs?

Looks like they forgot to pay a bill, this is most unhappy!

Oh video games and love...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1329362959167995041&q=tripod

Coming to the end of your grant you finally finish work on your experiment. When moving it to a containment unit everything goes wrong... Can you retrieve your precious experiment and save years of research and millions of dollars worth of funding?

Finally, I believe I have squashed every known bug and added a song generously donated by Mr. Adam "Darkstalkey" Hay

When asking for hints, please use the hints and tips thread that I have set up here:

Enjoy! and if you find any bugs, please post them here and please use spoiler tags!

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=download&game=694Ã,  Ã, 5 megs with music

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=download&game=694&mirror=1Ã,  1 meg without music

If anyone likes doing sound effects and would like to make some for the last part of the game, contact me please!

Eric

This thread is the official hint thread for Automation by Eric "MrColossal" Feurstein.

Please keep all hint requests in this thread and add spoiler tags! This will keep things nice and tidy for people searching for help. Thank you.

Eric

Hey people who may know more than me.

I'm looking for a free version of this type of program:

http://www.shelltoys.com/access_folders/

Making game art and such means I have to save pictures in one folder, levels in another, reference in another and concept in another, these folders aren't always right near each other and a program like Access Folders is awesome! You define favourites and just click one button and you're presented with them all for easy workability!

Now, Access Folders is cheap [20 bucks] but I'd rather not buy it! So, anyone know of any other programs like this that are free?

And no, I won't steal it, I'm not about to use stolen programs at work.

Any help would be AWESOME!

Eric

[Congratulations!]

Congratulations!

You've been hired on as a temp sprite artist for Colossal Industries. You'll be helping us complete our milestone in 1 weeks time to be shipped off to the developer.



We need this character turned into a useable sprite for the Gameboy Advanced. Please reduce the palette down to 16 colours including the transparency. Please reduce the animation down to 8 frames, 15 is too much for us at the moment.

Consider the animation provided as a conceptual animation. Feel free to embellish on what you think would help make the character look good. Do not add arms and he is only to have 1 eye.

As an added bonus, if you have time, please provide an idle standing animation facing to the right.

Good luck, keep track of your hours so we can compensate you promptly and correctly.

Thank you,

Eric Colossal
VP Colossal Industries

Edit: added another week

There is a 2 day [48 hour] game making competition that will be going on, well check the link here:

http://gamedev.acm.cs.rpi.edu/projects/contest/spring06gamejam

It's for people in college or one year out of college and this dude I know at work is putting it on. He asked me if I knew of any other free engines and after thinking about it for half a second I posted here...

Now granted it's harder to make an adventure game in 48 hours that is of any worth but you don't have to use AGS just cause you're from AGS... I know there are a lot of people who use various other engines here and maybe you'd be interested so there you go!

Eric

Hey there!

My name is eric and this is what I've been up to for the past few months.

I started working with some dudes on their mod project called Plan of Attack

http://www.planofattackgame.com/

I'm an artist over there [obviously] and modeller and general art direction and such... So I just wanted to pop on in and let people know about it, I think it's a wicked fun mod and keeps getting better with each new release. The new Beta is due out soonish which will have a new map, more bug fixes and new models textures by me, which you can see here:

http://www.planofattackgame.com/images/screenshots/060.jpg

I'd love it if some people here played it and spread the word! We've been in 5 I think magazines so far and featured on a few cover disks and awarded Super Mod! by a german games magazine which is sweet.

So yea, either check it out now or wait for the next beta, either way I hope who ever plays it likes it!

Eric

[obviously you need hl2 to play...]

Hello,

I just want to suggest something that would probably only benefit me because I'm the only one who cares about these things, or perhaps because the current tools are awkward it prevents people from trying, either way!

I would love to be able to edit palettes in AGS more than I can now. I would absolutely love to be able to drag and drop colours into new slots and swap the colours or copy and paste colours.

I spent a very very long time trying different programs downloaded off the internet to get very minor palette effects working. Dpaint, Grafx2, Palsuite, photoshop, paint, PSP, they all seem to work just a little bit different than AGS does and some of them don't work at all. Even when I select "save as psp .pal" which AGS uses, there are differences in files when opened in a text editor.

I eventually found a way of working in AGS that let me make palettes but it was so awkward and time consuming that making one palette ate up so much time I couldn't imagine making a night time palette of the same colours.

Anyway, enough complaining.

colour shifting, colour swaping, multiple colour selecting and then various brightness contrast hue saturation adjusters... Those would make my day...

And just to preempt this: Gilbert, no. I have tried many programs and you think photoshop sucks that's fine, but I don't want to have to use an old dos program from the 80's that barely works on this computer [and sometimes barely works].

Thank you!

http://media2.yahoo.com/player/ligans/?key=44057

Most awesome...

Scroll through the list in the bottom left and watch more.

WOOT

Sick and tired of what you say?

I'm tired of people always saying that Larry Vales and Pleurburgh have bad graphics.

People always seem to recommend PB and then immediatly say "Look past the graphics" or that PB is proof that good graphics aren't needed for a good game.

What are these people talking about? PB has some of the best AGS graphics, especially taking into account that it is a full length game and huge.  How can people think PB has bad graphics and not realize that they are talking utter bunk! Is it the backgrounds?

PB has some of the most detailed and consistent backgrounds out of all AGS games, each room makes sense architectually and they're all beautiful. If there's a computer on a desk there's a power chord plugging into a wall socket powering that computer. Chrille over looked very little when it came to laying out that game, its details and its hotspots. I'd walk into a room and a hotspot would ring up for something and I'd be like "Oh looks like I'll have to use that thing at some point in the game..." But nope! It was just a detail in the room adding to the amazingness of the game.

Is it the characters? The characters are also consistent and again... Amazing. Obviously this is my opinion but how can you fault Chrille when the majority of AGS games use text boxes to explain away animations and PB actually had those animations. Chrille doesn't like to animate as far as I know and he did [and continued to do with Revenants] an amazing job, the animations are very smooth and wonderful. Each character is original, not based off of a previous sprite from another game and definetly stylish. Each character also has it's own unique look.

So what is it? What about PB's graphics are so horrible? Someone who thinks they're bad please respond.

Also Larry Vales... Let's take this comment by Vel in the games page:

Posted by Vel on 2003-12-18 at 09:39 (IP logged):
This game is simply un-playable. I dont know what the plot was. Nor the dialogue. It all ends for me when I see the graphics. Every 5 year-old can make around 50-60 backgrounds or characters like these. This may be an AGS award winning game, but it certainly isnt playable for the average gamer.

BUNK! Utter bunk! Let's break down Larry Vales now... Character animation. Not much but Larry's walk isn't that bad at all. He doesn't just get flipped horizontally, his legs actually move. Considering again that the majority of AGS games don't have stellar walk cycles [especially back then]. Also, all the characters are original sprites made by Phil, not rips or paint overs [which can't even be said about Who Wants to Live Forever, Vel]

Backgrounds. Also detailed. Lots of hotspots and not just the bare minimum details needed to convince someone that you're in a certain type of room. When I walk outside in LV1 there are bushes clouds and such, not just a green line drawn horizontally across the screen with a flood fill.

When talking to people you usually get a close up, a close up! Meaning that Phil went out of his way to draw yet another graphic just to make the dialogues different when it wasn't necessary at all [again for the bare minimum]. Towards the end of the game you get lots of different scenes, up a pole, inside an air duct, on the phone, on the phone with your head smashed... Just tons of art and new backgrounds that really added to the game.

So what is it about Larry Vales that makes it so ugly?

I'm so curious...

Eric

Hello, I have a question for anyone who knows 3d studio max...

I'm so confused as to why this is happening. I made this scene and I started adding lights, I want light to stream in through 2 windows that I cut into a wall... So far so good

Except this happens:





lights just decide to shoot right through walls! everything was working fine and then I did some tweaking of vertices and bloop! my walls don't cast shadows anymore...

and it's only those 3 walls, the other walls block light like nobody's bidness

I don't understand.

Any help what-so-ever is so greatly appreciated

eric

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040806/sc_nm/ireland_atlantis_dc

You can go home Indy... We won't be needing you after all...

heyo, I have a request of anyone who can help...

there are 3 sprites from this game that i want for a shirt i'm making

http://www.c64.com/detail.php?gameid=100039

however, on the emulator i'm running it on [winVICE] one of them gets all garbled

in the game you can eat cake and an elixer to grow certain sizes, i have her normal size and her tall size but when i shrink her she's all blargy.

Is there anyone who can get this sprite for me? I've tried other emulators but I have no idea how to work them with the whole disk switching thing and even if i could they're dos programs and snagging a screen shot is annoy-noy

Help me anyone and I will be most appreciative

edit: hmm it may be the disk image, cause i tried it on another emulator and it's still mucked up

I tried both images from www.c64.com and c64unlimated, both the same

love,
eric