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Hi everyone,

I'm got a new piece of media (title screen) from my project that I would like to share for comments/criticism.  But rather than just post the picture, I figure I might as well kill two birds with one stone by linking to my website and getting some comments on the website as well.

CMK Studios, Science Fiction game page

In the title screen, I imagine that I'd put the menu items in the open starry area at the top of the picture.

Comments/criticism??

Mine's pretty simple.  My initials are CMK.  My username everywhere I go is CMK.

My "company" is:



(click on the picture to go to the website)

Clever, ey?  I've been using this for a good 6-7 years...overall, I find the CMK looks and sounds pretty damn good.

There's a GUI/Module listed in the technical forum at the moment that allows you to have a custom GUI, I'm sure, with little time on your part.  And I'm sure the added customization it allows can only help.

I also wrote a tutorial in the AGS Wiki a few months ago on how to do a custom save/load GUI.  I can garauntee that implementing it is, well, dead easy.

One GUI to do it all!?  WHOA!

It would be pretty easy, though, to copy some buttons and move some code to put everything on one GUI, if that's what you need. 

This is a tricky tightrope to walk; while I would like feedback on the story I've come up with for my project, I also don't want to ruin the story for anyone, as its got one or two twists in it along the way.  So, here's my best to keep it vague, yet specific. 

CMK Studios presents SCIENCE FICTION

Setting: The Future, circa 1950.  That is, what people in the 50's may have thought the future would look like in 20 or so years, similar to how a futuristic movie from the 80's (like Total Recall) is almost instantly recognizable as a movie from the 80s.  So, fashion and style are generally 50's, while emphasis is placed on things that the era expected to advance and change: space travel, atomic energy, communism, etc...

Story:

Callahan Hensen, a professor at a university in California, is planning a field trip for some of his students later in the week.  In preperation he, along with an unwilling brilliant student of his, Bernard, who is serving a detention, goes out to the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains to set up a camp site for the trip.

After a few hours setting up equipment, there is a blinding flash in the sky and a crash in the woods nearby.  An eerie glow can be seen on the horizon where the boom came from.  The duo go to investigate, finding a path of downed trees and mysterious men in black standing around, warding off onlookers, playing the situation down as an airplane crash.  Bernard, intrigued by the situation and unconvinced by the mysterious men, slinks past the police line and down to the crash, leaving Hensen watching as the student he is responsible for runs into the distance.  He has to get Bernard back, or its his ass, so to speak.  He manages to find a way down to the crash and is shocked at what he discovers: a UFO, definitely not human made.  Bernard in hand, Hensen attempts to get away before anyone sees, but he is seen and captured, and imprisoned. 

One of the mysterious men in black give him an ultimatum.  After what Hensen has seen, it seems his days are numbered.  His only chance to save himself and his student is to help the government with a space mission to negotiate with the alien beings before they annhilate Earth.  The entire situation seems suspicious and convoluted, especially since they seem completely unqualified for this,  but Hensen and Bernard agree, fearing for their lives. 

They are put onboard a ship with an able crew of 3 (including a pilot/astronaut, maintenance, and a doctor) and they set out on the adventure of their lives.  Along the way, they encounter ominous, empty, "haunted" ships from early US space flights, alien outposts, dangerous robots, ravenous killer beasts, a cold, calculated computer, and unseen treachery as they begin to find that their innocent, revolutionary, heroic trip to galaxies unknown is far more terrifying and sinister than they could have imagined.

The game takes place over the span of 10 acts, with the first three taking place on Earth and the remaining 7 taking elsewhere.

Act names so far...:

ACT I - Prologue to an Adventure
ACT II - A Twinkle in the Sky
ACT III - ??
ACT IV - Far Horizens
ACT V - Orbit II
ACT VI - ??
ACT VII - ??
ACT VIII - Atomic Dust
ACT IX - ??
ACT X - Epilogue

Anyway, any thoughts on the story?  I guess the most important thing at this point is does it peak any sort of interest in you?  Does this story sound interesting?  If not, what do you think could be done to make it better?

Looks great.  I don't know much about background art, so I wouldn't want to give you any bad suggestions.  The only thing I can really think of is that the back and right walls do not have shadows as they get closer to the floor, while the left wall does.  Maybe that is intentional, but otherwise, I like the style.

I think that using a cinematic aspect ration might be a good idea...someone had mentioned it to me before.  I figure then if I use 640x360, I'd save quite a few pixels per frame.

I've thought of bitTorrent as at least one form of distribution...hell, if anyone is willing to send me $1 (or a blank CD), I'll burn it to a CD and mail it to them.  Just gotta get it out there any way you can, I guess.

Someone also brought a good question to mind: what are good video editing suits for Windows?  Movie editing seems so Mac-centric that I haven't really been able to find a good Windows solution.

Hiya everybody!
(Hiya Dr. Nick)

Anyway, my current compiled folder, which contains about 5 GUIs, a single room about 30 sprites, a custom font, and a music file is about 8.6 MBs. 

My project will entail a great deal of FMV.  I've created a 5 minute WMV file as a test with decent quality at 640x480 and the file size is about 26MB.  Now, most FMV files will be less than a minute, but there will be a fairly large amount of them.

The game is fairly large as well.  Now, I'm shooting for a maximum final size of 800MB, but I'm afraid I may even find myself at the 1GB mark. 

Questions:

What is the maximum file size YOU are willing to download to play a game?

What are the possibilities when it comes to distributing the game, and will the internet be viable?

Does anyone have any tips for reducing overall size, whether it be through video compression or otherwise? (sorry, but I refuse to budge on the resolution  )

It looks great...sort of like a Disney/Cartoon look.  If I were playing an adventure game with these graphics, especially an amateur one, I would not find anything wrong with these graphics.  They're not detailed, but that was probably what you were going for.

Problems?  None particularly.  You might consider adding some clouds or something to the background of the second pic, sort of like in the first background.  The well in particular does stand out in the picture, just a bit more detailed than the surroundings.

Also, consider what in your background is going to be animated.  You may have already thought about this, but even if the background looks good, walking through a static picture in-game is not so great.  For example in the first picture, it looks like there are some bees in front of the hive; if those aren't animated in the game, it might look a bit strange.  You might also consider having a slight movement animation for the water.  In the second...smoke from the chimney?  Of course, this is just for the final game; the backgrounds as they stand, again, are great.

Hey,

I use Blender.  It renders in color and then I put it in greyscale.  I know the lighting is not very realistic, but I think that the correct lighting would look less...dramatic, I guess?  I can agree with the shadows on the ceiling, though; I could probably fix that by slanting the light downward a bit. 

Unfortunately, this has to be a day shot, and I've rather got my heart set on a light through the window.    Lighting has been giving me trouble since I started, and I decided that I'm more inclined to go with what looks right, not what looks correct, if you get my meaning.

Alright...again, I appreciate all the comments; they've helped immensely.  I've tried to clean up that pesky empty floor space and add a bit more to the room.  I am here to provide some closure...here is, probably, what the final render will be pretty close to:



I'm extremely happy with this, especially when compared to the original room.  I'm still going to add a few tiny things (I'm thinking, like, a bobble-head on the edge above the door, or maybe a coatrack in the corner by the poster), but otherwise I'm content.

Thanks again everyone!

I've created a walk area mask.  It is for a 640x480 room, but the file IS 320X240.

The mask consists of the black for transparent parts RGB(0,0,0), and blue for the walk area RGB(0,0,255).  The mask is 16 colours for a high color game.

At first, I imported it as a .PNG file, which had the strange result of making the black area of the mask walkable and the blue section not.  The help file says BMP or PCX, so I tried those.

When I import the .PCX, the editor says the file is corrupt.

When I import the .BMP, it works fine, but it doesn't use the right color; I used blue in the mask, and the editor assigned the walkable area to light red (255,0,0).

I mean, with the BMP file, it still works, but I was wondering if there was something I might have done wrong, or if this is a problem with the editor.

Thanks!

Hmm...

The widescreen does sound intriguing, and I'm sure it would help cut down cutscene sizes, if only slightly.  I'll look into that.

Also, I'll consider the shadow of the window panes...when I rendered this, the light source outside the window was very close to the window...backing it up would change that, but I'm not sure if I will yet.

Thanks for the comments so far.  This particular scene is very important, as it will dictate the artistic approach for the rest of the game as well.

At the risk of digging up an old thread...

I've been doing more work on ambience and such, trying to make it look more realistic, and here is the result, thus far.



It uses the Ambience effect in Blender.  It looks much brighter than the original, and I prefer this one in many respects, but I'm still a bit torn.  The grain looks pretty good, but being a comedyish game, I wonder if it isn't a little too serious looking from the grain.  I think the grain can be fixed up a bit; its just going to take about an hour to render. 

Oh, and yes, there does appear to be something funky going on with the plant's leaves; I don't know, maybe I'll blur it in post. 

Anyway, comments on the result?  Which of the two versions do you prefer?  And, looking at this picture, does it look to dark to be funny?

Ok, so I have this video and the volume of the clip is not affected by the in-game volume controls.  Is there any way to fix this?  The game would seem a bit unprofessional to have the volume turned all the way down and a video clip suddenly blares out of nowhere.  I've been fiddling with plugins for awhile, but I really just need to be able to change the volume of a video clip.  I'm at a loss, really. 

If there is no way to do this, is it functionality that can be added?  In my researching this, it looks like DirectShow has a handy function for changing both the volume and the balance of a clip; it seemed pretty simple to implement, but I don't really know much about AGS's coding.

Yes, I did see Theora.  It looks pretty good.  I'm hoping I can almost just create some wrapper classes in the DLL, something like PlayTheora(name, loop, skip_code), and hand off the movie to the video code.  I'm kind of hoping that I can get away with less code creation than code rearrangement.  We'll see. 

The fact that Theora is little used can be viewed as a positive, I think.  It means that people are less likely to mess with the video files in the distributed game; they'd have to pick up a player and such, in comparison to .wmv, which would just play.

Time to get neck deep in some code...if I'm not back in 2 days, just wait longer.

Hi everyone,

While experimenting with video files in AGS, I've come to find it very restricting.  My biggest beef is that the video volume is not affected by the game volume, but I would also like a way to put optional subtitles over video, and just have a bit more control.

Now, I'm dipping into an area which I know absolutely nothing about: DLL programming, video codecs, and video files.  So forgive me if what I suggest below is complete rubbish and not even slightly plausible.  Just let me know, though, so I don't waste my time. 

So, I've downloaded the DLL template file and have it compiling and running a blue line across my screen.  That much I've figured out.  What I was thinking of doing is plugging a free, open source codec into the DLL so that I can (and correct me if I'm wrong) coordinate the game and video volume, and maybe even set up a system that allows the play of subtitles based on a movie files position.

Being completely DLL and plugin illiterate (though somewhat trained in programming), I can only guess at the audacity and ignorance of this post.  I guess I just want someone with some experience to let me know if this would be at all possible. 

Hiya.

The game I'm working on will be making heavy use of FMV, so I kind of need to know some specifics about the engine and video.  I know I could just experiment with a video file, but I wanted to ask first.

1) When a video file starts playing, is there a moment pause (the screen freezes; the screen goes black for a moment), or is it immediate?

2) Do the AGS volume controls have any effect on sound volume, or is it defaulted to the movie volume?  If the volume can't be controlled through AGS, is there any possible work around?

3) What is the best type of video file to use for lose-less quality, and small file size?

Any help would be appreciated.

Well, from what I understand...

1) How does FillSaveGameList work?

All that FillSaveGameList() does is run through the save games stored in "savegameindex[]", and uses the "desc" property in the save file to put the games in the list box in order of slot number.

2) How do save files work?

To save files, you use the function "SaveGameSlot(slot, desc)".  What this does is save your games state to a file in the "Compiled" directory and it then references this save in "savegameindex[]".

So, if you save a game called "Bob" at the first place on the list box, it would be SaveGameSlot(1, "Bob").  This will save the game state as the file "agssave.001" in the "Compiled" directory.  It would then make a reference to "savegameindex[]" so that "savegameindex[1]" would then point to the saved game "Bob".

Right, now we have to add list box code, so we can save dynamically.
"SaveGameSlot(lstBox.ItemCount +1, "Bob") would always save a new file.  However, if we want to overwrite an old file, the reference to it is in "savegameindex[]", and the easiest way to identify it is to use the "SelectedIndex" property, since FillSaveGameList() fills the list box with the same numbers as "savegamelist[]".

So, to overwrite, we'd use: SaveGameSlot(savegameindex[lstBox.selectedIndex], "Bob");

So, if you wanted to avoid the bug that I currently have listed in the tutorial, it would be a simple matter of, rather than checking against selected index, running through the entire list and checking for doubles.

Anyway, I hope this helps.  If you need more info, I'll do my best.

EDIT: Considering what I said above, I've fixed the code in the AGSwiki.  It now checks all the saves, not just the highlighted one.  As far as I can tell, it now functions perfectly.

I recently added an article in the AGSwiki about making your own save/load dialogs, complete with delete buttons.  If you're still having problems, take a look at that.  I know for a fact the code works; I'm using it right now. 

All you'd probably have to do is change some element names and it would be fine.