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I quite liked the way The Walking Dead would give you a textual description of the action you're about to take, or the options you have to choose from (even though it offered the player very limited control in places).

One of the frustrating things about 1 or 2 click interfaces is when the character interacts with something in an unexpected way. Then it feels like the game is solving the problem. Somehow, being presented with the option beforehand gives a greater sense of decision-making.

Can we not call it a manifesto?

Manifesto! Manifesto! Manifesto!

It occurs to me - how often does a character stand at exactly the same Ypos as a walkbehind? It looks bad if a character passes through a walkbehind, so surely most of the time the walkable area is setup in such a way as that rarely if ever happens? Could that contribute to why lots of us haven't noticed?

Something really needs to exist to help patch AGS games, EXE files in particular - because replacing an entire game (re-distributing a large game to many people for example) is just clunky and not great for (small) commercial enterprises.

I don't know if it's practical for a commercial release, but I've used Clickteam's Patch Maker with AGS. Of course, it breaks save games, but the patch worked.

For me Im a bit worried about the "no sierra-style interface". I really like that interface, and really hate the 2-click one. I find it a lot more satisifying personally to be able to choose different kinds of interactions instead of 1 click for move and one for all interactions.

This might be off topic, but I think the Sierra interface is a really terrible idea, and it excludes all but the most committed nostalgia-phile. I think Vince Twelve's "Why your Game is Broken" article from a few years ago was the best case against it. Imagine an operating system, he suggested, which required you to 'Listen' to sound files 'Look' at photos and 'Read' documents, rather than just double-clicking on each of them. It would baffle and enrage people.

I was depressed to find playthroughs of Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! (as well as several comments across the web) in which people can't get the game working because they don't understand the verb-coin interface. It was an embarrassing reminder that times have moved on...

I just want to echo Calin. I've always used D3D and never noticed this problem - it is very concerning to think that some people might be experiencing it with D3D games though.

Absolutely. That is one among many issues I'm looking at. If you have any other questions, please PM me so we don't clog this thread up with a conversation!

I haven't sworn not to switch engine, but I certainly haven't made the choice to switch. At the moment I'm looking for the best way to make the game available across multiple platforms without having to reinvent the wheel. Hopefully AGS will stay at the centre of that.

I've replied to your question here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47753.msg636466569#msg636466569

Moderators, could you lock this old thread please?

It's made with AGS. It seems that Visionaire are civilised enough to post about adventure games made in other engines.

Sorry Tosek, that's where the simple technical fixes end and it becomes a question of aesthetics. The lighting is very flat for my game, but if you were using toon shading for a dark, graphic-novel look then you'd use completely different lighting setups.

All I can suggest is watching a lot of lighting tutorials for blender and looking at a lot of reference images. Toon shading is practically different from traditional shading, and there aren't many great tutorials, so beyond that it's just experimentation. Hope that helps!

You can do that from the Render Settings (the camera icon on the left of the buttons panel). Under the Dimensions tab, type your frame size in as Resolution (remember to set the scale at 100% when doing this). Under Shading set Sky to Transparent. Then under Output choose PNG and RGBA.

Then you'll be able to export PNGs with transparent backgrounds at the correct frame size.

I'm using the new implementation of Freestyle in Blender for characters in Nelly Cootalot 2. Freestyle implementation is very promising, but there are lots of obstacles making it hard to get images looking the way you want. Here are a couple of suggestions/observations:

The Toon Shader - Increase the emit value to around 0.5, then lower the intensity of the diffuse colour until the skin is the right colour where the light is hitting it. That will get rid of the black shading on his jaw. I'd suggest setting the specular intensity to 0, because toon specular shading isn't good for skin.

Intersecting Poly Problem - There is an inconsistent freestyle line around his eyes and hairline because the geometry is intersecting and (at the moment) intersections don't generate freestyle lines. I've found it takes a lot of tweaking the mesh to get lines working around eyes and hair.

Funnily, the Oxford English Dictionary prefers "ize" to "ise" in spite of being British. So you can go with your preference without upsetting the OED.

Like Grundislav, I just got round to playing this with my girlfriend. We really loved it. Apart from being beautifully realised in low-res, it's very well written. The balance of drama, pathos and humour is really good, and it's not full of the portentous overwriting which you often get in attempts at serious science fiction.

Thanks!

Running the cursor around scenery must be a pretty common pastime between adventure gamers

I like to make triangular pointers into wizard/dunce's caps for the characters.

Hello,

I think this is probably a known issue, but on a new laptop it's much more distracting than it used to be. When the mouse cursor is in motion over a script window it flickers between the pointer and the beam cursor in a very annoying way. Weirdly, I can stop this happening by changing the beam cursor in windows to the one with a white outline. I searched but couldn't find this mentioned, so I thought it was worth posting.

Also as a side note: The dialogue window in the editor does not work very well with Win 7's text sizes above 100%. The left column is too narrow and needs to be resized, but it still doesn't fit properly. If the same layout is used in the new betas, it's worth looking into because (I believe) 125% is the default font size for systems with a 1920x1080+ monitor attached at the time of installation. (And thanks to a windows bug, changing default font sizes doesn't work properly in this situation without editing the registry).

I hope those notes are of some use.

Surely to most sierra fans "the latest in 3D gaming technology" = "it's 3D".

Yay!

Any chance of seeing a full-size version of the screenshot?

Sorry to harp on, but would the technique you're working on allow (hypothetically) for scaling down a larger screen size like 1280x or 1920x?

[scale down]

Can I add another thought? Bearing in mind that AGS really should offer high/widescreen resolutions in the future, shouldn't the scaling process allow for that?

Hopefully one day, someone will try to run a 1920x1080 game on a 1280x720 monitor. Then the engine will need to scale down to accommodate that. I think it would be a real shame if these scaling and display improvements helped keep AGS locked in to dated resolutions.

I think Ali had troubles with widescreen mode, that's why he decided to program his own engine for Nelly 2?

I haven't started programming my own engine, I don't have the skills! What I was trying to do is something approaching what you describe in the post above, but the kickstarter campaign put my experiments on hold for a while. I got as far as placing an 800x600 window (unscaled) within a resolution of 1280x720, which would make the game playable at least.

I am increasingly interested interested in the idea of HD/widescreen resolutions. When you advise against the use of the Skygoblin branch, what are the dangers?

After that analogy I don't know about the Doublefine adventure, but I am a bit hungry.