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As requested, the animated version.

OH YES - animated waterfalls!!! That settles it - you'll be the one doing backgrounds for Snakes of Avalon 2: Behind the Toilet Door!

But seriously, great work on the background, and knowing your other games I bet these woods will offer a number of locations like this one to explore - all chock-full of animation, pesky gnomes, and other critters.

Ixnay on the Omegnays.  You'll give away all my plot ideas!

As requested, the animated version.  Purple-greyish block at bottom is where GUI goes.  As my web-browser (Chrome) won't scale and crop it properly, you'll probably have to resize the window manually to approx 640 x 480 to see it properly, but you get the gist of it anyway.  I'm not that happy with the mist (too bumpy on the bottom, in my opinion), and the flow of the water above the log doesn't quite line up with the waterfall below, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.  This is more or less how it will look in game, unless someone can offer some easy improvements.

Thanks again for all the help!

Nice interview.  A good read for anybody who thinks their project is taking forever....   

Maybe just try not to have the black foreground's outline being simply a straight horizontal line?
Apart from that the new version looks great!

Don't worry, that black space will be entirely covered with a GUI.  Whether or not that is an improvement over horizontal black lines is another matter....

For everyone else, thanks for the positive feedback.  Don't worry about that water, it'll all be PAVED with animation!

Wow -nice and helpful suggestions all around.  Thanks a whole lot.  I've been quite ill these past few days and so haven't done any work on this lately, but you guys have really fired me up to hit this bg again.  Back in a (relative) bit with a second draft.

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EDIT:

As I said, had to do a complete redraw (I forgot that the GUI would eat up almost 1/3 of the screen  : ).  This hurts the verticality of the scene, but there's not a lot for it due to character size.  I tried to take criticisms into account in redesigning the background (lighter hues, less detail).  Redesigned rocks are now shaded to add texture.  One thing I'm missing is that bold shading that theo demonstrated, but I fear this might be beyond my skill (beautiful and mood setting as it may be...   ).  I will experiment with bolder shades, but I'd like some feedback to see if I'm on the right track or not.

Hey all,
     I'm struggling a bit with my forest here.  I thought the foliage would be my biggest problem, but I'm fairly happy with the shrubs and trees, and the grass tufts are consistent with other backgrounds.  The water and waterfalls will animate, so no worries there.  But the rocks!  Oh, those rocks are painful to look at.  And I'm not at all happy with the background behind the scene.  It looks too busy, but not busy enough at the same time (if you catch my meaning).  So I'm looking for some constructive criticism:



    Limitations: We've got to stick with the line art, which means no blending/rubbing.  And I'm really only interested in a couple hues of shading MAX -I've got no patience for it beyond that.  After that any suggestions are welcome.  This is probably going to require a pretty major redraw for gameplay reasons, so no suggestion is too radical.  Thanks in advance.

The French AGS were on a kick for a while translating games into French.  They asked me for the translation file of Besieged and I happily gave it to them, and then when they came back with the translation I recompiled for them -they scanned for errors, made a few edits, I re-recompiled and now they distribute the translated game from their site, which I am entirely cool with.  The whole process took maybe an hour on my part (mostly to make sure the translated text still fit on my GUI labels), which is a drop in the bucket in terms of game making, and I was happy to do it since fans obviously thought enough of the game to ask to do many many hours of translation work on my project. 
     Now obviously no one is going to volunteer to do free translating for a commercial game, but maybe for a free demo or prequel to a commercial game.  Consider approaching a commercial author to translate their demo and see if they can keep track of downloads through a separate portal.  Comparing download counts of, say, a Spanish translation to the English version should give the developer a rough idea of how big the Spanish market is compared to the English market for the commercial version (it's just a ratio comparison).  If you raise some eyebrows you might scare yourself up some paid translation work.  Just a thought.

    Does it not make sense that lower res games have more acceleration?  The smallest movement would be one "pixel", but if that pixel is stretched over a wider area (fullscreen) then the mouse would appear to move faster.  Also screens do not conform to the 320x200 ratio so there's bound to be some stretching at fullscreen, which may account for the apparent x y movement differential.
    I have noticed this phenomenon too, but I always put it down to frame rate.  If you think about how quick a mouse flick is, would the engine really have time to update the mouse position in any visually accurate way even at 40 frames per second?  Has anyone with a faster computer than I tried doubling the frame rate to see if it halves the mouse acceleration?

I've just tested my current DirectDraw project built on Windows XP machine on my wife's Windows 7 laptop in full screen mode and experienced no problems.  As you say, it is rather unlikely that no one downloading your games has been using Windows 7.  I suspect the single machine -have you tested on many Windows 7 systems?  Or are you using something external to AGS in this current game that you haven't in your previous games (some weird .dll or something?) that might not jive with Windows 7?

Monkeys kill birds with stones -I never knew that. 

Many thanks!

   C'mon people, look at the clues.  Zombies don't drink a lot of water, their food source is high in fiber (especially brains, but also skull bits), and they walk really funny.  I don't think Zombies crap.  I think they're bunged up something awful.  They just keep packing 'er in until one day....  BOOM!  Crap and zombie bits spray out for a twenty meter radius like some sort of hell-sent 200 lb water balloon.  Try picking that out of your teeth.
    But rarely is a single zombie that successful at hunting down suitable prey species so it's a rare occurrence, not yet caught on film.  Thus it's understandable that most people are still confused about the subject.   

I've been dutifully playing the games in the FYC thread and am now trying to nominate but all I get is a "Service Unavailable" message when I click the link.  Anyone else having problems?

     So I've got this label on my persistent GUI that tells the player what the mouse is over: a plain and simple @hotspot@ command not only displays the names of hotspots, but also characters and objects as well.  Brilliant!
     I'm looking to take this a step further and tell the player what they're pointing at in the GUI on the same label, should the mouse coordinates indicate that that's where their interest lies.  But I can't find the code to do such a thing, or actually to set it back to @hotspot@ when the mouse leaves the GUI.  The best I could come up with was Label.Text, but short of determining precise co-ordinate boxes and constantly checking in Rep Ex if the mouse was over a button (roughly) I can't think of a mechanism for activating the label change (i.e. Label.Text = "Game Options", and as mentioned how to get it back (Label.Text = @hotspot@ throws an error due to the @ symbols).
     This isn't really a game breaker but it'd be nice to implement because my GUI only has room for picture buttons and not labels for what everything is.  Any and all ideas are appreciated.

This looks awesome -I love the comedic fantasy genre!  Not sure if the (high res?) talk portraits fit in with the rest of the graphics, but otherwise this looks and sounds like it will be a great game.  Good luck!

Hey,
   [typical disclosure] I feel dumb for not being able to figure this out, but I've spent a couple hours searching the manual and forum now so I'm swallowing my pride and posting for help now. [/typical disclosure]

    I've created multiple Text Window GUIs which I would like to use for Display at various points in my game.  Except that I can't figure out for the life of me how to implement them except for the General Settings prompt where I can change the Custom Text Window GUI to anything I want, but only as a one-off thing (so I can't use the other ones).  So my question(s):

1. What is the script command for calling different Text Window GUIs during the game?

2. Barring a satisfactory answer to 1, is there a way to change the "official" Custom Text Window GUI with script during the game?  I notice in very old threads something called game.Speech_text_gui = GUINAME which is so old it doesn't even appear as obsolete in the manual.  Surely this is still possible?

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EDIT: SetTextWindowGUI -the missing piece of the puzzle!   

Any ideas how we could start working smarter?

      Aha!  If I told you then I would be working smarter and you would be working the same!

     But, seriously, I just meant be more efficient, or at least get Dualnames to carry the work load for you, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

     Joking aside, congratulations on the milestone.

Might this involve the secret and perhaps most awesome reformatting of the last interview, so that the questions are interspersed with the answers?

Just don't ask me to work any harder!

Psh!  Working harder is for baby-boomers and Egyptian pyramid laborers.  I'm asking you to work smarter.

The thing I was thinking about is the MovementLinkedToAnimation function of the player character. Setting this to false made the scrolling smooth. Will this cause other problems I'm not yet aware of?

Probably.  Most solutions to one problem have unintended consequences, in my experience.  But then, you'd just find another solution to the new problem when you encounter it and knock those consequences further down the line, etc. 

This thread?