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Hey, Guys,

I have Defender Pro installed on my computer. Now somebody just called me up and told me they have a virus. I was sure that I could bring DP over to their house and install it without a problem. My girlfriend says that it willl cause their computer to crash because you're not supposed to do that. I tried to explain that it would work fine because I've got the CD key and it shouldn't do anything messed up.

Now my question is, will it install fine or no?

[ - EDIT - ]
I forgot to say that on the box it says that it's licenced for 3 computers.

Thanks in advance,


--Snake

I've never heard of a program actually crashing a computer on purpose... I'd think that would be a poor way to get sales from paranoid customers.  As long as you have the CD key and the willingness to give up one of your licenses, there shouldn't be a problem... as long as the computer in question meets the requirements of the program, of course.

To follow all of that up, I should mention that there's a free (for personal use) program called AVG from www.grisoft.com which is really quite good (and you know it has to be because its name is a set of three initials with both an A and a G in there).

Merv Griffin has died of prostate cancer at age 82.

I think he deserves a bit of the credit for the mainstreaming of non-sport games in media, right?

It says in the GNU that I have to enclude the source code to any changes of the:

Hq2x/Hq3x (graphic filters) - use the GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1,
February 1999. 

Unless I'm mistaken, the resultant product from the use of AGS isn't bound to the GNU license unless the author specifically wishes to release it as a  GNU release.

If Chris made any changes to the graphics filters for AGS, that would make it his own responsibility to include said source code in the AGS package itself..  It's not something the end-user has to worry about unless said user is up to mischief regarding the AGS EULA.

Then again, I may be way off on this.

Okay, I tried fixing it and I think it looks a lot better, though I'm still stuck on how to move the arms - I looked at those websites butyeah, her arms don't really move at all now (though it still looks better than before in my opinion!)

What do you mean by 'saturated'? Too bright?

Too "saturated" means that the color is too intense, brightness would be "gamma."  In this case, though, I think you could rightly refer to it as "bright."  That's subjective, though, of course.

If you want to give the arms a more real sense of movement, you'll want to darken the arm that's swung back and slightly lighten the one that swings forward.  Don't do it too much... even a subtle change will sell the illusion of depth.

The main problem is that the left side of your front-facing couch suggests a shape that slopes straight down, and that's what makes the right side look wonky and wrong.



Obviously, this paintover is what it would look like if the right side matched the left.  If you want to change the left side, you're going to need to move the frontmost part of the arm toward the right so that the curve where the back merges into it is forced to slope.

 



Meet Lemona Head, citizen of Monkey Island and fruit-head cannibal by trade.

Edit:  The front view is my official entry.  The back view is... because I had to.

Very nice pixelling style!  Very dollz-ish.

While your second attempts with the sprites are indeed better overall, there's one thing you missed that you got right in the first attempt.  You'll want to direct your attention to the facial expressions.

In the first attempt, you had a rather neutral mouth position... this is good.  Having characters that constantly grin isn't very natural.  Grinning frames are reserved for specific situations.

As for the walk cycle, it looks a bit unnatural as well, mostly because of the way the legs are moving.  She looks as if she's gripping some sort of invisible ball between her knees.  To fix this, you should have the forward-extended legs cross toward the center of the body more.  I'll try to whip up a paintover to show you what I mean.

Hotel Dusk - DS

Touch Detective - DS

Trace Memory - DS

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - DS

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All! - DS

I should also mention that there is a DS version of SCUMM-VM as well, and that it is "officially supported" by the SCUMM-VM group.  Gotta love the DS for its click-and-play interface.  It plays very well (even better than computers IMHO) for adventure games, and the developers have taken note.

People have been asking for improvement on my style but I can't think of anything better. I added somethings but apparently they're not reaching a good enough level.

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q53/JustLedZep/untitled12425.jpg

I can offer the following advice:

1.  If you're going to go high-color, then go high-color.  The graduated light effects mixed with the jaggy lines found in the rest of the image make for a piece that is inconsistent within itself.  At some point it looks like you're just casting darkness over places so you don't have to put anything interesting there... and the stuff that you do have there is essentially invisible.

2.  Check your perspective.  Now, I know that there's no hard-and-fast rule that you can't stylize your way out of using vanishing points, but it's a bad idea for beginners.  Moving beyond that issue, take a look at the vessel on the table.  I'm talking about the cylindrical one here.  You should be able to see the curve of the bottom of that item.

3.  Plan out the composition of the room.  Make things visually appealing.  Some people may disagree with me on this issue, but when I'm making a background... I'll take form over function any day of the week as long as there isn't a puzzle tied into it.  It doesn't matter to me if the science lab isn't arranged efficiently as long as it's arranged interestingly.  The two box tables against the wall don't do it for me, and the test-tubes in the foreground really aren't serving any purpose other than to add an obviously superficial sense of depth.

4.  All I'm going to say about this one is... balance.  The white piles of paper up there may be important to the plot, but there has to be a better way of balancing the value levels in the scene.

First off, let me say that the texture of this piece is really, really top-notch.  Very impressive!

With all of the color variation, I don't feel that the piece is "empty" at all, and I think that the flatness is caused by the stark contrast between sea and sky.  Maybe your water's color should fade toward the color of the background.  That would give the sea some depth and make it look less like a set piece.

The size is 84 x 87, and I used all nine colors... just made the background transparent.

So I, erm, worked on this and then went out of town for the weekend, and then I forgot 



Anyway, I know that this isn't a professional attempt by any measure, but it does at least demonstrate that you can capture the shape of a thing and still spare polygons... the entire head, hat included, only contains 166 triangles.

I tried to emulate a few things you had going in yours, including the toothy grin and the one smaller eye.  Actually, instead of making the eye smaller, I just partially closed it.  It didn't work out all that well, but there you go.

If anybody wants the actual mesh (to use or study, feel free to do as you want), you can download it here.  Zip file contains mesh in OBJ format along with the material file and bitmap texture.

What I'm seeing in this screencap tells me that you need to read up on low-poly modeling.  This model, as it is, is extremely wasteful of resources.  The idea is to use as little geometry as possible to capture the shape that you're looking for.  A prime example is the arms.  There are a ton of vertices (and therefore faces) between the ends of those cylinders that don't contribute to the shape at all.  You also don't need that many vertices in the caps of the cylinders.  For a simplistic character such as this, any more than six to eight is probably too much.

Basically, just looks at those really densely white areas.  All of those need to be toned way down.  The hair could even be part of the same mesh as the head with proper UV mapping.

Please view the first post for updated screenshots.  Thanks!

[gASK]

Sorry for the late awards, folks.  This was a tough decision.

First place goes to gASK for the (pidgeon) winged sandals.  Nice composition, nice clean sprite.  Great work!

Second place this round goes to SimB for the pirate pegleg.  Nice takeoff of footwear, nicely drawn sprite.  However, mind those gray pixels around the edges.

Third place goes to Ben304 for the blue boot.  I really wanted to vote this one higher, but as I said, creativity was first and foremost.  Although it was tempting to weigh your clever description into my decision, the end result was still a pretty ordinary boot, as well-drawn and interesting-looking as it may be.

Thanks to everyone for participating!  There might not have been many entries, but they were all high quality!

[Sprite]

This is actually TheJBurger's honor by all rights, but life has called him away, so he's passed the torch to me.

That said, I present to you... a new Sprite Jam for the week of Sunday, April 15 - Saturday, April 21.

FOOTWEAR

That's right!  Let's see some legwork this week.  First and foremost, be creative.  Think of the footwear as more of a starting point than anything.  Think shoes, boots, sandals, flip-flops, or even bunny slippers, and then run with it.

You can even make up your own types of footwear.  Prosthetics are not out of the question... think Sligs from the Oddworld series.

Edit:  Yeah... I just realized that I didn't put any restrictions.  It wouldn't really be fair of me to impose them now that this has been posted for awhile and some of you may already be at work, but for those of you who like guidelines, the ideal image is no more than 128*128, using no more than 256 colors.  Pretty daggone big for a sprite.  Scale it down as you wish.

Nobody will lose any points for falling outside of those parameters, but this is a Sprite Jam nonetheless... so it does have to be functional as a sprite.  We all know the difference.

Thanks for the trophy. 
I'm going to be gone for the next few days, so I was wondering if Candall would like to host the next competition, if that would be alright.

Sure thing.  Just give me a little while to put an idea together.  If it's alright with gASK, of course.

Ah, okay.  I see that gASK and TheJBurger are both absent.  Might as well go ahead, then.

That cherry was just too tempting, but the only way to aquire it was to use a special green plastic sword.  Now it's yours for the keeping, but it has a green plastic sword-shaped hole in it.  Oh well.  Beggars can't be choosers.

Nine colors including transparency.

The DivX (or more accurately XviD, in this case) codec is strictly for cutscenes.  It allows super-tight compression with reasonable quality loss.  It can be found at http://www.koepi.org/xvid.shtml

The game will run without it, but you'll get strange playback or a video error in AGS when a cutscene comes along.

Z-Con folk aren't very mathy.  We avoid it at all costs.  I suppose I could estimate that the story is about 95% complete and the graphics are about 40% complete... scripting, well, that's getting done as graphics are getting done... when it all comes down to it, any percentages that we spew onto the thread are gonna be pretty meaningless.

With that all said, I'm glad you dig the style.  Thanks!