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[Click the thumbnail above to watch the video!]

I recorded my first impressions (which turned into a "let's play" style playthrough of the beta), hope this will help.

I know I'm not exactly cut out to be the best let's play-er on Youtube, I did struggle with my English throughout the cast (ie. I'm able to make much more sense, speak more fluidly and coherently in my primary language) and my voice sounds horrible (partly because of the cheap headset mic I was using and partly because it just sounds annoyingly), but this playthrough is meant to show you developers how the game feels to somebody that has no idea about the project or anything, how hard the puzzles are and so on.


Click the thumbnail above to watch the video! Enjoy in HD!

I also miss several dialog lines and interactions, it's surprisingly hard to play an adventure game and talk at the same time! I did cut out about 5 minutes of not knowing what to do in the boss fight and a 2 minute search for the inventory screen.

I would ask the player to draw using both driver modes first, see if that makes a difference.

EDIT: I'm an idiot, you said v.2.7

Audacity! Google it! It's free and does a decent job.

Not a dumb question at all!

Since the code effects characters (which are 'global' meaning they don't depend on what room you're in or anything), you can best put the line of code in your game_start function. This way it all looks right from the start and never changes. In case your character, at some point, wants to change his/her z value, you'll have to code that in whenever you want the change to happen of course. Does that make sense?

EDIT: About the talk animations: when you search the manual you'll find a function that sets the talk or speech animation to a view. whenever you want to change the way the character looks when he'she is speaking, call that function and set it to the appropriate talking view you created, happy, sad, whatever.

Your English is perfectly adequate! Welcome!

You can use character.z for offsetting characters vertically. Set it to a negative value (-15 for a start for example, needs to be the difference between your two baselines in the last picture you posted) to get the effect you're looking for. With positive values you can have a character's baseline be lower than their feet resulting in flying characters!

Time for ddq's DID YOU KNOW fact of the day!

DID YOU KNOW that those are three of the shittiest leveling systems ever conceived by man? It's true!

You're also gonna have a tough time balancing it, especially if you give points based on every attack vs enemy defeated.

Come on, his problem isn't balancing and game design, his problem is implementing even the most basic features necessary for a game to work like that.

What we'd need, in my opinion, is a 'spark' to the discussion of some sort. Someone who claims to be able to prove one or the other. That true randomness exists or that it doesn't exist! I've never come across anyone who claims to have prove for either side however.

But that's exactly the problem. We can't discuss, theorize or even throw out educated guesses at things that go beyond our understanding as human beings. Whether or not something such as true randomness exists is something we really can't decide as there are a lot of random things in our world already of which we know that they aren't actually random, just random to us. And then there is stuff (chaos theory, random electron spray on contact and so on) that seems truely random but that we haven't really gotten any scientific insight into yet.

The result of a coin toss is random to the coin-tosser as human beings simply can't foresee the physics involved in a coin toss (initial placement, throw height, rotational velocity and so on) and conclude the right result. When computers generate random numbers, it's similar. Even though computers aren't able to produce absolutely random numbers they can easily provide us with numbers that look absolutely random to us human beings as we are not able to calculate the algorithms used by the computer fast enough to foresee the result. That's the part that your post there was missing, randomness differs depending on who is requesting the random value.

As for the randomness on atomic level, I'm not sure that we, as human beings, have enough insight into these matters yet to confidently claim that electrons spray into a random direction on contact.

Love the Defender of the Crown art, looks incredibly atmospheric and makes me want to play the game! Hadn't heard of it before too.

Sorry, here, I uploaded the files again.

The actual plugin
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42455/Razerblade%203D%20Plugin%201.0.rar

And the demo game
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42455/Razorblade%203D%20Testgame.rar

From page 4: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41581.msg572647#msg572647

Hope this helps you!

Wow, excellent work! I hadn't heard of the program but this looks like the next best thing to Cosmigo Pro Motion, which unfortunately isn't free. Works very well for pixel art and I also love that the control scheme is so similar to Photoshop! Will definitely use aseprite from now on!

I couldn't quite figure out how to do tiled drawing very easily. I did enable it, set up a grid, showed it, but when I have one tile drawn I still needed to, sort of awkwardly, select it and manually copy it over. Am I doing something wrong or is this still on the to-do list? I think it should work like in Pro Motion probably where when you draw in tiled mode it automatically makes the changes on all tiles that are the same as the one you're working in. Also automatic mirroring for x and y would be awesome in case that isn't implemented yet.

Ah ok, thanks, Calin!

No priority, but a proper event for doing this more elegantly would be kinda cool in the future!

Quick question to other AGS plugin authors: when using D3D9 drivers, how do you guys retrieve the D3D9 device on startup? I have always done this in the AGSE_PRESCREENDRAW by counting frames and setting things up on the very first frame and before rendering anything. This is not a very elegant solution however, I wish there was some kind of startup event that would pass the D3D9 device but I couldn't find such a thing. How are other people doing this?

You can also check out my MAGS title Revelation, it has a map editor so you could just try and make a big one with it, see how it runs and all.

Depends mostly on whether you want to use a tile system for your levels or hand-drawn backgrounds. With tiles, you shouldn't run into big problems, room-style backgrounds I haven't tried yet but large levels might pose problems.

It just keeps getting better. Every icey post is more facepalm than the one before! And to think I got so angry too, now I just sit here with a glass of wine and enjoy the entertainment! ~~brb laughing my ass off

I think the best option is to have the game unlocked to translations by default, but if the author feels the need to control translations, have them check a box to lock out downloadable translations.

That sounds like the way to go. We *need* to give game authors the option to lock their game from external translations, otherwise AGS will not be usable for commercial projects anymore, but it should be an option. And defaulting to having games be open to translations made by other people seems like a good idea. That way most titles would certainly be translatable by anybody with the exception of some protected ones in which cases we know the author really doesn't want it, it's their game and their decision.

Split it up into multiple lines!

Code: ags

surface.DrawTriangle(vertex[polygon[PC].a].x * polygon[PC].a].z*100, vertex[polygon[PC].a].y * vertex[polygon[PC].a].z*100, vertex[polygon[PC].b].x * vertex[polygon[PC].b].z*100,
vertex[polygon[PC].b].y * vertex[polygon[PC].b].z*100, vertex[polygon[PC].c].x * vertex[polygon[PC].c].z*100, vertex[polygon[PC].c].y * vertex[polygon[PC].c].z*100);