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Yay, major improvement all around!

Few nitpicks:

- The trees in the first picture now suffer a bit from a similar problem to what your grass did before; it's all one patern and looks like a big flat clump sitting on top of all those trunks.Ã,  What you might try to make things easier is bring a few trees closer to the front, paint those in higher detail, maybe some branches showing to break it up.Ã,  Then you can make the trees further back less detailed, but use a coupple color variations to break them up a bit more.Ã,  Perhaps a coupple other trunks in the far distance too; it still looks a little flat.

- Something is bugging me about the perspective of the path in the second picture; it looks like it's tilted too far torward the viewer (but I know you can't have it completely straight-on and still have a place for the sprite to walk).Ã,  If you can bring the front up a bit and smoosh the back edge so the hump is smaller than the front...
- I'd also drop a lot of the texture on that big mountiany thing, or rework it like you did for the cave floor.

- the cave doorways should probably be darkened more

The tavern could use some more shading and shadowing, especialy on the roof which looks like it has no edge.Ã,  If you make it more 3-d looking, like this:

That will make it easier to figure out where the light needs to go.

The wall really shouldn't need smoothing on it to begin with...it's *flat*, it's supposed to be angular.  And if it were realtime 3d instead of a still render, you'd be wasting the extra polygons.

Looks vaguely like Sir Robin, but it doesn't really look like a parody of anything, it looks rather too serious, in fact, to be a character... could you just show us the original image, please? I'm curious now.

I think he tried to do Sir Bedivire... see his pose in the photo?

It took me a year to get the xp prefessional version to work with everything I had running.Ã,  Sound card most important!!!

I run a theater.Ã,  I write music.Ã,  Sound had to be the number one priority... Since I built all the sound files from scratch... violins, flutes, sax, trombones etc.

You definately will want to wait a while before considering whether to upgrade then.  Vista rewrote most of the sound architecture and the software and hardware manufactuers haven't caught up yet.  A lot of old software might not work either.

I've been using the pre-release versions without a lot of problems though, and I will probably buy it when I build a new computer later this year.

Now back to your regularly scheduled topic.

You've got a bit of an interesting style going that I kinda like.Ã,  Good work so far.

I think, especialy in the last two, with the cave walls, you need more contrast of light and dark hues, especialy in the all-grey rockface.Ã,  Go darker than you think you need to.Ã,  Light you have to be more carefull with, but the strength of the hilights should depend on the strength of the light in the room and the reflectiveness of the surface.Ã,  (When I'm doing high-res stuff in Photoshop I tend to use a lot of gausian blur on lit areas, then play with the opacity until it looks right).

In the same vein as that...none of your stuff is casting any shadows!Ã,  Figure out where the light in each scene is comming from and try to get some in there.

In the second picture and maybe a bit in the first; objects in the distance tend to appear to have less saturated color, the further away they are from you.Ã,  This is only realy noticible over large distances like in landscapes but it's something to consider and experiment with.

All this is easier to show than describe but I don't have time to do a demo right now...maybe later, or maybe someone else will.

ETA the next morning: One quick smudge-over later...

Annotations:
1- Cast shadows!  This presumes the sun being on the left and the time somewhere around midday.  If it's early morning or late afternoon, they will be much longer.
2- This rock is colored lighter to make it look closer...(idealy it would be higher contrast in the detail too)
3- While this is dark and shadowy to make it look further away.
4- Compare the sharp contrast of this shadow to the smoother-looking boulder on the left.  Placing a bright light hue right next to a dark one gives the appearance of a sharp crease (that's also how you do stuff like wrinkles in fabric).

As an asside (and a mental exercise), pretend for a minute that it's night and there was a big campfire in the middle of this room.  What would happen to all these shadows?
First and most obvous, the color would change, since campfires emit an orange-yellow glow.
The cast shadows would radiate (if that's the word) in a circle pointing away from the fire.
The rock in front (number 2) would be backlit; the side facing us would be dark with light comming around the edges.
All the shadows will be even higher contrast, cause the light is close and bright and at night the shadows will be even darker.

Hope that helps!

[Perspective 101:]

Well the most obvious error is that the walls don't line up and the perspective is off.

Cause a picture is worth a thousand words (and because I can use the practice myself):



Perspective 101:
All the lines that recede into the distance should, if you were to continue them, converge on a single point, known as the "vanishing point"Ã,  (All the vertical lines should be paralel to each other).Ã,  That includes the brickwork, although I didn't draw any corrective lines for it.

If you draw a horizontal line through the vanishing point, you have a horizon line, which roughtly translates to where the eye level is.Ã,  I presumed you wanted the top-down look and calculated the vanishing point from your existing floor lines.Ã,  If you want to lower the angle of view into the room, you lower the horizon line and vanishing point

Perspective is hard to do without measuring; Photoshop, TheGIMP and other decent painting tools should have a "Measure" tool that will let you figure lengths and angles, along with "guides" (In photoshop, make sure rulers and guides are enabled in the "View" menu, click on the rulers on the edge of the window and drag over the picture), temporary lines that sit on top of your image and that you can use like a straight edge.
I put the sword above the door because the open door would have obscured it, but you can put it wherever (particualry if that door will close) and at an angle (with care).Ã,  Making the handguard vertical will make it look more like it's actualy up against the wall through.

The background is a freebie, grabbed and resized so I had something to use for the tutorial/testing.  I'm currently working on character art to attempt a MAGS game tho.

Just starting to learn my way around AGS.

For my first trick:



Tis the default AGS gui layout reworked in 32-bit color for 640x400/480.Ã,  Also did cursors (b&w but higher resolution) to match but those are harder to take screenshots of.  Sounds like an odd thing to start with but I wanted a set of "defaults" that weren't retro-style...that and, well, I allready know my way around Photoshop. ;p  Later I'll start figureing out how to get the layout a bit more to my liking, like putting the non-gameplay functions like save/load into a seperate menu.

Is anyone besides me interested in this sort of thing?  If so I might make some more variations and offer them for download.

I'm working my way through the tutorial, using a release candidate version of Vista; I've got one room and the default sprite, in 32-bit mode at 640x480.  Trying to test the game in fullscreen mode resultes in a black window and I have to kill it from the Task Manager.  Running in a window works fine though.

First attempt at being spirte-ly; not used to working in 8-bit



If he can't fight his way out of a tough spot, he can find a way out by quoting random lines of Shakesphere.