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Vel, I somewhat agree, but Dinah is meant to look androgynous. She's not your typical computer game heroine. I did realize though, that there is no shading at all to suggest that she might have breasts, and I'll correct that. But don't expect more than a very subtle shadow on her sweater.

Heh, it's nice too see that even an oldie like Goldmund is having trouble fit for the beginner's forum . I've been messing around with the alpha channel import for some days to add new effects to Shadowplay, and I've found that the only(?) way of doing it properly is to create the art with no background in Photoshop. Obviously this is a problem in your case, where everything is already finished. My one suggestion is that you use the magic wand to select the background color, but use the "feather" setting to turn the edge pixels of the character semi-translucent. Then delete the background. It should work. Another way is to delete the background, and then use the eraser around the edges.

I warn you though, it's a bitch trying to "touch up" art when using alpha channels.

Edit: What do you mean that it becomes "locked"? If you mean the layer in Photoshop, you can just "duplicate layer" and then delete the original layer.

Edit 2: You might want to use a grey background which you later remove. If you use something like pink, you're likely to get some pinkish grays in the transparent edge area. There's a technical reason for this, which I don't remember. But somebody explained it in the forum back when CJ introduced alpha channels in AGS.  

Hey Vel,

Sorry that I hadn't noticed your post before now.

The status of Shadowplay is that I'm still in the design phase. I want it to be 100% scripted out before I start coding more than the interface. After reading through Al Lowe's design docs for LSL5, 6 and 7 and Freddy Pharkas, I'm really trying to make the screenplay as structured an professional as possible. Even though I'm only writing it for my own use, I know I'll need it, or I'll get lost in a game this big

The art finished so far are mostly non-interactive or pass-through screens where I don't have to worry too much about interaction with the scenery. Don't worry, it's nothing like all the empty screens in Syberia. It's just that I've added exteriors for most locations, so you'll get a sense of the area and the architectural style. I though it was a major problem for GK1's New Orleans atmosphere that you never actually saw the wonderful French Quarter buildings except in cutscenes. I want to capture the feeling of Los Angeles/Hollywood, and that's hard to do if you show nothing but offices and living rooms.
I'm about to re-import most of the backgrounds and sprites. The new 32-bit color mode and its support of alpha channels allows for so many new effects that I have to take into consideration. Things like out-of-focus and semi-transparent foreground objects as well as interesting light and atmosphere (fog and smoke) effects.

For more info, as well as a bunch of new screenshots, see the next issue of The Inventory (no. 11), which should be out tomorrow, or at least that's what dimi tells me. Without revealing too much, I can tell you that I've hidden many clues to the plot within the screenshots I sent him.

76%

Damn, they got me on the software piracy and the ball licking

Teh wahT?  

I don't think there even was a specific ball-licking question, but aside from that, the misquote didn't really add anything, did it?

76%

Damn, they got me on the software piracy and the eyeball licking

Woohoo, it's final! Now I can get cracking re-importing all my backgrounds and adding out-of-focus/semi-transparent foreground object sprites.

Thank you so much CJ. This is an awesome Christmas present. I hope you'll have time to relax over the holidays after the amount of work you put into this version.

CJ, I just though this was a good time to remind you of something I brought up a while ago: custom location and size of text windows (http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=8945;start=msg108839#msg108839)

There are a lot of speech/text window related suggestions in the future.txt file, and I hope you'll take this into consideration the next time you make changes to the text display code. I think that a more customizable system would solve many of the problems that have been mentioned. There are a LOT of great adventures that use non-standard display modes, which are currently rather difficult to emulate in AGS  (TLJ and GK1 spring to mind).

Thanks for your time,
GG

Now I'm even looking more forward to your game. I didn't remember if it was you who posted the Portmeiron images a while ago, with the stoneship etc.

I think that interactive hallucination is definately the way to go. There were several episodes where they either hypnotized no. 6, drugged him or put him into some sort of virtual reality world. Sometimes it was rather obvious what was going on, and the characters were direct parallels to no. 2 and his helpers (Living in Harmony just transferred The Village to a western setting). But other episodes really had you guessing what was going on, and who to trust. I think an awesome idea would be to use one single hallucination  throughout the whole game and then build on it for each interrogation (will you have changing no. 2's like the series?). Possibly based on surreal flashbacks of No. 6's resignation.

I'll have to think some more about the symbolism and get back to you on that. Have you ever played Sanitarium or I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream? Both those games used symbolism very well, each in their own way.

Haven't seen the film, and probably won't. I did see the first film, and in my book it's Jackson's weakest film so far. Even The Frighteners rocked in comparison. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't get it. So what if the creatures look real if you don't give a shit about any of the characters anyway? I'm sure Tolkien is to blame, or it's rather the thousands of people, Mr. Lucas included, who mined his books to a degree that the "real thing" seems like a total parody. Yes, anyone who grew up around people playing D&D knows that dwarves carry big axes and don't like elves. But there must be more to a character than that.

I can't help thinking how much more I'd have enjoyed these films if it was just Peter Jackson and his old pals running around with a 16mm camera Bad Taste style. As it is now, it's like a Wagner opera, much too long, much too loud, and SO pretentious.

Give me Heavenly Creatures any day. Now THAT's how to use special effects.

Edit: After you're done kicking my ass, I'll be back to tell you my opinion of Star Wars

I like your current idea. If your art is very detailed, you could even have the look of the character (his facial expression, amount of sweat on his forehead etc.) tell the player how he was doing (instead of some sort of meter at the side of the screen, or just hiding the status for the player).

Maybe you could make it a two-way thing, so instead of just keeping the secret, your goal was actually to make the interrogator crack, at least for the moment, so he'll give up the interview? Have you ever seen the next-to-last episode of The Prisoner, "Once Upon a Time"? This reminds me of that for some reason.

What means are used in the interrogation? I was thinking, depending on the genre and style of the game of course, if they used drugs or other stimulants to make you talk, you could possibly make some sort of interactive hallucination scenes that were entirely symbolic of the situation and the secrets you had to guard.

Sorry, this probably isn't very helpful. I just tend to get inspired by other people's ideas and then take it in a totally different direction.

The game sounds really interesting though, I'm looking forward to see how you solve it.

Hey Pestilence, I'm just downloading Ad Verbum now but won't have time to play it till later. Is it anything like that weird Infocom game "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It"? I loved all those wacky puns and wordplays.

I think Dave brings up an interesting point with the age thing. Could it be that graphic adventures are less mature, simply because they are more accessible for a younger audience?

With a few well-written sentences, you can part the heavens, pour forth fire from the sky, level mountains, drain oceans and achieve things that would take a graphic artist AGES to get right.

But I do think there are plenty of excellent one-room IF games to show that there must be more to it than that. If one-room AGS games (of which there have been several great ones, 6 Day Assassin and Little Johnny Evil come to mind) were even NEAR the quality of well written one-room IF, there might be something to it. I mean, art, and possible a little animation, for a single room can't make THAT much of a difference to the burden of work.

It's because IF people are all clever and literate and we're mostly just dumb teenagers.

Hey, I'm not a dumb teenager, I'm eighteen thank you very much...

I'm not a dumb teenager either. I'm a dumb 26 year old

Well, I think that's a Douglas Adams thing rather than a general IF thing

I'm curious about this. It seems that while most amateur designers of graphic adventure are merely revisiting the territory of commercial titles,  amateur text adventures are going in all kinds of new directions. The genre of IF has gradually moved into puzzle-less narratives, and the games that still use them are so innovative, that you'd be hard pressed to point out if you've seen these puzzles anywhere else.

How come we're moving in such different directions? Is it just the graphics that make the difference? It's hardly a new thing that text adventures have more sophisticated narratives. Compare two games from 1987: Infocom's Border Zone, where you play through three parallel chapters from three different character perspectives, and Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry, an utterly plot-less quest for the right objects to give to the right people.

Does anyone else here play IF, and if so, do you think it could inspire the graphic adventure community to take game design in new directions?

Actually you have a lot of the other stuff in the kitchen. I don't recall if those two are all you need, but if they are, you should be able to mix the potion in your apartment.

Also we need to remember something, no matter how bulky the game is, if your at a very boring event or place, you dont care. Your gonna play those games anyway.

Ah, young people today. In the old days we never worried about battery time and interfaces. Our biggest problem was if the paperback novel would fit in our coat pocket.

You have to research it to know it's the right one to pick. As I recall, you can get a book from the library which you then use on the flowers. Of course, you need the recipe first.

This thread has gone somewhat off-topic already, so I hope I'm not upsetting anyone by posting some non-AGS related thoughts on 3D.

I'm not as nostalgic about early point-n-click adventures as most others in the forum. Maybe because I'm  nostalgic about the late text parser games from Sierra, like Colonel's Bequest, Police Quest 2 and Conquest of Camelot. And nobody really does that style anymore. So it's not as if I have much of a choice.

With the risk of starting a huge debate, I must say that I actually like 3D when it's done properly. But I'm not sure that's been done in true adventure games yet. I think Grim Fandango, while a great game, could easily have worked with drawn or possibly pre-rendered characters. The main difference, the controls, have nothing to do with 3D as such. In my book, GK3 is pretty much the only "true" 3D game, which was still a pure adventure (there might have been others, but less succesful).

The main feature added by 3D graphics with a movable camera (whether 1st person, 3rd person over-the-shoulder or 3rd person character-independent camera) is exploration. You can walk around objects, look under them, behind them, on top of them. As a designer you can actually hide things in the environment, and still expect them to be found without pixel hunting. Under a Killing Moon and its sequels did this very well, but the gameplay was hurt by the bad resolution of early 3D technology.

Whenever I play 3D shooters, it disappoints me that you have all these beautifully modelled surroundings and characters and all you do is put bullet holes in them. It's such a waste. In my mind, the perfect neo-adventure game would be a third-person game with a Max Payne-style over-the-shoulder view semi-attached to the character (similar to the first Hitman game, where you could move the camera in a half circle around the character without changing the way he was facing). And just like the Hitman games, you would have a cursor that would highlight whenever you moved it over interactable objects. When you clicked on them, you would have some sort of verb-coin or tlj-like interface. Character movement with keys, cursor movement with mouse.

Broken Sword 3 nearly did it right, except it removed mouse control and it added too many non-adventure obstacles (boxes, nuff said). As soon as some designer realizes that action-adventure graphics doesn't necessarily mean action-adventure gameplay, I think a lot of you are in for a pleasant surprise.

How about a cellphone port of AGS?

Seriously though, why do people bother with these things? Sure, it's fun that you can actually do it, but I'm sure that the only people who would actually play these games already played them on the pc. I'd be so much happier if all these people making ports and remakes spent the time on a multi-platform DOS emulator that actually worked instead.