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That's awesome Thunderstorm. Although I don't read German, I understood every single step. This was exactly what I was wondering about. Diagonals, strange, I never thought of that.

Thank you very much.

It was no fun playing George when all you had to do to save the world was to move boxes and jump around a lot.

I couldn't help laughing at the end of the game, as I was running from the plane, trying to reach the Glastonbury Tor in time to save the world, only to confront yet another bunch of boxes.

Come on, it wasn't the greatest game ever but I enjoyed it. Some annoying design decisions but overall very entertaining to play.

Oh, I totally enjoyed it too. That's not what I'm talking about. I much prefer it to the previous games in the series. Excellent use of 3D, intuitive interface, and mostly decent puzzles.
What I was talking about is the issue of games repeating the same themes over and over again. It's not necessarily that we've had enough games about egypt, atlantis, templars, whatever. It's rather that they could have taken it in some new direction (there was some very interesting stuff going on at the very end, with the sword etc., but much too briefly).

In my opinion they could have gotten much more out of the Voynych manuscript and all that, if they'd treated it as an actual mystery. But they gave it all away pretty early (your learned almost everything at your first visit in Glastonbury). Yes, there was a twist or two at the end, but nothing that really changed anything, which is what twists are supposed to do.

Ok, so I finally got my hands on BS3 (aka Sokoban 3D), and played it through this weekend. I'm not going to comment on the gameplay or the story as such, because that's been discussed at length elsewhere. Rather, I'll just bring up one of the points that really annoyed me: I felt as if I'd played it before.

Granted, I've never cared much for games about egypt and other ancient civilizations. I'm one of the few people who prefers LC over FOA, in part because I don't find Atlantis all that intriguing. So I might be more sensitive to these repetitions than others. But still, why do designers just keep recycling old plots - bad plots at that - when there are so many things that have never been done in games?

Evil cult - check. Apocalyptic prophecy - check. Megalomaniac trying to harness occult power - check. Kidnapped scientist - check. Underground temples - check. Pieces of an artifact spread all across the world - check. Energy beams and crystals - check. Ancient animatronics speaking in understandable language - check.

Even the designs are confusingly similar to other games. Egyptian inspired gravity-defying architecture. Machines sparkling with lightning bolts. Weird plasma streams. Haven't I been here before? Lara, Indy, are you in here somewhere? Gabe, is that you? And those artifacts (Key of Solomon in particular) look exactly like the artifacts in Unreal II, and just like the ones in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.

I was surprised to find that the three stones weren't stolen by the bad guys just as you'd found the final one. And that they weren't an important part in triggering the apocalypse. It seems in all other games, you find one piece of a device, which could doom mankind should it fall in the wrong hands. And instead of destroying that one piece, making the others useless, you travel across the world COLLECTING(!) all the pieces, so the bad guys can steal them from you rather than go about fetching them themselves.

Oh yeah, and how about the term "Dragon Power"? Was I the only one thinking about badly drawn anime?

I'm getting too old for this shit.

Edit: As an afterthought, it certainly doesn't help to distinguish the game that the characters are so damn bland.

Thanks ThunderStorm. That's a great article. Strange I've never seen it before. I've read all of Bill's stuff over at AdventureDevelopers, but this was new.

I totally agree with him. It's not really the issue of the walls on the side as much as it's the back wall (if the room is square that is ) becoming totally flat, it's top and bottom totally horizontal. That was the case with all the early games - Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Indy 3, all the AGI games like Space Quest and Larry 1 - but even more recent games have rooms with that problem. The voodoo museum in GK1 was like looking into a box with one side removed. It's probably that old platform game tradition where everything moves in one plane in front of a background.

Edit: Thanks Jannar. That's a really good tutorial. One thing I've had trouble figuring out though. How do you calculate the forshortening of objects along a perspective axis? Working on the computer, you can always lay down a grid, but that's not really possible when drawing by hand. I usually just draw what looks right, but there must be some kind of real technique to do this?

I'd like to ask all the artists who try to draw more or less realistic backgrounds, what's you're take on perspective?

How high do you draw the horizon line? Do you prefer central perspective or do you use multiple vanish points? Is it a good idea to use vanishing points far outside the screen area?

How do you work with perspective in scrolling screens? Do you use one vanishing point, or do you split the screen into multiple perspectives, like those "panorama" pictures you can piece together from photos?

The reason I ask these questions is that I've recently worked on a vertical scrolling room, and perspective was a pain. Basically it was two screens on top of eachother, and I placed the horizon line at the exact middle. So the upper part looked totally distorted, because you're not used to backgrounds shown at low angles. I ended up cutting off most of the top part and resizing the image vertically to get a non-scrolling room instead.

Anyway, I'd like to hear about your techniques.

First PC games:

1) Space Commander (Space Invader clone in CGA)
2) Castle Adventure (I think that was the title. Bird's eye view, arrow key and text input, ASCII symbols for characters and objects)

and the one that made all the difference:

3)  Police Quest

I remember the first time I played police quest on my cousin's computer as if it was yesterday. We didn't know about savegames, so we just restarted the game every time the character died (most often while driving). I thought it was so cool that you drive around and enter seemingly random locations like the hotel. My cousin left me at the computer, and I tried walking around and typing some things. I walked up the receptionist at the hotel and typed - I didn't know much English - "give me a gun". The game apparently interpreted this as "give gun" (to receptionist) and responded with something like "Thank you. But I'm not giving it back". And that, my friends, was my very first, but certainly not last, experience with the problem of text parsers.

I'm not sure how to describe this properly. There's probably a technical name for it, but anyway, here goes.

The new alpha channel support is awesome, and I've created some rather cool light and shadow effects with it. But transparent sprites are overlaid the screen image, background as well as sprites. Would it be possible to have some kind of sprite that only showed in the pixels where there's a another sprite underneath it. Is this making sense?

I'll give you an example. I'd like to do a scene where a character walks between a projector and a screen, a couple of feet in front of the screen. I want to create the effect that the image is projected onto the character, off-set from the image on the screen (for now, don't bring the character's shadow on the screen into this, that's another problem entirely). So I would have an translucent image, similar to that on the screen, overlaid on the walkable area, and when the character went past the image would be visible (transparent) is the area occupied by the character sprite.

Maybe this confused things further. I hope SOMEBODY understands what I'm saying and can translate it into tech-talk.

Thanks,
GG

Thanks Chris, I'll check it out.

Aside from the size/performance thing, will there be any future features that REQUIRE 32-bit, the same way that there are some things we now can only do in 256 color, and other that only work in 16 bit? Things like lightmaps, edge-antialiasing of characters etc. (all of these hypothetical of course), would they work in 16 AND 32 bit, or 32 bit only?

Obviously you haven't played a single Sierra game, it's not a flaw, it's a feature Actually, when I played all the old quests, I used to do obviously wrong things all the time, just to see the cool death animations and read the Restart/Restore/Quit messages.

But I do agree, the original KQ1 design was horrible, and Tierra didn't even try to fix it. Why anyone would want to remake KQ1 in the first place, without improvements, I don't know. Especially as it's a remake of a remake (though the old remake was EGA). I think other games, like Gold Rush, are much more deserving of a remake.

I'm from Denmark too - well, I've lived in Denmark for the last 20 years, but I'm actually a Swedish citizen.

What does 32-bit color mean for the file size compared to 16-bit? And how about performance? Is it like 800x600 resolution, something that's supported but not recommended?

if I believed in God, I would be a priest by now.

Funny, I felt the same way after watching Night of the Hunter

Seriously though, favourite pre-1960 movies, mostly b&w:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Bride of Frankenstein - James Whale at his finest.

Curse of the Cat People - Very atmospheric and very unusual horror film.

Kiss Me Deadly - beats any Humphrey Bogart movie hands down. This is the blackest of noir.

Rebel Without a Cause (VERY much a color film) - Best teen angst movie ever, along with The Breakfast Club.

Strangers on a Train & Rope - The gayest Hitchcock movies ever. Gotta love those effeminate bad guys

The Third Man - I just love this movie. It's exceptional in every way. Wonderful dialog, great acting, stylish cinematography and snappy-as-hell editing.

The Lady from Shanghai - Orson Welles with a horrible Irish accent. He sounds like a leprechaun. Beautiful camera work though. And a wonderful expressionist carnival fun house.

Singin in the Rain - My favorite musical from the classic era. I still can't believe the script is just pieced together to feature old songs that the studio owned the rights to.

A Night at the Opera - I just picked one of the Marx Brothers films. Could as well be Circus, Races or Duck Soup.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre - I really think they should have used more of the original's conflict in The Dig.

Arsenic and Old Lace or Bringing up Baby - Any Cary Grant screwball-comedy must be on the list.

Sunset Blvd. - Billy Wilder at his best.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers - one of the greatest pieces of paranoid fiction.

(I watched Big Sleep and Maltese Falcon again the other day, as research for Shadowplay, and I still think they're pretty bad as detective movies. But they have snappy dialog, almost screwball comedy style, which is cool. Great actors and some nice visuals too)

Thanks for all your replies. I still haven't made up my mind, but I'm probably not going to buy this game, at least not until there's a budget release.

I think my problem with adventure games is that there are so few of them, that you end up buying the average ones anyway, because even they are a rare breed (can't think of a single great adventure since GK3 really). It's strange, because I'm very picky in what movies I watch, and  there's really no reason to be any less selective just because it's an adventure game - in fact, with the larger amount of time and money you invest in a game, you should be even more wary of bad games than bad movies.

I've been considering buying Runaway ever since it showed up in the stores, but I'm not sure it's my kind of game. I've read the reviews, but they mostly speak of the story and the graphics - and horrible pixel hunting!

So those of you who've played the game, can you recommend it? I should probably mention that I prefer the realistic Sierra style of puzzle and story to the wacky LucasArts games, and that I'm not a big fan of humorous or too cartoony games (even the first two Broken Swords weren't my cup of tea).

I'm really torn about this, because I could get three DVD's for the same price (not full priced, but still, Labyrinth, Edward Scissorhands and Prince of Darkness...), or I could buy Broken Sword 3 instead, when that arrives.

Thanks,
GG

1/3 of the screen is large? Shit, my sprites are about 100 pixels smaller than the screen height (200-something pixels in 1:1.85 aspect ratio on 640x480).

You'd better have some pretty floors and ceilings to show off. Of course you sometimes need to show large spaces, but there is such a thing as character scaling you know. It's bad enough that games rarely use close-ups, but there's no need to make the player feel like he's watching a play from the back row.
Sure, if you look at the oldies, characters are small, but only because of technical limitations. I mean, even Bill Tiller complained about the small sprites in The Dig.

You know, that first drawing really reminds me of some of Ralph Steadman's illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Cool stuff.

Sounds like somebody doesn't have (or haven't read) their official Grail Diary(tm) . If you look in the very cool diary that came with the game, X actually marks the spot. And it wasn't really as pixel perfect as you make it sound. There was a margin of error.

I want to put in more accurate historical events, persons etc.

Vel, just beware that it doesn't become another Young Indiana Jones Chronicles with its historical-celebrity-of-the-week. With Shadowplay, I've been very concerned about this, like: "Is it too cheesy to have Harry Houdini and Orson Welles in the same story?". If you add historical characters, keep to those who are actually related, don't throw in every single interesting person who was alive at the time (a non-fictional League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I've seen this done in roleplaying games, and connecting too many factual - but unrelated - people and events actually detracts from the believability.

Can't you turn off pixel perfect detection and just have a few invisible  pixels on all sides of the object, padding out the clickable area?