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Good call with the steps, I imagine it really would look better - will give it a try. I completely agree with you and Crimson about the sunbeams, they're more or less a placeholder and I'm about to work on them.

It's really good to have feedback, makes me want to continue working on this .

If you have the lines in a separate layer, can't you just reduce their opacity?

Or maybe something can be done by playing with masks. If you post the lines layer without colors, I'd like to give it a try

Glad to hear you like the graphics! I'm sorry you don't believe in Kathy as a character, my intention is certainly not for her to be a one dimensional or shallow. I hope you'll give her the benefit of the doubt in the end.

miguel - Thanks!

Perhaps I was a bit too harsh. I believe Kathy herself could be likeable as a game character, it's just that in reality, people with her characteristics are often unbearable .

Looks great! I like the old-school precision and attention to detail with which the backgrounds are drawn.

My problem is that just looking at the title character makes me want to slap her. I guess I'm done with the goth-biker-rebel archetype - I find it extremely shallow and annoying. And reading that Kathy is supposed to be "sassy" doesn't give me much reassurance... it screams "self-important immature bitch" at me . But that's just me, I'm sure she will be well-liked by most players. Good luck with the game, it really does look awesome!

I like it, the style is clean and pleasing, looks professional. It's also the kind of style with which you can pass a certain amount of sloppiness as a gimmick , so I wouldn't mind the perspective too much - but I'm not one to judge perspective, I suck at it myself.

The signs on the last picture don't look right to me. I think the right side of the sign on the left shouldn't be visible, and the top and bottom of the sign on the right should be skewed according to it's sides.

I would also add a lights layer (a yellow fill layer in overlay mode) in the same way you've added shadows, and play with curves/brightness/saturation layers a bit to lighten the image and give it a more coherent feel. A little like this:



(just a quick example of what I mean, I'm sure you can do much better)

dactylopus, pharlap: Wow, thanks for the compliments! As much as I value the honest and constructive critique others are submitting, my ego is most grateful for those two short posts

Lewis: Yes, it helps, thanks for taking the time to explain thoroughly. As I said, it seems I don't have much of a spatial imagination, so while I understand the theory, I don't notice mistakes others see right away. The table actually looked ok to me until I compared the texture of the table to the texture of the floor. Now I recognize it's slightly off, but it still doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. If you could point out where and why exactly is the perspective wrong in my picture, I would appreciate it a lot, but of course I don't expect you to... your feedback is helpful as it is.

In keeping with my tendency to do things in the most complicated way possible, I've decided to first make a rough sketch of my background in Google Sketchup, then choose a camera angle, redraw it by hand, scan it and color it in Photoshop. Here's the first draft that came out of this process:




I was rushing to try it out, so I didn't model everything in 3D, and now the parts I've added by hand are still off. But I'm making progress

Crimson Wizard: Thanks for the feedback, I'm planning to work on the light beams, make them more irregular and maybe lower their opacity. I'll think about the shadow of the table.

Andail: Well, I'm definitely not going to start completely over . Could you please be more specific about what you think is wrong? What you say about lighting is correct, but I don't see how I neglected it. If you're talking about the blue color behind the door, that's not finished of course, there will be something painted inside it. Colors and lighting can be corrected quite easily without repainting the image, it's all separate layers.

I understand that the perspective is off at some places (mainly the staircase), but I don't think it's so botched up as to redo the whole image. Or is it? Again, specific tips would be more helpful. But thanks anyway .

Oh and I actually have tried it with a character and it seems to work. Only I can't let him go all the way up the stairs or too far into the foreground

Well, it's been small steps every day, I'm not talking about three weeks of full-time work. Plus I draw everything with my mouse, which isn't the fastest technique .

Anyway, thanks for the input! I've only recently gotten into the whole setting up a perspective thing, been reading some tutorials on vanishing points, but only after I've already gotten most of the objects placed. Apparently I don't have much of a spatial imagination, but I think I have a rough idea what you're talking about - I'll see what can be done with the stairs for example. As I imagine it when I look at the picture, the stairs getting smaller is not only indication of perspective, the top ones are actually smaller than the bottom ones... but I realize now that doesn't make much sense .

I'm not sure what's wrong with the table though. If somebody placed it on the floor like this, the perspective would be more or less similar, wouldn't it? Or is this just an aesthetical thing - that it should be facing another direction so that the lines are in tune with the rest of the objects? The texture on the table is hand-painted by the way, no copy & paste... but I agree it does have that flat, tiled look, I should work on that.

I guess next time I'll sketch the basics in google sketchup first to get the 3D elements right. Thanks again!

I've been slowly working on this background for almost three weeks now. It's still not finished, but I'm getting impatient and hungry for some sort of feedback to stay motivated. So I thought I'd just post it here to get some thoughts on it. I know it's hard to criticize when it's still work in progress, so some parts are obviously sloppy because they're not finished... just give me your general impression if possible. Thank you!

Those are not actual lines of code, just a rough summary to give you an idea what the code does. The code itself is kinda messy and most of the variable names are in czech, but in case you want to see it anyway, here it is:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute() {

if (player.Moving == true) {
    
    rozdil_x = player.x-s1; 
    rozdil_y = player.y-s2;
    newframe = player.Frame;
    
 if (rozdil_x!=0 || rozdil_y!=0 || newframe-oldframe!=0) {moved = true;} else moved = false;
    
    oldframe = player.Frame;
    
    if (moved == true) {
      rozdil_x_pomer = (IntToFloat(rozdil_x)/(IntToFloat(player.WalkSpeedX)*2.0))*IntToFloat(rychlost_moje_x);
      player.x = s1 + FloatToInt(rozdil_x_pomer, eRoundNearest);
      if (info_display == true) Display("rozdil_x_pomer = (rozdil_x (%d) / 2*player.WalkSpeedX (%d))*rychlost_moje_x (%d) = %f = %d[[s1: %d x: %d", rozdil_x,  2*player.WalkSpeedX,  rychlost_moje_x, rozdil_x_pomer,  FloatToInt(rozdil_x_pomer, eRoundNearest),  s1,  player.x);
      cLisa.x = player.x;
      cLisa.y = player.y;
      cLisa.Loop = player.Loop;
      cLisa.Frame = player.Frame;
      rychlost_moje_x = FloatToInt(0.14*IntToFloat(player.Scaling), eRoundNearest);
      
    }
    s1=player.x;
    s2=player.y;
    
 }
  
  
  if (player.Moving == false) {
  
  rychlost_moje_x = FloatToInt(0.14*IntToFloat(player.Scaling), eRoundNearest);
  cLisa.x = player.x;
  cLisa.y = player.y;
  cLisa.Loop = player.Loop;
  cLisa.Frame = player.Frame;
  }
}

The integers are first transfered to floats, and only the final result is rounded, so it really does result in 13 .

My speed is also calculated right - I let the script display key values on every new frame, so I can check for this type of mistakes. There probably are some discrepancies in my code, but I'm pretty sure anything like that is not the (main) problem.

Do you have any idea why the "AdjustSpeedWithScaling" option is behaving as my screenshots show? You said that you couldn't replicate it, and if it was how it's supposed to work, I think more people would complain about it. So I'm guessing it must be something specific for my game, but I have no idea what.

So I used an invisible character and tried to move the visible dummy character around it. But the core walking script outsmarted me . Basically, I did this (I'll try to sum it up instead of posting the whole script):

- I calculated my own adjusted speed in every game loop: my speed = (original speed/100)*scale
- Every time the player's x value changed, I adjusted the difference: new x = old x + ((new x - old x)/original speed)*my speed
- Then I just changed the dummy character's coordinates, loop and frame to the values of the invisible player character.

So far so good - the character was showing properly, it stopped shaking, but it still seemed to glide just as before. So I tracked it's movement after each frame and I found out that the core walking script is reacting to my meddling. The more I tried to slow it down, for example, the bigger steps it would make after every frame. If the basic speed was 15 pixels/frame and mine was 10, he'd make a 15-pixel step first (I'd adjust it to 10), then a 20-pixel step (I'd adjust it to (20/15)*10 = 13), then a 22-pixel step. My script would adjust the 22 pixels to 15, which is the original speed - from now on, the original script will keep making 22-pixel steps.

It seems that the AGS script counts the coordinates of individual steps in advance and then sticks to them even if the current coordinates change. I guess I'll just have to get used to my character gliding, at least for now - this is getting too complicated .

I have it set to "true", as well as "MovementLinkedToAnimation". This is what it does at scale 70: http://hvavra.sweb.cz/AGS/walk_70.html
Notice the "difference from last x" value - the character proceeds at normal speed for 3 frames and then it plays every fourth frame without actually moving. It slows the character to 75% speed, so the AdjustSpeedWithScaling option "works", but it makes the animation shaky.

This is scale 120, with the 28 pixel jumps as I described: http://hvavra.sweb.cz/AGS/walk_120.html

Maybe I have some other option checked that causes this... ?

Thanks for the tip with the invisible character, I'll definitely try that.

Here's an example of my walking cycle, not colored yet. It should be adjusted for speed 7, i.e. the foot moves 14 pixels with each frame:



Apparently, the scaling feature doesn't change the speed proportionally. If the character moves 14 pixels (= speed 7) per frame as mine does, and it's scaled to 120%, it won't move 17 or 18 pixels per frame. Instead, it'll still move 14 pixels per frame, and on every fifth frame it will suddenly jump 28 pixels ahead to compensate.

Thanks for the input!

You understand correctly. The idea is to use the core walking script for counting "rough" coordinates (basically to define in which direction should the character proceed at any given frame) and then adjust these coordinates with my own script. Creating my own walking script altogether seems too complicated, at least with my current level of AGS knowledge.

I can't offset individual frames because the change to the frame is always a little different depending on angle, speed, scale, etc. When I tried this, the animation looked okay when walking on straight lines, but it became completely disjointed and shaky with different angles / scales.

Even if I allow the character to walk only in the standard 8 directions (so he'd basically walk in octagons, not in circles), it'd still come apart when the character is scaled.

Hello everyone,

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the Technical forums, but since this is my first post here, I'll assume I must be a beginner .

What I need to do is adjust my character's position in every frame of his walking animation. It's a way to avoid gliding (the "anti-glide" and "adjust speed according to scale" do help, but they don't work correctly for me). So what I need the script to do is this:

- change the character's position and frame as usual, according to AGS's pathfinding engine.
- notice that the character's position and frame have changed
- change his x and y values depending both on the previous and on the new position
- display the character in his new position

What the script does instead is this:

- change the character's position and frame as usual
- display the character in his new position
- notice that the character's position and frame have changed
- change his x and y values depending both on the previous and on the new position
- display the character in his new position *again*

The result is that the character is constantly shaking - my script for adjusting position works, but not before the character is displayed for a split second in his original position dictated by the AGS engine. Is there a way to make changes to coordinates take place before the game draws the character onscreen?

Thanks for any reply!