Topics

well, tell me how great i am if you have any suggestions for improving the lights! It seems quite okay to me right now,  but I'm sure there's something that would double the effect.
Just unsure about them...  And do lamps have to cast shadows too? how?




aye, scaled for details

Well, here.


I'm quite statisfied with the overall pic, but colors somewhat suck. They are... er... sick?
Sky, flats, grass... it just won't mix somehow. Sky color makes me feel like there's a summer day and there's thunderstorm coming soon.

Is there any way to improve overall color harmony?

P.S. Don't pay attention to a bit wacky perspective, it's drawn "by eye" and no vanishing points etc was used. And I don't want to - I think that I'm not good enough to aim for full realism. So let it be a little wacky.

But colors, colors...

Well, I have suggested something similar before...

After looking through manual, I didn't manage to find any function for raw drawing a rectangle at specified opacity, neither a sprite with set transparency. Text-window gui's cannot be made transparent.

What I have tried to make, for a long time, is a text window like in the game named KGB...



Is there any way to implement a thing like this in AGS? All my tries to figure out how to make text window transparent or engineer my own textwindow function - have failed miserably.

Basically, just making text window background image transparent, would work. In higher resolution games, it also helps to make just 1 pixel black 'n' transparent grid pattern . but at 320x240, this doesn't look very good.

Only way I fgured out, was to put transparent OBJECT into EVERY room and enabling it whenever text is being displayed...
Well, this is way too complicated and pointless. Plus, it does not resize itsself according to the amount of text!

If there's a way to do that, any help would be appreciated.
If not - I don't believe that's too hard to implement in AGS...
if more AGS users would find such thing useful, of course.

Well, I might just be incredibly stupid, but I just can't manage to make a semi-transparent text gui!

I did set game's resolution to 16-bit.
I did made game to use text windows on my gui.
I used SetGuitransparency (ags 2.6) command to make gui 50% transparent.

Nope, not transparent.
What gui background color should I use? Does transparency apply only to GUI's with backgground images?
Will text be transparent too?
What did I do wrong?

I basically need my textwindow gui just to be a big semitransparent black box with white text on it. No border images or anything.

I wanted to ask (and supposed it's the right forum for this):

How does engine handle translation files? Is there some variable containing translation textfile's name passed to game?

For example, I have some GUI icons. With text over them (drawn, not gui elements). If I'd draw several copies of GUI verb icons with different languages, is there any way to make game change them according to the language selected from game setup?

I know how to change, but just don't know can I, or how to check which translation file is in the use at the moment.

I hope my question is understandable... 

Well, at the time I'm not doing things I'm supposed to do (sleep, eat, progress my own game, have a life, etc), I play CS: Source alot. Yes, the one that came with Half-Life2. It's pretty much social game. With strangers, everybody just run around and shoot each other. With known teamies... well, people make agreements first how, where and when  run and shoot.

Since none of my friends have this game (Estonia, country that can be aswell named Kazaa or eMule) and pirated copies won't work anyway, I really have no-one to play together with. Just browsing random servers all the time and hardly get to play as a team with anyone.

Are there any AGSers in CS universe? If so, under what nickname and in which servers do you hang in most?

I usually go by the name InCreator or InC, and don't have a resident server yet. Just picking by player count and map I like.


...
Ah, and from n00b scale 0-10 I'm near about -15

Well, problem lies in sounds. Sounds lag!
Like if character has footstep sounds added to his walking animation, game stops for about 1/4 second to play each sound.

I know it's not related to AGS version, different games compiled with different versions do this.
Now, I know that this isn't mainly AGS problem, but should be connected to my computer somehow.Ã,  It's just strange because it didn't exist before.

Now, as far as I remember, the major changes I made - and so which could be "guilty" in this are:

* Switched from DirectX 9.0b to 9.0c
* Replaced Geforce 440MMX 64M card with GeForce 5700LE 128MB

All other things are like they were before problem, for any case I list my hardware setup:

* 1,8Ghz Athlon XP 2200+
* 256MB RAM
* C-Media AC-97 compatible onboard audio
* the video card & DirectX I named before
* Windows XP professional

So system requirements can't be too low for DX9.0c.
I personally suspect DirectX. New version incompatible with soundcard maybe? Or AGS with DX? But other games (non-AGS) play sound normally...

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions about this?

[could]

Welcome back to InCreator's "Weird viruses & problems show" !

In today's show... It's teh ultimat3 goddamn inteRn0t 3xpl0r4r!

The thing is not downloading. It is downloading, but it is not downloading.

Like this: I start a web page, it opens. Downloaded, right?
Even pages I do not have in cache. Search engines. It shows pictures, plays sounds, everything. IM's work too.

But wait! Whenever there's thing that browser itself cannot open right away, like some unknown file extensions (all picture formats too), just anything that opens the "save"-"open"-"cancel" dialog, won't download. It opens the "Getting file information"Ã,  window, "thinks" a little - and without starting to download, displays st00pid error, like

"Internet Explorer cannot download blah-blah from blah.com

IE was not not able to open this internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

Well, right. It has been tested on everything, there's no way that mistake was in particular download. I can't get ANYthing.
Then again Save Picture As... works.

This crap happened just yesterday, when I foolishly thought that updating windows XP once in a millenia just could do any good. SP2 and "critical security updates" stuff.
I did so. I restarted teh damn thing and reactivated windows.
What a fool, I am.
What a bastards work there, at Microsoft corporation.


Now, I gotta use internet. My own logic - as everyone's others would - suggested to switch to some more normal browser, such as Mozilla firefox. What a nice idea. Especially when you are not able to download files from internet, which, of course - includes freeware web browsers...

Nope, no internet firewalls here.
No bad IE settings neither.

Oh.
Someone, please say something helpful. Or do something.
Thank you.

Maybe, just maybe someone has experienced somethig similar...

Okay, imagine this.
Every day when you arrive from work, tired and exhausted, you feel a little of bit of relief while turning on your computer, expecting some relaxing moments filled with creating or playing.
And just then, you realize that while you were away, some funky stuff has happened...

* BIOS has absolutely random settings
* CPU temperature is weirdly 52C, yet the computer was supposed to be "cold" yet
* and BIOS gives "CPU overlock fail" error thus halting the system.

Which - can be get rid of - only by reboot, quick BIOS enter and "load optimized defaults" choice.

Okay. The fun goes on.
Windows XP Professional loads...

Next "happy" notes you take - are:

* desktop is filled with photos of cute boys (in most girls opinion cute, I actually cannot imagine a cute male)
* a load of spyware, adaware and equal crap.
* savegames of your favourite games are OVERWRITTEN!!!
* MSN messenger's "My received files" folder contains loads of files named like "funny.exe", "myphotos.exe", "jokevideo.exe" and so on, each infected with some trojan/virus, usually with a name starting with W32/...something.letter
* I don't even have to mention another IE hijacker which has successfully overwritten IE's start page with some ad&virus related crap.
* Some things have deleted themselves!!!Ã,  :o

What a powerful and destructive virus, that is.
This virus is 20 years old, dumbest that anything on this ble and green ball we're living on...
...and incidentally my own sister.

Now, what I beg for - is all the help to avoid these frustrating evenings I have, cleaning up that whole mess she causes while I'm at work.
I definetly need:

- something to absolutely restrict some certain web pages.
- something to restrict access to certain folders on hard drive (about 99% of it!)
- something to avoid her downloading/installing any kind of software

I made a new "limited" user account, but since Windows XP help does not say a thing about it and all kind of toubleshooters lead to "Contact your ISP/system administrator" result... (which makes me really angry towards idiots at Microsoft, even if they think that every home user has some shady character named "system administrator" which turns computer on and off for him, Well - I DON'T) ...I have no clue how to do this from windows control panel.

So, freeware programs are welcome.
(No shareware please, I really don't think that I'd be safer if license just expires at some moment when protection is needed most.)
And also good instructions how to prevent/restrict this or that.

I can't just set a power-on password or close down whole Internet for "dumb user account", because my parents need sometimes my computer too, but JUST for some websites at internet and MS Office. That's all.

I don't know if this is suggested already, but what about adding sounds to view preview?
It could be useful for synchronising animations when the sound assigned to frame plays too.

Edit by strazer:

AGS v2.72 Beta 6:
* Editor view preview window will now play frame-linked sounds if they are in .WAV format.

[want]

argh.
It's 3rd month since I bought Hauppauge! WinTV + radio tuner card. It's 3rd month I'm swearing and stomping feet.

Fact is...
There's no software to watch tv.
Card works, and works just fine.

There's a program I used to watch tv, called Snowshifter.

Problem is - it's 14-or so day trial. Demo cannot be installed twice, with year 2004 going on with all these nice "no internet, no program - ha" copy protections systems... And there's definetly no way I'm going to buy two things just to use the thing I already paid for! Plus, no software store in Estonia sells TV-tuner software anyway and internet-buy with all this costy shipping and taxing would cost more than I neither could or wish to pay.

After all, I paid already. I'd like to watch tv now.

Ah, of course. There's some official software that came with the Tv-card.
But...
So called "program" is something that happens when you lock 9-years old retarded kid into a windowless room with some strong drugs plus a computer with Visual Basic installed onto it. For six weeks.

Tuner format? Is it DK, I, L or BG? How the hell shoud I know?!
Do I have to know? I'm just asking to wacth tv, that's all. I don't want to know.

Video format? NTSC, PAL (with many letters next to it)

Of course, "Select by country" thing exists there.
Of course, Estonia is somewhere at Southern Pole and there's no TV's there, only people living in igloos and eating their kids.
So, of course there's only about 20-30 countries listed and none of them starts with letter "E".

Okay. After sending them few e-mails, trying - and getting it to work with SnowShifter (just few clicks there), I finally found out that TV in Estonia and video format PAL B are related.

The dumbass at Hauppauge finally responded, coming to same conclusion. Only that... there's no selectable PAL B in WinTV2000 program. (Though almost all other letters are represented, from A to PAL NCOMBO). Yeah, the dumbass said "Estonia? shuld be PAL B" and advised me to run their Prodinfo program, gave a link. That's all I heard from them. PRogram just displays some as sick and nondecodable info which is of no use for me, neither won't do anything good. Drivers at all of their support pages (mirrors too) make me believe that "latest" drivers are absolutely "latest" ONLY if they're updated in June 2004. Or even 2002 (TV-watch program).

Okay, to cut long and miserable story short, I'm asking for any names and/or links to freeware or at least well-working shareware TV-Tuner programs or any feedback of other people having similar experience and their solutions for the problem.
Thank you for your time.

I'm not sure if it's approriate place to ask this, but...



I have two points. A and B.
Point A has defined direction. If we'd treat points as objects or characters in a game, point A had variables

A.x
A.y
A.direction

Point B needs only x and y.

And there's global-like variable, which shows distance between points A and B. Let's call it 'distance'.

What I need is a formula to calculate
x and y coordinates for point B, so it's always at the point where arrow at point A is pointing at - so formula must take point A's direction account. It also should maintain correct distance from point A.

The green circle on the picture marks the trajectory where point B could be, depending on direction of point A.

Now, It's actually really simple problem, It's just that I'm really weak at sinus and cosinus stuff - which most likely - IMO - should do the trick... if used properly.

So, whatever A.x, A.y and A.direction are,
what's

B.x =
B.y =

As a final result, when I need to change distance and direction of point A, point B should always get to the right position.

[Backgrounds...]

Well, well.
I think It's time to announce a game I've been making for half a year already... (thus hauling my lazy ass back to work  )

Let's see screens first (which tell the story and give some general idea about the game).

Well, happens that myself and Valter (main characters) win a trip...


But things won't turn out quite as planned...


And we end up on a strange island full of strange people...


And start exploring around, still trying to figure out is it just a bad dream or reality.

Okay.
So far I can say about game:

Backgrounds...
...Are almost ready, there's 13 of them. They're drawn pretty well, considering my lazy nature, every pixel is paid for, with sweat and tears. "Residents" of Critics Lounge maybe remember some others not shown here.
Maybe I just add 3-4 more screens. Or 7-8. Or...
oh.

Characters
There's 10 of them, all quite colorful and animated. I plan to add some more.

Animations
Game is already (and will more in future) filled with shitloads of animations. There's 2 reasons why:
1) I promised to put shitloads of animations into game.
2) I love to animate & I'm lazy. Instead of scripting or trying to fix the weak plot, I just animate and animate, so I can say that I'm working on the game... while I'm actually not working on critical elements of the game. Well, so that is.

Plot
Isn't anything normal human being could start building game on to. I really messed up with plot, fact that game could be ready by now - but I still have no idea what happens at the end - proves it.
But I'm still looking forward to patch all this mess up somehow.

puzzles 'n' other adventuregamey stuff
No pixelhunting or timed puzzles, but whole game plays as scripted cutscene. You do few clicks and enjoy the show again.

For example, I connected 3 rooms so you have to run around them many times. And this took 9 GlobalInts and 12 different animations to work. At the first I thought - "Lots of time on graphics, but since AGS is so easy to use, I'll throw rest of the game together later, just in a day or two"... well, scripting everything together actually takes more time than I spend on making bg's for 5 games like this!

Sound
There's plenty of sounds. Most of them ripped from Internet or various games.

Music
Not a tune of music. My weak musical talent has abandoned me this time for good. Actually, I hope to ask someone to make me music later, when most of the game is complete. Preferably something NOT midi, since I somewhat dislike MIDIs.

Release date
Not sure at all. There was about 5 months delay where I just started AGS and closed it after 3 minutes of looking at the project. Right now, AGS Team Challenge has increased my will to continue my own game too. I hope to get all of this together in few months.

Update (7-01-2005):
Finally, I got some time for the project, and some plot patching done. I started revamping some existing backgrounds (because my drawing skills have got much, much better since the start) and I won't even mention animating skills after last ATC and some other projects I tried/helped with.
Palette went from 16 to 32-bit, because of heavy gradients usage.
About enough material is together to make a demo.

Well, I'm trying to make something calm.
What do you think?

Any suggestions how should I finish this track?
Any other ways to improve this?

http://www.terran-x.com/increator/light.mp3 (bit less than 1MB)

Ladies and gentlemen,

I'm asking you to draw historical warfare with a (historical) mistake in it.

Something like on that picture I drew few months ago...


It could be just anything that shows
* warfare related stuff
* and has mistake on it

It could be a fighter plane with a simple kids slingshot, a modern tank without cannon, but a swordsman mounted on instead... or a clubman with a bazooka... just whatever. Imagine yourself making sequel to Age of Empires game and being really drunk at the same time...


Since topic is sick enough, no restrictions to color amount.
No harsh limits on image size, just make it smaller than 300x300.


And since I love animations, they're especially welcome!

Good luck. This topic will self-destruct (erm... lock) in 8 days.

Problem is like this:
I got a video cam yesterday, neat one, Sony Handycam DCR-TRV14E but since it is used, I have no software to capture my video creations!

The program that was supposed to come with cam is named ImageMixer. There's no possible way to get it anywhere, unless I buy it!

Question is:
How could I get videos from cam to computer?
Is there any other programs (FREELY downloadable) to do the trick?
Or can I get ImageMixer from somewhere?

Adobe Premiere 6.5 doesn't support the cam and all I could get was insta-recording into machine but this needs cam to be connected all the time. With 1.5m cable, It isn't much fun. Especially since I don't have a laptop.

Well, few weeks ago I bought a new case (chassis?) for my computer. With neat LED display mounted onto case which is supposed to show temperatures for processor, HD and system overall, changed with switchable button.

Since I made the buy, I haven't seen a single display from the LED. I connected almost every piece of wire and read motherboard manual enough to make its pages soft like toilet paper is. Well, no luck yet.

There's two types of wires still disconnected and I have no idea where to stick them.

First case:
power wire, exactly like the one coming from CPU cooler and other fans - power cable with small white end.
Since there's no fans on front panel of case, I have no idea why there's this cable. I tried to insert it into "system fan" and "additional fan" slots on motherboard, neither changed anything. There's no more places to fit it into.

And second case - the real mystery:
There's also three black wires coming from front panel which end with strange orange-colored thingy. Transparent piece of plastic with a wire inside. It's hard to explain so I drew it.



There's three of them, and each one has a label, "CPU", "HDD" and "SYS".
Now, It's pretty obivious that they're someway connected to the LED. But they doesn't look like they could be plugged anywhere!

If they were just some "protectors" erm... (crappy english) these things that burn out instead of burning whole system in case of errors in electric circuit - as they actually seem to be - why were they attached to 40cm wire then?

I also tried to photograph them, but my camera hates them as much as I do, and refused to focus onto them - it focused on anything else, leaving THEM blurred. Well, here's the pic anyway.



1) How do I get my LED to work?
2) What are these three damned wires?

Since I probably get no responses to this thread, I'll keep trying to solve the mystery.

P.S. The case I bought had no documentation, no well-known name and not even link to manufacturers website, so no help there.Ã, 

Well, yes.
Is there any good low-poly head (real-like, not cartoony) modelling tutorials for 3ds max?

I'm able to produce only a head with high polygon count, building every face by hand - which may look pretty, but is actually good-for-nothing. Especially when making a game.

I've searched internet often, but haven't found anything simple, yet good looking. Tutorials are too n00b or so complicated that things get out of hand already by step three or some other problems like that.

Making a head from geosphere isn't looking too good neither.

...about the temperature of my CPU.
It's Athlon XP 2200+ ~1.8GHz processor.
Not overclocked, since it's shitty even without it.

But temperature oscillates around 20 degrees Celsius all the time.
When I turn CPU on, it's around 40. After 10 minutes, It rises to 50C.

After a while doing nothing - or if I start anything that gives CPU some work to do - It rises to 56-59C. Which safety - I'm not sure about.

Now the strange part. After reaching 50C, everything goes into "bullet time" and Win XP lags as hell. If I take the cover off from main unit, temp lowers 2-3 degrees. This means that I could efficently use my computer as long as I surf in net or draw. When I start some 3D game or 3ds Max for example, it adds critical few degrees and snail-fest starts.

If I open window (my room's one) or manually make air move over unit, like waving some cloth or something, temp decreases 15 degrees! I have a HUGE fan over CPU, but there's no sign of word "stability". I close unit after reducing the heat to about 45C and... it stays so! What the hell...?

Now, the questions.

Does anyone have CPU like mine?
What's your average temperature?
How much is critical? If it goes to slow motion at 50, isn't it too much already?
What the heck could that all mean?

Ah, another one: Since the fan is freaking huge, I keep power-box (the one with two power cables and a fan inside) outside of the unit, because otherwise it would block half the top of the CPU fan, which is logically taken - bad. So it rests on top of the cover.

From mainboard manual, I read that power-box, with the fan inside it, makes air move inside the unit.
But -

Could that cause instability?
I plan to buy new main unit, a bigger one so I could put powerbox inside too. Maybe that helps.

I'm having this startpage virus for few months now, and I'm pretty tired of it. (The one which changes my IE homepage always to search-for-you.com)

What should I do? I've been through internet seeking for something that removes it, but best results are some progs which won't run under win XP.

AVG antivirus that i use behaves like it's eyes are tied, "no infections found". Yeah, right. I'm not a program and I clearly see a virus, but no, not the almighty AVG.

What should I do? There's no capital to buy some expensive antivirus prog, though I want to get this crap outta my machine.

There's another pretty weird thing happening -- my mouse cursor - the "link under cursor" one (usually a hand with finger pointed at link) changes to a "move" cursor (the one with 4 arrow pointing at each direction). Really weird. I can get normal cursors back to reapply my cursors at control panel, but after awhile, it changes again.