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Hurricane is good, I don't like other one much - sounds like a jazz on drugs, so I concentrate on Hurricane:

* It's a solid base for ambient (trance) you have there. There's some tiny things needing to be fixed yet:
* Ambient is an evolving (progressive) genre.
That means that instruments do NOT simply "kick" in. They should morph, fade in slowly. Everything should be fluid and transforming.

Now, after the first bass-only portion, that spacey pad simply cuts bass and kicks in, making it quite a mess.
You have to find ways to make everything transform from one sound to another more smoothly. Easiest way for this is to reduce slowly volume on one sound and increase on another.

* The bass is too loud. I find nothing wrong with the bassline, it's "slumber-y" and very efficient capturing overall mood, but a bit too dominating over other sounds. Cut bass notes a tad bit shorter, turn volume down, etc

* Don't introduce listener to new sounds too rapidly, don't make quick changes. Play one hithat. Then add another. Then add kicks. Then another pad. And so on. Everything should evolve over time.

* Have more pads and let pad play all the time. In the middle it often stops. Why?

* The beat you've used is nicely muffled, but isn't enough to carry whole song. It's nice for a breakdown-type beat to relax from main beat, but it won't fit as main beat.

* I uploaded a portion (20%) of DanClarke's ambient trance mix (looks like his main link is down and I don't have time to upload whole 90MB thing) for you to listen. Maybe you'll understand more what I mean by my comments and how closely you got with your Hurricane song to that genre. It's here:

http://www.increator.pri.ee/muz/danabletonmix.mp3

Notice that it takes about 20 minutes to even reach full beat!
(Don't let the start of the mix fool you! It's the best thing I've ever seen at AGSForums)

He's a capitalist. And as we know, all Russians hate capitalists.
In Soviet Russia, CJ bombs you! Or something.

Grandpa, where have you been last 17 years?
Soviet Union is no more, wake up comrade!
And russians are likely more capitalist than any other nation in this world. Don't you watch news?

---

And CJ is no capitalist. AGS is free. Everything we do in forums is free. AGS plugins are free, helping each other in threads and critics lounge is free, and so on. CJ doesn't oppress worker class to benefit from AGS (not sure about his cellar though, myths say there's child slave labor there). Anyway,

We're a socialist community. Or is it communist? Yes, communism is more correct.

No classes here (noobs welcome ahoy), moderators are no higher class, but something more like a leaders, "wealth" is equally distributed, resources are common ownership... And praise towards CJ is as legendary as it was with communists in Soviet Union and V.I.Lenin.

That won't apply to those greedy capitalists who made commercial AGS games though 

www.findsounds.com

There's really no ultimate way to get sound effects, most effective ways are:

* Know your way in music making. For example, I'm using fruityloops and for a simpler game, heavy amount of clicks and beeps can be done with synths, hi-hats, 3xoscillator and so on. Add a little of filters and you have your effects.

* Rip sounds from other games. In the Windows era, most of the games have game-specific data (images, sound, videos) in easily usable/accessible form. Browse data-folders in your games.  Even if sounds are stuffed into one huge pack file, most games have modding community and you can find extractor for these games native format -- either in game editor or webpage(s) commited to modding the game. For example, I ripped some better music tracks out of Half-life .gcf files (for casual listening), extracting tool was found by a quick Google search.

Of course, ripping doesn't have to be 1:1 and downright lame. Nobody's restricting you to cut, crop, add effects and so on in your favourite wave editor, so even fans of original game won't recognize those sounds.

* Use freesound project, findsounds.com, google until your hair will fall out and resample/repair/adjust those often awful clips that can be found freely. I've done this more that I would like to.

In other words, "dirty or not polished enough" is something that's your task this way or another. Free wav files vary in sample rate, compression, bitrate...

I suggest checking out major game-making tool sites though. Loads of AGS games got their music from RPGMaker resources, and I'm quite positive that there's loads of links to free sounds in other bigger game making communities, such as Game Maker (to check: forums), Flash (to check: major flash sites, such as flashkit.com boards) and other few. I won't do the search for you, though.

* Or, get creative with microphone. There's loads of tutorials on how to make a microphone muffler, how to get best quality with cheap mic, and good software to maximize the quality, such as GoldWave. Youtube and Google are man's best friends, right after the dogs and beer.

One line that always makes me laugh was from manual of "One Must Fall 2097", a  2D fighting game with building-tall robots. In the manual were quotes from game creators, and one was this:

"If I slap these two spoons together, then lower the
                sampling rate, it sounds just like..."

This obviously explains how the sound effects guy made the sounds of hundred tons heavy robots hitting each other, which in the game sounded like trains colliding...

One reason
I think is because you get interactive feedback and that means you don't do
as much work solving the problem.

True, partially.
But forum answers are short, brief and "you don't do as much work solving the problem" isn't always the case.
Imagine now. You just downloaded AGS and don't know how to start.

an example:

Option one:
You post a thread "how to make a room" in Beginners tech, and got answer
"RTFM" or "Click there, select new room, hope this helps"

Even if this helps, next step, "how to make character walk?" will be again the problem. So you post another thread...

Option two:
You open wiki, type in "room", and there's an article about AGS room, what are the elements (hotspots, animation, walk-behinds, how it all works, etc) and link in the bottom to complete newbie tutorial how to make a short game with a room, with images and links to further tutorials etc. Also, it's much easier to conduct search in wiki...

Which one would you prefer?

First.
We have AGS Wiki. Nobody's really updating it, or so it seems.

But wiki  (usually) is what's supposed to be all-around knowledge base and common problem solver.
So why don't you post there? If you have anything to offer, and wiki needing material, it's just what you need.
And others too. Make tutorials, helpful articles, etc.

If wiki gets some content, It'll be used more often too. Thus updated more often too. You get the point.

Second.
Is there an award for longest sentences possible? It's extremely hard to read your sentences if they never end... 
Press-enter suggestion what I agree on. It's much easier to read then.

Third.
I won't include link to AGS wiki. Find it yourself. It'll be a test: how simply can one access AGS wiki? I don't see links anywhere where they would be really handy!
IMO, the link should be visible in forum main (possible suggestion to CJ perhaps?), so instead of generating repeating threads, people could access wiki easily... like this maybe



But until it'll have some serious content, that's not very useful.

Fourth.
Regarding sticky topics, I usually never click on them. And if I need something, that happens to be very last place I look.
That's just probably me...  Or is it???

Any chance to see score/piano roll screenshot/notes however else way -- for original piano and pizzicato melodies? Wouldn't like to use neither originals or go through tedious process of reproducing by ear!

It's a threat to my ability to find a mate if my potential mates think I'm only interested in men.

Possible.

But I think that it's not the word or its meaning that offends, but thought behind it. I mean, usually if one goes calling other gay, that's a try to insult as heavily as possible. "Gay" was simply word chosen to use as "teh ultimate insult". It could have been aswell anything else. Term "gay", for straight men, is a term that tries to isolate and expel the named one, making him not a member of the social group ("not one of us") and forcing him into another group.

Most of the heterosexual males I know are either homophobes or simply deny it's existence, or are a bit less than neutral... "whatever as long as you leave my ass alone" is most common take on the subject. More or less, I'm too. Beautiful talks(or brainwashing) of tolerance and gay pride is what media does, not really casual people. That depends on country too, of course. But even many of those "politically correct" in public act different way when with friends etc.

If it's told as an insult, it's an insult.

A suggestion: Tune contest entries. Or atleast, winning tracks.

It would make one helluva music page.
But that would need (partial) hosting though, I don't think that Rapidshare/mediafire/etc links would last long.

12-13 year olds? You did the right thing.

Well, I think that's do-able. USB port has small voltage, right? Now you need something to get more amperes out of USB, and there's a device existing (capacitor? converter? can't remember english term for thing, but same stuff that makes tasers work). Or something like this.

All you need is to program your game to send usb signal whenever is the moment and connect yourself to the usb port.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvSuX8o1cKM

There's lots of guides out there but using device that flashes camera seems to be most believable.
zap!

Stupid idea though.

Yes. I didn't mean cat eye as issue with realism: What I did mean was that both cat, cat-human (er, khajiit?) and woman faces are have no sharp jaw like this, no neck like this and proportions overall aren't so off the target.

Lack of symmetry is probably what sticks to the eye most. Nose and many more shapes are very angled. But since those are very simple lines, it could be fixed with few minutes only.

The contrast between dark night and strong light of a lighthouse is almost non-existent. I think that bottom part and tower center, near the leftmost side of the lighthouse, should be much, much darker.

Lightning has always very intense color, and almost no attenuation. So, the spotlight on lighthouse should produce softer light and lighting should make sharp, heavily-lit areas.

Something like this, maybe


But with mashpotato's tinting.

But for a first tablet drawing, it looks quite cool.

Not bad... drawing skills might not be the best, but she sure has style, an eye of a designer.

The thing I'd work on, would be shape of the head. It's a bit too non-human. Jaw is way too sharp for even a kind of abstract style, if that's she's after. If she aims for realism, it's downright bad. Drawing a human head must start by planning head shape out.
Also, stronger contrasts and more shading (for example, straightening out neck and shading its edges to make it look more cylindrical) would help alot.

For improvements and less stressful look, I suggest giving hairstyle a bit more of volume and height. And curves! Right now, it looks like her hair is made of thick wires, and even a tornado wouldn't make her hair move in wind.
But in center of the forehead, hair looks quite natural.

Adamski and CJ, thanks for personal insult.
And no, I don't have a "thing" with this, and I neither am a homophobe.

I still won't praise anime dicks with you, though.
Hope you had your fun.

I'm not offended! I'm from scandinavia, so offense is very rare term in my life overall. I leave this "sport" of being offended about everything to americans and muslims (stereotyping here, eh).

But as heterosexual male, I don't enjoy looking at penis pics much. I prefer boobs and such
If this thread was about "check out the photoshop I made", I could skip it and move on.

But thought of seeing pic like this near someone's posts all the time, it's kind of nauseating. Plus, I wouldn't take seriously anyone with such avatar. That's-- sick. But that's only my opinion.

Would you like it when I took a picture of my penis and used it as avatar?

What impression would if leave for potential future AGSers if boards were full of penis-hand megamen?

It's still strange, I wonder how forums would look like if all users had similar pic as their avatar. While humor is often silly around here, it rarely drops to fart/penis jokes.
People are mature here. More mature than this.

Why change it?

As long as it isn't disgusting or in horribly bad taste, I don't see why not.

And if this image doesn't fall into this category, what would?

I'm truly surprised... didn't know that there could be such a support on animated genitalia images here.
Maybe we could all replace our avatars with penises shooting sperm?

Dear EviusPistachio,
now why in the hell should one want to use something as gross like as an avatar?

then again,
how do people do those things?

"gee, what a nice evening today. What shall I do?"
"I know! I will google for some pics of Megaman and photoshop a penis to be his hand.
"That's right, I'm a genius! Mom, come look what I drew!"

There are things I don't understand and I guess I don't want to, either.
Sounds like a hard case of puberty...

Seeing jokes here before, I didn't fall for it.
Infact, I found this one quite obvious.

Jokes of AGS being mutilated/commercial/whatelse have lived their life.

I suggest something heavier next year. I mean, HEAVY.

So that's why AGS 3.0 is so different...!

Thomas Newman - Ghosts
from album Road to Perdition.

My cellphone has this cool "TrackID" function, It records 5 seconds of any sound playing in room (or resamples from MP3 player/FM radio) and detects song & album by sending clip over GPRS. I can even sing something and if I don't do too bad, I get the name of original singer.
Rarely misses the mark too, I simply had to hold it near speaker and voila! Never miss a nameless good track from radio again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPonbwwojZI