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Yes! You can! Yes! Anything!

Anything that'll run 1-2 fps if not less!

bah!!! 

GM community is extremely strong where I live and yet, the stupid engine is so slow, that making anything but endless pac-man / Mario / top-down-view-rally games is absolutely impossible. '

Even the greatest GM fans "turn around" as soon as they've got enough experience to try something more serious and - good. Then the stupid fps drops to PowerPoint slideshow and the so does the support & GM hype.

That's my point. You can't do anything. It's theoretically very possible, but practically gets stuck behind engine's weakness / limits.

But trying making a platform game is quite easy there, and there's gazillion webpages full of tutorials and help for this.

Er... Game Maker?

First, I would like to congratulate you in making some awesome stuff - and welcome to the forums.

For critics,

* I think that right shoe looks a bit weird, you could fix this extra pixel there.

* And yes, the gun should not be flexible, as it looks right now.

* Firearms usually apply recoil pressure to shoulder. You could try to make shoulder move back more. Not sure about light handguns though.

* The hand, where it holds the piece, is a mess. A suggestion here:




Also, the copyright stuff is pretty useless, because no-one actually steals anyone's images here, and you could have more edits and paintovers if you'd remove the copyright crap.

Which would help more.

Thanks.
I got rid of the problem myself, though.

Yes, it was driver problem.
But no, not the video drivers.

Too old NVidia nforce2 motherboard drivers caused the problem, so I updated them.
Quite a surprise-attack, I couldn't even guess such thing, so I just got lucky.
Pity I didn't buy a lottery ticket yesterday...

But machine is about 2x faster now. And this rocks.

Hardcore Mario ownage!!!  :o
How nerd can someone be?

sick!

I very much sounds like driver problem.

I tried the original drivers which came with card...
They installed fine, but It feels like I have 2 sets of drivers for card now, ones from CD and these ones I downloaded from NVidia too...

Is there some way to un-install NVidia drivers?

[5 seconds per frame]

Well, yeah.
I got this crappy GF 5700LE card.
Well, it works, and I can get most out from games, since it's 128MB card and my system is not the worst neither...
But!

There's damned weird thing: In some cases and places, everything is EXTREMELY slow and laggy. Cases are:

* The main menu screen in Rise of Nations - There's some background picture/animation/intro with people fighting and stuff. Well, with old Riva TNT2 card, it moved smoothly, but now... 5 spf.... no, I didn't make a term mistake -  it's a 5 seconds per frame. I'm unable to move mouse correctly over menu items, I can't click them correctly, everything feels like I'm trying this on ancient 286.
Yet, the game itsself runs at all high display options and stuff and super fine. It's just the main menu that my card doesn't like.

* Main menu screen in Empire Earth 2 - There, ANY kind of clicking and selecting is absolutely impossible. I wasted 20 minutes and finally got to start new game, which itself ran very well, once again. Mouse cursor is frozen! Interesting fact that music plays very fine in the background, it isn't CPU lag... But in main menu... huh. I move mouse, wait 15 seconds and then the cursor finally jumps 100 pixels away. Then I try to move it again, wait, it makes jump, etc.

* The main menu comes up extremely slowly in numerous other games, such as Delta Force BHD. It seems like the problem relies not in menu itself: These main menu screens have always some big image for background and that's what loads so long. In some games, all kind of boundary images, menus, etc come up instantly, but this stupid image stays black for awhile.

---
And I'm absolutely positive that games aren't damaged or just in need of need reinstall. They ran well with much older and shittier card...

Of course I have latest patches to these games installed, DirectX (9.0c), Latest NVidia drivers. I even tried to downgrade drivers, because I've heard that it's advisable to use latest drivers with card's serial number, like 56.xx for 5700 card and so on. Tried reinstalling DirectX, everything!

This didn't help a bit - instead, some games that didn't have problems started to fool around aswell.

Everything else works fine! CPU runs fine at 1,8GHz, I have 512 megs of ram and there's no problems neither with modern 3D games that kick hell out from video card or applications. But just... some... games...

This is sooo bad. I paid for card and for game and can't use neither correctly.

Any ideas? Similar problems? Advice? Explanation?

I like it. He looks pale, like a vampire 

* His knees seem to be too high.
* His backpack could jump a little during walk. But only a little.
* Also, his shirt, where it ends on his bottom, looks weird during animation, it should move along with pants.

I'd say it's a progress, not a problem.

Well, for PC-s, not consoles. If back in "these" days, 8-bit Nintendo had more buttons than 6, I'd never had so much fun with it.
The games were simple, and keys too. Today, there's much more advanced games, so more keys are also needed.

But for PC, it's different.
I remember Mortal-Kombat-fest we had with friends. One player had to use letter keys and there was always fight, because everyone wanted to use cursor keys. Because they were less confusing and PC didn't go "mad'n'beeping" when you pressed all keys at once.

When one player lost the fight and had to play with letters, he often tried freezing pc with keyboard hangup as revenge

Today, with one hand on mouse and other on awsdrq, I really can't imagine playing Half-Life 2 with cursor keys. Or what would I do if I didn't have a key for reloading gun and other switching between 2 weapons. It's so comfortable.

[EDIT:]

Text readable...
Can't. The game will be sequel to my Henri series which were in Estonian language.

This time, I'll try to leave inside jokes and other too deep national stuff out, so I could share the game with AGS community (thus putting my foot finally onto ground and showing my own game!) and whole world so they could understand everything in game.
In other words, there *will* be an English translation.

The happenings in game happen in Estonia - capital city of Tallinn too, mostly because it's traditional trhoughout the series and much reality-based.
And it's my hometown

That's also why I didn't draw parking meters as they are extremely rare here.

I think I'll change the sign to something else, like "wear helmet" sign or something. In 320x240 it's impossible to draw so little text anyway.

I feel a bit shame because of littering 2dadventure.com so much, but I'm still going to post final, fully detailed version here aswell.

EDIT:

Ready.

I agree with others. I *coughpiratedcough* the prog, and have not yet seen anything worth the money.

I'd suggest Irrlicht (free 3d engine, with ragdoll physics, wide file format support and other lovely stuff), combined with 3ds max or similar 3d modeller, Visual Studio, GtkRadiant or other QuakeIII level editor  and some hardcore C/C++ skills.

Hm. I took your advice, Darth, and I like what happened. But I think that this can be improved...

Problem is, previously, I tried to match sky on this bg with my other city BG-s in game. That's why it was blue. But since I have always freedom to change time of day, this shouldn't be a problem. It's a comedy game too, so I can work around with this difference.

Pure gradient looks too empty, so I added microamount of noise and drew some dark clouds to simulate polluted air of this industrial scene. Maybe I went overboard with this...

Is that any better now?



2x:

Well, thanks for suggestions! After reading and staring at the picture again and again, I finally decided that tree has to go.

I added a factory... and bg looked alot more "full" already.
Now, a dumpster to the foreground and... I'm not sure anymore that it needs further "filling" - or what do you think?



2x:


Some little repairs here and there are still needed.

Another unfinished piece here.
This time, the key point is the building on the left, which happens to be a gang hideout. Now, I made the building... but I don't know how to fill the rest of the bg. The gate should lead to another property and possibly some residental house in the garden far back.

But the lot at the foreground looks very empty and I need some ideas to fill that.

Point is - this definetly isn't the centre of the city, the hideout should be in less-populated residental area. A quiet place.
So drawing traffic lights, etc is pointless. What should I do?
My back-up plan is just to turn this asphalt into a parking lot, but maybe someone has better idea... And some additional suggestions? Like for fence, background and building itself?
And - of course - all kind of crits und comments are welcome too.

Thanks.

So, agsforums down again, eh?
No wonder...

* I'd dump the all of the green on image and have fully blue and/or dark cyan tinting. Seaweed-green just looks ugly to me. Matter of taste?
* The blurry stuff behind window is weird, yet I have no much ideas how to improve that, if you really wanted to hide actual stuff from player... 
* The arch-things coming from windows/ceiling look like they have no width and they were super thin, like made of paper or something. Fix this?

Apart from that, the bg looks awesome.

Your style reminds me very much my own, so It's easy to give some suggestions on improving this:

* outlines. I also used them at the start, but after some time, I stopped using them (removed or covered them during painting & texturing). Non-outlined pictures look more serious and less n00b & cartoony. You should make little steps on trying to get rid of them.

* If you're using vanishing point system or similar perspective aid, you have to plan your rooms a little. Just take a look at the table on picture #1! While it may seem geometrically right, it still doesn't look very good. Exactly because it's "rightness". If you had the table a little left and made it "right" then, the overall feeling would be much better.

* Try to find harmony and combine the high contrast in picture 1 and softer(and less saturated) coloring in picture 2. They are like opposide sides of a style, so you should try to take best from each.

* DETAIL! Hear my motto: Smallest things often give largest effect. The small rooms are okay. Just detail it so damn well that a viewer has to look at the bg for a long time to see everything you drawed there. This makes things good.

* Practise shading and don't be afraid to use strong shade colors. Shading makes a big job in making your room more 3d and less just a flat picture.

I hope this helped you on your long way to perfection...

It's better now! Some things still bugged me, and after writing page-long post, I finally decided that I can't explain myself without an edit.

So, I made some adjustments...



What I didn't fix - and what you should - is the shadow of the ladder on the wall.

- it must not be shaded in any way!
- it must be darker where dark lines of the bricks are (the holes between bricks)

...or it will look like another real ladder placed behind first one - as it looks now.

Where is that 6% coming from? is it from just forum users clicking on pages? is the amount of bytes per page involved in any way?

Accepting connection and uploading page to user?
maybe?

If one of our top artists and animators - hosts a sprite jam and wants high-quality pirate, it's quite clear that task is difficult and we can't disappoint him.

Let's go!

Heaven knows that I tried hard.



2x: