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Closest thing I found was a word "finalizing CD" and Ahead Nero 5 - which I used for burning - was able to perform such action.

...so I tried that.
It just doesn't help. I also made one CD using Windows Media Player (version 10) but this one made non-playable mp3 disk too...

I don't have neither DVD devices nor a spare MP3 player... 
Tech like this is quite new AND expensive so there's no such way just to find this in my pile of tech junk (which occupies 90% of my room).


So either the player is defective or there's some other thing I'm missing... yet. The fact that player is top new and everything else works sooo-oo fine and sooo well makes me doubt in defectivity. It's not some used, scratched and dropped onto ground few-times player.

Of course, since audio CD-s work, I could just stick with them.... but mp3 support was the main priority on this purchase 

Well, once again, I've bought some technology that I can not operate.

This time, it's...

Portable mp3 player!

Yes. Not the one with memory card or hard-disk(omgexpensiveugh), but a sexy thing that has FM radio, audio CD-playing capability, plus "plays mp3s from CD" - one.

Well, happily home, I started to burn my music onto a CD.
Furiously, 40 minutes later, I threw third wasted effort out from my window, nearly hitting a passing car.

The thing won't play! So I googled and googled... Closest thing I found was a word "finalizing CD" and Ahead Nero 5 - which I used for burning - was able to perform such action. Not that it helped any way, of course. I made also an audio CD, it played perfectly.
But no, not the mp3 one.

From manual, I see that player supports playing mp3-s even if they're scattered around folders on CD. I just burned them all into root directory of the CD. What really happens is --

* It doesn't detect any more tracks than track 1.
* It starts playing the track 1 but no sound is heard: just some very quiet "sssh" sounds very randomly, which are NOT very quietly playing song, but more like an untuned radio.

So how should I format and name the mp3s to get this thing to play them? Which program should I use? What's the trick?

Does anyone have any advice?

Hey, great game.
Great is especially the fact that I have absolutely no clue what's the game is about. Checkmate? where? What is a checkmate? What do I have to guess? I know chess, but dice... 

So it's like 2 puzzles to me.

...or - a great alchometer: If I get what's that dice thing is about, i'm definetly drunk!

http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc Here's the most information I think you'll find.

The music from Mach 3! Can't be! Ahh, nostalgia.
:o


But ian80, best way to make "crappy music" is

1. Use QBasic! It's very simple, yet I have no idea how to save the sound later.

2. Use Sound Club for Dos - This should result - according to your skills - from MIDI-beeping to digitized PC-speaking. Just pull your sound card out first and set SoundClub to use PC-Speaker. Once again, I'm not very sure how well this would work.

...
ohine?

This is first time for me hear such a word.

Gee, that was some helpful analysis... Gives a lot to think about.

What is it with desks in adventure games missing chairs? Wink

Not this time. Not this game. Here, the character comes along with chair mounted to his ass

Actually, this guy isn't sitting behind the desk, but in front of it - the real owner will be at the other side... I imagine old and fat police officer with bald head and moustache 

As far as making it a background goes, there's not much space around the desk to get to the file cabinet, and the exit isn't very clear.

The - room of course - continues downwards, yet player never sees it. But as walkable areas go - there is only one, and pretty limited one. It's a room for just a cutscene where police will chat a bit with the main character. So player never has chance to wander freely around in this room. (I'm starting to feel that it's a waste  )
Exit? I planned to put a door onto far back wall. Well, half of it should be visible.

The map on the wall I'd like to see in less-saturated colors but that's just my preference.

This is a great idea. Actually, I had something similar in mind, and made so map itself has only 90% of opacity, but I couldn't decide what really needs to be changed here. Now you spelt it out - 'saturation'! Good.

---
I've never been too fond of simple, boring colors, so I think I'll burn/brighten each wood panel just separately and a bit less, maybe. Same goes to cabinet, yet I'm not really sure how to do that 

Thanks so far, guys. I'm getting alot better vision of the final product now.

[Here it is.]

Well, I usually don't use vanishing point system.
With this case, I decided to give it a try... did I get the perspective right? *sigh*
Any other suggestions, and C&C is also welcome.

Here it is.


Scaled version too


I'm especially clueless what to do about striped wall far back: the intensity of stripes is the same that the wall in foreground has, yet it's wrong. But resolution restricts me to change this.

Pic needs plenty of extra details, but main part is ready.

Oh, my phrase, "Golden DOS age" was distracting.
Actually, this goes to all games at this era, and was pointed to game development (culture?), not the machines or OS's. Like - console games for example? Buying a console game does not cause extra paying, or even if - then it's minimal. This nice thing stands until today - if I'm not mistaken. But only for non-PC games.

* A patch that is decribed as "adds support to new GeForce card" or something similar is okay with me. This is called product support (in some way?) and is very nice thing.

* But a patch called "You won't get stuck in a wall near house X" or "Removes nasty bug from here or there" isn't quite the same thing. This is more like something game development team should be ashamed of and avoid at any cost!

Do they?

"Oh, bugs. Games are so complex nowadays and every devloper makes some and this is what whole programming is about blah-blah --"

-- Well, not for the money the games cost right now!

Yeaaah... wish I could do that too.

No, not the drawing, It's good, of course, yet I believe I could do this with pencil and paper.


But what I mean  --

Colors!!! This is amazing. All the shading and blending...
And nothing sticks out because of wise usage of colors.

Crits?

* Well, the palette of whole scene suggests afternoon, or early evening, with starting sunset.
But setting sun comes to my head along with much stronger shadows, also they should be long and stretched.

* The amount of detail in the house on a hill draws strongly attention -- but this is the farther(sp?) background, right?
With a really nice, detailed and complex building/stuff in the background, this skull, sign and grass in the foreground look very pale. This feels somewhat wrong. You should add alot more detail to the area player is acting on. Especially this bush-y thing at bottom-left: It's blurry and confusing while it should be detailed and visible down to a single leaf - instead.

* I've never seen a sun with a shape like that. If it was intended - to simulate the blurry edges of the sun that happens sometimes when air isn't completely transparent - you should do it stronger. If not -- the part of sun that is hidden behind the cloud gives an imagination of very weird shape. It's difficult to explain, but is clear with a simple observation. Just imagine how the edge continues behind the cloud.

* The bottom-most *visible* part of the mountains far away should get a bit more darker at the bottom, so it would make bigger contrast with the mountain in the foreground. This way they won't blend that much into foreground and it's easier to understand that one is right in front of player and others are far away.

---
Huh, there's actually nothing important to criticize anymore, even as it is now, it's an ultimate challenge to all other artists around here.

[edit:]

Well, I go with Darth's first post in this one:
I human makes a lock, human can make a key-

So why not invest into decreasing the will/need to make a key instead?

There is no non-crackable things. Even if a game is so solid and though to crack, it will be compensated by something else - like these internet validations? It's 2005 and internet has made crack suppliers life more difficult...

While Steam games (Half-Life 2,CS) are in my favourite list, there's always an element of disgust -- I have to pay my ISP (for Internet) so I could play the game I paid for!!! 

Maybe I don't give a heck about internet at all, I just want to play the game. Validation takes only a minute. A minute a day. But I'm paying for whole month, this means that 99,9%  of the money is wasted! (As I said, it's 2005 -- "get a dial-up connection" isn't as easy anymore as it may sound.) Just to make sure some people won't steal the game.

A game from the company, not me. So me - and all the ones who bought the game are actually paying money so the team behind the game could get even more money and at the same time wouldn't lose any to thieves. Well, if that's not some cheeky attitude here, what is?

Well, this is all theoretical. Of course, no-one would make such investment for just a computer game.

Valve - and all these other software companies must think very highly of their products, if they allow themselves such freedom.

Am I the only fool who feels this way?

edit: And nowadays, games suck anyway. In golden DOS age, a game was released when it was ready. Now what the fuck do you mean by "update", "patch" etc words anyway? So, we pay for game, ISP - so we can do validation/registration, and also the damned updating every month? So basically we buy uncompleted and buggy crap! And pay further so we can move step-by-step (time-internet-updates) to a thing we actually wanted to buy in the first place.  And it is so with most games, ain't it?

Oh, this is so-oo unfair.

It's lot better now.

* But you should still make his forehead a bit rounder. I know that you're going for cartoony style and rectangular head is there for a reason. But I'd still change it, since face gives very flat feeling right now. Like it wasn't his face, but a man wearing a mask. This is especially distracting where forehead meets hair.

* The position of his left foot is weird. If it's for special stance for some special occasion, It's okay. But don't make a mistake making more characters stand like that. Actually, the leg should point a bit more to the direction he's looking at.  It's quite difficult to stand like this, with this angle of feet. The angle between boots is roughly near 100 degrees or more, yet people can hardly stand even with position of 90 degrees... Try it, if you don't believe!
About 50-70 degrees would be "normal" for human beings.

* Also, reduce (shorten) the line running from eye down to nostril, because he looks too much like a Schwarzenegger(sp?) with Michael Jackson's nose!

* An extra shading color on every body part would add some magic,. though it makes animation job twice as time consuming.

* The head makes him look wimpy/weak, pull it back 10 or so pixels, as ProgZmax suggested.

Overall, It's pretty solid character and should look very good in any game. You definetly have good drawing skills! Hope you didn't take my crits too seriously, If I spend my time for analyzing and suggesting a single sprite like this, it's definetly a good one, and therefore deserves it.

Aye, viktor, try www.autofish.net  if you mean oldschool Commodore64 style music instead of MIDIs.
They have some free project there (named Cell7), where people contribute good music tracks to help game makers out. All legal and *intended* for such purpose.

I remember someone using such style in an AGS game, (I believe it was Minimi in a MAGS game about a raven or something similar) and it sounded excellent! Well, you might want to try that.

If not --
or if you like different module music, writing "S3M download" or "MOD download" in google or yahoo! would take you to heaven in few tries.

But this is painful searching, since there's millions of songs out there with hundreds of styles and made by musicians with very different skills/experience level.

Sorry for writing totally offtopic thing here, but...

Does a casual AGSer either know or need that stuff?
Pointers? Pathing?

From 'dumb' side of view - AGS has gone very complex lately.
New updates consist mostly complex scripting improvements, and I actually don't believe that much people use them.

Like, it's still 2D graphics, AGS editor layout looks alot or totally like it was version before and so on. There's very little of changes to get really hands-on, if you're not a programmer.


I'm not discouraging code improvements. But It would be cool to actually see what this or that improvement allows to do.
Like some tech showcase, tutorials or whatever could demonstrate it better.

***
I'm an artist, not a programmer (though I haw microscopic experience with C++ and Basic) - so I'm sorry if my post was totally stupid.

Warcraft 3 is geat idea! Never thought about that, since I haven't played it for a year or so.
I also discovered most of wanted stuff in Stronghold.

Hey, thanks m0ds!

The biggest fish to catch is still the wood chopping.
These samples I need are present in every respectable medieval-themed strategy game, but very unlikely to be downloadable in Net. Except sword sounds.

Few links lead to more links which sooner or later result a dead page, so samples are more helpful here.

I'm really grateful, just as long no-one will ask why do I need these samples... 

Now this is not funny.
Not funny at all.

Poor human being (me) searches whole effin' world to get some sounds and hey - a page named www.findsounds.com...

Thank you.

** bangs head repeatedly against wall **

Well, today I came to a point where I started looking for sound effects.  A simple task, especially if you happen to be connected to the Internet....

Or is it?

After 3 hours of resultless searching I understood that this time could be wasted to something much more productive... like a MAGS game making or something. Another 3 goes to elimination of all teh ad-, spy-, crap- and nonsense-ware all these pointless "Get free samples here!!11" pages installed.

What I do need is 3-5 different tree chopping sounds.
Some swordfight ones. Some cavalry voices, like horses galloping and making noise. A catapult launch and hit sounds. A bow shooting (and hitting) sounds.

I also noticed that I don't have any games left where I could rip some.

This is impossible.

If anyone would know how to change my mind, I'd be grateful.

An edit?



crits?

It's so awfully blurry.

Looks very much like Darth Mandarb's style.

It's good, but way too dark. Also, Kalashnikov looks too big... I can't believe that an assault rifle could be a half of a size of human.... hey, even more....

Normal length should be 4/5 of the lenght of his foot or so. To be exact, 87 centimeters.

Also, take a look onto your own picture of the machinegun you supplied -- the ammo clip starts where trigger ends, there's no space between them. This is where you can cut the length - and get gun right aswell.

The pic with cigarette doesn't look too good, especially if zoomed out.  Try to change the angle of the cigarette and  also recheck his right hand. It's feels too short and is somewhat weirdly bent to hold the weapon.

I edited the gun a bit. But if you want perfecy, it should be modified even a bit more.



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