Messages

Well, I finally found the source of the problem, though I'm still helpless with the games made by other people, such as Apprentice 2, etc.

The sound itsself. I tried to assign different sound to footsteps and some did not lag at all.
Yet, some others do and they are same length and format/quality.

It's just paranormal.
But at least I can continue work on my game.

I think the original shading was just fine. Not every sprite has to be shaded to photorealistic quality. Besides it makes it much easier to animate the way it is originally.

Actually, I was not going for photorealism.
It's just that original extruded look gave photorealistic cardboard cutout character feeling.

But difficulty of animating relies mostly in amount of colors, not the way they are used. So I actually didn't make it much more difficult.

But It's JimmyShelter's sprite and he's free to do how- and whatever he wants with his sprite.

I'll call frames with assigned sound as a "sound frames"...

Character reaches sound frame, lags, then both sound plays and animation continues. So next frame is drawn along with sound. It's quite short moment, very hard to measure. But I'd say that lag is even longer than 1/4th a second. maybe half a second or a bit more.
Anyway, enough to ruin a walk.

I tried with 22Khz and even 11Khz (both 8 and 16-bit) wav's, lag still stays. PCM signed 8-bit stereo was exactly like 44KHz/16-bit. No change there.

I also tried to

- changing between anti-glide/not AG
...without antiglide, character moves very fast even with walkspeed 3, anim speed 6, delay 0 for each frame (in view editor) and AGS won't play footstep in each loop somehow. Though it should!
-  changing between not/uniform walkspeed - no change there

Hm...
The "weapon" making puzzles in Fascination, where you have to save a female photographer... And another one, where you have to "disable" a police inspector.

Well, what can I say...
interesting face and look overall,
but verrry baddd shaddding here.

There's some tips to improve the way you shade.



Now, I used the first image, because hand is actually more correct there. Then again, it's not correct enough, if character isn't a fat one.

I didn't change the face, hair or body build, because it has personality and character wouldn't be quite same, edit was only for pointing out shading.

Note that my shading has exactly same colors you used, only usage of them is a bit different.

Hope this helps.
Good luck.

Sounds interesting... and bizarre.
Proper formatting would get more feedback, since it's actually not the easier text I've read, especially because of my crappy english.
I believe that many people wouldn't even try to decode this formatting. So it's not only about what or where you write, but also how it looks like.

It feels like a piece of much bigger story. Which - I would surely read.

[really]

Actually finish something I start

Same here! 
Also, I'm planning not to let people down again promising them to animate this and that.
And finish the games/graphics I promised to.
And stop wrecking my health (which i do by quitting the job).
And haul my lazy ass to school again.
And get smart, certificated and rich.
And materially secured.
And get a life.
And a new girlfriend.
And...
Er...

Damn...
And get at least one thing from this list really done.

Well... there isn't much to edit. It's a lovely scene.
I worked a bit on lights, shadows, snow and path.


original

...and edit

Whoah!
But this big green mountain would look alot better if it's edge was made of very circular and bumpy hills, not just low-poly-3d-like lines.
In other words, make it much rounder and smoother.
Some hand-made antialiasing would help to smoothen things out here too.

This scene, despite it's stylishness, is hard to understand.
What's these volume lights up on the...   ....ceiling?
Why are ...torches? Lighting up so little of this wall the're attached to, but a big area on water?
How do medieval people make so almost-neon red light?

You definelty have to give some more light to this room. Low ambient perhaps?

About this footstep lag...

- it won't be better if game is windowed
- it won't disappear is swithing between "default directx sound device" and "default wave output"
- it WILL disappear if "no sound" is set from setup
- it is not affected by DirectSound acceleration. I tried all levels, from "no acceleration" to "full acceleration", also testing both DX sound device and default waveout device. Lag was there.

This is quite weird.
Why only AGS? With WAV sounds?

Other games use wave format too. And many have sounds packed into resource file too. They don't lag!

But yeah you can use Radiant's font editor to make a SCI font with some of the useless symbols replaced with symbles of your own.

Actually, russian alphabet contains so much special letters that this wouldn't probably work. Of course, you can use only uppercase or lowercase letters and draw all others onto other-case letters. Like "a" will remain "a", but "A" will mean this  "yu" letter and so on. I tried it few million AGS releases ago, when TTF was not supported, to "emulate" Estonian "ä"-s and "ö"-s and so on. It worked well.

But then the game making will be tricky, as you have to remember each changed character. And spelling checks would be a real nightmare.

anyway,
wish you luck.

[did]

I can talk only for myself, but I don't like:

1. obsolete crap on gui, such as "push", "pull", "open", "close" and so on, especially when they are needed only 2-3 times for a whole game. Variety of commands also make "confused! try-everything-on-everything" moments in adventure game a real nightmare. It's much simpler to just try to use, look and talk with everything. Additional interactions make this much more frustrating, which leads to surfing for a walkthrough, which I consider as ruining the game. 90% of adventures I have played had moments where my logic ran out at some point. And the games I still solved without external help, were the best, as far as I remember.

2. GUI that's difficult to use. Like when action icons are crippled together or I have to move mouse all over the screen to select next action.  Or they are designed badly (either size or colors) and I must spend extra time for getting the action right.

3. Verbcoins and other GUIs that have stupid icons. Monkey Island III was one of them - I never really memorized what each icon did. Good that statusbars are invented, which made it easier! Sam'n'Max too, though it wasn't that bad. Just these mode cursors were a bit confusing.

4. Pointless duplicate actions. Some games have for example duplicate icons. They act differently, but are basically for same thing. "Examine" and "Look at". Or "Use" and "Move". Such things should be done with only one action. Even "Pick up" and  "Use" could be just one, though in many games they are not.

5. Doubleclick usage, especially when it's not noted anywhere, could ruin a new game right at the start.

So!
Good gui, in my opinion

- has also a statusline.
- is nicely readable, mouseover animations are very handy too,
- depends on game, but most used actions should be shortcutted some way, like look (or use/talk) for right mouse button as default and walk-to for left mouse button as default (for LucasArts GUIs, and just as LucasArts actually did in many games)
- additional keyboard shortcuts always rule. But they must remain shortcuts, like numbers 1-9 for actions or qwerty or something. Not split all around teh keyboard.
- no gui at all (LMB & RMB only) is somewhat too dumbed down. It works in many cases, but takes away freedom to try things. It's forcing player to interact everything in pre-determined way and  this steals the joy of exploration. The game becomes an interactive movie/cartoon. What fun is in this?
- nice gui won't cover up more than 30% of game screen. Even this is too much.
- custom (but working!) actions are always cool. Like "fight" and "hide" in KGB. Or mood-based dialogs in Countdown (and some other games). In this case, extra action should always provide some result. Otherwise, it just an extra frustration, as I described in point 1.

Many AGS games use "unhandled event" or NO events at all if player isn't doing what  creator wanted/hoped him to do. This isn't so much about GUI, but worst thing in my opinion. Whatever you have on your GUI, the game must respond to every thing player did. Even if  using/looking something isn't neccesary to finish the game, a descriptive (or even better - FUNNY!) message as a result should always be what the player gets for wasting his/her time trying this.

[any]

Just make them!
GUI buttons can be done with paint program.
For default GUI elements (load/save and Quit dialogs), you need to make new ones.

Biggest problem would be getting the font right,  I think that AGS can import any TrueType font. I'm not sure how long the imported chracter range is, but I believe that at least first 128 characters will be imported.

And for imported font - 320x200 resolution is a bit low.

not too bad. I see that you're still learning, so picking on every single part of the image wouldn't be too constructive or helpful.

But here's how to continue your studies:
1) practise drawing things in right perspective as much as possible. It can be "totally learned" like memorizing a poem or math formula. There's several ways to make it easier, such as vanishing point system, which khrismuc demonstrated, or drawing over 3D scene/photo, etc.
It wouldn't be too hard. Even without any use of additional help, it is possible to draw things at right angle, just by feeling how things should go. This comes from experience.

2) And second step would be shading. Now, shading isn't a science you can "totally learn", there's many different techniques and ways to do that, and if learned enough, each artist develops his very own style. This is what you should practice trough whole time you spend on drawing. I'd suggest to start with 2-color shading: take every (differently) colored part of the ship, pick just few tones darker tone, decide where light source is - and try to add second color according to that.

Ah, I also made a little pic to show how trapdoor's perspective should really look like


note: this edit was according to my "perspective feeling", using vanishing point system would give much more precise result.

No sp2 problem here. Problem existed few days before that.
After all, I can't imagine SP2 affecting AGS any way.

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?

[Avoid]

A nice character!
but I'd like to add:

Tip2:
Avoid using the colors in high saturation (see the pic below)

Avoid, not ignore.
While Damien made a really nice edit, I still think that this is too Darth-Mandarkb'ishyâ,,¢ dark. The jacket and shirt are quite hard to tell apart!
Even if it's a suicidial-lifehater-60'sbritish-punkrocker who wears only dark colors, knowing it won't make it any lighter.

Nothing too difficult though, I just brightened shirt by 10% and difference was made.

So, here's an edit of an edit:


But yes, you totally crashed with choosing face colors, finding suitable skin palette is a real pain sometimes.
Look what Damien did and learn.

I think that some metallic stuff could be added to his jacket. Like metal buttons or pins.
Or if it isn't suitable enough, some hanging things, like little belts on his sleeves (don't know how they are called in english) to give him more "loose" feeling. I don't know, he looks like a guy who takes it easy all the times and is really  messy if not even a bit lazy... If combined with similar "lazy walkcycle" (dragging feet and maybe dancing a little with head and shoulders - disco walk? ), yes, I see a character here.

quite so.
At least, this is what

NOD32
Trend Housecall
AVG
and NAV2004 say.

No spyware neither, doublechecked both with Pestpatrol 4.0 and Spybot: S&S

...which was a real pain, because different antiviruses and anti-adware programs won't get along and declare each others as viruses and spyware! Huh.

Going through all this stupid mess that is called "options & settings for Internet Explorer" isn't something I'd like to waste my precious lifetime on to, but I did so to be sure it's not my fault - like something turned off or disabled there.  Nope. No explanation to this mystery.

It's most likely just some crap sp2 installed, restricting downloading sounds just like one of MS-guys tricks. I haven't seen any popup-blockers or other things that they advertised as "increased internet security" neither, maybe installation messed up itself some way. Some invisible way, because from what I saw, there were no problems during installation...

[S]

Maybe you should carry CD everywhere with you.
Just carry -- not install the SuperProblems2-

Just in case when life takes you into a big, dark, snowy and cold forest and you run out of firewood or food.